More than this

I’m sitting in the dark of the junk room, bathed in the light from the computer screen, surrounded by silence throughout the house. Everybody else is already in bed, and the clocks are ticking inexorably towards Monday. if I sit still and keep my mouth shut, the infection that has plagued me for the last several weeks seems to leave me alone. It wouldn’t take much of a clairvoyant to predict a request for more antibiotics from the doctor tomorrow. I imagine that might require a second visit to the nurse, and a second listen to my innards as I attempt to inflate my lungs. I’m fed up with feeling terrible now. My birthday pretty much got cancelled, and apart from a trip to the garden centre for a cup of tea and a piece of cake earlier, I’ve not set foot outside the house for a week. It’s all my fault, isn’t it. I wrote about wanting to start running again. That’s all it took for the universe to turns it’s attention on me, and whisper “let’s get him”. While cooped up in the house over the last week I’ve watched a lot of television, and scrolled a lot of the internet. Years ago we used to joke about reading the entire internet - that will never happen any more because a legion of robots are writing an infinite number of next pages, just before we reach them. After attempting to scroll through the dross at Facebook a couple of days ago I almost posted an incendiary post about the utter cesspool it has become. While scrolling I blocked perhaps three quarters of the posts I saw - “suggested” posts, written by robots. While reporting and blocking the umpteenth fake-news story I stumbled upon, it suddenly occurred to me that the reporting mechanism isn’t really reporting anything - it’s using humans as engines to help clean the swamp. I closed the browser tab, and sat back in my chair - shaking my head. It won’t be long until AI avatars are reading and responding to content, as well as creating it. It will be portrayed as “incentivising conversation”, or some such codswallop. Meta have had their fingers burned with similar experiments in the past. Anyway. Roxy Music just started singing “More Than This” on Spotify. Well played, universe. Well played.