This undetermined, indefinite pronoun camps-out in a hedgerow, it peers out from under a carpet, it's asleep under the mailbox - who knows when boredom will set in and it leaves us alone. After a couple of months of waiting, those of us who might have shared time with homelessness, who recognize the warning signs of loneliness, and are sufficiently sentient to acknowledge the relationship between dead fish and house guests, we refrain from "out damn spot" and do our best to basically reach for ideas that permit us to remain both uncaring and ignorant. Yet "thar she blows" and we gravitate toward.
There's a lot in the history of us people rejecting the alien. Ned Ludd, a young man whose master suggested he sharpen his needles before leaving work to find a good time in the bars of Anstey near Leicester. Oh yes, if you were a hand-weaver, a stocking frame was about as alien as you could get. Ned became gravely pissed off with his boss, he wasn't going to miss a night on the town, one thing and another, those bloody machines had run off with a way of life. Ned took a hammer to the needles, that'd teacher his morally unprincipled blackguard of an employer to treat an Englishman as a serf on his evening off. Back then of course it was high dudgeon and call in the army to sooth the worried brow of a county property owner. Ned Ludd became a folk hero, a myth making reaction to a new idea, which is spooky because Ned might never have actually existed.
In the end it's just a question of drifting a pointing thing around a screen and there you go, it has the chirpy beady-eyed aspect, it uses the greeting Hello and it knows your first name. I don't think I did kindergarten but when I was six I went to school and learned manners, so there's that. A First Lesson, maybe. The difference between bringing a stick-insect into the house and a device that offers "Hello Tim" is quantifiable. Both are aliens, one talks back, the other doesn't. And here, when you consider the amount of ink we people have lavished on Alien Life Forms, it might be nice to meet one.
