THIS FUTURE SUCKS

We weren’t quite there for the birth. Folks a little older than us watched the rise and departure of tech literacy.

<p class=”c0″>Given the lifecycle of internet culture, we’ve lived through epochs. The entire function has changed from businesses debated whether they need a website to websites debating whether they need a human userbase</p>

You (only) know html because of myspace. Do you have a job now? You need to train your 23-year old colleague and it’s like teaching someone’s nan how to click a mouse. We want to pretend Millennials were the generation that learned this stuff but I recently taught a 37-year old man to copy/paste so maybe that cava wants to smash against the curb rather than the server casing.

You’re nostalgic for that one evening on msn messenger. You’re nostalgic for that one evening on Arma 2 where all your mods worked and the server owner actually got it together to run an op. These feel like they happened last week, but also like they happened 4000 years ago to a completely different person. You boot up teamspeak 3 and it’s an inoperable shitheap, that you can’t imagine tolerating even if it were the only option.

You’re nostalgic for torrents. How long has it been since you listened to an audio file that you actually own? How about a movie? What happens when your preferred streaming service no longer carries your favourites? If it’s so important to you, why are you only renting?

They said “you will own nothing, and be happy”. Quick show of hands: who’s fucking happy?

I’ve seen footage. Now I can’t hear Funky Town without remembering. Some of you have the same curse. Alex Honnold didn’t quite Livestream his death. I remember Liking a video of Saddam Hussein’s execution on Youtube dot com. There’s plenty worse. Nobody worried about saying ‘fuck’ in the comments. He wasn’t unalived at the end.

The sites remember; Nothing gets deleted. gdocs remembers when we take out a section; we have to exorcise the trace in Sigil. The scar where the tattoo used to be is a few lines of spaghetti code that the human reader would never see, more like braille for your Kobo.

How many emails do you get every day that are composed by bot, addressed to a handle you haven’t used in decades? Guess how many are sent to accounts that haven’t seen a login for the past decade. There are plenty of dead people on websites. How many bytes are being churned out by no-one and sent to no-one, every second of the day? How many get filtered as Spam?

The point we’re dancing around is, we’re giving increasing amounts of power to things that a vanishingly small % of us actually understand. A vanishingly small % of current IT professionals understand this shit in any meaninfgul sense. Robojesus take the wheel.

Digital Dust on the digital wind