But what do you do when you're the victim of anonymous machines talking to each other? I recently received an automatically generated notice from an agency which asserts that I engaged in a financial transaction I never heard of but may well have been conducted automatically on my behalf and which may have generated some electronic form. Various computers were involved, and I have no idea which computer either got it wrong or missed the number.

So, I'd like to hate someone, but there's no one there.

It's tough for me to hate myself when I didn't do anything wrong. But computers have a way of making trouble for humans by not talking to each other properly, then later imputing their misconduct to humans who had nothing to do with them, so that all you need to do is have a social security number, and VIOLA! You can be in a lot of trouble for the crime of not knowing what it was not possible to know.

Which means you can be in trouble for doing absolutely nothing.

One of the dumbest mistakes I ever made was "moving" (only temporarily and because I had to, not because I wanted to) from California to the East Coast. This caused taxing authorities there to impute income to me that I never had, but because I wasn't there to open the mail, the imputed income morphed into real income because of the simple passage of time. (Nor did calling myself "bicoastal" help.)

Not knowing what computers are doing can get you in big trouble.

But when you can't even figure out which computer to hate, how can you figure out which human (or group of humans) deserve the imputed hatred?

I know the Christian approach is love, but isn't that also an emotion?

When we get into trouble, our natural instinct is to either blame ourselves (which results in an emotion of guilt), or blame others (anger or hate). These natural instincts and emotions are useless when contending with electronically generated trouble.

So, even if I put aside my feelings, I know that I am not the only person who has been treated this way by machines.

My theory is that there's a lot of hate with no place to go.

AFTERTHOUGT: It occurs to me that I forgot to mention the issue of fairness.

Silly me.

Can there be such a thing as "undifferentiated hatred"? I can think of few things more irrational, but then, nothing about is rational about being blamed for the mistakes of machines.