For all who sin via technology
and the internet, Saint Isadore of Seville
is not much mentioned nowadays,
but in the sixth and seventh centuries
he was a leading bishop and scholar
in a flourishing Catholic Church.
In these shifting modern times
the Catholic Church has recast him
as the patron saint of the internet
and of technology, with other saints
for bloggers, St Francis de Sales,
and computer programmers and gamers,
Saint Carlo Acutis, so that all who sin
online have these three names,
and more besides, as channels of grace
by which to seek forgiveness for their online life.
But there is a darker, less forgiving, side
to new technologies that renew themselves,
where technically secular and theocratic states
make their legal system a circular vacuum
where for those who are charges with a crime
cannot defend themselves in any language
that they know that the court has to respond to
-the charge denies them the language of a defence.
After tightening up the law, such states
tighten up what can be said and done
in the courts, the press, and in public spaces
by installing security cameras to with an inch
of outside private houses, thus enhancing
the potential for prosecution by default.
In Kabul the authorities have installed a new
technological panopticon-style security regime
where women who before have no legal grounds
for being out in public alone, and multiple laws
that reduced their liberty, are now even more afraid
than before of leaving, or looking out of, their houses,
as 90,000 surveillance cameras impose shariah law
in the strictest, tightest, definition known in modern times.
It is as if The Taliban are restaging Duke Bluebeard's Castle
with the women of Kabul behind closed doors as the cast,
and the United Nations Observers making the world
a passive audience, unable to change the narrative
whilst having no choice but to watch it, or ignore it, on repeat...
Abandon hope ye who enter here and watch
as Afghan opium sells at ever higher high prices....
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