Everything Technology - Raw Transcript
Here's the art. It's called Everything Technology. When I was growing up, stuff was analog. We had a tape player, electric, how it was magnetic, tubes. When you talk to a friend, you'd call them up on an analog phone, or you'd go over to their house, watch an analog TV, maybe read a paper magazine. I suppose in some extent, like for many, much of life had technology, but everything was discrete. And the computer was something that was put in the basement and treated as a, you know, specific artifact. It wasn't really eating life. At least, we didn't think it was. But slowly, it kind of was. I'd go down there, play games on it, mostly, to start off with. I think with friends, I'd use something called the BBS for a while, Bulletin Board System. But we'd still go to each other's houses, and we'd talk about what we did on the BBS, maybe we'd share files there, right? I think that ultimately, myself, I have always sort of enjoyed, especially, computer technology. And then, slowly, everything became computer technology. Well, not everything, that's probably a little bit of hyperbole, but definitely life became more and more dominated. I think that the amount of work that can actually be transformed into ones and zeros and then be placed in a computer has grown exponentially. And as that's grown, people on computers, because there's been a lot of businesses created just on computers themselves that have nothing to do with the physical world at all. On that, this has been pretty good for me. Give me a computer with a terminal and the internet, and probably, I could keep myself busy for a lifetime, enjoying just the slow creation, destruction, and further creation of things on my own computer and things other people build. To do what? To what end? I suppose, that's an interesting question. I know Ben Thompson recently has been saying that consumers don't want to pay for productivity anymore. They want to consume, and the business likes to make the bill. I guess the thing that's interesting is, what happens if, you know, as a consumer, honestly, what I find most fun is the slow iterative process of building things on the computer. Probably that's what people in Silicon Valley are like, whoa, I don't know, because what people think is productivity, they probably think I enjoy slowly iterating on computer stuff. So probably other people do it, too. I guess the fallacy here, and I think the productivity very difficult, is that as everything becomes technology, for those of us who enjoy playing around with technology, this has been great, right? This has been wonderful. You know, when someone tells me that, hey, you want to know that technology is not just for the secret things anymore, it's for thought-related issues, too, they're like, whoa, I didn't play around with that that much. That sounds fun. And other people will say, oh, my gosh, another thing in my life is eaten by technology. This is not really a good or a bad. It just is, right? There are a whole swath of people, probably the majority of the population, who doesn't really have any interest in this stuff. Okay, it is again. We want to do live, which is great. Hang out with friends, listening to music, watching movies, stuff like that. I think you read books, but then it turns out being on planes becomes emails. It becomes LinkedIn. It becomes calendar invitations. It becomes technology. And the technology doesn't always work, right? Hey, maybe this calendar thing is not working, so I don't have to spend my time. So someone like me, who's like, well, that sounds like an interesting problem. I'll just take a look into it, figure it out. It'll be fun. For most people, it sounds like a headache, right? Because they're not technologists. And I think, you know, that world is what we live in. We have to deal with it. And I'll be returning that time, which probably leads to work around it, but again, it's the world we live in. And I'm not sure if you know how to ask, how are we going to make it so that 90% of people can still enjoy life despite the fact that 90% of their life is technology, something we'll have to work on. Sounds like a good problem, so I'm going to do this. I'll work on it. But I think that one of the issues here is that when you drop things in people's laps, you know, they don't really enjoy it, so it would be like that. It has to be fully sort of worked out. Like even take someone who posted in my life recently, said, man, I wish I could just like not, I wish I could not use any of the apps that I call them all at a certain time. And I was like, how do I fix this? He said, no, I don't fix it. I said, well, let me figure it out. Figuring it out these days is easy. I just chat GPT, told me a specific set of directions. I think that took about three minutes. It was like, this is cool, this technology does it. But I don't know for the actual user. I don't think they find that really fun at all. And it's interesting because this iterative process that I enjoy, this is my first one. You know, it doesn't hold true in other areas. Like, I don't really enjoy slowly iterating on woodwork or photography. Maybe even writing. I kind of like to get to have AI generate something that's polished, then the annotation process, and maybe be done with it. An actual one, you know, I like to rebuild what I add, it kind of sells short. But as far as like writing a book that takes many discrete events, I think that would be a really different process. But writing code, you can slowly and slowly build yourself. That's super fun. And I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of people aren't having a lot of fun. Because that doesn't sound fun. Also, is why when I go to get my computer and it's locked down, I get heated. Because if you lock down a computer, it's no longer a computer. It's just an analog tool, back like in the childhood. And I don't really want it much. Let the 2026, give me the freedom to do whatever you want. I want you to do crack if you're a responsible individual who understands the world. I'm a technologist, but I undertook to understand a lot of people aren't. Maybe while I like technology, there are people out there who don't really know what they like, and they get to see a whole world of people who pretend, at least, that they do. Hard to know what's real. That must be hard. For me, I just keep my head down, keep iterating.