The Connected Life
I don't subscribe to the Steve
Jobs/Apple model of technology. Forgetting physical product design
for a moment, this is the Apple way of thinking whereby everyone is
always connected to a network, where ever they are, at all times.
In this model, you really don't carry
anything about you. Now you may think you do, because you can use
that iPad or iPhone to quickly access those vacation photos from
2011, but in reality you don't own that stuff. Oh, buried in that
end user agreement (that you didn't read, by the way) Apple says that
you do own your property, but you really don't. Same thing for your
contacts, your music, your notes. Everything.
No, all of your stuff in the connected
life actually resides on a server, somewhere in a place where you
have never been and, in for many in this day and age, couldn't find
on a map anyway. Apple (and in fairness, other companies as well)
have created the illusion that your stuff is, well, “yours”
through fast moving bits of data seamlessly streamed over an
ever-imagined, all-encompassing virtual network that exists
everywhere.
The reality though is that your stuff
really is at the mercy of a spider-web of privately run networks that
really exist at the whim of large businesses who sole purpose in
existing is to make money for someone else (not you). Yeah, yeah, I
can hear it now, “Socialist!”, a cry, by the way, that by and
large comes from people who really can't define the term “Socialist”
anyway. What's more, I personally am far more vested in the private
sector & free markets (more than a quarter century and counting
working in the for-profit private sector) than many of people I know.
I just happen to realize the limits of the system in which I exist.
I can't say that same for others (including the Governor of Texas),
but so I digress.
Getting back to the point at hand, the
real problem I have with the Connected Life is that it assumes this
constant plug-in to the “network”. Risky? You bet. But also
stupid. Think about it: in the Connected Life you are almost forced
to be places where you have a connection. You are at the whim of the
business continuation planning of all those Apple (and other tech
company) server farms that house the “iCloud”. You had better be
praying that Apple doesn't cheese off some hacker group, resulting in
those intimate pictures you had on “the iCloud” now serving the
fantasy needs of some angry Russian teenager.
Some are forget that there is real
value, at times, in physically owning the physical things that are
truly important to you. There is a certain security in being able to
say “this is something that I treasure and I'm not relying on some
big corporation that doesn't know or care about me” in order to
access it. How perverse it is to say that we entrust our treasured
memories to some non-corporeal entity that actually doesn't give a
damn about us? We lock our doors so that strangers can't access
our homes, but we let faceless strangers access much of our personal
(electronic) lives. Let's not forget that there is also a real value
in being able to completely disengage from the network from time to
time in order gain perspective.
To the last point in the previous
paragraph: I firmly believe that as a society we are moving to a
place where we greatly devalue the physicality of things like
friendship and identity. And of solitude. We wonder why there is so
much stress (and all the things it causes) in the world on one hand
while we tether so much of our identity to Facebook and the iClouds.
Here's to all of us taking the time to
disengage, at least for short periods of time. Here's to spending
physical time with our friends.
