Apt142’s Blog

Welcome to the computing world. At least, I assume you’re in the computing world. You are after all, reading a blog posting that only exists in 1’s in 0’s. Unless of course you printed it off. Then that just means you’re trying to thwart my narriative here.

So.. welcome to the computer world. You are now officially a wizard. Yeah, you read that correctly. You are a wizard. “Geez,” I’m sure you’re thinking “all I did was go to a web page. Doesn’t mean I can conjure fire and turn lead to gold.” And right you are, but you’re still a wizard.

Wizard as I’m defining it is the use of information or even simple words to complete a task that has some tangible result. In this case you’re taking a simple set of letters and poof, you get this page. You’ve effectively turned a line of jibberish (http://blog.apartment142.com) into knowledge. (Or something closing approximating it.) You’ve said the perverbial abracadabra and gotten your hocus pocus.

We’re turning into a society that if you’ve got the right words, you can turn them into just about anything. Need some food delivered? Type the magic words www.papajohns.com in the address bar. Add a bit of money to the spell and wait on hour. A veritable demon will show up at your door bearing cheesy goodness.

Need a dentist, a plumber, a handyman? All available. None of the magic words are particularly hard to remember either.

It’s so funny seeing the contempt of Faust for his hubris when we embrace it in this day and age. The internet has become our very own Mephistopheles. We tell it we want something and it fetches. And we as a society embrace it. Turn on the TV, or better yet click on this link to go on over to adcritic and watch some commercials. They are telling us, we can have anything we want, whenever we want it and we deserve to have it, especially if it makes us happy.

You can get anything you want over the internet. All you need is a little money to power the spell.

But, I might also add, that most of you reading this page aren’t even powerful wizards. Sure you know a few magic words and you probably know where you can look up more of them. But there are stronger wizards out there. The wizards that build the spells you activate with your magic words. The wizards who, given a bit of time, can pull up information out of the ether and transform it into whatever shape they desire.

 And of course you’re thinking, “This is silly. It’s all just technology working for me.  It’s not like I’m selling my soul or bartering with the devil here.  All I’m doing is communicating with other individuals.  Some of them are offering me information and some of them are wanting to trade goods and services for the dollars I earn.”

But, I counter that point and ask you to compare your relative power to that of a person with out internet access.  And by power I mean, knowledge, resources, contacts and time.  If you, the wizard, wanted to find an obscure toy from your childhood, you could scoot on down to ebay and odds are strong you could have it sent to your door by the end of the week.  An individual with out the internet would have to search through want ads in the paper, consignment shops and pawn shops looking for it.  There would be no guarantee of them finding it either.  The cost in gas and time spent looking for it would be considerable too.

 If you think about it, it’s kind of an ego booster.  You’ve got powers and you’re only limited by the power of the words that you can find.  But, with power comes responsibility. 

 You gotta share it. 

The internet can be a great equilizer and tool for mankind and there are lots of places on this earth where there is no capacity to have wizards.  Support causes to spread the spell power.