Almost every aspect of our daily lives is now shaped in some way by computer code. Yet the average person on the street has no idea how this all works or just how much influence developers now quietly wield in society. Tech journalist Clive Thompson is on a mission to change that with his new book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World. Before he was a tech journalist, Thompson was a high school hacker who taught himself to code on early personal computers like the Commodore 64. His prior book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, pushed back against the doomsayers convinced that new technological tools are rotting our brains, arguing that such things actually boost our cognitive abilities. With Coders, "I wanted to give the average person a glimpse into who coders are, why they have the priorities they have, what their passions are, what their blind spots are," he said. "So that the average person can understand a little bit more the warp and woof of this digital world that coders have created for us."
In recent weeks, since quitting most social media, I guess I’ve become a bit of an ostrich when it comes tofollowing contemporary events and news, but I don’t really care. I don’t have one of those fancy color televisions or cable, I don’t pay attention to the television news. I do occasionally turn on my transistor radio to catch up what they are saying on NPR News, follow some of the political podcasts, but I am not caught up in the 24 hour news-cycle like so many others are today.
I’m not totally cut off from them media. I do read the newspapers and trade publications as part of my job, but I’m not somebody who does it recreationally. I check NPR.org a few times a day and often read the trending article in Mozilla Firefox’s Pocket. But I don’t spend endless hours going down that rat hole — but sometimes there are interesting essays out there to review. But not all the time, as I lack Internet access at home.
Listening to Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Malvina Reynolds, John Denver, and generally music recorded a half century ago, further isolates myself from the modernity I find so distasteful. I’m cynical, and I don’t like modernity. While I use a contemporary laptop, with modern versions of web browsers, Quantum GIS, and other security updates, I like my XFCE Window Manager, which in-style hasn’t changed in 25 years — and using easy-to-use terminal apps for my purposes.
I walk or take public transit around town, rather then motoring. I like my big jacked up truck, but I really hate motoring, especially in locations with speed restrictions and traffic lights. I spend my weekends in summer months in the wilderness, although I do like having electricity, my truck camper, propane camp stove, and my propane heater in the cold weather. But I don’t do campgrounds, except when there is no other option. And I doubt I would ever stay in a motel, unless there was absolutely no other option.
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I don’t like direction of contemporary society with colorful screens and ‘modern’ ways of living.
This addictive effect is why Dr. Peter Whybrow, director of neuroscience at UCLA, calls screens “electronic cocaine” and Chinese researchers call them “digital heroin.” In fact, Dr. Andrew Doan, the head of addiction research for the Pentagon and the US Navy — who has been researching video game addiction — calls video games and screen technologies “digital pharmakeia” (Greek for drug).
I run the XFCE 4.13 desktop environment on my laptop. The last time there was "major revision" to XFCE was on September 25, 2003 but the software is regularly updated with bug fixes and support for the latest hardware and software.
I like XFCE because it's fast, reliable and never changes. It works like computers did 25 years ago -- XFCE 4.0 in 2003 was throwback back to an earlier, simpler time. And I think that's a good thing!
