Real life | 18 October 2018

After months of trying not to try the exciting new version of Gmail, the exciting new version of Gmail tried me.

I hadn’t realised it had happened until I opened my laptop and didn’t recognise my own inbox. With the horror that creeps up in me like acid reflux to greet all technological advances, I realised that forces unknown had shut down my laptop in the night and upgraded me to the new Gmail while I was asleep.

‘Dear God, no!’ I screamed, as I tapped away furiously trying to change my email back to the format I could understand. But the option in settings for ‘Go back to classic Gmail’ had disappeared.

‘No! Please no! Please! Christ, no!’ I wailed like Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man as the pagans are lighting the fire beneath him and the sacrificial chickens.

Turns out you can only resist new versions for so long by clicking the opt-out button.

They won’t let you resist for ever. I don’t know who They is exactly, but it’s not the whizz kids in Silicon Valley getting their millennial kicks out of tormenting the over-45s with new versions of things succeeding new versions of things succeeding new versions of things. Faster than the speed of menopause these new versions of things succeed themselves. Faster than the speed of deteriorating eyesight, faster even than the expansion of bunions.

So who is They? ‘They’ is the people the whizz kids work for. I have thought long and hard about this and the only motive I can think of for all this new stuff is to make our attention spans so short that we are sitting ducks for whatever is coming, ultimately.

The fact that your own computer can be shut down in the night, remotely, and that something you didn’t want can be downloaded on to it by a faceless entity is proof enough of something really scary.