System Tainted by Download

The worst part about that random hook-up, the abiding regret which neither liquor nor denial can purge, is that while not looking (the better part of that night was spent not looking), a lady friend downloaded Snood onto the computer. For the uninitiated, Snood is a silly game of cartoon canons that burp out cuddly-faced symbols, a game which so many call “infectious” but I call “incurable.”

One can blame that night on the alcohol. One can write off that evening as a youthful dalliance. One can synchronize a yawn to avoid her sidewalk eye-contact (broad daylight—ho, ho). But just as Lady MacBeth, even with all of Neptune’s seas, could not wash Banquo’s blood from off her ensanguined mitts, or whatever, so too is it impossible to delete the fargin’ Snood icon which sits blithely in the Windows toolbar—a constant reminder that I should be more careful about to whom I give access to my hard drive.

In the future, when the panacea for venereal disease is finally discovered, a new form of highly contagious and often unexpungeable affliction will excite the public’s fear: the download. Symptoms: icon blemishes, commonly found in the bottom right corner of the screen; a geologically protracted start-up delay; and the PC deathknell, “Fatal error has occurred. You will lose any unsaved information because you just had to download that pirated Backgammon software. Nice going, chump.”

Oftentimes you don’t even know you’re afflicted—that is, until one unremarkable day when the blue-and-white Ghost of Napster Past grins at you from his spot next to the innocuous Printer icon. By then, of course, it is too late.

You recall with nostalgia your computer’s first days out of the box: a simpler time, when she hurtled through her self-test; when the nifty “Available Disk Space” piechart showed seven gigabytes of untrammeled roominess; when windows and menus sprang from her toolbars like a great splash in a clear lake; when your desktop sat empty and content, like a mid-day showing of Serendipity. What is it, then, that drives us to engage in unprotected interface with these ill-intentioned download sites? Certainly this irresponsible behavior is not a means to some kind of useful end; after you initially polluted your computer with Free Cell or College Jeopardy, how many times did you actually play it? Methinks not enough to justify the lightning bolt that blazes in your icon tray every time Mntaindew69 signs on from his first period homeroom.

No, it is the act of downloading itself which excites. The ease and facility of these downloads, euphemistically labeled “shareware” (“blightware” is more like it), has spawned a culture of what specialists (me) call “e-donism.” The e-donist downloads indiscriminately, with multiple and anonymous partners, sometimes for a two-minute quickie with a basic screensaver program, sometimes for an extended fling with one of the well-endowed Internet browser conglomerates. And for what? That fleeting moment of recreation which quickly dissolves into years of blinking icons and burning regret.

What’s most pernicious about these “free” downloads is their tacit promises of protection. Take the RealPlayer shareware, a media streaming program so offensively retrograde that a million monkeys with a million keyboards with a million 1’s and 0’s could never devise it. During one illicit encounter with the RealPlayer.exe file brought on by a misbegotten attempt to watch “Bootylicious: In concert,” I responsibly unchecked all the boxes that would have signed me up for daily newsletters, news updates, update letters, dating news, upletter dates, and finally, that salacious e-menage-a-trois, “third-party offers.” (One wonders where you have to go to get fourth-, fifth-, and twelfth-party offers: Swinger Download Clubs?) The “opt-out” system falsely implies that RealPlayer will be safe to your hard drives and in-boxes. And yet, with RealPlayer finally loaded and “Bootylicious” playing (albeit between strange bouts of something called “Buffering”) still the icon blinks and the in-box clogs and the available hard drive space shrivels into nothingness. Like a Wolf who cries “Boy!” they tell us we can say “no” and then don’t listen when we do.

But these trespasses against the sanctity of my hard drive are inconsequential compared to the residual effects of Snood. It endures on the toolbar no matter how many trips one makes to the Recycling Bin. So to the young woman who has caused this scourge, look what I have been reduced to! And to downloaders everywhere who regret that moment of e-donism; to the promiscuous Snooders and College Jeopardy champions who hear my cry and want to send the blinking icons right back to the people who spawned them; come to the computer lab for an LED-light vigil, for a show of solid-state solidarity, for a Cartesian-coordinated effort to spam those e-violators back to the age of the 386! Let us broadband together and Take Back the Download!

Couper Samuelson ’02 is a history and literature and French studies concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.