Tech and Its Patinaed Boat

It's difficult to unpack the benefits of personal computing’s insights and innovations given their range.

Just since Y2K, tech’s boat has an increasingly dark patina resembling culture lately.

We've used tech’s insights and innovations as brain prosthetics, needed or not, perhaps losing our mastery of mind in the process.

As we begin to fix what’s wrong inside, we need to repaint tech’s dark boat with lighter hues.

By doing so, we may realize that paint may be the mask’s temporary tattoo but it can grow into permanent change in a good way if and only if the masks we wear have a positive patina that emerges slowly over time.

In the process, we use the prosthetics in-hand, all-day, everyday to try to lift our brains with tech’s tide, improving society as a whole and perhaps tech in the process by being the more empathic catalyst for calm we seek.

An experience that’s more empathic and less terrifying may be the result.

The true innovation is having faith in the side effects of contemplative computing, slow computing, or no computing.

We did the same with slow food, diet, and fasting (no food), though it took forty years to reach the US from Italy, or several millennia if you widen the aperture to match global culture beyond capitalism.

Then we realized that fasting doesn’t scale positively or permanently. There are diminishing returns on most things without limits. That makes Christopher Columbus look lightning speed at 61 days!

If you limit yourself so as to incorporate personal counter-measures to tech’s downsides, you may see this just like the relationship between fasting, food, and physical health has emerged slowly.

Hence, we may require an emergent info diet of no-compute, slow-compute, and mental health emerge too to match the fact that fasting doesn’t scale but its downstream effects do!

Looking back, it’s clear that society has been doing similar things around the world for thousands of years, despite the slow and varied empirical evidence.

This spectrum runs from left-field imaginary to the dubious text of apocrypha to fallacious phenomenology, without offending anyone, unless your atheism or scientism are so radical to be at prison's gate.

We can't get rid of smartphones, just like we can't throw away TVs.

The loss would be lossy!

While we can debate the origin of the word “lossy,” we agree that in a social context, “lossy” means the same as when describing data compression of music in mp3 or photos as jpg formats: diminishing returns.

Data compression causes a loss in signal, not noise, detectable mostly by audiophiles and similar fanatics.

This is a group defined by their comfort lurking in asymptotes as if hanging out at the Hillary Step is a good way to spend your time since it promises a short ride in a fast machine down to Nepal.

Sadly, you don’t get to pick your poison on the way down, like you did on the way up!

This experience may only matter if you’re sitting in a big lounge chair, listening to The Bad Plus, realizing that the mp3 codec used to make the recording was, in fact, lossy because your ears know the sound of a fine, dark cymbal made in Istanbul by hand, and this isn’t it!

Something feels wrong. What’s wrong?

Society, sociality, and community may be lossy too, just like tech!

We can fix tech ourselves whether we share the same physical space or create our own paradise. Fixing tech is going to be difficult since the most popular parts of the false dilemma are hard-wired. Think about it.

The subversive solution might be a hybrid just like work. Our intent manifests alone together, just as it does in culture, a problem paradoxically solved by tech, many years ago!