alex carter
Sep 2, 2018 · 2 min read

I guess I can say I’m, loosely, 3rd generation tech.

My grandparents’ generation did things like draw scientific illustrations for Cal Tech and work on The Bomb. It was family legend that, earlier than that, someone shagged rockets for Robert Goddard, retrieving them from wherever they came down.

My father was a programmer and died in relative poverty due to this choice. He loved carpentry and it’s obvious that’s what he should have simply done. And it was much more unionized in the 60s and 70s and even 80s.

My uncle put in a full career in space probes. “I don’t work for NASA!”, he’s exclaim. “I work for JPL!”. Apparently NASA was some kind of gov’t bloat to this Ayn Rand quoting … well … biologically at least I guess he was a human being.

So it was natural that growing up with 1000s of books in the house and plenty smart, I’d go into electronics. “Software made Dad poor,” I reasoned. “I’ll go into hardware”.

But the Randist ethics of tech, apparently going right back to Jules Verne, dictated that at age 18, we were all on our own to sink or swim. No fair if you started out with even a penny in your pocket, unless you’d earned it on your own and hidden it somehow. No help with college. No help anyhow, in tech IQ vanquishes all, after all! My parents had divorced and if Mom was going to be all on our own, we might as well all be, in this new economic landscape where we’re all Iks, equally.

It really hit a chord with me; about the copious amounts of work with little recompense and decreasing rewards. Electronics has up and left millions of us, and in the marketplace now I’m less skilled than the guy who’s been working at a 7–11 for decades; after all, he’s been working at a 7–11 for decades while I have not.

If there’s anything the author’s left out in talking down tech, you may contact me and I’ll fill in any holes he may have left in a landscape of despair.