Hold onto Your Butts

It’s one of the famous lines from Spielberg’s 93 classic Jurassic Park. Technology, the driving force that brought the park into existence by means of various different sciences, has malfunctioned and shut down. As Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) smokes his cigarette to the filter and shuts the system down I find myself wondering what would happen if technology shut down here, not a remote island in the pacific but throughout the entire United States.

Programs like this exist. March 31 hosts Earth Hour. The goal is to have everyone across the country, across the world, turn off their lights for one hour. So far the program, which started in San Francisco, has been a success. The problem is, it’s only one hour.

There are tons of things a willing individual can do to save energy, so why wait an entire year for one hour? Plug your multiple appliances into a power strip and turn the whole thing off when you’re not using it. Turn off lights you aren’t using. Use compact fluorescents. Wash your clothes in cold water instead of hot- it reduces energy costs and washing your clothes in cold water helps them to stay vibrant and last longer. Do these things every day, then go even further and pull a Jurassic Park and totally unplug. No TV, no phone, no internet. Yep, sit in the dark. See if you can do it for one hour.

The END OF THE WORLD

Hello internet.

I've been doing a lot of reading on you lately and some of it is not so good. There seems to be a rather hostile contingent that agrees that the internet will spell the end of the world. I'm a pretty big Terminator fan so I gotta agree, you machines make me nervous. How not? With your blinking lights and your electric chords... no way man, no way.

However, lately I've also been reading some interesting things to your defense. There are online communities that are making a pretty significant difference on how people interact and communicate that isn't all that bad. Hell, I used to go to chat rooms and stir up trouble, and I'll never forget the time me and some high school buddies got drunk and played chat roulette in my sister's princess castle. Fun times. So lately I've been thinking you've been getting a bad rap.

Now, I'm an earth hugging hippie chick bent on destroying the cold and truncated means in which we communicate but if information will save the world, this is the quickest way to get it. Patton Oswald calls it ETEWAF (everything that ever was, available forever) (Wired mag, citation pending...) and that seems okay, lots of sifting. But even if everything that ever was, was available I doubt that most people would care to look it up. I guess it comes down to who you put your faith in these days, humans, or machines.

If you're reading this, you are the resistance.