Apathy and inertia on the rise, no one cares: Redux

Electronic support's all well and good, but when electronic gadgets make the manual effort impossible, I cannot help but wonder if the fact that we, much like Goethe's sorcerer's apprentice, make ourselves the slaves of electronics not only in virtual but in real life, as well, will come back to bite us in the ass.

Case in point: the automatically closing trunk. It's not that the idea hasn't existed for a considerable time now, what with all the remotes to unlock and lock cars and also open and close trunks. It's that with these gadgets the use of the gadget itself was optional; the possibility of manual (un)locking and closing was still given. Now we have cars without keyholes. Now we have trunks that cannot be closed manually.



I witnessed this problematic situation personally when the packed trunk of a car wouldn't close after the button had been pressed and a manual closing was impossible because the trunk could only be shut by way of button-pressing.

Now we have a reliance on electronics without an alternative.

Now we even have man-made systems we have no power over anymore: The electronic administration program at my workplace has kinks and faults and problems we cannot change and have to accept and work with. Every time I ask why these systemic problems cannot be fixed -- after all, it was we who made the program -- I am told that the program doesn't allow the problem to be fixed.

I wonder: If we are the sorcerer's apprentice in this analogy, and electronic technology is the enchanted broom -- then who's the sorcerer?