Holiness in the Cloud: What in God’s Name is Going On?
So, I’m reading this, and apparently, the Pope, yes, that Pope, has declared some fifteen-year-old kid a saint. A “computer whiz,” they say. First “millennial saint.” Millennial. Saint. What in the name of Ada Lovelace is happening to the world? I thought saints were, you know, people who suffered greatly, or performed miracles, not some whippersnapper who knew how to plug in a monitor. Probably couldn’t even code in Fortran, I bet.
They call him “God’s Influencer” or some such nonsense. Influencer! That’s what these kids are, isn’t it? Staring into their little glowing rectangles, whispering sweet nothings to an invisible audience. Back in my day, if you wanted to influence someone, you had to, I don’t know, talk to them. Maybe even look them in the eye. Now it’s all about “likes” and “follows.” Next thing you know, we’ll have algorithms deciding who gets into heaven.
The Digital Divide: Heaven or Hellfire?
They say he used technology to spread the faith. Spread the faith? What, did he build a website? I remember when we built websites. HTML tags, tables for layout, maybe a GIF if you were feeling frisky. Now it’s all about “the cloud.” What even is the cloud? Just someone else’s computer, usually a rack full of blinky lights in a building with too much air conditioning. And now it’s holy? Give me a break. I still prefer a good, solid printout you can hold in your hands. You can’t spill coffee on the cloud, but you also can’t appreciate the weight of information.
This whole thing just proves my point: these damn kids are too reliant on their fancy phones. They can’t even tell you how a transistor works, but they can make a video of themselves dancing badly and suddenly they’re a saint. Where’s the grit? Where’s the struggle? Where’s the sense of accomplishment you get from finally debugging a line of code at 3 AM? Probably got some AI to write all his sermons. Probably used a spell checker. Pathetic.
The End of Days (and Dial-Up)
I guess I’m just an old dinosaur. But you know what? Dinosaurs had a good run. We built the foundations for all this digital tomfoolery. We laid the fiber optic cables, we wrote the operating systems. We made the damn internet work before it became a cesspool of cat videos and whatever an “influencer” is. Now they’re canonizing kids for, what, having good Wi-Fi? It’s a slippery slope, I tell you. First, it’s millennial saints, then it’ll be AI popes. Then we’re all truly doomed.
Maybe I should just go back to my command prompt. At least there, I know where I stand. And no one’s going to declare my dir command a holy miracle. Though, sometimes, it feels like one when it actually works without a Bad command or file name error.
And don’t even get me started on their little emojis. A saint with emojis. The horror.