The Techno-Priest
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We spoke earlier about how virtual world professionals and web2.0 obsessoids, well, we’re not completely understood by our friends and families. What if we were? What if that turned into a bad thing somehow? Herein I play a Techno-Priest zealot some years hence. Take it for what it’s worth.
Blessings of the Almighty Digital be with you. Please be seated.
Thank you for joining me on this, a remarkably low-lag Sunday, in the The Church of The Divine Engineer which has expanded itself as you’ve arrived to a tremendous size. Your faith in the divinity of Technology and its power to heal the soul has brought you here. Of course we also all have a sense of jubilation at this week’s news. We’ve been looking forward to spending this time together as a congregation to share in each other’s joy.
As I’m sure you are all aware last night the tracker showed that there were no longer any humans on the planet without access to The Network. We are now all online. Today the blogs have filled our RSS readers with a single, unified message: The Golden Age Has Begun.
The spread of technology globally has brought 3,202,583,013 positive developments to the real world by the current tech-changes-the-world.com estimation. Poverty, starvation, and loneliness are now historical footnotes. Help in any situation is a mere click away at little to no cost. The FreeZone is spreading as more governments succumb to their inevitable irrelevance. We are finally, truly free.
It is impossible to point to any one development to take credit for our good fortune. Some, however, are rather certain that it is our new ability to share and collaborate with each other at a newer, deeper level that has brought about the Golden Age. After all, we commune using so many methods that the application with the ability to count them all has continued to be one of the few things that eludes us. A generation is now being born that takes these things for granted, and considers them banal and obvious facts that only we, the oldbies, seem to find fascinating. [Onder Skall smiles.]
I would like to remind you, however, that we must remain vigilant. While it is true that griefers are now easily marginalized and instantly punished with the cruelty of ten thousand negative impulses (Almighty Digital be praised), there exists a kind of griefer that eludes the feedback sweep. They grief us all every day, and they do so without the slightest negative rating score. They grief us not by seeking out an audience with the intent to irritate large crowds, nor do they send us spam, nor do they attempt to induce lag. They do, however, cause us all immeasurable harm by simply doing nothing at all.
I speak of course of the Techno-Agnostics.
Not to be confused with the Neo-Luddites, whose activism becomes self-defeating in the face of useful collaborative web applications, the Techo-Agnostics do not campaign against technology. What they do is far worse. They do not fear being banned, muted, or even publicly listed as the griefers they are. Even the wisdom of the Almighty Digital, that collective consensus and divine toolset we have all come to worship today, fails to reach them.
How is this possible? Simply put, the Techno-Agnostics see no reason to log on at all!
Yes, it’s true! They simply do not bother logging into The Network beyond what they call “the bare minimum”. They don’t own household servers. They don’t fill out their online profiles. Many have never even created a single avatar and their systems are filled with dysfunctional, out of date software riddled with security holes that a simple upgrade patch could resolve.
It’s difficult for a rational person to picture what I am describing, but you must trust me that these people do exist. They don’t seem to exhibit overt forms of insanity, nor are they scoring lower on intelligence tests. They simply feel that they don’t need a personal relationship with The Network.
Obviously, this cannot stand.
To allow this type of behavior endangers everything we hold dear. Engagement has made The Network possible. Engagement made Augmented Reality possible. Engagement created industries upon industries so that one might spend their time doing almost anything and seek monetary compensation for it. These people, these deviants who think they don’t need any of this to be happy are costing us all immeasurably in lost potential. Worse: they may induce others to do the same.
Vigilance, people, even in the face of a Golden Age, must never be forgotten. If you meet someone who has never filled out a profile in a Social Application, or only has the one Avatar, or is unaware of the most basic uses of Mirror Worlds, please report them to the Digital Outreach Brigade! Only united to a common purpose can we remain free!
Let us give thanks to the Gurus, the Evangelists and the Futurists who have come before us. Amen.
