Legs Are Tired
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I feel like my mental age is nearing the point where I start sounding like a grumpy old lady when it comes to the state of modern tech. I don’t like it. I don’t want it. I don’t want to be told to want it. Need it. Use it. Worship it. Sacrifice my real world engagement for it. Because it’s no longer fun.
Because it’s no longer optional. Or doesn’t feel optional. I like my options open. Illusion of free person. Yada yada.
This essay is nothing profound but my short personal rant about new tech releases. About how watching Apple’s events makes me feel nothing. I used to feel something. Mostly because the brick got perfected enough to be useful years ago, and whatever is added now is only useful when new problems are manufactured to serve profit-making.
And aid marketing teams bleeding dry of ideas.
iPhone as a beautifully engineered device excelling in design and performance. Or, from where I’m sitting, a surveillance machine presented as accessibility. Beautifully engineered to increase screen addiction. Stuffed with functions nobody asked for. For a price tag piercing the sky.
I kinda wish they pivoted ideologically to serve people with disabilities only. A noble and actually interesting use case. But that requires data. Lots of data. AI loves data. OpenAI wants data. Governments are turned on by data. Which sounds oh goodness so noble.
And why foldables? Why on earth do we need foldables? Teeny tiny foldables to fit in a pocket instead of shrinking the brick and decreasing the price. Or big expansive foldables to give a feeling of a tablet but not quite reaching in power and size. What a con artistry. Magic.
But what do I know? I’m not the target audience anymore. In fact, I’ve left the cult of audience for most things really. Except for the Amish, my new superheroes. So fearless. So bold!
The 35-year-old version of me wants two things: make calls and send texts. Preserve the art of email writing for desktop only. Take pictures with my camera for photos. Watch social media burn in hell of its own making. Have nothing to do with unethically trained AI models and newly developed problems that are meant to be solved by AI because we need to use it for something.
Ah right. Acceleration. No thank you.
We don’t run into our graves here. We walk and take breaks on benches.
Legs are tired. Varicosis is real.
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