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Day by Day: Drive-by machine coma
Thu, 06 Sep 2007

Permit my mind to wander, as it was another night with only a ocuple hours sleep and as all know.. blogging only occurs under sleep deprivation mixed with caffeine.

As distant as they come, every once in awhile a thought enters my head that might be credited to a book read for highschool. I mean, I was never forced to read Moonfleet like so many of my contemporaries, but I was cojolled (greatfully) into Day of the Triffids and Animal Farm and so forth. There was a short story we read in English class .. "The Machine Stops" or somesuch which I thoguht was very slick. Somehow it ties into Ellisons "I have no mouth yet I must scream", but thats just because I am compelled to bring it up. Anyway, as our little girl slowly (quickly!) grows, taking control of her motor functions and studying the amazing details in every day items, I wonder about her future and where its all going..

When up last night voyaging around the quiet depths of semi-sleep I got to thinking about "The Machine Stops" (wherein a society is so utterly dependant upon a computing complex for all of lifes requirements, and it fails, they meet their fellow man face to face for the first time.) and it occurred to me again that our interface to news, to research - and more alarmingly - to friends and family - is through a one way non-social technology. Being the generation that I am, the Matrix generation, the Intertube application-building generation, means that life was so fascinated with the technology as it blew open so many years ago. We geeks lived and breathed this new domain, never questioning the very laconic nature of it all .. we were as gods to a new world, building applications and adopting this newfound openness assuring ourselves it was better, faster, more efficient, more open.. more human despite being electronic. Coding is cool, is power, and half the time.. humanity be damned. We were better. It hit right there .. if it enabled _more_ communication, how could it restrict it? We created the new systems, so how could we be limiting ourselves? We geeks had finally gotten ours -- we were cool, we wore a lot of black, and it was better than microwave ovens (we knew, since it was better than BBSes.) We'd all created communication systems whereby you chat in real time (IM and IRC), or at reader conveniance (email, usenet, websites), and could transcend language, culture or handicap. Technology was full of awesome again.

Naturally, we all figured this would save time. Be more efficient. Or cooler anyway, and that at least came to pass. Like flying cars and civilian jetpacks, efficient and technology will never really come to pass -- we all know that our laptops are faster than ten year old supercomputers, and yet loading up your latest email can take a few seconds. Anyway, all this so-called efficiency is also inbred -- we're better, we're faster, and we're doing more.

Really, humans are better at doing less. I mean, sitting around a fire, going fishing, all these things we tend to frown upon until we do them and remember how appealing they are.. heck, just taking a break to sit out in the sun feels gorramned great Doing more is taking a piece of our humanity away. We're social creatures, not machines. We should be making this technology work more for us and not making us work more. Youtube, flikr and so forth are very enabling and have created whole new aspects to our culture and exchange.. but its really an illusion at control, while we are born and registered, learning from TV and the net, going to school and being marked by technology, and peeing in cups for work. We've both created the illusion of freedom, and taken it away. Fine, its our generations fault, I can deal with it.

But once in awhile I think about my poor daughter who will be hooking into the Great Portal in the not too far off future. She'll be a wonderful and open creature, not yet formed in her minds pathways, ready to absorb so much information. And she'll have a tonne of it, all shovelled into her brain, performatted and predigested.. and unavailable to change. I suppose for children it has always been this way.. but with so much at her fingertips, will she be forced into its way of thinking? Given technology makes our food, provides our transportation, and is the basis for learning.. have all the alternatives simply vanished? I know in my life I've always admired from afar sitting around the campfire and singing. Its not my thing, but I know the option is there. But it is increasingly distant..

Anyway, I'm a tech guy. More than most people, for sure. So it is ironic as a PDA developer I don't trust PDAs; as a well read time management nerd I don't trust time management systems. And as a coder who taps away at a keyboard for every waking moment, to have ideas like this pop into his sleep deprived head at 5am .. is .. well, to be honest, its sleep dep talking :) I mean, we've created this system which in and of itself is not directly harmful, or even backwards .. but are we aware of the future outcome? Just as all this genetic hacking on our food won't prove good or bad for decades after we've all been consuming it. We optimize by statics.. we're all min-maxers now, forever cutting away at the profits and pushing the curve here or there. I've often lamented about the lack of gargoyles on buildings, by which I mean taking the more fun or humoured or human approach to a problem, and not just working the numbers. It is a tragedy of our own making where our society stopped having fun.

The technology costs more than it gives. We always knew this, but know those little blue eyes look up at me, while I type away on my keyboard. And I feal shame for my part that I have wrought.

Course, its not all bleak; we've created much that is cool, and tied people together in new and exciting ways. We've evolved a little as a society. Let us hope that despite my being another number in the great cog my daughter will be more, so much more.

Yeah, like I said, late night thoughts. No need to reply, I know its tripe :)

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