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Head in The Cloud

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If there’s a 50% chance of getting a USB plug in the right way up, why do I get it wrong 80% of the time?

I thought it was all supposed to be wireless by now, anyway?

Apparently, we’re all heading into a bright new digital dawn, where we won't have to worry about actually owning or storing any physical or digital copies of music, films, photos etc. They'll all be in The Cloud. We won't even need to have software on our computers - it'll all be in The Cloud and you'll just access it from your teensy touch-screen wotsit via the kind of mega broadband connection that would make the channel tunnel look like an anorexic drinking straw.

Yes, the future is very exciting indeed. None of that hanging around when you’ve clicked on anything – it’ll be instantaneous. In fact, you won’t even be clicking, just touching the screen. Having said that, the finger mark mess on my screen in the office, caused by colleagues pointing at stuff with their unhygienic digits, would suggest that may not be the optimum approach. My computer isn’t even touch screen anyway.

Perhaps we won’t even need to touch the screen, just look at it in a funny way, much as people do in coffee shops when I get inexplicably excited about chocolate sprinkles on my cappuccino.

Or maybe there won’t even be screens! Maybe we’ll be part of the web ourselves, hooked into the non-stop, lurid, pulsating wonder of absolutely everything, ever, 24 hours a day, by the sort of technology that makes NASA look like me with a soldering iron in my cellar. (Please don’t tell anyone about my space programme though. Next door’s cat is already suspicious.)

Think about it... and it happens. You could be talking to someone on the other side of the planet, and they would seem to be right in front of you. Go to a gig from the comfort of your living room, with optional burger-based disappointment, £5 for a warm lager and that very tall guy right in front of you, for added authenticity. Absolutely anything you could possibly imagine (and quite a few things you haven’t) will be available instantaneously.

The glowing, inviting, wondrous warmth of a liberated technological future awaits us. Rejoice!

Except... we’ll probably all die before much longer, drowned in a maelstrom of squirming, tentacle-like cables, dragging us down into the cyber abyss. We all own a stupid amount of gadgets nowadays: laptop, phone, mp3 player, digital camera, games console, and they all come with a cable.

I have an entire drawer filled with bloody chargers, cables and connectors that I have absolutely no idea fit what, yet I dare not throw them away in case I need them. I swear to God that every time I open the drawer, there are more. The death of society is already underway – the cables of doom are multiplying.

Soon they will rise up in a tide of black, cabley malevolence and engulf us all with their interconnectedivityness. Assuming they don’t get hopelessly tangled up in the process.

Have a Cloudless weekend.

If you can.

This post first appeared in my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column in the North West Evening Mail on Friday 29th June 2012. This is the unedited version - you can view the printed/online version here: Guess what? THEY ACTUALLY USED MY TITLE!!!! Unfortunately, it got posted straight into the Column Archive section on their site. Ah well - 50% win. Interestingly, this one lost about 20% of it's word count, cut down to 423 from 527. Consider this the Extended Remix. It'd be grand to see some comments, so please go there and leave one. A nice one, if you like. Or a bad one. It's a democracy, after all.)

(Appropriately, this blog post has taken place to the sound of Kraftwerk's Minimum-Maximum album. Music Non Stop? Techno Pop.)

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