In recent years I’ve noticed bizarre trends in cars, pickups and even waste collection trucks incorporating suspicious touchscreen control panels, military or naval design elements and even stranger industrial design innovations.
I see cruise ships navigated via miniature joysticks and lesser input than an average AC unit. I even saw a flat ferryboat-gondola or what you will turned bar-saloon floating along by the shore. Electric skateboards and scooters have likewise advanced the transport arsenal in select urban hubs, managing to also lug that one extra passenger.
Climbing the scale of adversity I’ve seen a growing number of sensor-abundant touch-screen computers worn on wrists like watches because the regular handheld devices apparently didn’t suffice, presuming you don’t also ride a Tesla car to crown the affair.
I enumerate an entire motley of developments of ranging moral and environmental implications. Personally I embrace any energy friendly transport alternative particularly of two wheels or less and capable of tangibly maneuvering among pedestrians; which by all means excludes the motorbikes shooting through the Medina.
Meanwhile, I’ve naught but suspicion borderline contempt for the hyper-connected fully computationally aware assistive device outside of stationary environments reinforced by barb-wire or signboards of hazardous waste.
But I’ve been failing. I’ve cornered myself into using a smartphone as sometimes the only tangible means of communicating with the persons abroad. I wish more people were active with their emails (or other device independent, open peer-to-peer protocols).
I try to keep the device at home for not only the sheer size (unmanageable but within a small wheelbarrow), but the conservation of my humanity. This particular model, though several years aged, is blazingly fast, all powerful, all accommodating and most detestable. Should you find me with it, the circumstance will appear altogether natural, not a wrinkle of apprehension; but internally it’s sufferance all the way.
I shall soon head to Mexico for a bit. There among the myriads of phone providers one can still find a call/SMS only prepaid plan. My older Nokia button backup phone accompanies me for that very purpose.
I continue to sport some Casio wristwatch until the plastic wristband inevitably pops, rendering it a mere watch, an ultra compact pocket-watch.
The point of it being, one should differentiate between progress leading towards an improvement to our existence (individually and across the multitude), and that fundamentally altering our brain structure in abusive ways: impacting the addiction circuitry, thought, patience, perception, means of interaction.
I see the electric scooter and the wrist computer at the opposite scale ends. Automatic updates, notifications, ads, pop-ups, trackers, corporal sensors all contribute to dehumanization as far as I’m concerned.
Must disconnect. Must distance. Must uphold that earnest do-nothing time with myself.
Grossly saturated web pages loaded in a fully uninhibited browser, three to maybe ten kilobytes of pertinent content next to the hundreds of kilobytes of garbage and up, congest the information superhighway. Such terminal web browsers as my personally used W3M and Links go a long way at liquidating much of that garbage en route.
Blessed be the RSS feeds still (and blessed be their readers): no unsolicited content, manual updates, all feeds marked read on a whim, slate clean. Should you follow mine, you’ll find truncated content including just the initial paragraph - an ancient practice that I still adhere to as means to conserve those kilobytes. Follow the source link to read the entirety.
Questions, comments? Connect.