This picture says it all. 
I first encountered EI, which is an abbreviation for “environmental illness”, on the TV show “Better Call Saul.” The main character’s brother, a powerhouse trial lawyer, is homebound in a house without electricity, phone service, internet, anything electronic. He believes these make him ill. Well EI is for real for the people who have it; for others, family members, friends, co-workers it’s often considered more a neurosis or even a psychosis. Harper’s 2024 October issue had an article on this, and it definitely brought out the kookiness of EI, but is Environmental Illness a real one? I don’t know EI is real but DI sure is.
I was hoping I could sneak up on you with this latest rant against the digital. I was going to say DI stands for digitalis illness but that’s a medicine to treat congestive heart failure. Also according to Wikipedia,, “Digitalis is a genus of about 20 species of herbaceous perennial plants, shrubs, and biennials, commonly called foxgloves.” (I know. Using an internet source to complain about being digitally ill is hypocritical.) In any evert, since I’m not ill from heart medicines or plants but from things digital, I have Digital Illness.
I write things on my computer, whether my lap top or desktop, and I can’t find them again. Oh I eventually find them, but they are not where I thought I had put them. Google continually wants me to sign-in as does Microsoft. Not banks, not financial institutions, not insurance agencies, not doctors want you to talk to a human. No, go to their website. They’re happy to help you there. Some of these are the same ones who warn me how open to hackers I am if I use electronic devices.
You know who wants to talk to you? The guys pedaling everything from home improvements, to solar panels, to bathrooms, to trimming trees. Being home during the day, I am surprised by how many businesses think they will sell someone potentially thousands of dollars’ worth of stuff on a cold call. I could get rid of them quicker if I’d say, “No, I’m not interested but that neighbor right over there was just talking about that.” That would work, but the Golden Rule even applies to the retired.
I got a bigger TV recently. It swallows the living room, and I can’t believe how fast Netflicks can load and reload and advertise some more. I feel pursued by the Digital as if Pacman wasn’t a game at all but a prophesy of what would be once we all set down in front of a screen. More and more of our life and less and less real living would be done there.
The Digital is another dimension. I’m like a character in Edwin Abbott’s 1884 Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions. [I referred to this in a 26 Jan 2015 blog.] I’m a two dimensional character discovering the third dimension. But the only real access point is the smartphone, and so I remain unplugged, disconnected from and disconcerted by the Digital. Literally everyone around me is plugged into this dimension all the time. At stoplights I have to honk to get the person or persons in front of me to look up from the screen at the light that turned green seconds ago. I’m the only one honking. I suspect they’re all in that other dimension. I’m the outlier, the weird one, the other.
All these connected ones believe they have the world at their fingertips and they are absolutely well-informed about all of it. As they have conversations with people I can’t see or hear, they would consider me to be the crazy one if I started praying out loud. I’m crazy for having faith in God and His revelation of Himself, but they are not for having faith in AI and its revelations.
I am not crazy, but I am ill. Made ill by something outside of me as surely as Randle McMurphy, but there’s no flying over this cuckoo nest. It’s coming home to rest in spades with Musk’s Optimus robot that will end poverty and probably bring world peace. It’s sort of genius for a child of the 80s to name his save-all robot Optimus, think Optimus Prime. That would be like my generation naming our save-all robot “Bones” or one of the 70s naming it R2D2. One thing is certain no one’s naming it HAL which I fear would prove prophetic, but what do I know? I’m Digitally Ill.
