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Our business seems to develop god-like characteristics

A full-page ad of a well-known computer company recently appeared in the back cover of a well-known magazine for entrepreneurs. The ad said –I am paraphrasing- that since our business never sleeps, the technical support of the computer company doesn’t even blink.

The idea of the ad is clear. We live in a world that never stops. We use computers day and night. If something happens to our computers, we need somebody who doesn’t sleep ready to help us any time of the day each day of the year without ever taking a break.

There is no doubt we live in a globalized and technologized society. Time zones and time for rest are not as important or respected as they used to be. It is also true that if we are in need of a solution for a technical problem, the urgency is usually so real we can’t wait until the next morning.

However, the idea that there is somebody (or something) that never sleeps and doesn’t even slumber, somebody (or something) always there and always available to answer our requests and provide a solution, that idea was in the past reserved to a different area of our human experience.

Probably three millennia ago, somebody wrote a song. That song eventually was thought to be part of a sacred text and today we usually know it as Psalm 121. In his text, the ancient writer says, speaking about God, that God “doesn't doze or ever get drowsy.”

In other words, what in ancient times was a characteristic of the deity, in modern times is a characteristic of technical support and customer service.

It should be obvious that in the context of this column we can’t analyze with any degree of seriousness the similitude between an ancient religious text and a modern full-page advertisement. However, the similitude is there and I don’t think is just a coincidence.

I don’t think the creative staff at the advertising agency that designed the ad on purpose reviewed ancient religious expressions to recontextualize them in our modern times.

It’s more likely that the creative staff was able to feel and capture an unmet need we all have, the need of having somebody always caring for us, without ever closing his or her eyes.

But that “somebody” is no longer, as he or she was before, a supreme being or even a superior being. Our helper is now another human being, or, better said, a group of human beings that, as a group, never sleep or even blink.

We can then say we are seeing our business and ourselves in the same way ancients perceived their gods. But, unlike the ancients, we are asking other human beings to care for us. And there is a short distance from “caring” to “control” us. The old helper God has become the modern Big Brother.

Technology has created its own mythology. It makes us feel like gods, but at the same time it is taking away our very humanness.

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