Analog5:Article 008
From Hak5
The World Outside
By: Moonlit
Published: January 20th, 2007
Every time I take a ride through the countryside it makes me wonder. While it's not for everyone I have to say I love the scenery. I watch the green hills roll by, the cattle grazing in the fields and the corn peacefully swaying in the breeze but wait... there's something I can see that seems to follow me wherever I go. No matter how far I go, no matter where I look that something is technology. I look left and I see a string of electricity pylons wired together like robotic scarecrows, I look right and I see the pylons continue off in to the distance toward the town. Does it make you wonder where it's all going to end? We enjoy everything electrical from TVs to toasters, blenders to washing machines, lights and sounds all provided to us courtesy of electricity. Electricity also gives life to the big box of tricks you're viewing this file on right now - your computer. From the lowly ICs of yesteryear to the powerhouse multi-GHz, multi-core, 64 bit monsters of today, they're all essentially the same;
you put data in, you manipulate it and it gets spat out of the end as more data. The things is though that all of this, the pylons, the toasters, the Athlons and Pentiums make me wonder where we're going with all of this technology. Surely it has to end somewhere, doesn't it? We continue to try to force out new pieces of kit that might be faster, might have new features, might be able to do more than the previous incarnation but do we need it? Merely a century ago we were using pens and paper as our Notepad, puppets and theatres as our VLC and orchestras as our WinAmp so what changed? It's all the same thing isn't it?
We continue to buy, to purchase more and more equipment, more and more power with more and more bells and whistles but do you need that Vista powered beast with upwards of 2GB RAM and a dual core 2GHz CPU when a 7.14MHz M68000 Amiga or a 25MHz i80486 can do almost the same thing? "But they can't play Far Cry" I hear you yell, or perhaps "It can't play my videos!". Well, that's completely true but do you need to play Far Cry or watch videos? A 486 can let you connect with like-minded souls so why would MSN or AIM need Windows XP? An Amiga can play music so why does iTunes need such a hefty system to run well? While we're on the subject of old machines why does your mom have a Pentium 4 when all she does it write some letters to her cousin or use it as a glorified PDA? Why isn't a Pentium II good any more if it was good 10 years ago? I bet it'd still work... I think it's easy to miss the fact that a computer is layer upon layer of finely tuned systems all miraculously working together and we cry when we have a BSOD or kernel panic. You wonder why errors occur when these machines are chewing on thousands of calculations per second. We continue to demand that little bit more every year when what we have right in front of us now wasn't even dreamt of 20 years ago. I have to admit that we wouldn't have these machines at all if people hadn't demanded more, hadn't experimented and pushed the technology that one step further but there has to be an end, surely we can't just continue to make our machines more and more powerful until the day the planet gets wiped out... I'll leave you to ponder on that for a moment as I skip over to another aspect of ever improving technology. We complain about 'big brother' watching our every move and telling us what we can't do but do we need to accept it? While they're all worrying about DVD piracy and who's leeching the new Britney Spears album we could go and experience something that doesn't have a monitor. Go for a picnic, go to a theatre and watch a play, go see a concert. Granted these things aren't police-free but you can enjoy them without fear that you're accidentally doing something illegal (unless you whoop out your handycam so you can be the first scener to XviD Les Miserable). We seem to have forgotten there's life outside. Perhaps though it's because we're not so fond of people. I know I'm not. Really though, if you find a quiet spot somewhere in a field with a friend or two, perhaps even a lady friend or a strapping young lad with a basket of wine, fruit and cakes you're not likely to encounter obnoxious irritating idiots and much less script kiddies or rude gamers who are just there to scream HAX!! (and much much worse, I'm sure) over TeamSpeak. You get to choose who you go with, you get to choose what you do. I think sometimes we forget that we don't have to accept what the internet feeds us just like we say about the TV. I appreciate that it's not always easy to get away from it all if you're smack bang in the middle of a huge city or whatever but just think for a moment, what could you do? There's always something...
While you're watching the fat lady sing or the birds twitter though you can forget all those Japanese police robots too. Do these make you think it's all gone a bit too far? They have their uses I'm sure, perhaps in situations where it's a little dangerous for a real fleshbag to stride on in and start trash talking the dude with the gun but whatever do you imagine the Victorians would think if you put an autonimous robot on the streets... they'd probably be horrified... now why aren't we? We're striving to make our technology more user friendly to the point of trying to make computers act, talk, think and move like us, rendering lifelike images of humans that are almost indistinguishable from a real member of our species, creating robots with skin. Isn't this a sign that we're missing the point? Computers are tools like a flint, a hammer or a knife so why not treat them as such? You never heard of someone trying to make a chainsaw look like a cow, right? This has been something of an incoherent rant for the most part but I guess the point of it was that you don't need to be in front of a computer to have a good time. Sure, we can go out and drink ourselves stupid and come home and compile the latest kernel or leech the latest movie but while computers may be an integral part of our lives they are only tools. There are many other tools you can use to have a good time (yes, alcohol's one of them but there's still even more to choose from). Go out, take a book to the park and sit 'neath the old weeping willow and while away the hours in a world of humour, pain, horror, romance or just plain poetry. Turn off the monitor/TV and go for a walk, maybe take a friend or a partner and talk about all the stuff you could be talking about. Anything, there are so many possible things you could do... We did without computers before then we did fine with low spec computers so what's wrong with a PII being your main rig? You only need $6000 worth of kit if you rely on it to make a living or rely on it to live for you. Go forth! Don't take the car unless you need it to get somewhere nice, go to the beach, a park, anything! In fact, it doesn't matter where you go if you've got good company. 'Do lunch' with some people, maybe an evening meal. Oh, and one more thing; you don't need to get drunk to enjoy alcohol, it's a tool, don't overuse it. I'm stuggling to find an end to this thing, so I'll nid thee farewell and hope you enjoy exploring the better side of being sociable. Later.
Props to gameman73 for being my personal backup service, without whom this article would have been consigned to the eternal bit-bucket in the sky.