Do you feel the same way: that too often you want to throw your arms up, perhaps exhale a thunderous bellow, and just give up all things high-tech?

A few weeks ago, we were locked out of using a Google account. No reason was given. We couldn’t reach a human. It was simply suspended, with no flesh-and-blood person to whom one could ask the simple question, “Why?”

Not a week later, our Facebook account was likewise suspended due, apparently, to a hacking attempt, removing our capability to post something each day or two, as is our custom.

We never relied on Facebook; didn’t work really at building it up; only post quickly and click out; but we had a decent number of folks using it and certainly wanted to keep them posted.

“Could be this weird Catholic censorship that is happening since covid lockdowns,” asked one reader temporarily locked out of the reports. “Lots of Catholic channels are getting blocked or removed even.”

Well, we have no evidence (yet) that it’s quite that.

But along with countless other examples of how drenched or buried (pick your metaphor) one is with poorly designed complexities, there is often the mechanical, almost non-human aspect to some of the actual humans one finally gets on the phone — let’s say, an aloofness.

We still can’t get a human to resolve the mysterious Facebook issue, and “Meta” (the parent company) is supposedly reviewing it. With great suddenness, everything is in the hands of AI — which probably was responsible for locking us out of Google and Facebook to begin with.

Two days ago, we posted a new “Special Report” (on a WordPress subscription site we use), only to be met with a flurry of emails from folks from foreign countries who were being denied access (it’s now resolved) because a tech had set the firewall too high.

It’s fine now, but there was no human we could reach by phone; we could only go online and open a “ticket.” The closest you can get to a human is to text (if you have a phone number).

Are there humans anywhere these days? Are we already extinct? Is there anyplace that doesn’t slough you off to a complicated on-line system? New passwords. Forced updates. A different system every time you turn around.

Uniformity is out the window. Websites often seem constructed willy-nilly by young folks who are bright and earnest and creative but sometimes seem to be in some kind of competition: playing games. One website has the menu button up here, the other down there, right, left, middle, small, large, or you have to scroll, with no hint that scrolling is necessary. A website might have nice clear buttons for various options while another exhibits esoteric symbols that seem like something out of a board game (like Clue) and unrelated to the function you’re looking for.

Is there any consistency between websites — or do they all have to have their own systems, each with a little (and sometimes not so little) learning-guessing curve that no one has time for? Do they have to use so many flash screens, causing one to constantly click this and that?

The technology has some tremendously positive attributes. The way Google can return millions of search results in a nanosecond is “astounding,” in the true sense of that word. Yes, awesome. One can go online now and find extremely valuable medical information. It has opened up news channels to more than just several networks. Folks can communicate with others at great distances at no cost. Remarkable stuff. Facetime. Instagram. Without the internet, you wouldn’t be reading this.

But the dehumanization is a real issue. If it’s not opening a “ticket,” it’s a “chat” with a “robot” (computer) which has to consult another AI system. 

Recently The New York Times ran a story about the surge in AI and how, when one person (Elon Musk) was debating another (Larry Page, a co-founder of Google) about the dangers of artificial intelligence (Musk being wary of it), the ex-Google fellow accused him of being a “specist.”

Musk said, “So, I used to be close friends with Larry Page and I would stay at his house and we’d have these conversations long into the evening about AI and I would be constantly urging him to be careful about the danger of AI and he just he was really not concerned about the nature of AI and was quite cavalier about it.”

Musk then said that Page referred to him as a “specist” for prioritizing human consciousness over machine consciousness. “Musk acknowledged the label, admitting that he indeed considered himself a ‘specist,’ firmly advocating for the preservation and advancement of human experiences,” said the report.

There is racist and sexist and homophobe and misogynist and now (in a litany that could continue), specists: those who favor humans over machines. Here we begin to draw nigh to the spirit of anti-christ. 

It’s getting a bit scary out there — particularly considering the control Google-Meta-Apple-Microsoft-X-ChatGPT-Amazon-NetFlix and other high-techers have over the world.

You can’t use a television now without the internet.

You go to turn on a computer and without asking you, it’s updating.

And when you do call a phone number (these days, for anyone), it takes a minute or two or three of clicking past their start-up options (which try with great might to dissuade you from waiting for a human).

Text this. E-mail that. Use Instagram. Or now Substack.

How quaint, AOL now seems!

Every week, a new system one has to learn (or learn to ignore).

This Advent, turn down the electronic noise. The internet certainly has taken away prayer time.

Recover that. And don’t sit around a dinner table staring at your iPhone. A news site informs us that Father Eduardo Hayen, an exorcist of the Mexican Diocese of Ciudad Juárez, offered a reflection for the first week of Advent, warning about the “vampires” that can draw people away from God, such as alcohol, sexual vices, and addiction to social media.

It’s said that in the late 1960s, Saint Padre Pio finally agreed to see his first movie. On the way, however, he suddenly shouted to stop the car, that he didn’t want to go, to turn around, that the “devil is in it” (movies).

That was movies. Mere celluloid.

Can you imagine what he would have to say about “artificial intelligence?”