Tours de Farce: Throw Your Cares Away!

It’s late at night in Manitoba and Ben is arguing with Lenny over whether to see Fugazi or Audio Adrenaline. Ben throws a frying pan at Lenny’s head. Lenny ducks then heaves the kitchen knife set, including the meat cleaver, at Ben’s face.

But the Web site’s software doesn’t care that it took 25 stitches to close the gaping wound across Ben’s temple. Nor does the software care that Lenny looked up the dates for 98 Degrees 7,312 times in a row. The software served up each page without complaining and displayed the associated artist list 7,312 times without a single remark about the redundancy of Canadians or the proper care of kitchen cutlery.

Every day people log on and look up concert dates for acts like A Flock Of Seagulls and Stone Temple Pilots. Millions upon millions of individual results are retrieved and displayed, but the software never complains about being overworked. It cares not that Lucy in Des Moines, who just accessed the dates for The Knack and Fishbone, is having an affair with her sister’s husband, who plans on seeing Journey in Atlanta with his cousin’s aunt. The software is oblivious to the fact that Fat Sammy in Chicago just ordered his boys to whack Three Finger Louie right before a Slash’s Snakepit show in Philadelphia. The software isn’t concerned about racketeering or philandering husbands, nor is the software the least bit curious as to why people still live in Des Moines.

Ours used to be a world where people mattered. A world where people dressed their best as they interacted with the human data operators at Pollstar.com and requested dates for Los Straitjackets or Percy Sledge. However, the software has changed all that. It has no feelings, no emotions, no wants, needs, vacations or workman’s comp. The software does not feel sadness because it caused the elimination of 4,291 jobs, nor does it now feel remorse over the once-proud employees who spend their days pushing shopping carts along the interstate.

The software continues as it did the day before, cranking out dates for Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe, So Many Roads and Blackmore’s Night without complaint. Nor is the software aware that it was created by a gigantic corporate conglomerate based out of the Pacific Northwest as part of that company’s quest for world domination via our computers, PDAs and laptops.

The software, needless to say, just doesn’t care.