Paradise, location unknown

Looks innocent on the outside – white. With a strikingly traditional sign – apple. The oldest fruit, the fruit of the paradise, the fruit of sin.  The fruit that split humanity from God. Two thousand years later the fruit keeps splitting.

One screen, click F3, split in half, click, in a quarter, click, in eighth, click in  sixteenth and click ad infinitum. . .(into infinity). For a computer user of today does an infinite number of task in a split of s second. In a click. windows open and close constantly, no worries, no danger of a draft, just of mental ventilation.

We focus on one window for only so long: our impatient fingers suffering from a certain type of keyboard ADHD are drawn to the F3 key as if it was made of magnesium and our nails – of metal. Three essays at a time, friend’s skyped voice in the background, iTunes music in another background: for Apple allows for hundreds of backgrounds, and not a single foreground. It should in fact be an onion, not Apple: for an onion has got layers and makes us cry.

Golden Apple

Apple is all round, but computer-users cannot be called all-rounded with the amount of windowed feedback they obtain every moment. Attention, attention! What do you mean? The old commando saying lost its validity long ago, attention is an extinct species hibernating side by side with memory (a post for another day) in our appled world. They did not keep up.

Nowadays you have to be quick: focus is short-lived, does not hold much, strives for constant readjustment. We scan the screen, peep out of one window, back into another, glimpse here and there, click to and fro. Round the world in a 100 days, round the screen in a hundred seconds! It’s a silly marathon though, a marathon without an aim and a prize. And without a route. It is a movement for movement’s sake. Where do we go? All the windows might be open but the view is bleak. . .

A wall of incomprehension with graffiti of footsteps running in circles. Soon we wont even have time to open windows, we’ll just break glass. Emergency exit. Even Ctrl-Alt-Del will not help us there. Send a rapport of an error? You might, it will not get far, two windows away.

There is no door out.  Apart from a real one. Out onto the street.