The world of the computer has already been very much invaded by the wretched, and the cheaper things get, the more wretched it becomes. Not because the poor are necessarily wretched (though they often are, sometimes even as much as the rich), but because cunning people will use the wonders of technology to further brutalise the poor, the kind of poor who live in tin shacks with television antennae on the roof. And in doing so, they, i.e. ‘the powerful people’, also brutalise themselves. They’ve always been brutes, in one sense, and now they’ll become even more brutal, thanks to technology. The internet will leave the cultural sphere where it began once and for all, and will instead be under the control of businesses and states. But even so, the structure of the computer, and the intelligence of the human race who made it work, will always be there. It will always be a world to be untangled, a world you can converse with, because it must necessarily be governed by logic. Without logic, the machine doesn’t work. Even if the person using it isn’t logical. These days a drooling football fan can press a few buttons and get a few results. Soon he’ll be able to do a lot more, with even less intellectual effort. Nevertheless, there may always be a few individuals who’d rather converse with the inner workings of an operating system on Christmas Eve, indifferent to the firecrackers and drunken revels. Of course I find this solitude somewhat painful; things could easily have been another way. Of course I submerge myself in the world of the computer to numb the pain, which is more nostalgia than pain, or a kind of nostalgia, the kind you find in tangos, which doesn’t need to relate to a concrete fact or a real-life experience. Nostalgia for what a race, or a country, could have been. Ah, people …