This month, more about my relationship with what I call digitalia, the assortment of devices and software and networks that have infiltrated my and your life since the 1960s, when I was all for it. It took me three decades to start to have regrets.
But first, a few comments on some already-old breaking news:
While golfing at his links in Palm Beach last Sunday, Donald Trump escaped assassination the second time in two months. The alleged assassin — Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, currently of Hawaii — was apprehended as he fled north from Trump’s Palm Beach golf course. You can read about it in lots of places, so I will only say that Routh may live to regret he didn’t score a hole in one.
Routh, who donated small sums to a bewildering set of left, center, right, and wrong candidates for office, is a puzzlement. He volunteered as humanitarian in Ukraine and lobbied to get other Americans to go there. He owns a bunch of guns and has gotten himself in trouble with them. He’s a registered Independent who voted in a NC Democratic primary but seems to lean Libertarian. If I had to say, he was gunning for Trump for caving in to Putin, but from what I’ve read about him I’m sure his reasoning went beyond that, and I for one would like to know.
Routh might epitomize a segment of “swing voters,” notable for being finicky regarding what matters in current events. Their ranks surely include many single-issue voters who tend only to be interested in races in which their cause, be it abortion, immigration, crime, gun & property rights or whatever, is at stake with a candidate they want to win or win over.
Luke O’Neil made a good point about such folk in a recent Welcome to Hell World newsletter.
Prem Thakker reported that the suspect Ryan Routh “voted for Trump; donated to Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Tom Steyer, Beto O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warren; and then has tweets… yearning for a Nikki Haley/Vivek Ramaswamy ticket…”
All that may sound a bit insane but keep in mind that every presidential election comes down to winning over 50,000 people with those exact politics in a handful of swing states and no one else. It’s a perfect system and we can’t do any better than it.
“Voted for Trump.” Alas, yet another disgruntled lover committing domestic violence.
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But I digress. I was talking about my conflicted relationship with digital arts, letters, and science. In my techie days I typed heaps of code (all since rotted away) to crunch numbers and display graphics. I digested systems analysts’ reports into a weekly newsletter. When my coding days were over, I documented technical computing software before retiring to tend to the servers that host my websites and email. I keep my hand in digitalia because a) I’m imprisoned in it, b) am dependent on it, and c) I’m forced to feed its needs just to keep going (try maintaining a website sometime).
When I chose coding software as my life’s work I had no idea of how it would take over everyone’s daily life. And after I left high tech, I incessantly blogged warning of threats and menaces to attention spans, psyches, pocketbooks, and society. Apparently nobody was listening, because I see more slaves to the machine than ever before and it’s only getting worse.
Thus my wariness. I’ve gone from early adopter to late adopter to don’t adopt if I can help it and clung to analog lifestyles; e.g., I feel naked without my Skagen watch (not the one shown up top). While it’s sort of digital inside, it has an analog face with actual hands that helps me visualize the difference between now and then. It’s also pretty to look at.
In the vein of pretty-to-look-at, check out a graphic hack I did as a grad student. Instead of writing a term paper about a geographic theory of location called Central Place Theory, I built an analog device to animate it. I called the machine Hexagonia, and 40 years later, I wrote it up, produced a video about it and donated the thing to a Harvard library in full working order.
For a quick look at the thing, please see a story about Hexagonia that’s part of Processing Place, a current exhibition of geospatial computing at Boston Public Library. Watch a video excerpt of the device animating the theory as a light show. View the full video here and my documentation here.
Still a slave to analog, I have a vinyl collection that I play on my vintage turntable connected to a 1980s analog receiver, along with a cassette deck. My CD deck is, by necessity, digital. And of course our new TV is digital and allegedly smart, but I refuse its pleas to connect it to my router. None of my prior TVs came with an operating system nor needed one to deliver the goods, plus they didn’t spy on us.
I’m a writer and thus type out a lot of bits. I work on an eight-year-old computer, the fourth used iMac I’ve needed to own, each upgrade providing better performance and irritating incompatibilities. While I write books on that machine and can’t imagine doing it any other way, I don’t use machines to read them. I buy and borrow hardbacks and paperbacks for my reading pleasure. Admittedly, eBooks are great for vacation reads and killing time in transit, but I don’t move around much.
Like you, I have a smartphone, which I try not to use. Mostly I take pictures with it, having given up film photography long ago. I don’t know where I’d find a darkroom, chemicals, and a lightproof box of silver paper even if I wanted to make prints again. And then I would be consuming water and flushing chemicals into the sewer that might not get cleaned up. My inkjet printer produces tolerable photos, though a good enlarger could do better. I give digital photography a thumbs up for cutting down paper, silver, and chemical consumption. It gets thumbs down for deluging us with more still and moving images than we can withstand and for making it easy for them to lie to us.
Another analog device I have is a Micronta slide rule left over from college. It rests in a drawer right in front of me but I never pull it out in lieu of a calculator. You have to draw the line somewhere.
I suppose I’ve made as many compromises with digitalia as ones I’ve refused to make, and you surely have had to, too. And anxiously experience downtime when your devices or the services they use are on the blink for one arcane reason or another. Obviously, things break in the analog world too, but much less often. And if we can’t fix them ourselves we can figure out what’s wrong and whom to call.
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* In fact, I have posted this newsletter at medium.com, hoping to attract subscribers. I’m not above playing that game. You do what you gotta do that you can stand to do.
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