In the subconscious that we struggle to keep beneath the surface there reside the demented ideas and inventions that we would never ponder in a sober state nor speak aloud.
You know, inventions like the ungodly creation in the video below: a solitary, disembodied finger continuously pressing the lone button of a vintage mouse. Over and over again. Forever.
The finger is a fiendish facsimile of Thing from the Addams Family, minus the four other fingers. But this scurrying appendage misses Thing’s charm and comedic timing. This finger has only one object in mind, if it can be said to have a mind at all: Keep pressing the mouse button.
Take a look (if you dare) at the terrifying device, known the Random User and created by Monobo, a “Madrid based design and development partnership.”
Look at it. The demonic gadget simply cruises around the room, randomly clicking the button here and there, whenever it feels like it.
The parallel between the Random User and you, a random user, is simple to make. We click here and there, even when we should have been in bed hours ago, even when our spouse and kids need us—beg us—for company and sustenance. We can’t stop clicking because we’re addicted, no better than a mechanical finger without a soul.
But there’s something else that came to mind when I watched this devilish display. When the Jewish people pray on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, they ask for forgiveness from their lord, and during one such prayer, they pound themselves in the chest for each sin they’ve committed. They pound their hearts, and they pound some more to absolve themselves of their sins.
This clicking finger is actually our pounding fist. We can’t stop sinning on the Internet—with the time-wasting, the porn-surfing, the Twitter trolling, the illegal streaming—and, as Random User makes us well aware, we can’t stop ourselves. We don’t live to click. We click to live.
Indeed, we are doomed to an Sisyphean existence in which we can never stop pounding. We can never disengage. We can never stop asking for forgiveness—a forgiveness that will never come.
H/T Death & Taxes | Screengrab via Monobo/Vimeo