"The great thing about the internet is its leveling effect; online all opinions are equally WORTHLESS." --Grant Morrison

Machine Life (A Different Sort of Rant)

There were people long ago called Luddites that eschewed progress. Today, people who reject technology, or even people who are afraid of it, are sometimes called Neo-Luddites. Robert Anton Wilson calls such people "neophobes."

I am not one of those people.

I love gadgets, machines, and crazy new programs for my computer. When I first got a computer of my own (not counting the kooky Vector computer I had in college), I was one of those (slightly annoying) people who assigned different sounds to every action the computer took. Even as a kid, although we never knew the term, my family was made of "early adopters." We had a microwave oven before most people had even heard of them -- which meant it didn't work all that well and was not nearly as fast as most people's microwaves. We had a "Pong" machine -- a big, clunky, black and white console that allowed you to play nothing else but Pong on your TV. Don't get me wrong, it was a lot of fun at the time, but now it sounds almost absurd.

Anyway, my point is that I love machines. The truth is, though, I don't know squat about them. I like to think of myself as a smart guy, but when something goes wrong with a machine, I'm out of luck. I spend the better part of each day in front of a computer, and I know a bit about computers, but if something went seriously screwdriver-in-the-hard-drive wrong with mine, I would have zero chance of fixing it. I drive my car all over (like we all do) but when it won't start, like it didn't start today, I open up the hood and look inside; the car seems to send me a message that could not be clearer if a sign on top of the engine block read: "You are dumb." I don't know anything about cars. I don't know what most of that stuff is under there. The car made me realize just what an ignoramus I was.

Last night, I was hooking a new VCR up to our new TV (yay!) and could not, for the life of me, get it to record. Now, I've been hooking various VCRs to various TVs for years. I did it for my parents' components when I was a teenager, and I've been doing it a lot for myself (when you move a lot, you find yourself frequently hooking and rehooking up your stuff). Heck, when I was a teenager, no one owned a VCR. We all just rented them from the VCR rental place along with two or three movies. Do that a couple times a month for a few years, and you get to know how it all works.

Or so I thought until last night.

So where's the rant in all this? It's this: We live in a world surrounded by machines we don't understand. If someone put you in a room with all the proper parts and tools, could you make a TV? A computer? A microwave? A can opener? I'm sure some of you could, but I speak for the vast majority of us all, I believe, when I answer:

"Not a chance."

Does anybody besides me think this is a little scary? Maybe I've seen too many post-holocaust movies, but if everything suddenly went kablooie, I'm one of those guys stuck wearing skins and carrying a club (and that's assuming I figure out how to make the skins -- even the cave men are ahead of me).

I love technology, but it scares me to be so dependent on it. When the power goes out, I'm lost. No computer, no TV, not even an electric light to read a good old-fashioned, low-tech book by.

It's a terrible thing to be so helpless before the very machines that make your life work. I wish I could sit down and learn how each of them works, inside and out. But, with all the different machines out there, that could take years. If we all did that, we'd all be technicians, but there would be no doctors or lawyers or game designers in the world. Knowing how everything works is a full-time job. You can't win.

Now, part of the don't-know-how-anything-works dilemma is that, I think, people who know how it all works are either extraordinarily bad at explaining it, or secretly don't want you to know. Read an instruction book for a VCR or stereo component lately? But that's Another Rant...

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