Little black boxes

If you – dear reader – would like to have more serenity regarding the currently apparently hysterical world or zeitgeist, you could try Terry Pratchett’s novels to enrich your perspective with some humour.
There are numerous little observations in these multi-faceted social pictures that make us think. For example, on Discworld there are so-called iconographs. These are small, black boxes through which, with a viewfinder, you look at a motif; you press a button and a picture of exactly that motif comes out of the box. A miracle of magic. But one should not open this box carelessly. You don’t know whether the little goblin who lives in it and paints the pictures might not be taking a bath and reacting a little offended. Nonsense, you mean? Well, Pratchett wrote fantasy novels and the box is not a camera but an iconograph, but … do you actually know what happens when you press the shutter release of a camera and … wouldn’t the leprechaun explanation be as good as any other for a worrying number of fellow citizens?

Devices that you don’t know how they work but that you use anyway are called black boxes. For most people, cars are already something like that, even though you occasionally learn about the principle of an internal combustion engine at school. Televisions, computers or smartphones, however, are almost completely beyond general understanding and yet they are used by almost everyone. If a problem arises, you need the help of an expert. With the car, too, as a rule, but here you can still follow along, at least mentally. The specialist fiddles around mysteriously on the computer and suddenly the thing runs. Now he could sell us the greatest miracle stories about his divine secret knowledge and if he had danced around the computer with a bone through his nose and a rattle, we would have had to accept that as adequate as well – at least when the box works again.

This practice, which is increasingly taking over our entire social life, is called blackboxing. It implies that more and more people are basically stumbling through our technoid present without technological present. This basically presupposes an enormous trust that the Apple voodoo master will not overcharge us, but that the overcharged, but most people don’t seem to be aware of this.
As increasingly apparent, it is not just the average person who is clueless, but above all those whom they trust to have a judgement that one would like to orientate oneself by Journalists.

Tagesschau, for example, reported on 16 September 2022, and later on
later also Deutsche Welle, reported on the wonderful invention of Mr.
Maxwell Chikumbutso from Zimbabwe – you will remember – it was about a
television set that was supposed to generate electricity and solve all our
energy problems. The fact that we did not use this miracle
was due to the fundamental racism of our society.
Racism of our society. (The possibility that the goblins
in these devices cannot live in colder climates was not even considered.
was not even taken into consideration). Let us leave aside the fact that we have
paid for the fact that our public service broadcaster is making us the
makes us the laughing stock of the world.

Perhaps one is tempted to compare Mr Chikumbutso with Mr Edward Makuka Nkoloso from Zambia, who in 1964 planned to launch a spacegirl, a missionary and two cats to Mars with a catapult in his private space programme. At the time, there was a whimsical television interview, probably to show off the unfortunate man. Whether it also mentioned that his fellow countrymen thought he was a fool or whether it rather served to serve prejudices against Africans is not known. But the case with the television is different. This can also be illustrated by another case: On 14 June this year, Mr Jeremiah Thoronka from Sierra Leone was honoured in Berlin for inventing a special principle in 2017 (discovered by the Curie brothers in 1880) with which he now operates large invisible piezoelectric power plants, the electricity of which he gives away to the poor people of Sierra Leone.
I assume that both Chikumbutso and Thoronka know they are talking nonsense, it might have been different with Mr Nkoloso.
Fama would have it that in olden times Western colonisers would have swindled the semi-natural tribes in America or Africa out of their land and treasures with worthless glass beads. Who could blame these two men for doing the same to our journalists and politicians? Chapeau! Cleverly done.

And it makes a problem of our society visible. Whenever someone presents a solution to (equally misunderstood) problems of our present, there is always someone who grabs for it like a glass bead. There is no more examination and no more thinking, and that is devastating. Originally, the Enlightenment project was started to help people out of their self-inflicted immaturity. Today, we have to trust everything and everyone, because our everyday life is organised with devices and mechanisms that we no longer even begin to understand and that put us at the mercy of every charlatan who comes along. This also applies to the supposedly big issues in society. For example, the unfortunate climate change deniers are unable to penetrate either the climate issue or the supposed solutions. At least the suspicion is obvious when they cannot even name the CO2 content in the atmosphere. Both the supposed problem and the supposed solutions are delivered to them as a black box. Of course, with alarmist rhetoric, so that they reliably fulfil their intended role. However, if I am annoyed by the bluntness with which this „follow the science“ is pumped through the media channels into the spinal cord of a hopelessly overtaxed public, I overlook – I have to admit to myself – that the attempt at enlightenment on a broad scale has above all replaced a rather naïve childlike faith with a scientistic superstition.

In Pratchett’s novels, at least some of the influential players see through such mechanisms and use them for their own ends, while our protagonists broadly give the impression of complete cluelessness. However, it is possible to play dumb and if it is not stupidity but intention to ruin our society, it might be possible to intervene against it, for plans are more easily foiled than accidents prevented. But we must not hope for the intervention of Granny Weatherwax (probably the most famous witch on Prachett’s Discworld) but must take action ourselves. A first step against this would be: Remain sceptical.