I put on my bifocals to read Chris Miller’s Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.

The book was on my bedside table, on top of one of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books. Christie is more appropriate nocturnal reading, but I am “studying” computer chips, because I am paranoid  about the tracking devices on phones, computers, tablets, etc.  Even the books have barcodes – are those chips?  We don’t have a smart refrigerator, but the toaster might be smart. Not very, though.

I have a split consciousness: I am aware of computer surveillance but use computers every day.

Chip War is not the book I’d expected.  Miller writes about electronic chips and global power, and analyzes the chip competition between the U.S. and China. He says that the best and fastest chips will determine the extent of economic and military power in the twenty-first century. The U.S. is still ahead.

On the cover of Chip War is an image of an American flag with a chip where the stars should be.  

This is an excellent, important book, but I need something less global.

After this I was in the mood to read something amusing: I wanted satire. Because how did the world  become dependent on chips for every aspect of life?

 The Roman satirist Juvenal wryly writes, …difficile est saturam non scribere.  (It is difficult not to write satire.)  And if Juvenal were around, he’d write an elegant satiric poem on the ubiquity of chips.

Roman satire takes the form of witty epigrams or satiric monologues. The satires are rooted in morality, even when they use obscene language: they hilariously attack Roman vice and hypocrisy.  Juvenal, the wittiest and the most elegant satirist, is a comedian who inveighs against politicians, eunuchs, gossips, hypocrites, adulterers, homosexuals, women, lawyers, pimps,  landlords, bad parents, the nouveau riche, and the general decadence of Rome.  Juvenal is careful not to portray specific individuals but sometimes names notorious characters from the past. And careful though he was, he was exiled eventually. Writers do get exiled from Rome: Cicero and Ovid, too.

So how can I connect Juvenal to chips?  Well, one could say that the chips are akin to the thuggish informers he attacked in Satire 1.  In modern life, chips are the informers, or the tools of informers.

Do read Juvenal:  he’s better in Latin, but he will make you laugh in English, too.  Here is a paraphrase of a bit of Satire I.

It is difficult not to write satire.  For who, enduring this iniquitous city, would be so cruel as to hold back… when a litter passes by with the informer who ratted out his patron and now intends to wreck what survives of the ruined nobility?  Massa [an informer] fears him, and  Carus [another informer] bribes him with gifts, and the frightened actor Latinus has sent his actress girlfriend, Thymele, to appease him. 

The Romans feared the informer as we should fear the chip.

And yet here we are.