Too Much Magic
Note: Here’s another draft from the seven-year-old archives. Did I finish this book? No telling. Mostly I find this funny because I’m oh-so-carefully picking on Facebook, which over the next seven years would be thoroughly excoriated for mis-applied algorithms and plenty else.
As a product of the 1980s, I literally have never known a world without computers. I’m not great with code and markup, but I’m also not scared of it. If I was ever confused about how to use a mouse, I don’t remember it. I never hogged the phone as a teenager, because I was on chat. (Although technically I did use the phone line, since we were on a dial-up connection then.)
So, sure, I’m comfortable with technology, to the point where it’s a fluid part of my life. I think that’s true of people outside of my generation, too, for the record. And I think it’s important for those of us in this crowd not to take offense when we encounter thoughtful criticism of technology; it’s not a criticism of us. It’s asking us to think about the ways we define ourselves via technology.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference—and, to be sure, many criticisms of technology are rooted in fear or insecurity. But for those of us for whom technology is security—well, we’re overdue for a reckoning there.
This is precisely the angle Jason Benlevi takes in his 2012 book, Too Much Magic: Pulling the Plug on the Cult of Tech. He does a fair amount of finger-pointing, but I think it’s ultimately in the interest of empowering his readers.
I'm only partway into this book, but already it's raised some good questions for me about how I take technology for granted in a manner that also shrugs away a degree of my own agency. Not to pick an absurdly easy target, but just earlier today I found that I'd been tagged in a stranger's Facebook post—an accident of 1) us knowing a person in common and 2) her quoting the movie When Harry met Sally. "Would you like to add this story to your Timeline?" prompted Facebook.
To their credit: I clearly had a choice ("Hide story", although what I really wanted to do was "Share, with snarky commentary", but I didn't want to embarrass this unsuspecting stranger). But it illustrates a point: I am not the only author of my life story—not online, anyway.
