The screen in front of me is not quite the dreaded Windows blue screen of death, but it *is* the black screen of endless updates. In the middle of the screen a message huffily informs me that the downloaded updates are installing and I should sit down and shut up. Perhaps I paraphrase, but I can almost hear it sniffing, impatient with my impatience.
Be still
and know that I am updating.
Below this imperious message, a small arrow chases its own tail around and around in a circle, the hamsters being otherwise engaged, I guess. 
Progress is shown in percentage terms and the numbers are low. Well, low *and* slow. We crawl through the single-digit integers: 2 . . . 3 . . . 5 . . . 8. Me, I’m not sure I’d bother reporting the great leap from 2 to 3, but–as is being made only too clear–I am not in charge. We dawdle through the tweens and teens: 11 . . . 15 . . . 18. And there we stop.
After a few minutes, I wonder whether the update has failed but the little Ouroboros arrow continues chasing its own tail, world without end.
Side note: Britannica tells me that “Ouroboros expresses the unity of all things, material and spiritual, which never disappear but perpetually change form in an eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation.”
I didn’t do too well in physics (or in metaphysics either, for that matter) and maybe this is why: I have questions. Like, the unity of all things–material and spiritual–sounds pretty good but if things perpetually change form drastically enough that they seem to be destroyed, how would you know that they’d been recreated? And this: Wouldn’t it just be simpler for things not to change form in the first place? But, as with the computer updates, it is only too clear that I am not in charge. Neither Windows® nor the universe care about what seems simpler to me.
Anyway, I think this constant motion is intended to be reassuring but it’s not having precisely that effect. World without progress either, apparently.
18 . . . 18 . . . 18
Then the screen flickers: 40. And again: 50. As I watch in disbelief, it flickers again: 95.
This reminds me of something and I realize it’s my own life. It took an eternity to get to age 6, a second eternity to get to 18, and then everything stopped and stayed stopped for the longest time. Maybe I’d never get any older? It seemed to be heading that way. Then one morning I woke up, 40. The next day I was 50, and now I’m watching 75 approach at a great rate of knots.
But wait. On my screen, the 95 is yielding to 100. Not that we’re done, you understand, we’re just onto the next procedure and a new count-up. Sigh. Now I understand why they’ve used imagery that evokes Ouroboros. Never mind that whole “destruction and recreation” part, but the cycle of computer updates does seem to be endless.
And the cycle of life? We’ll see.
I clicked on the “blue screen of death” link, read the list of instructions for resolving the problem, and thanked my lucky stars I’m a Mac user.
Jim T – 🙂 I never got onto Macs or other Apple stuff because all my work was on PCs. Now I figure I don’t want to take the time to learn a different system. But Apple users are loyal in a way I don’t see with PCs – I’d call us “resigned.”
Isabel – updates that take FOREVER can be solved by doing your updates more frequently.
Now I check for updates everytime I turn on my computers.
Just trying to be helpful.
John – I take your point but don’t think that was the problem this time. It appeared to be a big honkin’ and only occasional update to Windows itself.
Isabel – If you are using Windows 11, there was a complete update for Windows 11 towards the end of last week – about 2 hours from the start of the download until the install was completed.
John – 🙂 Thanks! Yes, I’m on the newly updated Windows 11. Complete would be le mot juste. Also lengthy, surprising, obstructive, and obnoxious. (Now that I’ve thought of them, these ob-words seem to have the right connotative feel to them, but I can’t come up with any more except obstetrics and obelisk and they don’t apply.)
Isabel
If you had a Mac you could do the update overnight.
Tom
Tom – I think I could have done it overnight if I’d thought to wait. Helpfully (not!), the request to update did not come with a time estimate.
The endless updates were followed by the annual subscription rates, which are tyrannical and encroach on the intellectual work that you and I should own outright. Can you imagine how quickly and easily all of our screens could stay dark? Then, came the pestering to store everything “in the cloud.” Now, the arrogant little Ouroboros -es, -i (what would be their plural spelling?) have grown into the mammoth pythons of AI that feed off all of our computerized or published written and graphic thoughts as well as our human appearances. The aim of the computer titans is to replace us, not only individually but en masse, starting by undermining opportunities to use our thought processes and identities. After all, the inventors have fortunes astronomical and we, the buyers and users of computers and their software, have made them so. Their fortunes are self-perpetuating. We have no further use to them.
We who believe hope is possible in this dark time will hold steadfastly to the Light of reason, righteousness, integrity, compassion, forgiveness, care of our resources, self-sacrifice, and service. The appropriate use of language is our primary vehicle for learning, teaching, expressing, remembering, and preserving that goodly heritage and for contributing to it. Let us not surrender it to the Machine.
Laurna – The older I get, the more I see wisdom in Chesterton’s “distributism”, which some are now calling “localism”. Small and community-based, in any event. For any who want to read more on The Machine that Laurna references, check out Paul Kingsnorth on Substack.