Woke up from an awful South African dream. I was in Gqeberha, the city whose name to me looks like your Scrabble blocks when you know you’re going to have to miss a turn. In my dream, I was somewhere dark, dangerous and desperate, and I remember thinking it feels like PE, a place I hardly know. It seemed I was working, somehow, which compounded the terror.
Just as I was settling in to embrace this nightmare, two tsotsis emerged and expropriated, without compensation, my work vehicle, a low-insurance white minivan. But in the way a bad dream keeps giving, it turns out I had a backup vehicle nearby, a consolation even if for some reason I’d parked it so close to a wall it was impossible to enter.
As I puzzled over gaining ingress, I felt a tap on my shoulder: the same two tsotsis, and now a second car gone! A classic case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
I was happy to wake up relieved that in real life I didn’t have to work from a minivan in PE. However, I rejoined battle from the night before to try paying a Netcare bill, again without success and fearing the number of apparently failed attempts would empty my virtual bank account.
I would later reflect on how much of the postmodern internet age we inhabit shows characteristics of the nightmare world of troubled sleep. There’s something creepy about the internet and the way it pretended it would empower people when all it did was leave us defenceless against an onslaught of bogus news, “friend suggestions”, “notifications” and crashed websites. Please rate your DStv payment experience, Mr Bulgar!
The internet is the home-builder DIY of the virtual sphere, and it’s no coincidence how it relentlessly promotes the bone-crushing logic of consumer capitalism. DIY obliterated an entire class of craftsmen and tradespeople, making everything “cheaper” while subliminally trading (down) on guilt-inspired virtues of self-reliance and frugality. The outcome is invariably inferior.
The internet, on a global scale, has put power in people’s hands: to pay bills, watch Netflix and ignore the local protest they wouldn’t know about otherwise, and so forth. And it just so happens that the millions of middle-class people who no longer have decent-paying jobs will be staying put at home, as public investment in amenities is refocused exclusively towards the rich and their needs. The rest of us must luxuriate in the exhilarating sensation of shopping from home.
The last thing you want is to give any hint of being overwhelmed by the Gen whatever-letter-we’re-at-now age of the internet
As a source of entertainment, the internet is an ideal way of paying people a lot less, if they have a job at all, while creating the illusion of an abundant, yet ultimately empty, existence.
Traces of Luddism, you may protest. Maybe. Yes, I do miss going to the hole in the wall at city hall in central Joburg and paying my quite understandable lights and water bill. Sometimes, I try to look at the bills we get now, and my brain disappears into the fog of levies and surcharges. You just pay. Anything to relieve the pain of undercomprehension. And I do miss standing in the queue at United Building Society with a banknote to be deposited in my subscription shares, confident that very note would go into a safe, behind a metal door in a building in Loveday Street.
While missing the old days as any old guy would, even if in secret memoriam, the last thing you want is to give any hint of being overwhelmed by the Gen whatever-letter-we’re-at-now age of the internet. Is “internet” even a modern word?
In any event, anyone past 60 must comport themselves as if they can’t answer the question young people have, which is, how did we “do internet” before computers came along? We used to go to the library and take notes from encyclopaedias, a word that, as I write it, looks like it belongs in the museum of obsolete terminology. So when Uber asks, ‘How did you enjoy your trip with Wellington?’ I’m quick to say, ‘From a mobility point of view, it was all I could ask for.’ And when Mr D wants to know how I liked my lukewarm Nando’s order, I fall into line with a favourable score, dreading the multiple follow-ups that might happen otherwise.
In another millennium, I remember collecting my correspondence (another museum word) from poste restante in Arequipa, Peru. The world was a bigger place, and you could explore the ruins of Machu Picchu without being disturbed by a “courtesy call” from MiWay.
I troll the internet. French President Emmanuel Macron, in shades still, is giving a medal to the “last newspaper hawker in France”, Ali Akbar, originally from Pakistan, purveyor of newspapers to the powerful of Paris. Akbar has no intention of retiring, and even at 73 one doubts this veteran of print could afford to. Still, he’s gone from selling 200 copies of Le Monde to 20. Quelle horreur!
Here’s to the age when dinosaurs still mattered, Monsieur Akbar!
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