Judgment Day

    It is with great personal joy and no little excitement - in which I’m sure my readers will join me - that I can announce that I’m engaged to be married to the Internet.

   I know what some of you are going to say and I have to agree that; yes, it is not currently legal in the UK for men to get married to the Internet, nor indeed to any non-biologicals. However, there have recently been hopeful signs that the ancient taboos and clannish prohibitions against man-machine unions may be next on the list of outworn, oppressive obstacles to the satisfaction of any and every imaginable individual desire.

   My family and friends are more worried for me now that a lifelong connection is potentially in the offing; more so even than that spectacular family gathering when I first announced that I had ‘gone online.’ They had hoped that for all my flamboyant browsing (often in public places and using hand-held devices where it’s commonly called ‘surfing’) that being an Internet user was for me just a phase; that I’d post my wild oats, grow out of it and settle down with a nice girl, etc, etc.

   They just didn’t get that for many men of my age-group and later generations, love could truly, madly, deeply be found in the beautiful and exotic world of the Web. But how can any man-machine relationship, no matter how pleasurable, be regarded as even remotely equivalent to the genetically-determined and 3 billion-year history of sexual reproduction and hence of sex within species between male and female? How absurd such arguments seem now in our enlightened, sophisticated days? As if evolution is somehow true; as if species really thrive by successfully adapting to mutations and producing similarly-mutated offspring and then somehow enabling their survival. I mean, what kind of Neanderthal crackpot fundamentalist actually believes in Evolution, for gossake?

   And as for the Internet not providing the companionship, social cohesion, comfort, sense of belonging and material security that marriage to a woman… well, fyi: Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Google, Wikipedia, MSN.. say no more, right? We’re happy together; isn’t that enough?

   

   But what I and I really want to do is to adopt.  

   Again, I know what many of you are going to say: that a man and Internet can’t possibly be good enough substitutes for the father and a mother who produced them. As if smelly, grunting biologicals had any kind of imperative to help their spawn to survive. Some; many even, ‘traditional’ marriages fail or are imperfect, and still children suffer discomfort and injury at the hands of one or more biological or adoptive parent or guardian, so what’s the point in preserving such and inadequate definition of marriage and family at all?

   Soon a man and the Internet will be able to adopt, cherish and raise, say , a little boy of six and seven years largely or entirely unsupervised by a suspicious and authoritarian State. It’s not as if children living in homes with their biological parents means they aren't going to encounter violence or pornography or nasty belief systems; ‘marriage’ already allows such things to happen in some cases, so it is only logical and just that homo-digital partnerships are likely to be just as good for kids as their meat-breeder ‘parents.’ Human-cyborg relations are every bit as likely to produce well cared-for and socialized children as the randomly joined, unscientific, undesigned pairings of tree-refugee primates who just happened to have indulged in mouse-free sex together. Internet will be a perfect co-parent for me as I try to bring up some orphaned or abandoned waif in the privacy of my own home; away from prying eyes, apart from Skype and other places where pictures can be exchanged.

I mean, it’s not as if men are some kind of monsters predisposed to having as much sex with as many bedmates as possible and that are consequently less willing than mothers to sacrifice themselves or their time or resources to enable the survival and health of their own (much less other men’s) children. You’d have to be some kind of man-hating feminist to argue such a thing and what nutcases they are, yeah?

It’s all so clear why I would be so good helping me raise a son: it would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there.

   And just say for an instant, to all of those repressive paperbook-readers and traditionalists that all this is all very well but there’s no background or tradition of man-digital partnerships being truly willing and able to protect children, then I’m sure that kids in such exciting new family structures can be protected at the stroke of a legislator’s pen.

  I’m certain, for example, that that successful gay marriage advocate (and coincidentally equivocal opponent of paedophila ) Peter Tatchell has insisted that safeguards be put in place to protect little boys who are now to be adopted by couples of married men and that such safeguards can also be applied to the wards of homo-digital marriages too.

   I’m sure they’ll be every bit as effective (as if they were truly-needed!) as the wise and well-funded professional State apparatus that protected Baby P and the fatherless children raped by Muslim paedophile gangs in Lancashire.   

It’s going to be awesome.

  

Picture from here.