It does not compute.
I’m a theologian. If it makes you happy, you can prefix that with “amateur,” since I don’t get a dime for what I write or say. I’m not sure I care one way or the other about degrees, titles, positions, etc., since they often have no bearing on the quality or importance of the verbal product. I’m certainly no better than someone noted by many as a theologian, but I contend I’m also no worse. And you are free to ignore all that, since the whole point is revealing my personal emphasis. Mostly, I’m just a writer with a preferred subject matter which falls under the academic heading, “theology.”
I surely enjoy technology toys, and especially operating systems. Sometimes I write about that, too. The whole point of this is keeping an eye out for a better means to writing my stuff. All my computers are simply glorified pencils. In my youth, I kept piles of pencil-scratched papers. I preferred pencil to pen because I was pretty sure I’d change how I wanted to say something in one part or another. When I got a typewriter, the first thing I wanted was a way to erase cleanly. The Army introduce me to computers after I hit thirty, but I was hooked. It was the ultimate typewriter, since nothing was committed to paper until I hit that “Print” command. If I needed to change it, I could print it again.
I have small piles of material, some of it going back to the pencil days. I hardly ever look at it. Indeed, most of what I once tried to drag around with me every time we moved has been tossed. Some smaller subset called out to something inside me, and I kept it. You might guess that stuff is theological in nature. Nowadays there’s a lot less of it, since I realize I can’t go back there. Proverbially, I have moved to a far distant land, and a far distant time, leaving behind most of what folks gave me. I realize the utter importance of those gifts as the starting place, but their primary importance now is the means to define what I reject. I tried it and found it wanting, and it remains a part of my identity, since what I now write reflects the failures of where I’ve been. I can’t call out to those who share nothing with me, so I keep some small expressions of what I once believed to remind me where that is.
The new land where my soul lives is defined by a fairly large collection of material. Printed and bound, it would be a small library. What would it mean to me if all this passed away? That is, if the dire future I predict for America and the West comes anywhere near our reality, I might lose access to most of that, since it depends on technology and electricity. I suppose I could make a stab at printing it all up real soon, but that might cause yet another headache if something in the future turmoil requires a sudden departure from this residence. The only reason I consider the question at all is realizing when I chance to reread some of it, I find I had forgotten little bits and pieces. Can I trust my mind to retain what seems essential? I don’t know. I’m torn. In the end, it’s a matter of faith, which is the founding stone of all this writing in the first place.
It’s painful enough for most people with data losses when things are supposed to be working well. Instead of the piles of paper I once carried, I have a stack of CDs I burned, but I seldom look at them, either. Smaller, but just as much a ball-and-chain. I’m on my fifth USB memory stick. But I’m pretty sure Nik Cubrilovic is right on one thing:
The solution may be to do nothing, certainly not to panic. The biggest problem is that we hoard data. We produce more data and information than we ever have, and we are all vain enough to believe that the data we create is so fantastic that it should live on for eternity. Losing the contact list on your phone shouldn’t be a problem — you should know who your friends are anyway. If you are losing sleep because you can’t find an old email you wrote, you likely have deeper issues to address.
Technology has spoiled us to the point where we feel nostalgic when we lose data that didn’t really matter in the first place. If it did matter, a primal instinct would have driven us to do more to preserve, rather than rely on a sleep deprived sysadmin on the other side of the country. If you didn’t care enough to take care of it yourself, then you didn’t really need it. It is our misguided expectation of technology that causes us to panic when we lose data. The only people who have a larger incentive to preserve your data are those who are using it to target an advertisement at you, or sell you something.
Not only is a lot of this data not important, but do we really want to keep it? I certainly would not want a full account of everything I did in my youth sitting on a server somewhere. I am also certain that we do not want the record of our as a society time being documented and discovered by future civilizations based on Twitter messages.
Data experiences its own form of natural selection. What is important will survive, the remainder will thankfully fade away.
While it may be the mere vanity of a self-important nobody, a wannabe theologian whose contentions will be forgotten only slightly later than his name, I consider often how I can keep it for future use. I’ve studied the issues of file formats, the minimum necessary to convey what in my mind is the essence, and the widest possible use, and the most convenient recall, etc. I’ve studied copyright, and decided I really don’t care half so much about my name as I do the ideas. What difference it makes in another human soul strikes me as more important than all the wealth of the world. That’s what theology is. It’s about things which, if correctly understood, will affect you long after your body and this whole universe has passed.
But then, how could something like that depend on such a flaky system of transmittal? It’s enough, according to my theology, that we do whatever it is we do best until we can’t do any more, in the cause of passing on these ideas. If all computers and technology, and electricity itself, suddenly disappears from the earth in some man-made catastrophe of global self-immolation, I can’t do much to prepare for that. I’ll have to assume that divine prerogative demands yet another change in my Really Big and Important Plans.
