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This started as a Gab post, but was too large. It’s generally unfocused and not carefully written. “Rant” really is the best way to describe it.
It’s sort of a sick irony that I’m a technology professional, because I’ve grown to hate so much technology. People design software and hardware to be far more complicated than it needs to be, so we have to spend a great deal of our time trying to debug what should be simple. Just today, the web framework I need to use wouldn’t parse POST data and I have no idea why, the WiFi at the coffeeshop I was at wouldn’t connect to the internet, my phone service arbitrarily decided that I couldn’t use hotspot functionality even though that’s a phone feature and not a service feature, and my Nintendo Switch just won’t charge. Don’t even get me started on Bluetooth– That’s absolute trash that I won’t touch anymore unless I have no choice.
These are problems that just shouldn’t exist, but they do because designers make Faustian bargains with ridiculous technology designs, with solutions that cause more problems than they solve. Then they’re too prideful to admit that it doesn’t work. Or they force an unfinished product onto the market like “artificial intelligence”/“machine learning” (which is so infantile that I wouldn’t trust it to mow my lawn for at least twenty more years).
Even the stuff that does “work” is in a horrible state and we just tolerate it. The general state of the web is an absolute nightmare of distractions to navigate. I have to dismiss five or six things just to use any website. Even Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook put posts in my notifications instead of feeds, where they should go. And Facebook is just a spam machine. There’s literally no other purpose to Facebook.
Even without the distractions, loading a single page is an insanely complex mess of JavaScript and “serverless” and whatever trendy idea came by and proprietary garbage, most of which serves absolutely no purpose. Every single search engine I know of is complete trash because they all ignore the terms in the search string. Every browser leaks memory like a swimming pool with a hole shot in its side by a cannon from the Spanish Armada. And the interface is absolute trash, sometimes literally by design because an engineer filled with hubris forces the end user to use their broken pet project feature that nobody likes, like Peter Kasting’s horrible Chrome autocomplete.
This is why I’ve learned to avoid “smart” technologies. Smart cars, smart TVs, smart thermostats, smart refrigerators… Virtually anything with the word “smart” in it may cause some “oohs” and “ahs” at first, but in the end it’ll just be an endless source of headaches because it won’t work. Even smartphones are generally inferior to actual computers, though they’re not nearly as bad as other IoT junk.
This is also why there’s no way on earth you’ll get me on board with transhumanism. I just know that whoever the woke otherkin engineer in Silicon Valley is that designed the intelligence-enhancing chip in my brain is going to cram some kind of Node server in there running on a Docker instance and it’ll fail because of a botched system update, and the next thing I know I’ll be repeating “null null null” every time I poop, and probably occasionally spout advertisements for “Raid Shadow Legends” in my sleep. And I assume that the chip that regulates my lungs will probably be designed by whoever designed HP printers.
I think this is why I like guns. Gun technology is getting better and better, but it’s largely advancing in the proper way. Gun tech is essentially the same it’s been for a few hundred years– You click and it goes boom. Things certainly can go wrong, like a squib load, but the basic mechanics aren’t unnecessarily complicated. Even the super impressive engineering behind an AR-15 is pretty understandable.
And it’s also why I like books. Real, paper books. I turn the page, and, lo, there is text. Or pictures, if I’m reading The Far Side. I don’t need to worry that “This program has performed an illegal operation and will shut down”. (Admittedly, that particular error message probably isn’t used anymore.) I don’t need to worry that I’m missing dependencies. I don’t need to worry that my favorite ebook reader may or may not be compatible with Windows 11. If there are ads, they don’t spring up into my face as if from nowhere. And nobody follows me around and harasses me to subscribe to a useless newsletter. It actually does just work.