Farting around

I saw this quote from Kurt Vonnegut recently and I just had to share it, if no other reason than to know where it is so I can look at it whenever I like. He tells his wife that he’s going out to buy an envelope:

Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great-looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

I love to tinker with computers, and when I was younger and more naive (and Big Tech was less big) I saw all forms of tech and ditigal advancement as being positive. Obviously, the world has changed, and it’s changed me with it. I still like to tinker with tech, and lots of fun things have happened in the digital realm, but only in the interest of play, and making the lives of my friends and family better.

It is likely that I am writing this post the same year that the AI bubble collapses and, hopefully, takes a huge chunk of the hyperscale tech industry with it.¹. If Big Tech takes its foot off the accelerator, I would love to see more of us taking every opportunity to dance and fart around.

1. I really, deeply, hope that the human toll, including on the employees of those companies, is negligible. My ire is exclusively for the owners and executives of these reckless companies. ↩︎