Will the planet outlive my dying laptop?

10 11 2023 | 16:22Stewart Lee / THE GUARDIAN

I may be in denial about my computer being on the blink, but after another hot and muggy Halloween, one thing is frighteningly clear

Ifear the Apple Store. It’s a disorienting cross between a Los Angeles hotel lobby, the place where everyone over 30 gets killed in Logan’s Run and the headquarters of Hydra ™ ®. The protocols for attracting a staff member seem inexplicably opaque, like the rules for bidding in an auction, or initiating a new friendship. They induce mild panic attacks and my heart flutters as groomed twentysomethings, who could be customers or staff, waft by me, geishas for Steve Jobs’s ghost. Why aren’t there any queues? Can I just sit in here quietly and eat the things from my bag? Is there a duty free section?

In the Apple Store, I never know if a commercial transaction is taking place, or if I am just involved in a continuing discussion about my “needs”, a situation I admittedly find replicated in my dealings with my therapist and people generally. And there is now a raised area at the rear of the Regent Street branch in London that suggests a ziggurat. Here, ancient Aztecs tore out people’s hearts to appease Quetzalcoatl, a sacrifice still less demanding than the financial one required buy a new Apple laptop. When I mentioned, to the charming young man attending me, that the shop design made me think of the death rituals of the winged serpent worshippers, he just smiled, as if I were complimenting Apple’s bold aesthetics. But I will have to go to the Apple Store again. Soon.

My laptop has been on the blink, for more than quite a while, and I am in a textbook state of denial. It shuts down at random, like my memory. The battery percentage surges, like my blood pressure. It suddenly switched off just then, in fact, when I was Googling “Quetzalcoatl”, but not before it reminded me of Larry Cohen’s 1982 David Carradine vehicle Q – The Winged Serpent, a demented horror movie in which both the female nudity and the kung fu fighting are entirely gratuitous, as indeed they are in life as a whole. Look. I know it’s true and I just can’t face it. This laptop’s on the way out. Like life as we know it.

It’s Wednesday 1 November. October ended last night. As a kid, I loved the writer Ray Bradbury, and Ray Bradbury in turn loved the word “October”, an all-purpose adjective redolent of twilight, encroaching cold, dry crackling leaves and woodsmoke. The October Country of his imagination accommodated The Autumn People and The Halloween Tree, and his best novels, Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dandelion Wine, are both set in very Octobery Octobers. Nobody ever got poetic about September. New pencil cases, the Ludlow food festival and International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

But last night our October Halloween came and went, hot and muggy again now as usual, and to my children the word “October” has no meaning. It’s just another month, without its distinctive Octoberness, in a calendar of largely uniform weather, spiked by sudden climatic shocks. The year is now like a bland edition of Antiques Roadshow, an endless parade of willow-pattern plates, enlivened by unexpected moments where unpredictable members of the public suddenly present a sickened Arthur Negus with a demonic phallus made of quartz, some old worms, or a fossilised patriarch of the early Coptic church.

October as we knew it is gone. Today, where once I remember the first flavours of winter tailgating the closing month into November, like Tories pushing a wine fridge into Downing Street, instead I’m preparing for monsoon weather and tropical deluges, like an old geordie man who’s run off to live on a beach with a Thai sex worker. The world, like my laptop, is demonstrably deteriorating, but the effort required to fix it seems too much to contemplate. I give us 10 years, tops. Put it this way. If I get a new laptop, it certainly isn’t worth taking out an extended warranty. And, with things as they are, I won’t bother starting that box set of The Wire that’s been sitting on my shelf for a decade.

And as everything burns and buckles, the unelected evil idiot Rishi Sunak grants new North Sea oil and gas licences, even as his party makes political capital out of demonising exactly the sort of people who’ll be displaced as their homelands drown and smoulder. We’ll flood your country and beat you back into the sea with sticks. The wealthy regard the planet’s future as collateral damage in the battle to bolster their bank balances, oblivious to the fact that there’s not much point being top dog in a dead world. “Waiter! There’s a fly in my soup!” “That’s because all the other food sources have vanished, sir. Nothing grows any more, but flies still hatch from maggots laid in the decomposing corpses of the dead. You’re lucky to have a fly, to be honest. Will there be anything else?”

Paul Marshall, the co-owner of GB News, who is currently contemplating the Telegraph, runs a hedge fund with $2.2bn of fossil fuel investments. Is it any wonder that climate scepticism runs through GB News’s coverage like an oil slick, with a third of its presenters reportedly spreading climate science denial on air in 2022 and more than half criticising climate policies? Could that be why Marshall’s quasi-respectable libertarian UnHerd website routinely criticises climate action? Or maybe Marshall just hates all life on Earth and wants it to die, irrespective of the financial benefits he gains from mass extinction. But why? Well, it can’t have been easy being the father of the ex-banjo player from Mumford & Sons. “That was really good, Winston. Really good. But I’ve just got to go and discredit Thunberg.” Must we all suffer for Marshall’s shame?

We’re doomed. And our overlords are evil. Next Halloween, I’m going as the ex-banjo player from Mumford & Sons.