Thoughts on the early stages of AI

Thinking about what AI has done ... is doing ... to our world, it occurred to me I should write a blog post to commemorate this watershed moment. Right now - June 2026 - AI is more advanced than most people expected it to be, and not quite yet as sophisticated as we know it will probably be quite soon.

Seeing as this my time capsule, I may as well document that the big AIs at the moment are Google's Gemini, Open AI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. And somewhere in the mix, Microsoft also has Copilot.

Where we are right now is on the precipice of everything we've known before, and while most people are trying to ignore it, it's getting harder to ignore. A lot of people worldwide are already losing their jobs to AI. Most people are already using AI to write better-sounding e-mails for them.

AI is being built into everything. My LG TV has AI. My Samsung cellphone has AI. My Samsung smartwatch has AI. And yet ... it's not truly intelligent, not yet anyway. It has access to all the world's knowledge, but it still hallucinates, and is used to generate AI slop videos on TikTok and Facebook.

AI slop, you ask? Aah child, remember a time before AI generating all videos? Back when people recorded their own videos, and put them up on social media for reactions or even fame and money? I suppose you might have forgotten that time, but for me it was ... last year.

Now it's getting harder to tell AI content apart from human-generated content. Journalists are bemoaning receiving AI-generated press releases. LinkedIn business posts are also AI slop - em dashes and emojis everywhere, on a business platform! If you aren't intelligent enough to write your own material to appear intelligent in front of a professional audience ... no doubt some of whom are using AI to sumarise your AI-generated content ... why even bother?

"Vibe coding" is also a big thing at the moment. Maybe one day the term will have lost relevance because computers will write all the code, but at this moment most humans still write code and other humans use AI to generate code for them with absolutely zero understanding of what it actually means, only caring about what it can do for them. Which is fine, I guess, right up until something catastrophic goes wrong. Like somebody vibe codes the safety software for an elevator control algorithm, or a self-driving car, or a smart missile target acquisition suite. That's still coming I guess.

Me personally, I'm not afraid of AI. I'm kinda looking forward to true agentic AI, and not this limited pay-per-play kinda dumb kind we have now. The thing we remember now is Microsoft Clippy, the "original" AI. Remember that little guy? It's ok, ask your AI agent to tell you about it.

The question we're all facing now feels really existential: what SHOULD we be asking AI that we're not? Are we falling behind hopelessly? And is that the life we choose anyway? I mean, we could already access all the world's information through classic Google for the past two decades, and mostly we rather spent our free time watching Netflix movies.

I like chatting to Gemini using "voice mode". Yes yes, back in 2026 most interaction with chatbots is still via text, typed out via a keyboard. I know, how quaint. But here I am anyway on the cutting edge of technology, and like most people I'm now discovering that talking to AI is a bit easier than the technological kludge that has been the keyboard. Old habits die hard though.

Heck, I'm (still) 40. Where might this all go when I'm 70 or 80? Augmented reality for everybody? Virtual reality with our little AI friends and assistants, for everybody? Inserted into tubs of goo, with our body heat harvested by the machines, like the Matrix foretold (that's a movie ... moving pictures ... story time for sophisticated cavemen).

The irony is rich here, because I think we really feel stuck between the future and the past. The cutting edge is starting to cut, and we're not entirely clear what our place in the future is going to be, or how to get there. So we're joining seminars, reading think pieces, or just losing ourselves in Netflix and letting the future reveal itself rather than worrying about it.

Wherever you are, gentle reader, and whenever you are, I hope that you've got a few more answers than I do. Here's to a future that is decidedly less boring than the one I bemoaned only a few years ago, when I said regretfully to my girlfriend that everything had gotten so bland: every year's cellphones were the same glass slabs with faster processors and better cameras, TVs are larger glass slabs that get ever-sharper, the internet connections get ever-faster, computers get ever more capable ... but nothing felt NEW. 

Well. AI arrived and said "hold my beer, watch this". I'm watching, AI. And trying to figure out the doing, as well. 

Hello forties ... and goodbye 2025

Ladies and gentlemen, on 19 December 2025 it finally happened: I woke up no longer a vibrant young man in my thirties, but a full-on middle-aged dad-bod-sporting man in my forties. What a difference a day makes, hey.

I haven't written a blog post here in a few years, so for the sake of my future biography let's share a few milestones shall we? 

At the end of 2023, I bought a house with my girlfriend. We celebrated Christmas in our very own home, and for the first time in my life I could stop paying rent to someone else (instead paying bond payments to a bank - same difference except now I don't have a landlord to complain to when things go wrong).

In some spectacularly poor timing, I installed a spanking new inverter and two batteries in the very month that South Africa declared an end to loadshedding. The inverter has helped my house stay powered every since, even with a couple shortlived local power interruptions, but loadshedding surprised everyone by not coming back. 

There were other surprising things as well, most notably that COVID didn't come back. And the ANC and the Democratic Alliance and some smaller parties entered into a Government of National Unity (cue endless Gnu-related humour, not that any of us in South Africa really even know what a gnu is). And Donald Trump somehow getting elected to a second term (may it be forever recorded in history that he is known as the first Cheeto president due to his orange colour).

While things have felt a tiny bit more stable in South Africa, the international landscape has never looked worse: an endless Russian invasion of Ukraine, horrific public shootings of all kinds, the confusing emigration programme implemented by Trump for Afrikaans farmers to escape persecution in South African by moving to the United States (I'm genuinely not clear on whether Afrikaans bakers and candlestick makers are ineligible under this programme - or if all Afrikaaners are now classed as farmers).

As I write this, on 30 December 2025 while on holiday, I recently completed a lengthy roadtrip holiday with my girlfriend and stepson: from Johannesburg to George, then George to Cape Town, and back up to Johannesburg (sleeping responsibly halfway in Colesberg on both directions) ... and it was both weird to see how much I still remembered for places I haven't visited in decades, and also how some of the things I remembered most fondly have almost completely changed.

I described a childhood growing up in that area which is no longer possible: driving a bike from a school that was not surrounded by the protective fences it currently is, to a games arcade that is now a mechanics workshop, to grab a pie at a train station where the train station no longer runs (but the pie store is still there and we enjoyed some tasty pies there) ... and off to Knysna on the weekend, where the library my grandfather dropped me off at is now switched around, with the children's books section I spent so many happy hours now on the "wrong side" of the library, and the donut shop he and I sat and enjoyed the most delicious donuts I'd ever tasted in my WHOLE LIFE (of around 10 years) is now a cellphone accessory store ... to eventually work as a newspaper reporter from an office which is now in the building next door to where it is now, and take photos of stage plays at the Knysna Playhouse which is now a funeral undertaker.

Mixed feelings hey. While in George I also met my old High School buddy for the first time since we matriculated in 2003. We chatted easily, but he now has two kids and a wife and is gray like me in places but I could still chat to him and feel like I was in High School still and it was almost time to submit that big Geography assignment.

Professionally, I finally had a change at my job: I now have a different key client at my advertising agency, and focus more on media than outright project management. Same agency though, making this easily my longest-ever job.

Personally, I'm planning to get engaged in 2026. I'd never have thought that was possible if you'd asked me a few years ago when I went through the trauma of divorce, but my girlfriend is the perfect woman for me. It hasn't been easy, but nothing is ... that was the Offspring who sang that right? We've both grown as individuals and as a couple, and truly love each other in a way that I've never experienced before.  

My website is also starting to get a bit more daily organic traffic, mostly from Asia ... if it blows up there, I'm not sure if I'm ready for what that will mean. My biggest concern is the Google Maps license fees and how I'd cover those if my website pushes out of the "free" tier with Google. But it's definitely time for growth there too, so let's see what 2026 brings.

Aaaaaand ... that's about us up to date on the big stuff. I'm suffering the typical midlife regrets of "I haven't accomplished everything I wanted to by 40", and trying to use every last shred of wisdom I have to understand that this is 'just a phase' and I need to power through this.

If you tune into this blog waiting for the post where I say "I've made it" (after winning the lottery or having some massive boost to my career - or both why not), just know that I'm also waiting for that post. 

Roll on 2026, let's make it good.

Goodbye 2022: you were weird but better

Let's continue the trend of annual year-in-review blog posts, shall we? Something for my biographers to look back on one day. Or just me ... in some old-age home with a magnifying glass.

2022 for me won't be defined by the outside world, for a change. I met the love of my life early this year ... moved from Pretoria to Johannesburg to be closer to her ... and two weeks ago she and her son moved in with me.

This time last year I was sitting writing this update on a laptop before going into a cinema to watch a movie by myself. This time I'm sitting at my PC, listening to my girlfriend and her son talking while she cooks dinner in the kitchen.

I am ... feeling blessed.

I'll be honest, I wanted so much for myself this year. Again. I accomplished so little else worth even mentioning. Again. 

Let's call it incremental gains. Small updates on my website. Finally getting my firearm license, paying off my handgun (a Glock 19 Gen 5 for the record), collecting it (feeling simultaneously that little bit safer AND significantly more apprehensive about all the new worries it brings into my life).

No change in my working life (for better and worse in this economy I guess).

It felt anticlimactic when the announcement came early this year that we could all remove our COVID-19 masks. Somehow the infections dipped and the masks came off and ... COVID just disappeared. Herd immunity? Government conspiracy? The vaccines finally helping (I got my booster at the start of this year)? All I can say is it's good to see people's faces again. And I'm not feeling naked in public any longer (it did feel VERY strange for a good month or so without a mask on). There are STILL the odd few people (mostly old couples - understandable I guess) mooching around in masks, but I'm happy to say COVID disappeared just in time for us to collectively face our next national crisis.

Loadshedding.

We moved up rapidly from Stage 2 loadshedding to Stage 4 loadshedding, and are now switching between Stage 4 to 6. I wonder if I'll remember living in 2022 and not having electricity for half the day in blocks of 2 to 4 hours at a time. 

We're working around it. Of course we are. Solar has never taken off more across South Africa, and everyone is an expert in lithium batteries and inverters. I can't get solar because I live in a residential estate. My girlfriend is planning to buy an inverter trolley for us, using a small windfall she got ... so maybe we'll be a little bit better off in 2023. Because it's not going to get better. Every day Eskom reports grimly on all the additional power generating units which have gone offline for unexpected repairs. Even the Eskom CEO resigned (no-one is surprised - the only surprise is that he lasted this long, but the political pressure became unbearable).

That's politicians, isn't it? Something needs to happen before the next elections. Only we all know it won't be easy. The warning signs were there the first time we had loadshedding, back in 2009 if I'm remembering it correctly ... when I covered the affects loadshedding had in Knysna while working as a community newspaper reporter. Then it was a novel issue and interviewing the local icecream manufacturer bemoaning the loss of all his stock was just intriguing. Now it's feeling more dire.

Someone in the ANC likened loadshedding to motivating for regime change. That's a rough paraphrase but it'll do. You get the point. He's not wrong. Even the least educated voters will understand there is a problem when the lights keep going off. And they might understand that Eskom's failures cannot be attributed to Apartheid. This is on your doorstep, ANC. The buck stops with you.

*shrugs* Can we stop talking about electricity now? It's boring. It's so contrary to the 'dream life' we're all trying to live, which is hard to do when it's by the light of a rechargeable lantern.

No, let me rather talk about the new hope my girlfriend has given me for both my life personally and the future. For the new responsibilities her son has brought into my life. Talk about going from zero to 100 rapidly ... from not being a father, to suddenly being a co-parent to a 13 year old boy.

I can't tell you how good it feels to hold my girlfriend and to just not be alone anymore.

So ... 2023. What do you hold for me? I swear to goodness I am either going to get my website off the ground once and for all, or else I'm going to start afresh with something else. And ... money. Yeah I want to pay off my debt. Same as every year then. A luta continua.

 

Goodbye 2021: you won't be missed

What's to celebrate about 2021? In others' lives ... maybe something. In mine, it's slim pickings (mostly a handful of hard-won lessons which I'd have just as soon preferred not to learn).

For me, 2021 is a year of finally buying a new COVID-19 facemask (after my first batch of handmade masks ... made by my ex-girlfriend ... had way outlived both the 'few months' we'd all thought the COVID pandemic would last and their own frayed elastics).

In terms of love, this was a year of 'close but no cigar' on four different occasions. Totally different women, totally different reasons for breaking up, but the end result - wistful memories and tears and disappointment - still remarkably alike each time.

Professionally, if 2021 had a label it would be "Let's do all the things we improvised in 2020 while working from home and livestreaming everything ... and try do it a little bit better and more professionally this time around." It was a year of incremental improvements, increasingly frayed nerves, more staff resignations, more e-mails starting with "I'm sorry but..."

I know I'm not alone in this. I've seen a news story just today about a survey where the majority of participants agreed that 2021 was a terrible year for them not only personally but professionally as well. So I guess I'll draw some comfort from not being alone in the experience, even if I am still alone physically (not least a sensible 2m away from everyone - thanks again, COVID-19).

For the sake of posterity I should probably note that at the time of writing this, it looks like we've survived South Africa's fourth wave of COVID-19 infections. I personally got the Delta infection in July this year (and survived without hospitalisation - although I felt sick and had to get medicine for the symptoms), and got the two shots of the Pfizer vaccine. Next year I get to look forward to the third booster shot.

I'm sorry if I sound so pessimistic. There is hope as well. Hope in the improving statistics surrounding survivability and transmission, as vaccination rates in the country steadily increase. Hope in the reduction of stories around people's loved ones and friends dying. Hope in the continued low lockdown level and its ever-reduced curfew hours (currently 23:00-04:00 if I've got it right ... I can't be bothered to check).

What will all of this mean fifty years in the future? Will I remember it? Or will these magical words and phrases be lost to time. If they are, it will be no loss. COVID-19 might have helped so many of us work from home, and forced our employers to digitize their operations in ways we could never have imagined less than two years ago. I used to personally generate reams of paperwork which had to be printed out, signed and scanned back in dutifully ... and digital signatures of PDFs have eliminated all of that. While some people are still close friends of a printer, I'm happy to say that I'm no longer.

How will I remember 2021? I will remember this as the year of falling in love with a woman I had to eventually file a formal missing person's case for through the SAPS (not a recommended experience). That case is still open. Like so much else in 2021, closure is hard to come by.

This year I also passed my firearm competency testing and applied for my competency certificate with the SAPS. Our beloved SAPS (the Southern African Police Services - god forbid I forget that) are taking a mere 12 months to process the application, so 2022 should allow me to purchase a handgun and apply for a firearm licence ... which will take another 12 months to process. Something to look forward to in 2023, I guess: the ability to defend myself.

Let me not forget the noteworthy deaths of this year. Closest to home: my uncle Peter. There's a lot I could say about that, but not much of that which I wish to put to (digital) paper. I flew down to Cape Town to attend the memorial service, and it was extremely emotional (overlapping as it did with the latest chapter of the 'falling in love' saga mentioned above). A bit further but still close: the marketing manager for my client, Marius. Further out yet ... Desmond Tutu. And that woman from Egoli. And FW de Klerk. And ... *sighs* 

This has been a year where I think 'tried my best' summarises it. I've given my all to 2021. Absolutely every last shred of myself. There have been successes along the way. There have been the highest highs. I am not mentioning all of them here, but ... not enough.

And that's the sticky part, isn't it? After 2020 and surviving the first year of our very first pandemic, AND the most painful breakup of my life, I know I'd had high hopes for 2021. I don't know now if I didn't deliver on those hopes, or if they're all just slow-burn works-in-progress. 

I've worked more on my personal website and plan to promote it some more this December holiday. I bought a laptop for myself (after getting frustrated at wasting all my money on women who were no longer in my life). I'm writing this article on this new laptop now, sitting at a Mugg n Bean, about to go to the next door cinema soon and watch Spiderman's 'No way home' in IMAX 3D. It's a small step in the direction I want to be heading in, and right now at this very moment, god knows I'll accept any small step in the right direction I can get.

So 2021 ... sleep well. RIP. Farewell. Thank you for some things. Fuck you very much for others. 

2022: hello baby. Where've you been all my life? I've been waiting for you. Let's make some magic together.

The old new normal

I don't know why it is, but around once a year these days I think of this blog and think "Hmm, I should probably share something." My last post, I wrote as lockdown was announced in 2020 for COVID-19 ... now, here we are in August 2021, still under lockdown.

This thing we were all hoping would be over in a few months, more are saying will be with us for the rest of our lives. The thought of that is so terrible, it's hard to describe. So collectively we just don't think about it anymore.

But before I talk about the future, let's document the past year. A year of changing lockdown levels to keep track of every few months: curfew times (CURFEW - in my mind that was always associated with war time), how many people can be in a building, whether or not you can buy alcohol or cigarettes.

The one constant throughout: wearing facemasks in public places, and sanitising our hands before entering any store. Businesses closed down during lockdown, restaurants in particular. I was one of the lucky ones, able to work non-stop from home for my employer, an advertising agency.

South Africans used to shake hands everywhere ... now we generally don't even try the awkward elbow bump we tried doing for the first few months. Behind masks, 2m apart from each other, not touching: this is not the future I signed up for. Now I joke whenever I see a girl take off her mask how rare it is to see a nose or lips ... and although it's an old joke, it's just becoming truer all the time.

We spoke in 2020 about the "new normal" of getting used to video-conferencing and staying clean. Then going into 2021, I heard a radio DJ talking about how this is not the new normal anymore, this is just normal. And that was inescapable in January, and equally so now in August.

Two things have changed for the better: you can actually BUY sanitizer anywhere and everywhere (I currently have a bottle of 80% alcohol with tea-tree oil for softening my skin in my car), not like in the early panic-buying days where sanitizer was snapped up like it was holy water; and the long-anticipated COVID-19 vaccines that we just heard about for months being rolled out in the UK and US and other organised countries have finally arrived in South Africa in a big way and are publicly accessible (I'm actually booked for my first of two vaccination shots next weekend).

It's also worth mentioning I've survived COVID-19 myself. Twice, I think. Last year I think I got it but I never went to the doctors because there was a stigma about getting it and everyone knew the doctors couldn't really do anything about it. Besides, that time I didn't cough or heat up or get anything worse than really bad muscle aches and headaches. In July this year, however, I got the new-and-improved Delta variant of COVID-19, which is something like two or three times more infectious than the regular old kind, and this variant is killing young and healthy people left and right ... but like I said, I survived with nothing worse than just bad flu-like symptoms and a regular cocktail of prescription antibiotics and vitamins.

It feels weird sharing these little details now, but I'm almost doing it in the hope that one day all of this "too common to mention" detail will all seem barely-remembered and strange. Can you remember the times the hospitals, even the private hospitals, were so full that you basically couldn't get into one unless you were dying, and even then it was a struggle (with news articles about people dying in ambulances outside of full hospitals - until the newspapers got tired of the same stories)?

Can you remember where we used to have our temperature measured religiously? All I know is my average temperature on the skin is 36.5. AND that when I got COVID-19, one of those scanners never even blinked a digital eye at me, so the whole saga is just ritual to help us feel that The Powers are doing something, when in fact we're all just helpless in the face of this virus. Mass vaccination and herd immunity should help ... in a few decades.

And I reckon that's enough about COVID-19, don't you? I pray for all of us, every single one, that we get through this, and find a way to adjust to life even under these conditions. We're getting there. By next year I think this will feel like plain old normal life, for real. And yes, that's sad. And no, I can't do anything about it.

In other news, this month marks the second year of my divorce. I'd like to say I got my life together, despite COVID-19, but I honestly don't. I've been working longer hours than ever this year, the girl I felt sure was the real love of my life broke my heart and my finger (THAT is a story I'll leave to my memory), and I'm moving into a new apartment next week. The most 'exciting' personal news I have is that I've completed my proficiency training for a pistol last month, and applied for my firearm competency through the police (a process that is expected to take months), and when THAT is done I get to buy a gun (not a cheap exercise) and submit a license application and then just maybe in a few more months I can eventually walk home with a gun concealed in my waistband.

That's not a decision I took lightly, or a decision I ever expected to take. But there were a few factors this year that made me realise I needed to be able to defend myself. And that I'm all I can rely on. And the bad guys have guns, and they're merciless. And all of that was BEFORE the riots and looting of a few days in July, triggered by former president Zuma going into jail.

So here I am. COVID-19 survivor. Alone. Tired. Over-indebted. Sad. Hopeful for a better future. And very much aware we all feel this way. We're in trench warfare together, against an enemy we can't see, with no way to fight it except to stay away from each other. 

That was my last year. This is my present. And how about my future? What will that hold? Honestly all I want is love. It's all I've ever wanted. COVID-19 hasn't taken that part of me away, nor will I let it. Tune in in 2022, I guess. I hope I've got something more positive to share then.

COVID-19: reflections on Day 4 of the crisis

Firstly, I just have to apologise for my long absence ... 17 October 2018 was my last post, and here 1.5 years has gone past. It's been a tumultuous time, filled with the lowest lows and the highest highs, and yet here we are ... 19 March 2020. Things are getting more tumultuous than ever.

So what's brought me to post now? COVID-19 ... aka Coronavirus. In South Africa we're sitting on Day 4 after the President declared a National Disaster following the global spread of COVID-19, and its growing impact in South Africa. That was Sunday evening, with around 48 "infected" in South Africa. Now it's Thursday evening, and we're sitting at 150, but the true number is most likely way higher (we just don't have enough test kits - and the government is most likely trying to avoid mass panic anyway).

Everybody calls this an unprecedented time, and it certainly feels that way for me. I heard the phrase "worst plague in 100 years", but don't quote me on that. I think that's really the thing about COVID-19 that is so difficult to navigate: telling the genuine facts apart from the outdated data and outright "fake news" (another recent phenomenon).

I felt this special time warranted a snapshot in time of what it's like living now. Of where I'm at.

Things are moving quickly. Yesterday my company had already released a Coronavirus Business Plan detailing its new corporate policies surrounding everything from travel restrictions to how to apply to work remotely. I did the latter immediately and got my approval today. Tomorrow when I wake up, I start work from my PC at home: armed with Google Hangouts for videoconferencing and a VPN to get onto my server, I'll need to make it work.

This week has been a flurry of trying to do "normal" work, alongside COVID-19 related tasks. I'm a project manager in an advertising agency in Pretoria, so that's entailed liaising with suppliers of sponsored events to enquire what their event plans are (most events are cancelling after the president declared a ban on gatherings of more than 100 people), briefing in urgent social media and other communications, helping forge electronic communication channels between myself and my client (in-person meetings are a luxury nobody is indulging in anymore), and generally just hoping that nobody I'm meeting has been to Italy (Gauteng DOES have the highest infection rate in South Africa - so I'm at ground-zero).

Let me not forget the panic buying. Stories about people stocking up. Then evidence in the local stores of long queues and people loading shopping trolleys to breaking point. Me joining in one lunchtime on a limited budget and walking away with this (not the biggest haul in the world - but hopefully enough to buy time in a true crisis). All the basics: tinned tuna and pilchards, instant noodles, my favourite cereal, long-life milk, bottled water, and some other odds and ends:

I feel obliged to mention for the sake of history that people are so afraid of running out of toilet paper that everybody is over-stocking on it and the stores are reportedly all out. I haven't checked on this yet ... I need to check that out this week and see if I can get some more. In case. Apparently it's all New Zealand's fault because they import toilet paper from China, so when COVID-19 locked down Chinese imports then they found themselves in a ... err ... sticky situation. South Africa manufactures bog roll so we should be fine. Should be. But apparently shelves are running empty there too, of that most priceless commodity.

It's just another painful reminder that we're all human. People are afraid. They're angry. They're tired. They didn't ask for this, but now it's here, just as we start to tip over into the winter chill and were emerging from the darkness of Eskom's national loadshedding problem (I can only hope that the me in the future reading this doesn't still have electricity shortages).

Where to from here? In South Africa, we're most likely going to see COVID-19 cases spiking. I fear for our industries which are most affected: hospitality and entertainment are being wiped out overnight or forced to retrench most of their staff. You can't move a bar experience online (maybe the new business model is to ship alcohol to clients and they can get drunk together over a video-call ... but getting drunk alone and vomiting over your keyboard most likely won't have the same appeal).

There are rumours of province-wide shut-downs, if not country-wide shut-downs. Families will be broken apart. People are being retrenched. We're still trying to find the humour in it, and there are COVID-19 memes everywhere ... but they're just not funny anymore.

The ONE upside, if any, is that COVID-19's worst symptoms for most people are a fever and dry cough, and you get better in two weeks with no medical intervention. For 2% of people (mostly the old and infirm) there is a harsher downside: death. Nobody has died yet in South Africa, as far as the media knows. Yet.

I like to think that this is better than an Ebola-type virus, which would strike people down with blood running out of their ears and noses, with guaranteed fatality in most cases. At least that, right? Maybe this is just a trial run. Maybe it's an opportunity for a bit of that "Blitz spirit" (World War 2) in a country as divided as ours. Maybe it's going to drive a deeper political wedge between people, when COVID-19 enters the townships and the poor cannot afford to stockpile or access private medical healthcare. Most likely that, in fact.

So if the above demonstrates nothing else, it's just how all over the place this is, and this is just for me. Stories are swirling around out there, with every more bizarre headlines. And maybe we're all going to get Coronavirus. Maybe we have to. Maybe it's better that way. Maybe we should be deliberately infecting ourselves rather than trying to distance ourselves and just prolong the agony. Two weeks and you're either dead or alive and able to continue life (although some people CAN apparently get reinfected).

Hope. We have hope. I have hope. We will survive. Some of us will survive. Most of us. I think. I hope. I plan. I work. I try.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

Things they don't teach you in school

In an increasingly networked world, how strange it is to find ourselves so frequently isolated.

The problem, of course, is that we aren't taught to network with each other. Our parents outsource our networking to teachers, and our teachers just try and ensure that none of us choke to death on an eraser on their watch.

Social networking, ironically, encourages the same form of isolation. Facebook, for all its might, is possibly the single most damaging social networking tool I know: yes it will help you find your long-lost friend and that aunty who will like your pictures, but how will it help you find people who will challenge your ideas, people who need you in their lives, people you can fall in love with?

Facebook is fantastic for keeping touch with your existing social circles, but it fails spectacularly when it comes to meeting new people, or having real-time debates. Twitter is marginally better, except who uses Twitter anymore except for children and people in the Middle East who're organising rallies all the time (apparently)? 

By an anachronistic stroke of luck, I discovered real social networking online in 2008, in the form of Internet Relay Chat (that's a whole separate story for another day). Even then, it was abundantly clear that most of the people left on IRC (and there weren't many) were in their late thirties and forties, and remembered it from its heyday in the '90s ... at which time I was in my teens, and my family didn't have a PC in the house, never mind a 56k dial-up modem.

IRC, for anybody not familiar, is moderately complex to use by modern 'point and click' standards, but the principle is dead simple: users connect to chatrooms that are hosted on IRC servers, and those servers record and send plain text chat messages (both public and personal) instead of websites. It's real-time, and although your 'client' (the programme you use to access the IRC server) might save all the chat messages in text logs, nobody really reads those: just like real life, you're either there and participating in the conversation, or the moment is gone and ancient history.

The magic, then, is two-fold: 1) You immediately get access to a pool of human beings connected to the same chatroom as you, from around the country or around the world (depending on the type of server you're on); and 2) The ball is entirely in your court what you SAY to these individuals, and how you react to them.

The reason why I am STILL going back onto IRC in the year of our lord 2018 is precisely the same as it was ten years ago: there's just nothing like the possibility of having actual conversations (both group conversations and one-on-one) with people you'd most likely pass on the street and never share more than a momentary glance with otherwise.

While society seems to increasingly isolate us into our individual worlds of cellphone screens and media consumption (TV, movies and staring blankly at other people living their lives on YouTube); IRC forces us to connect. If nobody says anything, then they'd just be sitting there staring at a blank screen.

And so people DO speak up. Social barriers dissolve. And (if you're lucky) real connections are formed. 

I won't lie to you and say that all debate on IRC is highly intellectual. I won't even lie to you and claim that most of it is emotionally uplifting. The vast majority of it is pretty much the kind of small-talk you'll hear with a bunch of strangers in a bar, only nobody's drunk (well some are) and they're all listening to their own music.

Like anything else in life, however, it becomes what you make of it. I've found repeatedly that it's an amazing icebreaker ... just milling around in chat until you find somebody whose chat style gels with yours, and you continue the conversation in private. Before you know it, you've made a friend you wouldn't have imagined you'd ever have: maybe somebody 15 years older than you, maybe somebody living 1 200km away, maybe somebody with some wildly different views than yours, but ... a real, living human being, and you're not just shouting at each other in a bar but having actual conversations.

Again, I feel it's important to stress that IRC isn't this magical place where unicorns live. It's just a blank screen, and a very loosely moderated one at that (although most rooms will have admin teams who will try keep conversation just this side of an outright fistfight) ... and because all the input comes from humans, a lot of that input is filled with anguish, anger, petty frustration, egotistical-driven grandstanding, or wild jealousy.

And love. Real, unadulterated, knock me over a feather, how is this even possible, love.

I met my first girlfriend on IRC, on a general 'chat' channel. I met my wife on IRC, on a trivia channel of all things (where a computer programme asks general knowledge questions and the people in the room try to answer correctly before anybody else). My theory is that it doesn't matter where people who have a strong connection meet, that connection will jump across distance and mediums like an electric spark jumping between two wires.

That doesn't mean I'm advocating IRC for lonely hearts. For a lot of the reasons mentioned, it's actually a spectacularly bad place for that: it is filled with groups of jaded people tired of being endlessly flirted with, and other groups of people who just endlessly flirt out of habit rather than desire. Somewhere in the middle are the normal, everyday people ... and talking to them might help you see problems in new lights; feel better about your shitty life; or just laugh when everything else is bringing you down.

And so IRC for me is caught in this weird twilight state: it is a dying technology platform (with a very low-grade form of cancer given its longevity), and yet it also contains unadulterated human connection that is found absolutely nowhere else in our always-on, always-consuming (and hardly ever publishing) world.

Personally I'd love to see IRC receive better marketing, so more people are even aware of it. Maybe what it needs is a transition of its core tenets to a new technology platform (Virtual Reality-based chatrooms already show all the benefits of IRC with additional body language and physical interactions not possible on text-based IRC). Heck, if there's a passion project I'd ever love to attempt, it would be to reignite social networking on a mass scale using an IRC-type platform to encourage people to truly connect with each other.

If you haven't experimented with IRC, there are so many gateway drugs. The easiest way of getting on is simply via your website browser, using platforms like www.chat27.co.za (South African) or www.dal.net (international server). Pick a username, connect to a channel, and plunge in (just type "/list >15" to get a list of chatrooms with more than 15 people connected to it at that time). Once you get hooked, you simply download your very own dedicated IRC client like www.mirc.com ... and the rest is history.

If there's one parting thought here, it is this: gaining confidence in online chat is a crucial life skill that translates perfectly into the real world. How do you start a conversation? How do you resolve conflict? How do you keep stringing together words in a way that somebody else will actually want to read them? What do you have to give to the world, and what do you want in return?