Ashes To Ashes...

The ingenuity of mankind knows few bounds: '...What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals.' [Hamlet, Act II, scene 2], and it would seem to be obvious that our ingenuity as a species is a self-reinforcing feedback loop, with one idea or physical invention of our ingenuity leading either logically or tangentially to another, and another, and so on. The development of human natural language is inextricably linked to our development of technology and vice versa. 

Out of the need to teach and pass on our tool-making came language, as much as it emerged out of our need to navigate the wider world beyond our immediate environment for survival. As we gradually corralled our environment to serve our needs, so too did language develop and feed ideas back into further technological advances; in agriculture, medicine, warfare, commerce and so on: each advance in communication bringing commensurate advances in technology, in turn bringing further advances in communication. All good, to a point. But the reverse to the obverse of '...this paragon of animals...' is the darker facet of mankind that seeks to royally screw over one's fellow creature, either physically or commercially to their own benefit. As Hamlet continues in his soliloquy '...And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so.'

As our tools and communication become ever more sophisticated they also become ever more arcane, abstruse and opaque in their inner workings to the vast majority of us. Few understand that the black mirror of their mobile phone is in reality a networked computer of unimaginable complexity, power and sophistication, fed and interconnected by a data network, likewise of unimaginable complexity, power and sophistication of itself: both products of that very particular human ingenuity in toolmaking and communication.

As we become more and more divorced on a prosaic level from the underlying mechanistic detail of the technologies we now so absolutely take for granted and oh, so absolutely depend upon simply to exist, so too there is a class of human ingenuity and endeavour that, Loki-like, wants to fuck things over, sometimes just for the sheer hell of it; most of the time simply to siphon away other people's money into their own pockets. But the level of ingenuity entailed in some of the more technological spheres of these nefarious human activities is, to be honest, staggeringly impressive in its depth. More later on one particular topic arising from this thought-stream; but whatever shenanigans we as humans get up to in life, we should all remember: we are all but mortal: '...this quintessence of dust...'. Old Will Shakespeare, as usual, hits the nail on the head...