Making impersonal personal
Sorry, but there was a glitch in the system! How many times have you heard that! ‘The system’. Anything that is presented as an impersonal entity that the human entity on the side of that system could not do anything about, and it certainly wasn’t your fault. But then, how could the person on the side of the system, a person with a name and certainly with some sort of personality be guilty. “It was the system.” Even when you look at the songs that bear the title of impersonal’ or “Impersonal World” are usually unknown quantities.
When writers encounter such situations, the first name that probably comes to mind is Kafka. A person against the system, or more precise, vice versa. But then come the questions — who created the system; who is operating it? And about two thousand and one questions that go along. A person or persons, of course. A system is usually just an excuse so that aggrieved party is actually the one that certainly bears the brunt of somebody’ else’s mistake.
Because there is always somebody else. No matter how impersonal it is made to be it has some sort of personality, and that includes the currently developed and debated artificial intelligence. Writers should always give that impersonal entity some sort of personality because no matter how much somebody else tries to hide behind a Chinese wall of impersonality, there’s always a person in a world that is being set up by humans for humans. In the end, it turns out that writing about ‘a system’ is still writing about ourselves.
Will there be mistakes in that writing than makes impersonal personal? Certainly. Because no matter how times it was repeated and how trite it sounds, we all make mistakes. ‘The system ‘ obviously does.
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