My love-hate affair with technology
&gt; <i>Nowadays, to the average person I probably look like a technology curmudgeon</i><p>Nowadays, most discussion &amp; thoughts about tech are far more ambivalent &amp; concerned than they used to be. What hope &amp; optimism there is often feels shallow &amp; vapid. Doubt &amp; questions &amp; concerns seem well justified &amp; rampant. Few individuals seem like they are a driver seat- it feels like tech is steering it&#x27;s own ship and the &quot;where do you want to go&quot; idea, the personal computing idea, is way way way way outmoded &amp; most tech is now us, in the hands of far greater powers that shape what tech will be.<p>I adore Nolan&#x27;s writing &amp; thoughts, but to cast himself as an outsider &amp; cantankerous &amp; a crank is not how I read the tea-leaves of society today.<p>There&#x27;s very little shiny promising &amp; exciting on the horizon. What progressive technology camps there are tend to have their faith in weird cult-like high high high tech AI, Blockchain, Quantum or other deeply beyond mortal reach technologies. Most mainstream tech has had a shadow but that underbelly&#x27;s visibility has grown greatly &amp; dissatisfaction &amp; untrustability- conservative, fear based minsets- have quite justifiably exploded in adoption. Almost no where is there a practical progressive view of technology as a can-do adaptable system that we all can use to shape &amp; guide ourselves, our lives, our way of communicating, and our way of thinking.<p>I for one have unbounded optimism, but it&#x27;s because I think it would be very easy to start doing for ourselves. I think our assessments are quite real, quite good, I think we understand how dastardly so many of the traps we&#x27;ve fell into are, begun to deeply comprehend the dangers of superficial low-agency software systems &amp; &quot;creator&quot; economics. We&#x27;re getting enormously better at information tech, even though we&#x27;re still not using it for anything remotely empowering or good. But some day we&#x27;ll start to, and we&#x27;ll get better fast at personal computing, once we start to see &amp; realize what progressive, positive computing basis could possibly look like.