Published on December 21, 2024 at 5:06 p.m. / Modified on December 21, 2024 at 5:12 p.m.
9 mins. reading
Trolls, demons, ghosts… We come across them in tales, in exorcism manuals, in Gothic novels. But not only that: trolls abound on social networks today. Demons (or rather daemons, as they are spelled) are these small, generally invisible pieces of software that ensure the general functioning of your computer. The ghosts? How many times, when writing the Temps, have we not heard the author of these lines belch – when confronted with a malfunction in the complex computer architecture used to produce the newspaper that you hold in your hands – that there was probably a “ ghost in the machine”?
Let's expand the menagerie: facing our keyboards and screens, we are at any time likely to encounter Trojan horses (that is to say malicious software which, to your misfortune, sneaks into your computer to disrupt its proper functioning); vermin (in other words, in English, bugs, like the one, fortunately avoided, of the year 2000); zombies (this will be the sad fate of your machine if it is controlled remotely by a cybercriminal). We even risk coming across ghosts, or being victims of possession phenomena. Go to the online forum Quora, you will find a number of questions that are strange to say the least: “Can a smartphone be haunted?”; “Can good or evil spirits use technology to contact or harass people?”; “Can a ghost own a cell phone and communicate through its screen or text messages from another person's device nearby?” Surprising resurgences of ancestral imaginations in our hyper-contemporary gestures, when you think about it. Are (electronic) chip makers there to take (money) from us?
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