Rise of The Social Machines

All the Beaker Folk gooing away over the messages from the Philae comet-lander coming through on Twitter. Even though I've been trying to persuade them it's not the lander itself, but the monkey that was sealed in the unit. But still, like a cross between HAL and Thomas the Tank Engine, the little craft has won its fans. Philae's last message was to say it was having a snooze, but  with the hope it might wake up later, when it gets more sunlight.

I don't think Philae has thought this through. It will get more sunlight when it's much nearer the Sun. Which suggests its next message may be "What is that big orange thing? So this is it, I'm going to die".

You have been warned.

Meanwhile given the whole maelstrom of cyber-whimsy, Young Keith thought it might be nice to hack the chips in the household devices and have them post updates on our internal social page, the Beakernet. Bad mistake.

At first it was fun, as the CD player told us how it was getting bit dizzy, the Aga repeatedly told us it was "hot" like some spambot on Twitter trying to attract the sorts of men who like women with numbers in their names. The fridge took on a Fonz persona, repeatedly telling us how cool he was.

But then, like human-based social media, it became a bit much. The freezer turned out to be "in a relationship with" the microwave. The tumble dryer started trolling the liquidiser. The juicer - who put a chip in a juicer? - fell out with the telly, and terrible flame wars started. And then we found out that the washing machine is heat-sensitive. Oh those agonising, terrible tweets. We've had to put everything on a "wool" setting. The microwave then announced its relationship status was "it's complicated" and the freezer blocked it. But then set up a sock puppet, pretended to be a teasmaid, and hung around posting snarky messages. 

What really put the tin lid on it for me was the discovery that every time a toaster ejects its toast, it's the human equivalent of sexual climax. I never want to read any statuses like those again. Filthy thing. I'm gonna use the grill from now on. That only posts pictures of kittens.