Apps Aversion AKA This Is Not The Future

I find it hard to believe apps are universal or even permanent. They are universal to those who with heads bowed daily going up and down in elevators perusing lord knows what.

If this sounds curmudgeonly, so be it. I do without apps. I have a very smart little phone that can make videos and calls and so forth. I find it vastly secondary to other things in my life and the thought of vacating my desktop for one of these is not present in my mind.

Why?

This cannot be the future. We are entering a world of absurdity where the only possible fortune to be made is to develop something more clever than something that did the same thing last week?

I understand that real dollars flit about in micro units to benefit the lucky few who come up with a splendiferous something that will spare me the inconvenience of having to turn a radio dial or click on a Dylan song or maybe even read my email. But the word elitist flies through my head when I think of millions, no billions, who are not interested in getting scores with one click, or having an app tell me it is morning.

In Manhattan, we are amused when folks look at their apps to determine where they are. We are bothered when folk with selfie sticks bump into us. And we shrug when we read about valuations of businesses that are helping to perpetuate the one thing I believe really does represent our future — the delightful day when Peak Oil is reached and attention actually turns to the construction of the real, post-oil, world, not repairing our outmoded infrastructure but building communities that will eventually make wandering around with Gadget-neck Syndrome a thing of the past.

Anyone has been around cyberspace long enough to remember when it did not exist knows that the next big thing is likely to be some smoke and some mirrors. The notion that nine or twelve apps will make my life go swimmingly, while things like consciousness, meditation, creativity and productivity are made ever-more-marginal, is somewhat sad. Understand. I know this is where minds are now. I also know it cannot last.

What will change everything is the first mind with several billion dollars at hand who actually builds the prototype of the cybercommunity that is the subject of my most recent Medium posts. The premises are rather more weighty than the twenty most useful whatever apps.

What the world needs now is rational dealing with what is large, dangerous and seemingly intractable.