A young lady acquaintance of mine sent me a text the other day, outlining one of life’s difficulties she had encountered, perhaps seeking the sage advice of an elder statesman – though why anybody should consider that somebody who has led a life as chaotic and ramshackle as mine should be a fount – or should that be font? – of all human wisdom, I simply can’t imagine. Anyway I did my best. First I commiserated: “Dearie me!” Then I didn’t presume to give advice, although I think I may have said what I would have done under similar circumstances – which of course is not the same thing. Anyway I pitched my spiel and, just prior to pressing “send”, went back to the top to check the text.
“Desire me!”
You see – predictive text could have landed me in all sorts of bother. Fortunately I spotted the error and corrected it. I wonder what would have happened if I had received such a message rather than (nearly) sent it. I could have been the victim of a so-called “honey-trap”. Honey-traps have been in the news last week because an MP fell into one. A honey-trap works by seducing the victim, who then compromises himself, and renders himself vulnerable to blackmail. Honey-traps are intimately associated with social media, because so many people seems to conduct their affairs (as it were) using a myriad of platforms seemingly designed for the task.
But honey-traps of one kind or another existed long before the advent of the silicon chip. They predate Samson and Delilah. The femme fatale with the hidden agenda. Hollywood noir is full of them. In Double Indemnity, Barbara Stanwyck sees the hapless insurance agent Fred MacMurray coming, and seduces him into murdering her husband, he for love, she for money. It all ends very badly. In From Russia with Love, the chess grandmaster Kronsteen, working for the KGB, concocts an exquisite honey-trap designed to enmesh James Bond, the lure being one Tatiana Romanova. Actually James is not really seduced by Tatiana. Rather M is seduced by the prospect of getting his hands on a Spektor decryption machine.
But the sad fact of modern life is that every time you answer the phone, or open an email, or even a letter delivered by the Royal Mail, the first question you need to ask is, “Is this real?” Scams of one kind or another are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and our institutions in turn try to keep up by introducing increasingly refined security measures. The result is cyber warfare and a cyber arms race, as each side tries to outdo the other. Whenever a representative of a bank tells me their digital vaults are impregnable, I cock an eyebrow.
Being the victim of a burglary (house-breaking north of the border) is a painful experience, not merely because of the loss of property, but because of the intrusion into your private life. Your filing cabinets have been rummaged and rifled by alien hands. Similarly, being the victim of a scam is painful not merely because of the loss of money, but because you have been tricked. It is a form of character assassination. You are a patsy; a fall guy. How could you possibly be so naïve? What an idiot. It is an injury to self-esteem.
We shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves. After all, our sole misdemeanour was that we were trusting of our fellow human beings. You might resolve never to be taken advantage of again, and regard every subsequent human interaction with profound suspicion. But by now you have retreated into your security bunker, surrounded by high walls, barbed wire, goon boxes, and security cameras. All human transaction becomes remote. Before you can begin to communicate, you must enter a PIN, then a password, another PIN, another password, then a six digit number sent to your mobile. This is the way we live now.
There is a theory given wide credence, that there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about any given digital platform; what matters is how you use it. I am beginning to doubt this familiar trope. We have gone down the wrong track. The dystopia we have recreated cannot be beneficent. We are not designed to sit huddled over a computer screen. We are meant to be out and about. In my latest novel, The Last Night of the Proms, I took the liberty of quoting Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native:
The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.
Log off.
jamescalumcampbell 