The Gates Ajar

The Gates Ajar, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's spiritualist novel of 1868, is about the internet. How so? Allegorically and with a keen foresight. The internet is as desirous of its users' privacy as Phelps's characters are of contact with the dead. Arguing about privacy on the internet and tracing the latest means by which it is being stolen is as pointless, repetitive, and obscure as the religious rhetoric of Phelps's characters.

What this means, at least for me, is that I much prefer to read confounding books than to be confounded by having all my accounts and internet guises inexplicably connected against my wishes.

Since youtube and facebook continually demand to be "merged" with my google/blogspot shenanigans, I'm giving up on keeping the gates ajar, Phelps.

That is, as much as I enjoy discovering new blogs and having visitors drop by here, that pleasure is definitely outweighed by the fear of a Kafkaesque trial at a job interview for accidentally ambiguous wording of a post or for what I did on Thursday, May 20, 2010.

I'm not closing this blog but locking it via the invitations option. If you'd like a key, write a comment under this post in the next two days or email me.

I hate you, evolution of the internet.

Congo and Conflict Minerals

Let me clarify that I have been aware of the wars in the Congo for a long time. But I think that if my ability to feel shocked and want to tear the hair from my skull were exhausted, it would mean that I'm either dead or cynical to the bone.

I'm neither of the above yet I am one of the millions of people who reap benefits of these wars: I do have appliances that contain minerals stolen from the Congo. And I do feel stupid, wrong, and at the same time cheated because of that.

And so what?

I think we're in a situation where none of this can carry any weight. It's hard to even make it sound genuine, since my outrage is only a drop in a sea of outrage and mere outrage can't do anything. And where does the exploitation stop if we're increasingly oblivious of the way our pretty toys are produced? It's "invisible hands" and "fairy material" and only if you really bother to ask yourself about the path each part of your laptop or cell phone has traveled will you--perhaps--realize that the trip began in one of those areas of the world that have rare natural resources: stuff necessary for your laptop to work, stuff necessary for your stupid cell phone to vibrate...

I hope some day (soon!) this will stop happening.