80.) The smarter your technology is, the less control you have over it.

While hardware defines what a technology can do, it's software defines what it will do.  Slowly but surely, that software is being designed to resist our wishes in favor of the best interests of corporations (such is the case with DRM), and it won't be long before it is designed to resist competing technologies, too.  As we enter the age of the Internet of Things, we run the risk of transforming our households into either technological battlefields or fiefdoms.

79.) All systems have embedded purposes. The less we recognize them, more we mistake them for given circumstances. We start to treat the map as the territory.

At the very least we must come to recognize the biases - the tendencies- of the technologies we are using, and encourage our young people to do the same. If we don't participate in building our digital future together, it will be done by someone - or something - else.

Source: "Why Johnny Can't Program" by Douglas Rushkoff

Rant

Cellphones have forever ruined the contemporary horror movie.  Ten minutes in, instead of rooting for the heroine, I'm just thinking, "if the bitch can't be bothered to dial 9-1-1, she's got it coming."

Rant

Computers used to be cold, soulless appliances.  Now they're our most private, personal possessions.  I'd rather someone go through my underwear drawer than my hard drive any day of the week.

Rant

I sometimes find myself wondering things like how I would describe my modern day life to someone from the beginning of the last century.

I'd start by explaining that I possess a device that fits into my pocket that is capable both of accessing the entirety of human knowledge and broadcasting my own thoughts to an audience of millions.  Then, I'd admit that I use said device to look at silly photos of cats and argue with strangers all day.

"Your mobile phone has more computing power than all of NASA in 1969. NASA launched a man to the moon. We launch a bird into pigs."
- George Bray, March 22, 2011

Rant

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.  Thanks to mobile apps, dating is a bitch of an uphill battle if you're not the one with breasts in the relationship.

Rant

The TurboTax mobile app is definitive proof that there's such a thing as too much portability.  There are homeless guys who spend their days ranting on street corners about the apocalypse who have more sense than to do their taxes on a phone.  I'm pretty sure this app is an IRS plot to more efficiently target morons for audits.

62.) Resign yourself to the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete.

If it's on the store shelf, it's old new.  That's just the price of living in a technological revolution.

60.) Summarize, Repost, Reblog, and Forward it, but pass the credit back and verify, verify, verify.

42.) Disconnection is the new counterculture.

Source: "Exodus" by Nicholas Carr, April 8, 2010.

41.) Freely teach other people what you know. 

People, most especially coworkers, resent those who are stingy with what their knowledge, but they respect teachers, even after they've surpassed them.  This goes double for people in the technology sector.

36.) If you aren't comfortable placing the same information on a sign in your front yard, don't put it online.

Your online life is more public than you think.  Always.

Martin Luther King, Jr. on Technology

This evening I would like to use this lofty and historic platform to discuss what appears to me to be the most pressing problem confronting mankind today. Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress.

Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

- The Nobel Prize acceptance speech of Martin Luther King, Jr., December 11, 1964.

Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff

25.) Programming is the new literacy. 

...or, at least, if not programming, then the ability to fluidly adapt technologies to specific situations.  Thanks to the ubiquity of technology, tomorrow's generations will be stratified according to the depth of their understanding of technology.  Don't believe me?  Go browse the list of programming gurus who top Forbes' list of the world's richest people.

Geek Reading: Achieving Techno-Literacy

One of my all-time favorite tech writers, Kevin Kelly, published an excellent piece in New York Times Magazine entitled "Achieving Techno-Literacy." In it, Kelly discusses what he learned about technology from homeschooling his 8th grade son for a year.   It's really worth a read, but here's the meat of the piece:

Technology will change faster than we can teach it. My son studied the popular programming language C++ in his home-school year; that knowledge could be economically useless soon. The accelerating pace of technology means his eventual adult career does not exist yet. Of course it won’t be taught in school. But technological smartness can be. Here is the kind of literacy that we tried to impart:

• Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused. Look for its costs.

Hacker Ethic

As I said when I launched this blog, The Great Geek Manual is heavily inspired by a lot of better works that I grew up reading. One book that's always been an inspiration to me is Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy. Every time I re-read the book (which I do often), I never fail to be surprised by just how relevant the work remains.

In chapter two of his book, Levy spells out the general tenets or principles of the hacker ethic:

1. Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total.
2. Always yield to the Hands-on Imperative!
3. All information should be free.
4. Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.
5. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position.
6. You can create art and beauty on a computer.
7. Computers can change your life for the better.