TECH is AWESOME! Now get rid of it!

Tech is awesome! I love it! The internet is incredible! AI helped design this art and this site! I love getting my next newest greatest cellphone! Awesome! Incredible! Now get rid of it!

Just kidding…kind of. I have a long love affair with TECH. Im a dork by nature which means that I spent a significant amount of my youth arguing with friends that my Commodore 64 was no VIC-20 and blew the pants off of their Apple IIe. I was wrong about that. They loaded their programs through a floppy disk while I was regulated to a cassette player. Put in the tape…press play…go watch a half hour of TV while your game loads. But I loved it. I even programmed a little game in basic with 8-bit Sprites and everything. I went to the Computer Expos in San Diego to check out the latest disks and software. I bought a Packard Hell (in the know folks understand that's not a misprint) and was the coolest dork among dorks in the early 90s. I got online through AOL. I chatted dirty with hot girls on AOL chat that were most likely disgusting old men and did it all. To stroke the pony back then I downloaded a dirty picture in a quick 20 minutes, line by line. I have owned over 15 desktops in my life and I am nowhere near the end of that rainbow.

But now I have children and grandchildren. 3-year-olds that can work a tablet with ease and pick their shows effortlessly. I watch in restaurants as everyone is focused on their cells and completely oblivious to the people sitting with them. I include myself in this. I do it as well. We have become a nation with self-imposed Attention Deficit Disorder. And I am as complicit as everyone else. There are days I just have to disconnect from the world to center myself. In the late 80s to present the 24-hour news stations and news cycle came to fruition. They were available to watch on TV 24 hours a day. Now that news cycle can reach you wherever you are at all times through cells and watches. You subscribe to your like-minded political bent and then get force-fed updates reflecting your worst fears 24/7. Never ending. Over and over. This is how radicalism develops.

Social media sites have created new forums for people to share photos and experiences and connect with friends and families. And shake their ass with booty dances. Ah, feminism. So much for that when you can get oogling eyes on you huh? I mean women’s rights are great but check out this ass! You like it, baby? Or they have created places for you to try and connect and just get ridiculed and shamed until you are burdened with tons of psychological damage. Plus they have made content creators out of EVERYBODY. People commit crimes and livestream themselves doing it just to create content for their Facebook page. People have literally been killed in our society for “likes”.

Then there is the never-ending updates for cell phones that are just a fraction better and another $1000. This phone is a little better, with a little better camera than last year's model and a new shape for just $1000 more. My daughter has spent thousands on a cell phone that is infinitely more powerful than the computers that sent men to the moon. Is she running CAD on it? Solidworks? Texting and web browsing…things a 150.00 phone can do. But those phones don't have a partially eaten fruit on them.

I love tech and don’t want to get rid of it. I am excited to see the new places it takes us. But I do worry about the disconnect. I worry about the impatience that we have

bread. We should be able to wait things out a bit. A clearer vision on things is good, not bad. Sometimes you have to enjoy the ride and not just get to the end and click on to the next thing. I worry that movies are in decline not just because tech has made the home theater a major competitor but that people are becoming used to their entertainment in 30-second chunks instead of long-form movie storytelling. I just hope enough people have enough patience to read to the end of this post.