Sleep will not come
Blue light lights up the blues;
The dreams we need are playing
On our own devices, in our trembling hands.
Wired to the stars,
Whatever sparks our synapses
No longer conducts electricity enough;
Now we mainline, plugged in, socket by socket,
Powered by grids and lines and the networked night.
Universal serial busses
Asynchronously digital data streams
Connect us with the latency of satellites
While the mad moon hangs above our heads,
Lunatic and huge, shining in the lonely sphere of heaven.
Now we lie
Men and women paired
Not with each other but bluetoothed
While fingers tap and stroke the keypads
Screening the virtual sediment for information
To unlock the secrets of the wire,
Energising nano-circuits
Navigating algorithms;
Quivering with light
We lie awake.
No flesh is ever touched in the passion of this ritual:
No intimacy is exchanged, no small tenderness,
Not even a brush of fingertip on skin,
Not even a glance.
Instead of sleep, pull a table up the bed, slip beneath,
Hard-wired, connected, for it to stupefy the loins;
Casually suppressing every desire but sight,
Its pornography of light draws the eye
To the nerves electrons stimulate.
All we see are pixels flickering,
Our nystagmus, our vision
Slowly blurring,
Going blind.
© BH, 2018
A friend posted a link on Facebook to the The Bedchill overbed table (In the Know) https://www.facebook.com/InTheKnowInnovationAOL/videos/1912894845669836/
It’s a bit like a hospital overbed table but fully wired with mains and USB ports so you can plug any device into it and lie back in bed and, as they say, enjoy.
But I had a vision of we humans, fat and slobbering, like latter-day orgiastic Romans, slouched on our divans, gorged on grapes and wine, but with added brain-slavery delivered by e-device.
Bread and circuses has nothing on that.
So above is my dystopian take on the human race’s final emasculation by telecommunication. In the end we won’t (literally) give a fuck.
Unwittingly, this became the first in a series about enslavement by device, totalitarianism of telecoms, mesmerism by machine intelligence.
Series -
The image is myself in a virtual bed with borrowed pillows, dark laptop, streaming data and broken wires.
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