The brogrammer becomes the flat, oppressive ideal, and the fact that "bro" was originally a term of complex, critical affection within a community is lost, replaced by a distorting mirror in which people see themselves reflected as comic Hollywood caricatures, while disavowing their own, very real participation in what remain very real cultural issues.
David Shapiro: People Will Think Less of You When You Show Them Your BlackBerry Z10 (Betabeat)
It is impossible to type these words without seeming sarcastic, but if you can lighten the oppressive burden of human existence by not having the kind of cell phone that will make people think less of you, why wouldn’t you do that?
FarukAt.eş: Translation of General Misogyny to Uncomfortable Truth
“I am too lazy to expand my world view to include the possibility that I may have unconsciously treated women and minorities unfairly my entire life, and it wears me out that you’re trying to get me to understand this.”
FOMO is ‘Fear of Missing Out’ and it’s a major problem on the internet.
“There is a company that sells radar equipment to the police as well as radar detectors to the public. Clorox is one of the world’s worst polluters of water, and also sells Brita filters to get the bad stuff out of the water again. Lawyers create mazes that you have to hire a lawyer to escape. Similarly social software both creates and cures FOMO. If you didn’t know that party was going on, you’d be home contentedly reading your latest New Yorker. But since you do, you hungrily watch each new tweet.”
“We forget that what we have is more than what we need. Obscenely more. I know it may sound perverse, but here in the future people often feel like they need more than they have.”
The world and the technology by which we take it in is becoming more and more "addictive" and what can we do about it? A concerted effort to stick to basics and saying no, says Paul Graham.
Tweetage Wasteland: The Web’s Five Most Endangered Words
"Let me think about that." In other words: with a glut of information, we're trying to form opinions and take action on it all just as fast as it's coming in, and we're suffering for it.
NYTimes.com: Your Brain on Computers — Attached to Technology and Paying a Price
This guy seems to have some family issues that his addiction to incoming data via screens is severely aggravating. I experience, on a smaller scale, some of the problems outlined in this article, and, though none of this is particularly new to me, it's frightening to see these habits taken down the slippery slope.
Should all of us, and especially people like Kord, make a concerted effort to make screens less a part of our lives, lest we lose our humanity? Or is trying to avoid technology's increasing integration with our every second just being traditionally biased and counter-progressive? I think there is a middle ground where one can be hooked in and focused on doing work while still not ignoring ones' children. Food for thought.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T
"I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline."