
DATAcide: The Total Annihilation of Life as We Know It - DocFeind
https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/115/datacide-total-annihilation-life-we-know-it.html
======
lmm
The internet is other people, and what we get is what people, on the whole,
want. It's like the olympic gold medal in _Cool Runnings_ : if your life is
meaningless without it, it's still going to be meaningless with it.

> These are the most boring people on the planet.

Yes, we are. That's the real revolution here: that you don't have to be
"wacky" to participate, to set the agenda even. Facebook forces us to accept
that most people are boring. Forces us to at least consider the possibility
that terrifies the politico-artistic-humanities complex - that maybe it's ok
to be boring.

> if our data is the oil of the 21st century, then why aren’t we all sheikhs?

Or maybe our data isn't actually that valuable. Maybe it's worth approximately
what we sell it for.

> There’s no sneering, no sarcasm, and no self-deprecation. Everyone is just
> sort of floating along in an earnest tranquility. As if each anecdote about
> “that cool loft I found on Airbnb” contained some deep spiritual
> significance beyond my grasp.

Isn't this a good thing? What do we think the author would have written if
everyone were being cynical and snarky?

> magical cloud of squandered human potential

No such thing. Data isn't destroying these things - it's just forcing us to
realize that they were myths all along. I think the author kind of
acknowledges this with the statement about how "those invisible power
structures continue to thrive."

The Internet only amplifies what's already there. It can, and does, help you
do what you want with your life. But you have to decide what that is for
yourself.

~~~
romaniv
I could reply point-by-point, but it's pointless (pun intended).

Here is one thing I learned over the years.

There are people of type A who believe there actually are meaningful things in
life. This belief requires to acknowledge that there are also meaningless
things. And yes, sometimes identifying those things can get a bit depressing.

There are other people, type B, who believe there are no meaningful things in
life. This same statement can be given a positive spin by negation, but the
essence remains the same. This is the type that lectures everyone on how
subjective and relative everything is, like it's some kind of revolutionary
idea we have not heard before.

But that's not it. What I really learned is that having a conversation
relating to meaning or value of _anything_ is entirely pointless if you're
speaking with people of type B. Eventually, they will fall back on stating the
same core belief (the one I just described above) in a myriad different ways.

And here is a question worth asking. If people of type A can have a productive
conversation about things that type B considers non-existent, which belief
system makes more sense?

~~~
haberman
I always find it very weird when people have debates about whether life is
"meaningful" or not. "Meaningfulness" is just a feeling inside a human psyche.
If it feels meaningful, then it is meaningful to you. Other people may have
different feelings about what is meaningful.

How can a person of type A claim any kind of universal or objective
meaningfulness of anything? How would you build a meaningfulness detector or
write a meaningfulness algorithm to discern what is meaningful and what is
not? What evidence is there to suggest that meaningfulness is a concept that
exists outside of our own minds and experience?

~~~
tjradcliffe
> What evidence is there to suggest that meaningfulness is a concept that
> exists outside of our own minds and experience?

Why would you need or want to?

I exist. My mind exists. My consciousness exists. My experience exists.

I mean that in the perfectly ordinary, uncontroversial sense that we use every
day. There is no particular mystery or problem when I say, "My cat exists" or
"My socks exist". I can provide evidence for them, in the same way I can
provide evidence for my own existence and the existence of my experiences. If
you can read and understand this post you have evidence for my existence and
the existence of my experience.

Furthermore, because we are beings of a particular kind, the things we find
meaningful--like the things we find nutritious--fall into a relatively small
number of categories. Particulars won't be the same for everyone, but so what?
It would be very strange to say that because I like meat and you like fruit
there's no objective or universal standard of nutrition, and anyone can eat
anything--rocks, trees, nothing--and get along equally well.

Simply because our nature does not determine what we find meaningful or
nutritious does not mean it does not constrain it. This is again a perfectly
ordinary phenomenon that for some reason people get all confused about when it
applies to the contents of our minds rather than the contents of our stomachs.

~~~
ThomPete
The question is not whether you experience you exist but what it is that
exist.

So it doesn't help your argument that you can point to a sock and say it
exist. What you have to show is that there is only one way to interpret what
you see before you can prove that what you see is in fact what you see. Only
then is it truly "a thing" regardless of perspective.

In other words. The rock exist in your head as a concept, it's not a concept
in nature. A pattern perhaps but not an universal object and the pattern that
it is is only one perspective.

------
kasey_junk
I quite liked this piece to read as art. But there are some pretty simple
solutions to the general malaise he is expressing:

1) get out of the myopic SV culture. There are lots of actually interesting
problems to solve (even in the very small world of software) and if you are
tired of talking about the same old thing, go somewhere that isn't doing that.

2) if you aren't interested by the data you are consuming, don't interact with
it. Don't consume facebook, twitter, HN, et. al. Or more realistically only
consume the ones that add value to your life. It's harder to opt out of being
collected in the massive hoovering of this data, but in nearly all instances
out of sight, really is out of mind.

~~~
api
"if you are tired of talking about the same old thing, go somewhere that isn't
doing that."

I was getting bored with music a while back, so I did an experiment: I limited
the music on my phone to nothing older than five years. To do this I had to
remove hundreds of albums.

At first there wasn't much left, so I went looking... for nothing released
more than five years ago.

I found quite a bit of new stuff.

Eventually I re-added old stuff I loved, but my musical repertoire had
broadened quite a bit.

Part of the problem today is that the amount of signal around us has increased
so much that it's overwhelming, and people haven't yet learned that it's
_okay_ to tune out a significantly larger amount of chatter than what they had
to tune out in previous eras. It feels like ignorance, or being "out of the
loop," but it's essential.

I plan on repeating the music experiment regularly. I should probably purge
some of my "feeds" too.

~~~
Snhr
TLDR; I've done what you've done on a massive scale.

Most things end up depressing me if I follow them, knowing people are
willingly participating in such an absence of brain activity. I had to stop
myself from constantly scrolling down on facebook when I was bored (I realized
I don't even actually read what people post most of the time because I'm
looking for something interesting, but I still subconsciously notice what
people are doing somehow.) I'm not against this by any means, so don't take
this as me complaining. I don't know what's popular right now, I don't know
what is trending on twitter. What's left is my little bubble where I have what
I need to explore what I'm interested in. I can find interesting articles, I
can find new music, and I can talk to people who actually are interesting to
talk to. I've completely cut off any noise and am completely left with pure
signal.

I'm completely out of touch with most everybody, and I've never felt better. I
guess this goes hand in hand with being super introverted, I couldn't imagine
actually holding a conversation with anybody around me with the information I
know that wasn't super technical or completely shallow. I've lived with this
obvious gap between me and other people my entire life though so it doesn't
even feel lonely anymore when I can just find whatever I need to keep myself
occupied when I'm bored.

The beauty of the internet.

~~~
Chlorus
TL;DR "I've built my own echo chamber!"

~~~
ctdonath
To the contrary, seems he built an anechoic chamber. The only signals he
perceives is what he wants, cleanly. He has decided what he _doesn 't_ want,
knows that most signals out there are just variants on the same such content,
and blocks it all.

I'm approaching half a century old. Comes a point where you realize you _have_
heard it all, and are not interested in anything "new" because it isn't. I'm
this -><\- close to shutting it all off and going seriously minimalistic. The
tipping point would be a news service which presents only actual need-to-know
news, and a stream of new music.

Address, enumerate, and centralize your core axioms. Build from there. _Stop
letting others dump $#!^ in your head._

~~~
JonnieCache
The purpose of the anechoic chamber is not to keep out sounds from the
outside, but to allow you to differentiate the direct sound you're making from
the environmental reflections.

------
justcommenting
This reminded me of moxie's recent post about whether we've put the glasses
from _They Live_ on or taken them off[0].

In terms of the internet as a failed utopia, it seems to comes down to the
choices we all make in deciding this for ourselves: what we participate in,
what we work on, how we choose to spend our time, and especially whether or
not we work to build positive alternatives.

It can be a useful exercise to ask oneself whether the work they're doing
helps to control others or whether it positively enables people to live in the
world they want to live in, and one way to respond to these types of concerns
is for people to focus on building that world.

Sometimes that's the harder path, but sometimes the harder path is worth
choosing.

[0] [https://whispersystems.org/blog/they-
live/](https://whispersystems.org/blog/they-live/)

------
normloman
> There’s no sneering, no sarcasm, and no self-deprecation. Everyone is just
> sort of floating along in an earnest tranquility. As if each anecdote about
> “that cool loft I found on Airbnb” contained some deep spiritual
> significance beyond my grasp.

This is what I hate the most! Everyone here is so positive. It's like a cult.
Any post containing an ounce of negativity is downvoted. Anything that strays
from the party line of "technology will solve everything, and we are changing
the world" is shunned. And whether this attitude comes from techno-utopians or
from eager beaver entrepreneurs, it's toxic to our industry. It makes us
ignore the social impact of our inventions. It keeps us narrowly focused on
technological solutions when the problem isn't technological. And worst of
all, it gives everyone a huge ego. Learn to laugh at yourself, accept that
your crappy web app isn't changing the world, and remember that the homeless
guy you passed on your way to work is a person like you (who just lacked the
opportunities you did).

~~~
rjruizes
Remember that this is in an interview context-- everyone is on their best
behavior and it's a little fake.

~~~
normloman
You're right--interviewers act fake. And besides, this article generalizes,
hyperbolizes. But I'm not using this lone anecdote as evidence. My experience
on HN is the evidence. My experience working for tech companies is the
evidence. And the smug attitude in the article, even if fictional, captures
reality perfectly in the same way that a comedian's impression reveals more
about the subject than a faithful depiction.

------
symlinkk
I thought it was a great piece. Most of the "innovation" we see is total
bullshit. Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, all of these things are NOT new
ideas, and NOT lifechanging services, but they're valued in the millions and
billions of dollars. It feels like we're in the middle of another dot-com
bubble, and sooner or later it's going to pop, and we're going to realize how
little we've actually contributed to society.

~~~
dmix
And these apps are a small percentage of the entire tech industry but get 100%
of the press on sites like Techcrunch.

Most products and technology are boring. It doesn't mean the 1% fringes aren't
doing exciting things.

Such as robotics, automated cars, automated surgery, machine learning/NLP
services, VR (ala oculus/Magic Leap), smart AI assistants are improving
rapidly (Siri/Cortana). Business intelligence and data mining are new massive
industries.

Nor does the fact one niche (social networks/mobile apps) becoming saturated
with products means that tech innovation is dead.

IF most of the applications of software are boring and software is to 'eat the
world' then there is at least another decade or two of purely boring stuff
needing to be transferred to software. For ex: no-one is tweeting about
advances in business automation.

~~~
normloman
It is a small percentage of the tech industry. But it's a good percentage of
startups. A good percentage of yCombinator companies. A good percentage of
what we discuss on Hacker News.

~~~
dmix
> it's a good percentage of startups

Have you looked at any portfolios on VCs websites of startups they invested
in? The majority of them are all boring companies, and you'd never hear about
them even when they sell for a $1 billion.

Many people on HN work at startups building boring software. They just dont
site here discussing it because it is boring. And lots of the articles here
are a reflection of the tech journalism, not industry.

That being said there are tons of articles on HN discussing robotics,
automated cars, magicleap, etc.

------
DanielBMarkham
Not bad! I liked it. Kind of weaseled out at the end, though. I get the
feeling the author got as close as he could to the truth and then just
couldn't cross the chasm.

I was struck by the conscious selling out that the author points out. The
folks building the next generation of internet content _know_ what they're
doing. It's not like it was back in '95 when we thought that we'd all just
turn on machines and share. Back then it was utopia. Now, as he points out,
you don't surf the internet. The internet surfs you.

But we know that. Yet to point it out is a terrible faux pas. The "correct"
answer is just to sell out, grab the data, flip it, and move on. I guess the
conclusion is that it's better to be rich with a slightly guilty conscience
than it is to be moral and honest. It's rude to be perspicacious.

If true that people are starting to wake up, interesting. It's showing a shift
a shift in the conversation. Far too many techies will rant at length about
some kind of social injustice in the world -- while helping to create an
authoritarian state the world has never seen before. It's about time some of
them looked in the mirror a bit.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Maybe techies are slowly realizing that this whole trendy web industry is 50%
schlep, 49% bullshit and 1% of something actually valuable to the world. The
schlep jobs are obviously boring, but the trendy 49% of bullshit seems to be
actually harmful to humanity.

I realized this long time ago. And yet here I am, working on a schlep. I guess
that's a step up from the bullshit work I was doing before. Maybe one day I'll
be brave enough and take another step, ditch this whole thing and code
something actually beneficial to fellow humans.

People will say (I wonder what's edw519's stance on this) - go with what your
clients/employers want, and let the magic of capitalism sort it all out, turn
it into real value. But we see that more and more things we do don't actually
bring any (nonmonetary) value to the world.

So you say, there's a shift in conversation. I'm afraid, that the shift will
is towards apathy. "Sell out, grab the data, flip it, and move on". Because
they don't give a shit about the world anymore, it's going down the drain,
nothing we can do, so let at least have some expensive parties before the
whole thing explodes.

~~~
porker
> Maybe techies are slowly realizing that this whole trendy web industry is
> 50% schlep, 49% bullshit and 1% of something actually valuable to the world.

Couldn't put it better myself.

------
eveach
Love this: a euphemism for a human centipede of marketers selling marketing to
marketers for marketing.

~~~
mason240
Also this: But what many [communes] had common was a cascading systems failure
of their foundational hypothesis — that social change could be achieved
through self-transformation and the problems of power could be solved simply
by ignoring them. There was always a Machiavellian in the transformational
mist, though, and a refusal to acknowledge outright how power creates
invisible structures that undermine the potential for cooperative action
ultimately led to their implosion.

------
ynniv
This reads like Wired back when that was a good thing.

~~~
webmaven
More like Mondo 2000.

------
sjafri5
This is an incredibly pertinent point. Why is the collective data, profitable
for such a small percentage. Why are those that are contributing the data not
being rewarded for their contributions. If we live in the information
econonomy then those that are contributing that information should be
accounted. How is this not digital feudalism??

~~~
scrrr
Well, there's choice. I use more obscure tools, for example Unison instead of
Dropbox or Tox instead of Skype. It would probably be feudalism if there were
dependency, but nobody forces you to post on Facebook. I don't use it. I have
friends that I see often, I enjoy life just fine without it. heh.

TBH, I'm more worried about cameras that scan faces and license plates.

------
Alex3917
For what it's worth, Ryder Ripps' poem Howl 2.0 explores similar themes:

[http://genius.com/Ryder-ripps-howl-20-for-fixoid-
annotated](http://genius.com/Ryder-ripps-howl-20-for-fixoid-annotated)

Since the author of this Adbusters piece was also clearly inspired by
Ginsberg, it's pretty cool to see two different authors exploring the same
ideas when they are both using the same work for inspiration.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I see your Howl 2.0 and raise you Meditations on Moloch!

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

------
ctdonath
One word summarizes the article: "emo".

It's a long angst-dripping screed lamenting the extreme data connectivity of
today, failing to note three critical points: (A) the connectivity is as vital
to "life as we know it" as your nervous system is to your body, (B) he lives
it by choice, and (C) he can unplug if he wants to.

He fails to notice that "we" is not universal. For high-tech types living in
crowded cities, yes, but there are a whole lotta people much less, and even
un-, connected to the Web.

He fails to notice that the connectivity he laments is _critical_ to
maintaining life as he knows it. What he takes for granted, the symbiotic
consequence of extreme data proliferation. Take away the interconnectedness
that scares him, and he has few options beyond tilling the ground and
harvesting his own food.

He fails to notice the choices he has. Going only so far as locking the door &
smashing the phone, he laments the data-driven world still exists just feet
away. Newsflash: there is life outside the blue/red[1] border.

He fails to notice that disconnection _is_ an option, to whatever degree he is
comfortable with. Log out of Facebook. Avoid HN. Stop viewing social media.
Most news is irrelevant. Pay in cash. Accept that disconnection means longer
waits and fewer options. Realize that most of humanity throughout history,
some 40 billion people, got along to what they considered "fine" without the
Web.

While briefly still connected, take a look at these:
[http://www.zillow.com](http://www.zillow.com)
[http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com](http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com)
[https://www.google.com/#q=library+near+me](https://www.google.com/#q=library+near+me)
[http://www.mypatriotsupply.com/Articles.asp?ID=245](http://www.mypatriotsupply.com/Articles.asp?ID=245)

Quit whining. If you want to get out, you can. There is an off switch, and the
disconnected life is wonderful.

[1] - if you look closely at voter precinct maps and their blue/red
Democrat/Republican Left/Right Progressive/Conservative boundaries, you'll see
stark & consistent delineation right at the urban/rural boundary. Cities are
political archipelagos, and he's lamenting the foliage & ground, longing for
the oceans he doesn't realize surround him.

~~~
ashark
> [http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com](http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com)

Ouch, portability comes at a very high (~5-6x/sqft) premium.

~~~
ctdonath
Well, in fairness Tumbleweed Homes _are_ premium. I'm just giving a starting
link as a hint. If you're looking for serious cheap & portable along those
lines, I got a used pop-up camper for $2000 (new $10,000) that I'd be OK
living in (and do for a few weeks a year, family of 4 + 2 dogs). During a
sale, I also got the detailed plans for a Tumbleweed Home for $20, simple
enough one could scrounge most of the materials. You can spend as little as
you like, so long as you're willing to DIY and have flexible standards.

Speaking of which... Go to the Zillow link and search (largest range allowed
is a whole state) for properties at/under $1000. Dig thru the
auctions/scams/typos, and you'll find viable - even nice - lots dirt cheap.

Put those together, deal with misc paperwork & other costs, be ready to work,
and you can have a home free-and-clear for under $5000. (Yes, it's not a 2400
sq ft ranch in the suburbs; deal with it.)

~~~
ashark
I've found the tiny-house movement fascinating to watch from the outside. It's
got a real appeal to me that's only increased as I've gradually transitioned
from my youthful can't-wait-to-be-uploaded outlook to a much more reluctant
relationship with tech and the always-on life.

My concerns about trying it myself:

1) The country-living variety defeats any small-ecological-footprint appeal,
unless you live like depression-era or earlier farmers ( _i.e._ don't
underestimate the ecological sensibility of a studio apartment in the city)

2) The urban/suburban variety is much harder to make work if you don't want to
live illegally in someone's backyard, thanks to zoning, HOAs, _et c._ , plus
the cost of land very nearly ruins the money-saving angle.

3) Health care is really, _really_ expensive. I doubt I could make enough
money to cover that for my family, on top of other unavoidable expenses, while
living a disconnected life in the sticks, as much as it might appeal to me
otherwise, even with the savings from not having rent or a mortgage. That goes
beyond "roughing it" to "irresponsible".

4) I've got a tickle in the back of my mind that a large part of this is a
marketing ploy to sell mobile homes at a premium by appealing to "economy" and
"eco-consciousness" when both of those would be better (or at least similarly-
well) served by buying single-wide in an ordinary mobile home park, which for
some reason[1] rarely comes up as an alternative. Incidentally, if you've ever
been to poor rural areas along sleepy back-woods highways, you've undoubtably
noticed that you can do the trailer thing and the dirt-cheap-land middle-of-
nowhere thing, too. Of course, they're ugly and couldn't possibly be mistaken
for Thoreau's cabin.

Your pop-up camper approach seems sensible (though I, also with a family of
four, can't imagine living quite _that_ small full-time without going insane—a
few weeks a year, sure) but it's not the kind of thing you see blog posts
gushing about, covered by documentaries, or featured on magazine covers.

[1] Class, almost certainly; trailer park = white trash redneck, "tiny house"
= creative class, educated.

------
brudgers
The mention of buildings based on _Walden 2_ reminded me of one of my favorite
buildings, Ricardo Bofill's _Walden 7_ :

[http://www.walden7.com/](http://www.walden7.com/)

[http://www.ricardobofill.com/EN/666/PROJECTS/Walden-7-html](http://www.ricardobofill.com/EN/666/PROJECTS/Walden-7-html)
[might be broken]

[http://www.mascontext.com/issues/4-living-winter-09/case-
stu...](http://www.mascontext.com/issues/4-living-winter-09/case-
study-2-walden-7/)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_7](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_7)

The links don't really do full justice to the three-dimensional interlocking
of the dwelling units. It's Corbu's _Marseilles Block_ plus peyote.

------
shubhamjain
There is one thing which is completely unrelated to contents of the article
that puzzles me. The article is quite long and if it wasn't for being at the
top of HN, I would never dare to read it and I believe, people are as lazy as
me when it comes to long posts.

But, the article did came from 1 to 200+ points and the thing which I wish to
know is who were the early readers when the article was at 0 - 20 points. I
mean even though writing style is pretty interesting but seeing the length of
the article, I would be pretty much discouraged to go through the whole of it,
if it had less points.

So the interesting thing to know is what makes the early readers to upvote
something. Would they indeed go through whole of the text before upvoting or
would they impressed just by few ideas in beginning, and may be just bookmark
/ pocket it.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I saw it early, when it had low two digits score. I almost ignored it (I
wasn't in the mood for too much narration), but when skimming something in the
middle drew my attention, so I scrolled back and started reading. Upvoted
after that, of course.

------
coldcode
"We were told to surf the web, but in the end, the web serf’d us". Funny and
sad at the same time.

~~~
politician
If you always do what you're told, don't complain when you're labeled a serf.
;-)

------
rjruizes
This essay raises a lot of good points-- mass conformity, data ownership,
overstimulated brains. If you work in this field, you're rich, richer than
many, many generations before. If we don't ever pause and consider these
things, we'll take them for granted.

------
leroy_masochist
"He’s dressed like a Stasi agent trying to blend in at a disco."

Best sentence I've read in a while.

~~~
Yhippa
"Textbook Zuckercore". I love the wit.

------
teirce
Reading this makes my skin crawl. I'll admit -- I only got about half way
through before I had to stop. The disposition of the author is entirely too
sardonic for my tastes. He's locked himself into an endless spiral of hatred
and self-victimization, of course none of which is his own fault.

How can this be seen as normal or healthy?

Maybe I'm just one of the "boring" people. I don't have a twitter or an
Instagram, and barely maintain my Facebook that follows only people I have
known personally.

Take a walk. Go outside. Get some fresh air. Realize that you don't need to
allow things to consume your free time if you don't enjoy them.

~~~
alexbecker
I believe the piece is not entirely serious.

------
Dirlewanger
Like everything else in the world, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Yes,
in a certain lens, we are digital serfs bound by companies' TOSs forced by
none other than our own listless volition; people don't care where the data is
going, they just want the service. Yet in exchange these services allow us to
_do more_ , _live more_. Using Kayak instead of a travel agent saves me
precious hours for going on a trip. Next time I want to take a trip, I use the
knowledge already gained through Kayak to book it even faster instead of
futzing around with another person's schedule. Do you want convenience, or do
you want your digital "rights" to be respected?

------
wmnwmn
AdBusters. Enough said.

------
blisterpeanuts
This is a very well written essay, but I find it rather Valley-centric. There
are other worlds out there, non-internet worlds. There are people in west
Texas and North Dakota working on oil and gas drilling rigs. There are
painters and carpenters, dentists and nurses and oncologists. There are
Marines and Navy pilots and infantrymen and -women. Many of these professions
are largely the same as they were prior to the advent of the 1970s
microcomputer revolution.

Of course, there are plenty of professions that are in trouble if not ceased
to exist. Shoe stores, book stores, and clothing stores are all in big trouble
these days, as are small hardware stores and small grocery stores and non-
chain coffee shops.

Someone who's feeling the level of angst and confusion and directionless of
this author should probably consider changing fields, or maybe disconnect more
often and wander barefoot in a garden (watch out for deer ticks and yellow
jacket wasps, though; nature is not necessarily all fun and games).

The internet is a tool, a means to an end. It's been a way for many of us to
reconnect with long lost classmates, stay in touch with distant loved ones
like never before. It's enabled severely handicapped people to have jobs and
lead more productive lives. It's a miracle, really.

When I was a college student spending a couple of years abroad in Asia in
1980, there was no email, no Skype, and no cell phones. I'd write long letters
to the family on international airmail paper, fold it and put an airmail stamp
on it, and drop it in the mailbox. A couple of weeks later, it would get to my
family in the U.S. If I wanted to make an international call, it was a big and
expensive project. I took hundreds of photographs and they had to be
developed, and copies made, and physically mailed out to people.

Now, kids doing a junior year abroad are light seconds away from their loved
ones. They can text their significant other 50 times a day, send them selfies,
post a running travelogue on Facebook or Pinterest, and virtually speaking
they are right next door. It's an incredible shift. Take a video of where they
are and post it to Youtube the same day. Unbelievable, to those of us who grew
up before this was all taken for granted.

And, probably there will be equally vast technological shifts in the future
that will have the current 20-something generation, who are so tech-savvy,
saying in 25 years -- Wow, we used to have this thing called "email" and we
had to use Google to discover interesting facts! We had to carry around these
devices called tablets in order to access the world's knowledge -- and even
then, we couldn't access all of it all the time! We needed these little
devices called cell phones in order to communicate. Etc. Huge paradigm shifts
await us.

Perhaps they will not be so benign, e.g. vast AI entities that wrest control
of our world away from us. Perhaps we'll be slaves of a future superior race
of cyborgs, or wiped out as an inferior competitor.

The future is exciting, and challenging, and even though one can point to the
dark corners and seediness of things at any given point, in the long run it's
an amazing ride, an endless roller coaster. We have amazing power today to
shape our future, if only we can understand and direct this power without
destroying ourselves.

Just my 2 cents' ;-)

------
B5geek
I saw TA in the title and got my hopes up for a modern Linux port or the game.

I don't think I have work on the brain right now.

------
stevebot
What is this? I read the first few paragraphs and couldn't keep track of where
it was going and lost interest. Can someone explain to me why this is at the
top of HN and why I should read it?

~~~
LesZedCB
Because it's in interesting article about the human condition in the social
technological culture we currently exist in. Though if you're genuinely
curious, you could just slog through the article.

------
oldmanjay
The judgmental tone turned me off long before I read enough to even understand
the point of the piece. I'll assume it's a load of hyperbole that boils down
to "I don't like things that are different"

------
Animats
Oh, the banality of life! Whining about that goes back to at least Socrates.

The new thing is that everyone in even the semi-developed world now has access
to more banal entertainment than they can possibly consume. Prior to TV, most
people were limited in entertainment consumption by money and location. With
broadcast TV, something was on all the time, but choice was limited. Now,
there's a wide range of banal content, more than any person can consume,
available at all times at low, low cost.

Smartphones and legal pot now keep the serfs quiet and passive.

