rho's Journal: Fundamental Nerd Ignorance

I'll just go right ahead and piss directly in the eye of my fellow nerds.

You're wrong, and you're too stubborn to admit it.

We are living in a different time now. That old, creaky 386 has been replaced with a whizzy new Pentium IV. The $1,200 I paid for 32MB of RAM (and was happy to do it at that time) is now the minimum allowable in a Casio watch. That pokey old 20MB drive has been replaced with 60 gig speed demons.

We are no longer slaves to hardware limitations!

But we are still held in bondage to our old ideas of how a computer should work, based on our old assumptions of how fragile and limited they are. We toil under the delusion that we are some kind of vaulted priesthood; an Order of Nerds from whom all blessings should flow. We have the same secret handshakes of the Masons and a Bill Gates (or Richard Stallman, if you prefer) Secret Decoder Ring. We look down on our fellow humans as lesser beings because they have not attained the priestly learning that we have.

And it's killing that which we love so much.

Thank goodness for boobies and blood! Without those two, the pervasive Internet would probably never exist. If people couldn't get nudie pictures and news, Playboy and Peter Jennings from the Internet, they'd probably chuck the computer out the window like a failed hobby.

The computer, its acceptance and its power, is lessened because of this complexity. There are untapped sources of new ideas out there, but the twin handicaps of difficulty and dickheads prevent these new sources of knowledge from ever being tapped: difficulty in using the computer, and dickheads who refuse to admit there's a problem.

"But," I hear you cry, "a computer is a complex machine! It must require a certain level of knowledge to operate!" I'm not so sure that's the case. Surely the ability to read is a prerequisite! Well, since I've seen pre-literate kids play with a computer, I'm not conviced that's neccessary. The ability to see? Well, there are quite a few blind computer users.

The difference here is that the machine is molded to serve the user in both of those cases. For the general public, however, the machine is immutable, and the users must mold to suit it. This is the fundamental brokenness of the computer. The old belief that the computer is limited and the user must conform to its rules is still in effect.

Until we face this problem and accept that it is in our hands to fix it, the computer will forever be an Infernal Machine rather than a human advancement.