I love technology

I love technology. Computers and the Internet were my first love and will probably forever remain the grounding rooted deep down in my psyche. The products of the late-2000s tech scene have shaped me in ways that are pretty hard to comprehend.

Is it possible to imagine a Justin sans the parts influenced by the Internet and gadgets I adored as a child? I don't think there is. There are not that many photos of me as a kid playing with toys, or reading books (I read a lot), but there are plenty of me on a laptop.

I spent far too much time on the Internet as a child. That's something I often tell people when they ask why I have such specific yet deep holdings of information in my brain on Apple products or BBC television idents or mid-2010s Twitter culture, or the phone banking system used by the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.

All of that history feeds into my curiosity and optimism about the power of computers and the power of technology. It's hard for me not to be excited when I see real potential in computers doing new and amazing things.

It's also something that strikes me repeatedly when I witness the daily horrors brought to bear by the techno-fascist hegemony in control of technology, the Internet, and computers today. The weirdos and ideas that used to live at the fringes of society, culture, and politics now run all three.

And I'm frankly not sure if any of us like it this way.

A computer that can talk to you in natural language is rather interesting technology that I find seriously cool. Large language models such as Claude are extraordinary leaps which are an inflection point for people like me who care about Moore's Law, and using technology to build cool new stuff. But. The People Do Not Yearn For Automation.

Why did I spend $120 on a Matter smart home bridge and smart lighting technology in order to turn a light bulb on and off? Unsure! But it was fun! And I love knowing about how this stuff works! Do I wish to impose this tyranny upon anybody else I know? No! Yet this appears to be the future that the world's economy is betting on right now.

On technology I think you should be allowed to be both sceptical and excited at new things in the space. The alternative is something I'd rather not imagine.

It's extraordinary that I can see and hear my grandma's face while she sits at her kitchen table, and I sit on a train, neither of us paying a cent for the privilege. It's extraordinary that a stranger will leave their house, drive to a restaurant, and carry a warm burrito to my door for the price of a few dollars, tracked the whole way on a map.

But being extraordinary on its own does not mean society must revere it.

It's hard for scepticism to not be the default position - if not the only rational position - when elites in control of technology appear to want to force smart homes on everybody, compatible and controlled by Microsoft Copilot.

Technology alone is never enough - that's a common refrain from Steve Jobs. The potential that real technologists see in computers is in the marriage between technology and culture, the humanities, the liberal arts, and the users - the people that make making technology a useful and productive endeavour for humanity.

My sense of wonder and curiosity about the enormous leaps we've made kept me excited as a child, and keeps me excited today. It's what makes me excited to use LLMs, it's what makes me excited to walk into a flagship Harvey Norman store, and it's what makes me excited to start a blog.

The interface between those elements - democracy, society, technology, and business - can be messy, but in the absence of anything else, must be an endeavour worth preserving. It appears many in Silicon Valley have given up on that intersection between their technology and the parts of society they are intending to upend.

So when I think about my next vibe coding project, that's the tension I'm sitting in. The same person who spent too long as a child on Club Penguin, or figuring out how to download YouTube videos as MP3 files, is still here. And I'm still excited, but we know with a high degree of likelihood that the people building these tools aren't all building it for me, or for my grandma at her kitchen table.

The marriage between humanity and technology is still worth building towards even though some people have effectively already filed for divorce.

I still love technology, but I'm less sure it was ever built to love me back.