Early in my years I would follow Phish for as long as my legs would carry me, or listen to the rock and roll radio while driving around and hear bands like Faith No More cry about IT, what is it? It blew my mind, or actually, left me hanging. Second thought, it didn’t really provoke any thought, other than it left us hanging, as an audience. We could narrow it down, wait, look into the future, or hypothesize but the amount of change and possibilities were so endless. Regardless, today IT is more or less across every other discipline and is in reference to Information Technology, mostly as it contributes to infrastructure, and consumerism. While it can handle larger tasks or render AI Google Sites larger than multiple football fields, people utilize it every day and it contributes to our security, finances, and day in day out agenda however it may be that we determine. Whether it’s assisting us with work, or a much larger organization handling IT on a grander scale, IT’s smart technologies and variants as it contributes to varying demographics are dynamic, while almost fundamentally apart of a computer schema that when broken down, differentiates itself from many other machines in the way that it’s either this or that, 0 or 1. A Mathematical binary calculation with endless potential for development, and calculation. The reason it beckons to handle in a discussion between the ratified abbreviation IT, or it colloquially between pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs, is namely because of how it sounds and how we discuss it. 

We infer what it is based on content, but sometimes with the helpless rendering of our understanding, before going to work for the man and assigning ourselves daily schedules micromanaging our lives alongside that of our employers, it just sounds like a hopeless fall out. 

“I go fishing, cast off for a moment, and wonder what it is.” Conversation rolls along, sure that’s part of the excitement of fishing, and we remove ourselves from what we were doing with work only moments ago. We’re not going to break from the topic of discussion, character, ethics, being polite or what we have patience for to rant about IT, and infrastructure. Our mind trails off on its own, kind of knowing what IT is, and what it’s made of, how much it contributes to and determines our selves in the post pandemic world, how we want to organize ourselves accordingly to be more secure, and whole as an individual. 

It’s not that the threat of IT hangs over our heads in lieu of a potential AI robot threat that could replace our person as a worker in that same corporation or LLC that we work for, it’s that IT itself I think is also under attack by cyber attackers, and in a way we kind of share in this experience. Our data goes missing, or our ID is jeopardized in a romance scam based in Nigeria, or somewhere on the Ivory Coast. We’re not talking to a beautiful, too good to be true prospect. We’re talking to an adversarial, a struggling citizen from a nation state torn by war, that relies on cyber security exploits and vulnerabilities to steal, under a government that might not be adequate granted ongoing war, or uprising that takes away from their infrastructure security.

Pity them or the fool that gets their ID jumped and loses money, the looming threat and uncertainty renders our maintenance and understanding of a simple equation, IT, as less secure or supportive than it used to be and we get even stranger things like being paranoid, carelessness, drug use, difficulty making relationships and trusting another, and disease probably as a result of lack of hygiene or sanitation in both a community health sense, and a matter of a secure IT infrastructure. We can buy into anti virus software or have a company handle our ID alongside other financial instruments, or we can look more into computers and understand the root of, causes, how best to mitigate, etc. People use computers every day and can certainly take the power back. IT doesn’t have to be a matter of being outweighed by a robot, or AI. IT can support our efforts, and make things more sustainable for ourselves everyday.