When I was a boy, “magic” had been confined to church. After world war II, everyone assumed “Yankee ingenuity” could fix anything, often with little more than “string and bailing wire”. Farm boys were all mechanical geniuses, City kids knew how to outfox anybody. All was – or would soon be – knowable and under control .
As examples, we fixed our own flat tires, changed oil. When a TV or radio didn’t function, I’d take vacuum tubes out to test and buy at Radio Shack. Even later, I knew how transistor “gates” worked and could program in binary (zeros and ones) or assembly. TV or newspaper news was limited, trustworthy, opinion confined to editorial pages .
Now? It’s all magic. Even mechanics can’t fix new cars, God himself couldn’t repair a broken circuit board. I have no idea how quantum computers work, nor how AI is programmed. And all sources of “news” are slanted and suspect .
In fact, once again, we inhabit a world of magic as profound and (possibly) as dark as anything in the Middle Ages. We know how to (mostly) talk and provide services for money, shop, consume, and be entertained. A few “experts” know a lot – or claim they know a lot – about increasingly tiny bits of esoterica .
That makes the residual child in me quite uneasy. Without understanding I still believe real control is impossible .
HuntingtonHarborThoughts 