In my last article I come off as a technophobe of a sort, or at least a techno-skeptic, and weird as that might sound, I think this perception might actually be accurate. I think of technology as a tool for solving problems and doing things that you want to do. If it creates more problems than it solves, does it really fulfill its purpose?

I’m a techno-skeptic (with a dozen working computers of all kinds in the household) because I see how people use technology. If someone was spending his life hanging out in a bar and wasting time in superficial, shallow conversations, we would recognize this as socially unacceptable, something worthy individuals don’t do. However, this is exactly what social media is: shallow people wasting time in superficial quasi-dialogue, and it’s all worthless and going nowhere. The only one actually profiting from it all is the bar owner.

Technology gives every kid an opportunity to become the smartest person who ever lived. You can buy a Raspberry Pi for a few dollars, plug it into a TV, keyboard and mouse, and install a free Linux OS on it that allows you to access the vast tomes of knowledge on the web, play multimedia and write code in multiple programming languages. And how many use it for that? How many of you did sudo apt-get install gcc?

For 200 EUR you can buy a smartphone that’s actually a 8-core pocket supercomputer with Geekbench 3 score of over 4000. You can load it with a library of books and music, you can use it to access Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha, you can use it as a multiple-language dictionary, interactive road map with satellite navigation, you can use it to SSH-connect into a remote server, to write and execute Python code, essentially you can do everything a personal computer can do, that doesn’t require a keyboard and a big screen. Its price makes it accessible to almost anyone, and even for 50 EUR you can get a device that gives you most of those capabilities. Based on that, you would expect the people who own such devices, and the even more powerful ones, to be the smartest and most capable of all people who ever lived. Instead, they are barely literate, with poor mental focus, disastrous social skills, horribly limited general knowledge, are ignorant of history, philosophy, politics, art and science, they have very poor understanding of technology in general, and people in the 19^th century would see them as retarded scum that lacks both education and proper upbringing.

Does it mean that I think that children should not own smartphones and computers? Of course not. My kids use whatever technology they need. They both have laptop computers and mobile phones. They both play videogames. However, they play Minecraft and Universe Sandbox, not Call of duty, and to them computers and mobile phones are not a life-substitute, but a tool. The older one can write code in Logo, Python and some c, and the younger one can tell you everything about masses and composition of planets in the solar system. Guess why? They read, they talk to adults, they use their brains.

The worst thing that can happen to children is to spend too much time talking to other children, because with other children there’s no positive intellectual and emotional differential, there’s just ignorance, prejudice, and a very violent and abusive pecking order. One of the main reasons why elderly people were so respected in the traditional communities is that they used to talk to children, to teach them true and useful knowledge, and do it in a calm and peaceful way that would unplug the children from the frenzy the other children caused. Children are actually the worst thing that can happen to children, because the only thing children usually learn in the company of other children is how to establish an abusive comparative ranking based on usually completely arbitrary criteria, because kids are too stupid and immature to know what’s really important.

And that’s exactly what people use modern technology for: they use it to entertain themselves and to participate in some social network with arbitrary and worthless comparative ranking. They thirst for attention and approval, and dread ridicule and criticism, and in they fears they primarily dole out ridicule and criticism. Essentially, the entire social network is a cesspool of ignorance, prejudice, ridicule and criticism of others and never satiated desire for approval. In order to earn others’ approval, people adopt one of the few memes and quasi-philosophies, and there’s no place for real diversity of opinion, because if you want approval of others there’s only one thing you want: you want a choice, an opinion and a philosophy that will earn you most approval, and everything else is secondary. That’s why you want the best phone, the best computer, the best camera, the best philosophy: you want others to recognize you as worthy and to approve of you.

You know what I told my kids about peer pressure and desire for peer approval? “Just accept the fact that you’ll never be accepted by all people, or even the majority of people. The only way you can get approval of idiots is to be an even worse idiot than they are. The only way to get approval of average people is to be slightly below average. What you need to do is accept the fact that whatever you do and whatever you choose, someone will try to shit on you. Even if you’re Jesus they’ll crucify you. That’s how people are and that’s what they do, and the thing is, you can never know if they are sincere, if someone is shitting on you because he honestly dislikes what you do, or if he’s just jealous. You need to measure your success by how much you are succeeding at realizing your personal goals, not by what others say. If you want feedback from others, ask the adults, who actually have a developed brain and a reasonable set of criteria, not children who are stupid and immature.”

That’s how people are abusing the technology. They use it to try to get peer approval, and instead they get to participate in a giant hen-house as a part of the pecking order, where they don’t learn anything really useful, except how to efficiently insult others and make them feel worthless, because they know what worked on them.

If you only let go of people and their bullshit approval, you can find great stuff on the Internet, stuff that can make all that technology worth while. You can find an abundance of downloadable books and music, that you can store on your mobile device and read. You can find excellent articles about ancient Rome and topology on Wikipedia. You can find analytical tools that can interpret common language queries as mathematical equations. Or you can get caught in some meme in order to get group approval on some forum.

I always use the best technology I can afford, if I find it useful. You should, too. However, to use it in order to create a virtual pub in which you’ll waste time trying to “be popular” is an abuse of opportunity. So, it turns out that I’m not really skeptical of technology; I just think most people are idiots to whom technologically facilitated social networking is as harmful as an orgasm button to a rat: it feels good, but eventually the poor animal dies of hunger and thirst pressing the damn thing all day.

If you asked a person on the street whether he thinks he’s smarter than a stone age person, he’d probably say yes. If you asked him whether he thinks he’s smarter than someone from the Roman empire, or the “dark ages”, the answer would probably be the same. After all, he knows that Earth revolves around the Sun, and owns a smartphone and a computer.

The interesting thing about smartphones is that I asked my son what do the kids in his class have – he’s 6^th grade. It tuned out that most have the top-tier devices like iPhone, Samsung Galaxy 6 edge and Sony Xperia Z5. It’s a jaw-dropping piece of information considering how those kids are not really geniuses; they get average grades, are of average intelligence and are not especially well brought up, to put it more kindly than they deserve. You would ask, what are they using their super-devices for? Games, of course, Facebook and some chat app that’s currently “in”.

Do they use those things to read up on Wikipedia? Not really. Do they use them to navigate Google Earth and see different parts of the world? Not really. Are they reading the news to find out what’s going on in the world? Not really. Are they using them for reading books? Not really. In fact, my son told me they laughed at him when he told them he reads books, because “we’re not in the 13^th century to read books”. So basically, those children are idiots with very expensive toys. They are as stupid as a brick, and if you think they would come on top in a comparison with a person from ancient Rome, you are probably wrong.

So, if you strip a today’s person of his technology, how much does he really know, what can he really do, and how much is he really worth?

If you try to reduce social media to the actual message that is shared, it’s all mostly “look at me, I’m a vain, shallow, stupid idiot that’s exactly the same as everybody else; nothing worth seeing here, but do click me because I seek attention”.

The kids in my son’s class act as if there’s a difference between having this or that smartphone, but is there, really? If you waste 10 hours a day hanging out on Facebook, as some of them apparently do, does a better phone help you waste time more effectively, or do you just feel cooler and more important as you do it?

If you strip Augustine or Thomas Aquinas of technology and dress him in rags, does it change what he is? But do it with one of those modern fancy girls who are so full of themselves they can’t stop shooting selfies with their phone and posting them online. Strip her of technology, wash her of her make-up and dress her in rags, and tell me, does it change what she is? What is she, really, if everything she is can be stripped away by removing the superficial?

I have a serious problem with significant, massive Internet services being owned and controlled from a central point, be it government or a corporation.

Just take a look at Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Paypal and, first and foremost, Google.

In order to figure out why that is a problem, let’s see what Internet is and how it works. On the bottom layer of the Internet you have the networking hardware. Then you have the central infrastructure of ICANN which defines top-level namespaces and the DNS system. Then you have servers that run services, and clients who connect to those services.

Now, in the good old days of the Internet, the services were standard: HTTP, NNTP, IRC, SMTP, POP3/IMAP, FTP and similar. Essentially, if you wanted to host a website, you needed to run a HTTP service on your web server and put files into the designated directory on the server, and everyone on the Internet could access it. If you wanted to write a blog, you put a blogging CMS into the webserver directory, install and configure the database, connect the blogging CMS to the database and you could write your blog. If you wanted to host a mail server, the process was similar – you installed a SMTP service which received mail on your domain, and a POP3/IMAP server which enabled users to access their mailbox on your domain. Those services were standard, worked the same everywhere, were accessible using standard clients.

Then came the services that offered to make things easier. You got things like Blogspot which made it easy for someone to write a blog – you just registered, chose a visual template and off you went. If you wanted to have a website, there were options that made it very easy, and ultimately most people decided all they need is a Facebook account. If you wanted a chat, you had ICQ and Skype and what not. If you wanted to host video clips, you had Vimeo and Youtube. Basically, the standard generic services that ran on any number of Internet servers were replaced by huge corporations that offered to do it all for you.

Now, what’s the problem with that? Why would we not have it easier if we can? Why would someone configure mysql database and apache webserver and wordpress blogging CMS in order to write a blog, if he can go to the Blogger service owned by Google and create a similarly-looking blog in seconds with zero effort? I’ll tell you why. Because if you host your content on some company’s web-based service, you are in a position where that company can essentially close the tap at any time. If you start writing something they don’t like, or something that will make some socially evil entity with lots of influence pissed off, they can complain to that company’s helpdesk and you’ll find your account suspended, and you’re basically silenced with a single click. On the other hand, if you host your content on a server you personally maintain, one would need to have something very serious, like a court order, in order to force the hosting center to suspend your service. You still can’t do anything criminal, but today you don’t need to do anything criminal in order to be silenced on the Internet. It suffices to have some social justice warrior complaining about you and you’re fucked. It won’t do them any good in a court of law, but they can suspend your Twitter or Blogger or Facebook account, because those accounts are hosted by companies that are publicly traded and their revenue is generated exclusively from advertising, and advertising revenue depends hugely on good public relations, which basically means yielding to pressure from lobbying groups and professional complainers.

What I find extremely worrisome is that huge parts of everybody’s online functionality are based around services provided by huge, centralized corporations that are hugely sensitive to pressure for more censorship, and we will unfortunately see more and more of this every day, because people will continue using what is easier and gives them good results with a minimum of effort, which will result in producing single-point control over their online functionality, forcing everyone to basically censor themselves and reduce variety in the mental space in which we all operate. Because, if you unconsciously censor yourself in order not to have your account suspended, and the rules for account suspension are generated at a non-democratic single-point (corporate management and public relations departments in Facebook and Google, for instance) which is vulnerable to pressure from minority focus-groups (the professional complainers and whiners), the logical result will be either people reducing their thoughts to an increasingly narrow space of political correctness, or doing what I did: taking things into their own hands and doing it the hard way, by hosting everything on their own server (which is very inexpensive to do these days) in order to be able to write whatever they want, and if someone doesn’t like it, he needs to actually take you to court in order to take your content down. And in order to take your content down by a court order, it isn’t enough that they don’t like it or that their feelings are hurt. It needs to be something that is actually illegal, like piracy or child porn or giving advice to terrorists on how to make bombs. It can’t be mere opinions you disagree with. The point of the freedom of speech is that the option to speak offensive opinions needs to be protected by all means. Freedom of saying only inoffensive things isn’t worth having; they had that in Stalinist Russia.

Certainly, if all you want to do online is post pictures of your cat and talk about coffee, then by all means use Facebook and Youtube. That is, until some focus group starts complaining that cats and coffee trigger their psychotic episodes and hurt their feelings about something, that white cats and black coffee are racist and your offensive content needs to be taken down in order to protect their right to be fucking idiots.

There’s that thing that I find irritating in technology (and in society in general), that one could call the lemming trends. You know, the lemmings, the tiny rodent thingies that supposedly jump over cliffs in herds, because if everyone does it, it can’t be all that wrong, right? The way it happens in technology is that someone, either the tech journalists or users on the fora accept some arbitrary criterion by which they measure devices as either “good” or “bad”, and when this criterion is off, the entire industry goes off a cliff.

A notable example of that are the TN panels, that were lauded by the tech pundits in the media as the best because they had the least pixel inertia – a pixel could change its state much more quickly than on an IPS or PVA display. However, the TN display has shitty colors and even shittier viewing angles, and usually looks like a fluorescent negative image when viewed at any angle other than perpendicular, and since this type of a panel was “best”, it was widely adopted by technology manufacturers, because the buyers would not settle for the “inferior” IPS or PVA when they could get all those wonderful refresh rates. This went on for a while, until Apple started putting IPS panels on their devices and people started drooling after them, realizing fully what a horrid piece of shit a TN display really is, and now nobody wants to be close to anything that even resembles a TN display, except for the gamers and, presumably, the idiot journalists who brought that plague upon us.

Another example is the camera industry. In the 1990s, the camera manufactures started producing the autofocus cameras, which were advertised as the professional solution. Soon, most buyers went for it because they wanted a “professional” camera, and they threw away their manual focus lenses. A camera was measured by how many autofocus points it has, by how accurately it tracks a moving object, and by the ultrasonic-motor lenses it worked with. The thing is, those cameras were advertised for the professionals of a certain kind – wedding photographers, sports photographers and the photojournalists. For this target audience, the autofocus cameras are great. However, if you photograph landscapes, closeups and, basically, things that don’t move fast, a manual focus camera is as good. For things that require critical accuracy of focus, the manual focus lenses can actually be preferable, but you could never explain that to the people who just got into photography and trolled the photographic community with comments like “your camera is shit, it has only 3 AF points”, when you only wanted to photograph bugs and waterfalls and you couldn’t give a damn about autofocus in general. But an interesting thing happened lately. Some premium equipment manufacturers started producing series of brand new, expensive, super high quality manual focus lenses, such as this one:

BTW that’s a $800 lens, not an old beater from the 1980s that’s so behind the times it actually can’t focus electrically. And the tragedy is, the same zombies who used to praise autofocus are now herding around those “newest and best” manual lenses.

What I want to say is, people are idiots. They have a terrible fear of exclusion from a group, and if a group defines criteria, they will attempt to be “good” if not “best” according to those criteria. If a criterion is having a shitty TN display, they will have the shittiest of all TN displays. If a criterion is to have a shitty plasticky piece of shit lens, they will have the shittiest plasticky lens with a camera that has the greatest number of autofocus points and shoots ten frames per second, although they intend to take pictures of waterfalls. If the criterion of acceptance into a group is to bow to some psycho’s imaginary friend four times a day, they’ll do it, and make everyone else do it, and have them put to death if they happen to “offend” their bullshit. If the criterion of acceptance is to have your daughter’s clitoris cut off, they’ll have their daughter’s clitoris cut off, and slut shame everyone who doesn’t.

The thing is, it’s very nice to be excluded from most human groups, because humans are usually vile fucktards with no sense in their heads and no inherent ethics other than “I’m good and my tribe is good and if something threatens me or my tribe, it’s evil and must be destroyed”. Being excluded from a group that worships hallucinations of idiots or mutilates children is a great thing. Removing yourself from the company of idiots clears the mind like nothing you can imagine, because you no longer have to accept completely ridiculous and obviously false ideas just to fit in and not get into conflicts with fools. Just do your own thing. You can be wrong, but at least if you’re wrong you can correct yourself quickly. If you’re wrong because you want to conform with a group that’s wrong, not only will you be wrong forever, you will not be yourself. And if you’re not yourself, how can you ever learn? The groups never learn. They never, ever fucking learn. The bronze-age shepherd cults still dominate the intellectual discourse in the 21^st century. People still believe in astrology, which was devised in ancient Mesopotamia together with divining from animal entrails. You just can’t make this shit up. The only way you can get rid of evil traditions, apparently, is to kill all their adherents or at least completely destroy their culture, which is why the Aztecs no longer perform human sacrifice en masse – there are no Aztecs. Is there really no better way to get rid of totally idiotic ideas and cults? Oh wait, there is: people would simply have to get rid of the concept of needing to belong to a herd. Then the need to accept the herd’s insane beliefs and practices would simply fall off, as necrotic mental tissue, because people would judge ideas on other criteria, such as usefulness, correctness and practicality. However, this is such a radically heretical idea it’s no wonder Socrates was killed for it. Accepting only what’s good, true and useful? Why, people might actually stop making human sacrifices to Poseidon! O heresy, o evil! As I said, you just can’t make this shit up.