Technology: A Modern Day Inferno

 In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.
~Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno

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‘Twas a lovely Thursday afternoon and sleepy as I was, I woke up with a definite smile on my face. Yesterday, was a complete disaster since I got called in to work unexpectedly. It was a killer night and it was only for some miraculous reason that I actually managed to escape the office around 11:30pm despite the workload being similar to a Senecan greek tragedy- in other words, very brutal and bloody. After doing my “morning rituals” at 2:00pm, I went to hover on my computer, hoping for some comic relief and ironically, this message greeted my smiling face instead: 

Insufficient system resources to complete requested services.

Technology has been trying to spite me for the last couple of months and this frustration just keeps getting better and better. Imagine a figure in the form of Cerberus bringing me this message of doom and scaring the wits out of my brain. I went into panic mode because there was no way of transferring my files: my dvd drive seems to have hibernated, programs are in lock down, drivers fail to detect network connection and my usb ports simply refused to open their gates.

Here I was, literally banging the doors of hell and they won’t let me in? And we thought, heaven was hard to get in? Hell is just as exclusive apparently.

A good friend once told me, “technology is stupid. in the war between Man VS Machine, we humans still kick ass” and I couldn’t agree more. On a literal level, we indeed have the leg power to kick some asses. On the other hand, it is only a matter of time till we become completely dependent on technology to supply us with happiness. For instance, our daily vocabularies now consist of “youtube”, “google”, “wikipedia”, “facebook” and etc.  This generation already depends on youtube for entertainment, google for searching answers, wikipedia for information, and facebook for socializing. Hence, I would not even be surprised if people become dependent on it for divine sacrilege. One thing is for sure though, technology is another religion for double standards.

I mean, for quite some time now, literature has been giving us warnings about the dangers of modernity, and we see this in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno where the protagonist, Dante, loses his way and finds himself wandering into Lucifer’s spiral abyss. There are thirty-four cantos or chapters alotted to depict the nine stages of hell in which he becomes in contact with:

I. those who have been pagans and do not accept Christ,
II those who have been lustful and lived for sensual passion,
III. those who have suffered from gluttony,
IV. those who have become indulged with greed,
V. those who have dwelled in anger and rage,
VI. those who have  turned to heresy for guidance,
VII. those who have commited suicide, sodomy and murder,
VIII. those who have become politically corrupt and dealt harm to others by doing so
IX. those who have betrayed the trust of their loved ones and friends.

THE NINE STAGES OF HELL in Dante Alghieri’s Inferno

There he meets the souls of figures such as Helen of Troy, Socrates, Plato, Alexander the Great, Brutus, Antony, Cleopatra, Lancelot and so on. These are all  some of the great men and women of history whose greatness still finds their way haunting the pages of modern day texts. Ironically, Alighieri depicts this greatness as the ultimate source of their damnation and likewise, we are all Dante in this age of modernity. We find ourselves lost and sinking into the far abyss of a technological inferno, moving in our respective spirals with no other direction  to go than downwards. The creation is progressing more than the creator and in due time, the nine stages of hell will appear right infront of us and we won’t even know the difference between that and the life we are currently living.

That said, technology certainly is on its way to becoming a new form of religion and I would not even be surprised if it already has. There is no way of controlling it when vices are refused to be looked upon for the sake of modern progress. We think so much of the future that we neglect to incorporate the mistakes our predecessors have previously made in the past. So the big question is… Is mankind progressing at all? Or do we just have insufficient system resources to complete the true nature of our mortal existence?

But hey, don’t mind me. After all, these are all just inquiries of a nocturnally deranged woman, right?

That is all.

Adieu.