 On the one hand, there's that Douglas Adams quote about irrationally hating technologies that appear after the age of 35 On the other hand, when you're over 35, you're old enough to remember that they're re-using the same lie that they told you, two tech hype cycles ago 33 comments
"The technology itself is morally neutral of course, it's all about how you use it."  @researchfairy @floppyplopper @researchfairy at the end of my phase reading one or two newspapers a day I concluded that not many people do that much, and even fewer remember what they read. Even reporters (who now work at a sweatship pace and mostly from their office). That is how reporters keep falling for the same scams over and over again such as tech hype. And of course, some media depends on tech hype to sell ads and subscriptions!  "We're going to scrap these nice frameworks we've written and used very productively because we're going to rewrite everything in the hot new language, for some reason."  Never much liked his "Look at this exaggerated caricature of how bad humanity is, that makes all of humanity so dumb doesn't it?" brand of humor.
And you remember how we used to get things done. You've used a paper notebook, consulted a map, figured out a library, kept a calendar, calculated change for a $20, got film developed into photographs, made anonymous phone calls, and written commands in DOS. You have some grounds for comparison. @jill_the_pill @researchfairy i've this weird "arc", i guess, w/ computers i accidentally acquired one as an elementary schooler, early 2000s. we could never afford one, it was weird luck. but i quickly became entranced with coding and self-taught everything to do w/ computers. so a properly well rounded techie i was as 2010s rolled in but then, when i (re)started uni around 2014, for a couple years i barely used computers for anything. those two years were my most "productive" ever 1/2 @jill_the_pill @researchfairy i read a lot, learned a lot, did a lot, and was properly feeling self-fulfilment then for some reason later in 2015 i decided to digitise everything and that correlated, perhaps causally, with a drop in all of those now i had very negatively impactful life events around then also, so it's not a healthy comparison, but i do thing there is zero effect either nowadays i often fantasise about "de-computerising" myself, but can't be sure enough to follow thru 2/2 @kutuptiyini @jill_the_pill @researchfairy I really like computers, and I think they do a lot of useful and beautiful things. However, I do think that this effort to put computers EVERYWHERE in EVERYONE'S life is a big mistake. @researchfairy @jill_the_pill I marvel at how I (mostly) got to the right place at the right time in towns and cities I’d never previously visited before the internet and SatNav. It’s a bit of a mystery to me how I / we used to do it. @jill_the_pill @researchfairy quite frankly, I would trade DOS for the clunky IWMS system we have now.  @researchfairy I struggle with that all the time. I've taken the quote to heart for decades, and still use it to keep an open mind, but on the other hand I still think 98% of what I see nowadays in "tech" is unhinged bullshit. @researchfairy Every new technology has its own Mary Whitehouse and an idiot expert on The Drum explaining why children will be irreversibly damaged by it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Whitehouse @researchfairy Ok the Drum has been cancelled! The experts will have to move to sky after dark. @researchfairy Pondering how I was lured in by the shiny marketing prospects the first time is a good self-reflection practice. Recalling of having heard it before is good reminder to do it. @researchfairy My own view on this is that assuming all new inventions are great is *nearly* as stupid as assuming they're all evil @researchfairy This is the correct answer. You learn what is good enough to do what you need to do, and what is actually something new! @researchfairy Sometimes it doesn't even need to be a full-on hype cycle. The number of times I've seen takes along the lines of "the Database Admin role is dead" in my working life when some new tool/feature is released & yeah, sure... we're still here, working away. 🤷♀️   @researchfairy but bear in mind he was writing that back when we still thought digital watches were really cool things ;)  @researchfairy By the time you’re 55 you’ve seen another two hype cycles and their aggressive defenders. (presumably aggressive because otherwise they’ll realise their own gullibility) Then you realise your friends are investing in Whisky/Wine or small plots of land or 1p shares or day trading.  @researchfairy "Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." From time to time Adams used to get things wrong. Check out hashtag #CasioCult – it's all smart people who think digital watches are a pretty neat idea... @researchfairy @researchfairy heck at 43 my hype cycle count has overflowed and wrapped back around to Lisp hype. Wow, this blew up Support Marcia https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-marcia-get-stable @researchfairy @researchfairy 👋 dot-com crash rememberer reporting in. I’d just left school and wanted to be a web designer. Same shit two and a half decades later. |
Gregory's Server
"This technology is coming for my job and so I better accept worse pay and working conditions because if I don't they'll put a robot in my place? Of course it will."