Everyone is saying this is great, and it truly is. It's one of the best things I've read in a long time, & it has moved me to put something on Twitter that I've always happily told anyone in real life: I haven't liked tech since the 1st 3 years of Ars. https://popula.com/2018/09/30/sarahs-magnum-opus/ …
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I've written a lot about tech & I'm very proud of all of it. I've even written a book on microprocessors, which I'm also proud of, because it is good. https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Machine-Introduction-Microprocessors-Architecture/dp/1593276680/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538407753&sr=8-1&keywords=inside+the+machine … But after about year 3 I stopped caring about this stuff & just did it for the money...
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...which was a great move b/c there was a lot of money in it during those years. But the whole time I mostly just looked forward to never having to pretend like I cared about tech again.pic.twitter.com/FbHfypW5E2
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To be clear, I care about a lot of things that tech is deeply implicated in, now: voting, politics, civic life, inequality, the economy. I just don't care about the actual tech as a thing in itself -- phones, chips, radios, protocols, & the like.
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Here's something strange that I ponder a lot: I actually do care about guns, knives, camping gear, and general outdoors stuff. So I care plenty about things & gear, just not things with screens, for whatever reason.
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Actually I know exactly why I don't care about things with screens & why the new wore off so quickly: there is nothing grosser & more depressing than a dusty stack of screen-having things that's old & busted. I learned that early on. By yr 3 I'd acquired a dusty stack of old tech
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To be a tech writer for more than 3 years is to have a dirty bin of gadgets that just 3 years earlier people lined up for & camped out in the rain to get their hands on & overloaded the servers hitting "refresh" during the keynote livestream.
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I think the day I was really truly done with writing about tech was one day @ Wired, when somebody came around the office w/ a box gathering up all the old smartphones for a photo gallery of old smartphones. That gallery crushed everything I'd done that month in traffic.
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It's not like this hadn't happened to me before, but that was like the last straw... or at least one of them. It sticks out in my mind. This box of gross, dusty old PDAs that got photographed & turned into a photo gallery that crushed all my punditry on "the cloud."
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Old electronic gadgets don't *mean* anything. If you carry & use a watch or a knife & it gets a patina of use and age, it has something of you inside it. I have a pocket watch of my grandpa's. But an old phone is just kind of embarrassing.
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I've been a software engineer for 25+ years, and I've always loathed "tech" for this reason. It's consumerist trash. I live on a farm and I use tractor I maintain myself, my father's father's hammer, and so forth. There's no comparison between plastic ephemera and real tools.
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I've just built a custom backlit mechanical keyboard with typewriter-style keycaps. Sadly no blue switches, because my wife told me in no uncertain terms, she'd divorce me if I kept them. I had to settle for browns.
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