Obsolete Tech Support

You never had a chance against the Tidal Wave, until now.

Personal Websites, Analogue Tech, the Netscape era of the Internet, Vinyls, Point and shoot cameras, CDs- these devices of vibrational connection have met their terminal fates and yet live necromantically suspended lives as hobbies. We are unable to avoid indulgence, and that’s a good thing. Remember that hobbyist revolution when Covid hit? keep that in mind throughout this essay.

In my early days of exposure to the public “the outside world”, I was met with satirical comic strip after comic strip that made fun of the people addicted to media. Sure, they made me more self aware, but they never offered a healing solution.

Lately I’ve been noticing how easily the majority of the public can take matters into their own hands and unplug from the Matrix. But, we have to be rehabilitated, and to do that, we have to sympathize with people who are addicted (consider how it overwhelmingly effects the vulnerable in our population (children, elderly, neurodivergent, etc.)).

We consume food, we consume media, we feed our souls and bodies. The methods and types of food or media administered have to be produced with informed consumer consent (but are currently not). Otherwise, how are we to blame for chronic online usage, when the whole of social media is an attention casino (You pay with your attention in the hopes that other people will give you theirs)? We are forced to work against the rip current of capitalism just to not feel sick inside, just to restrain our hands from reaching out for the chocolate bar, the for-you-page, the carrot on a stick.

Here’s a Picture of your upbringing:

You are a series of choices: choices that were made for you, made in reaction to factors you cannot control.

Your birthplace was chosen for you, by your parent’s medical insurance company, or by the midwife.

The children of your parent’s community were the only choices you had for your friends. How they treated you and how you treated them was decided before either of you were born, by layers and layers of cultural norms, and the degree of allowance to act outside of cultural norms was already chosen before you were born.

Your affinity for practically everything in your childhood was chosen by the companies that had, through psychological marketing ploys, convinced your parents they should be invested in.

Your media was chosen for you by which country you live in, how old you are, your chromosomal type, and your phenotype, and your parent’s demographically swayed beliefs.

There were so many tropes, patterns, and rituals that you could not escape, unless you were able to outlive them. So many things twisted and carved you, if you wanted to resist, you had to weigh the cost of resisting vs conforming.

You never had a choice in your identity, even when you were asked to choose between basketball or football, and you thought yourself unique because you chose boats.

That was only the start of your uniqueness. It opened the door to greater deviancies.

Now, if you’re reading this post-adolescence, your taste might be more refined, you chose soldering, architecture, forensic medicine, marine biology- whatever niche field of study/hobby/career, you chose your faith, your hedonism, your vices, and what you’re willing to risk for them. You chose between dilemmas increasing in complexity, until eventually, you further and further dug yourself into that niche.

So at what point is the credit for shaping you, your own?

All of your past choices that were not yours to make don’t define you. You must be informed in order to consent. The informed choices you have made are what define you.

The lines between nature vs nurture are grey, extracting the environmental effects on your past are tedious, but it helps to know the source of the minutest decisions you make in your life, it helps to know the bigger picture.

It helps to know that the conditions you were fated to be swayed by were assembled for you by many people, and many environmental factors over thousands of years ago. It’s almost as if your entire life has already been decided for you.

And you only have so much strength to escape particular fates you were born with.

But, the idea of being nonconforming, isn’t the end all be all of self actualization

You are not a lone wolf.

Nothing solitary is unique, uniqueness is a derivative of a series of carefully chosen combinations. You cannot be unique in isolation. You cannot be unique without community. This is the answer to accessing the resources we need to break the cycle.

Knowing the past, knowing the greater picture of how we all live along with one another can inform your decisions in the future.

And you, in small ways, can also decide the fates of millions of children in the future.

Take responsibility for how you are shaped, and how you shape your surroundings.

You had no chance, no choice, until now.

I predict an era, a movement like what happened during Covid, where we stop shaming people for “hyper-consumption” in the way we make movements towards nipping “body shaming” in the bud. Once it becomes obvious that there is an entire world outside of what’s being spoon-fed, we simultaneously need to realize that we cannot reach that world alone. The world’s future depends on us collectively embracing “hobbies”, where we continue to nurture technologies, crafts, data bases, and third places, that automation (fueled by profit seeking) attempts to turn obsolete. The world needs an “obsolete tech support”. A library.

As a kid, I had two things, which are really about as distinct as the concrete jungle vs the rainforest. One is artificial, and faster, the other is organic, and slower. The internet and the library are two sides of the same coin.

(painting by Mike Wilks)

Those two things had such an enlightening impact on me, I make choices in my life now that my nine year old, or fifteen year old self never would have made. I reject things I once craved, I embrace things I once found deplorable. But to this day, despite the differences, I dive headfirst into what I love and consume voraciously like any “hyper-consumer”.

The solution to online addiction is to redirect consumption towards the library, the gaming store, the craft store, the camera/video store, the camping store, the garden, the museum. We need to prioritize accessibility in these spaces, so that we are not dependent on the internet to meet our needs of accessing data. So that our identities can be preserved, so that they too, do not fall into the pit of augmentation by past choices.

The most reliable way we can unplug, de-industrialize, rebel, is if we unplug together, and economically speaking, use money not as a wall or barrier between accessibility to communities, but as a bridge. Hobbies should not be expensive- remember to donate your old books, your CDs, furniture, jewelry, tech and remember to use what money you do have to depend on your local thrift stores, libraries, and to take part in a workshop.

You may just discover, or help somebody discover upcycling, calligraphy, woodworking, beading, crochet, bioactive aquariums, programming languages, a favorite musician, or artist, or scientist, or sport.