Faith & Spirit Quote by I. F. Stone

Stone’s line lands like a one-sentence editorial cartoon: a biblical scale of suffering, updated with a modern tool that promises mastery and delivers migraines. Job is the classic test case for endurance under divine chaos; the computer is Stone’s late-20th-century emblem of man-made chaos dressed up as progress. The joke works because it treats technology not as a neutral convenience but as a new species of affliction - petty, relentless, and uniquely demoralizing. Illness and bereavement are tragedies; a computer crash is a humiliation. It makes you feel stupid, dependent, and trapped in someone else’s logic.

The intent is less Luddite than prosecutorial. Stone, a journalist suspicious of power, is pointing at the way complexity becomes authority: when systems grow opaque, they stop serving people and start managing them. The computer, especially in the era when Stone was writing, meant bureaucracies with bigger memories, faster ledgers, and fewer human faces. You don’t argue with an error message; you submit.

Subtext: modern suffering isn’t only catastrophe, it’s friction - endless passwords, vanished files, automated decisions, the quiet sense that your life is being processed. By invoking God and Job, Stone also slyly flips the old theological question. Maybe the torment isn’t a divine test at all. Maybe it’s a corporate upgrade, shipped with bugs, and billed as inevitability. The cynicism is precise: we didn’t need heaven to invent new trials. We built them ourselves and called it efficiency.