Technology is a force, not a choice.

In an effort to become more productive on this blog, I recently set up a distinctive twitter feed for it, and started following a number of tech related feeds from it. Now obviously, this led pretty much instantaneously to a TED talk waddling its way in front of me. So I said to myself "hey, why don't you watch that, and do a little response to it as a post?" I figured I could post the video, concur with some of the ideas expressed, and hopefully drum up a few page-views. I figured wrong. Just because a thing is sponsored by TED, promoted by a tech blog, and claims to be about "cleaning up" human relationships through technology does NOT mean that it in any way has a perceptive or even particularly interesting take on any of the above.
     The talk is given by Dr. Sherry Turkle, an eminent and respected figure in the tech community, and someone who has been thinking and talking about the impact of technology on our daily lives for over 30 years. Which is why it is so disappointment to see her lapse into the tropes of sad, rote luditism which she employs so aggressively in the TED talk I've embedded below:




Some interesting notes on the talk:

1. It's from 2012. Why was TED promoting it today? I don't know, but hey, their choice.

2. It is a given of the modern world that technology has already changed a great deal in the 2 years since this talk was given. For one thing, ComScore estimates that smart-phone penetration has increased from 47% to 72%.

3. Dr. Turkle seems convinced that the increasing presence of digital communications technology will atomize both our attention spans and our social skills.

4. Dr. Turkle also focuses very intently on technology as it addresses what she identifies as an emotional need: our fear of being alone.

Now, while professor Turkle is no doubt substantially smarter than myself, I just can't help but feel pretty strongly that she is both missing a lot of what is going on, and missing the point of what she is catching. Does always-on communication tend to atomize our ability to focus on a single stream of data? Yes. Does this happen because we're all profoundly lonely and tragically grasping for any form of closeness, no matter how low resolution, false, or unrequited? I don't think so.
     While I understand that human connection is both a universal need, and an aspect of life that must perforce intersect with our use of technology, I just don't see it as the primary driver of our current glut-o-inputs. That I put down to two, occasionally conflicting, impulses. The first is my personal favorite, the desire to make life simpler. Yes, when you can talk to people anywhere at anytime you talk to them both more frequently, and with less 'depth'. But you do this because in the old, complicated, world, you had to condense your communication into time slots in order to make the initial outreach worthwhile. Doing that was complicated. It was bound by both spatial and temporal fetters from which we are now blessedly free. The second impulse, is boredom. The reason Dr. Turkle's teenage daughter will sit in a room next to two friends and totally ignore them is because on a transaction by transaction basis, they are substantially less interesting than whatever is on her phone.
     The next point of disagreement between me and the good Dr. comes up here, because at this point she makes a value judgement. Now, maybe her argument has been unfairly reduced by the limited parameters of a TED talk. To me though, it seems like throughout the video she is asserting that small batch digital communication leaves us less connected, and worse off, than large batch face to face communication, and that we need to do something about it. I'm not really sure what the philosophical taxonomy of my objections to that are, but they are strong, and they go like this: we don't get to pick how we interact with technology in that way.
    In the history of the human race we have never successfully chosen to just stop using something. This is a point I will reiterate at some point in the future when discussing climate change. The only way to change how people interact with a technology is to invent a new one, one that achieves a higher rate of adoption than the one you're hoping to replace. To be a Luddite is not just silly, it is a ticket to a slow, panicked death, railing at a world that doesn't even notice your existence.
   

A Minimalist Future

Stuff.  We all want less of it, because it is annoying, distracting, and occasionally stressful.  In every honest futurists dreams they live a Next Generation like life, prancing around in a spandex speed suit, a brass and silver boutonniere their only tool and tether.  In the present world though, there are an entire THREE items without which one cannot leave the house: wallet, keys, and phone.  Forget any one of the three and you'll die like a beached whale, desiccating slowly in the sun while praying someone comes along to hose you down.
For a few years now though, a promise as lurked just over the horizon of a bright future in which you really only need ONE of those three: your phone.  Technically, it's already supposed to be possible.  NFC payments have been extant but underdeveloped for years now, and the technology can supposedly function as a key substitute as well.  So while my smart phone may be a bit bigger than Captain Picard's lapel pin, I decided to see how many of the same functions it could take up.

So, my wallet contains:

• 2 IDs (Drivers License and work ID from a university I use to scam student discounts.)
• 4 credit and debit cards
• Some coupons
• 1 insurance card I keep on my in the hopes it will get me delivered to a decent hospital before they find out the coverage has lapsed.  (C'Mon Obamacare!)
• 2 gift cards
• 2 library cards
• 2 transit cards

So, how many of these can I get rid of?

The first thing to go was one of the gift cards, since I realized it had originally come to me as an email.  This is important.  If you hate stuff, or love someone who does, always send gift cards electronically, so they don't have to carry more crap around.  The other card I'll just have to try and spend quickly.  Same goes for the coupons, though I have plans to deal with their ilk permanently in the future, which I will detail shortly. 

Then I sent the transit cards to storage, since I don't actually live in the either of the places where they work.  The cards I decided to try and get rid of next were the library cards.  I did a simple search for "library card app" and guess what?  It turns out that a lot of apps that let you digitize loyalty card programs can also take in library cards.

Boom. Not carrying those anymore! Library doesn't take digital cards? Burn it down.

Whose next?  Credit and debit cards.  You will recall from earlier that I had 4 of them.  But one of them, was this little bugger:

That card access a magic @Google account, to which I can add value using any other debit or credit card.  Set it up properly, and I can ditch all the other cards.  So I did.  I still have them at home if I need them, but they're not bloating out my wallet any more.  The tragedy though, is that I shouldn't even really need the card.  The Google Wallet App does all the same things as the card, only it relies on NFC for communication, instead of a magnetic stripe.  Some retailers accept NFC, but not anywhere near enough.  And of course, no-one accepts digital IDs yet.  I was tantalizingly close to zero wallet though, and so I decided to take the drastic step of being a semi-moral human being: I would stop carrying the cards I didn't really have a right to use - no more insurance, no more old staff ID.  Which meant that the total contents of my billfold was now reduced to this:

Which is not zero, but it is the perfect amount to fit into a wallet phone case!  Which...unfortunately they don't make any decent ones for my phone, because it is old and I am poor.  When I get my next one though, I will no longer have to carry a separate wallet.  That leaves only one enemy standing before me: my key chain.  That unfortunately will have to wait till later, but don't worry, that fucker is done for.

Re-purposed!

HAHA!  This blog is hereby re-purposed: from here on out it will chronicle my efforts to update my life so that I am living....in the future!