It's Personal...

Below is an extract from my upcoming book "It's Personal..." which is a biographical account of the impact of technology on individuals and society. It is a dark story based on my life events which shows not just the good side of technology but also the bad.

The book will be published next year.

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The problem is that in the UK, even a well adjusted person from a normal background with strong family support can struggle to meet the costs and pressures of University - so even if I had met any of those criteria there was always a chance of things not working out; I had none of them.

I received a loan for my fees sure - that covered one cost but the very minimal amount I received for living costs simply wasn’t enough.?I had to work my way through my studies.?On top of this, I had a tremendous sleep disorder - I would literally go 4-6 days without sleep on a regular basis.?I would work in a restaurant on campus from 5pm until 3am 5 nights a week; I would finish in the restaurant and head to the lab to feed my hunger for information and knowledge then I would (when I had the mind to remember) attend lectures and seminars.

Quite quickly my life became a psychedelic nightmare because when you deprive yourself of sleep to the extremes I was, your brain chemistry gets completely fucked up.?I mean to the extent that the computer fans in the labs were playing an asynchronous symphony of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven and things were moving in my peripheral vision which were not really there.

I was also smoking a lot of weed - and I mean just insane amounts because despite depriving myself of sleep I was always incredibly hyperactive - mostly because I was drinking so much coffee; and the only way I could bring myself down to a level where I was able to interact with other people, I had to be stoned.?From the moment I became conscious to the point I passed out (often days apart) I was stoned.

My depression was returning because not only did I have all the baggage of my childhood trauma still haunting my increasingly torturous dreams, I was also failing in the one thing that had kept me going - I was failing in my studies.?All of my time was taken up by work and my never ending hunger for information.

I was addicted to data and it was killing me, no I mean it was literally killing me.

Then the end of the first semester arrived and every one went home for Christmas - well mostly everyone.?I didn’t have a home, I had been estranged from my family since I was 12 years old - so I had to stay.?It was a huge campus and spending Christmas there alone was one of the most damaging things I ever did.

If you can imagine finding yourself in a ghost town but being forced to stay there because you had nowhere else to go, for almost an entire month, you can imagine what that Christmas was like.?Total isolation for a young man who was completely unstable, no income (because the restaurant was closed) and only my own insanity for company.

My only option, my only solace - was to chase that proverbial dragon all the way down the rabbit hole - complete immersion and submission to the virtual.

It is hard to explain exactly how that felt or what that meant - partially because my mind was so lost that trying to recall things rationally is, well, simply not possible.?But to anyone who thinks that addiction to technology, games, data etc. are just excuses for people who have no responsibility - I can assure you, you are wrong.

But it wasn’t all bad - one advantage to not sleeping is you have a great deal of time on your hands and living in the lab surrounded by those Sun SPARC workstations, those gateways to the virtual, probably saved my life during that Christmas. There was no question I was suicidal but I was distracted from taking my life by being plugged in.?I was able to communicate with other people over IRC which to a certain extent dealt with the isolation and at the same time I was feeding my hunger for data by being at one with the virtual.

In the corner of the lab, R2D2’s head had become much smaller than the ones in my first lab 15 years earlier, but I knew they were there, that anonymous being, watching me.?Perhaps even the same anonymous being that had first watched me as a 10 year old boy because that is the beauty of anonymity, you just never know. They watched me disappear down that rabbit hole for days on end; they watched me pass out over the keyboard; they watched me in my despair and they did nothing.

I didn’t recover from that Christmas really, Christmas became Spring Break, Spring Break became Summer Break - the same isolation, the same patterns of behaviour but in Summer Break I couldn’t stay on Campus, I had to move to student housing in the city - I lost my lab, I became unplugged and I crashed.

I remember the splintering of wood and the cacophony of belts and batons as the police forced their way into my room.?I remember the paramedics asking me questions I didn’t understand - like they were down a tunnel far away and I remember waking up in a yellow room and that smell of nothing.