essay: first draft of OK Computer, Goodbye

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@@ -30,6 +30,61 @@ The good and the true are convertible with being, they are fundamentally the sam
 
 The counter argument is that God should not be constrained by his own nature. Therefore something is good because god wills it. (voluntarism). But this then leads to the idea that Not the nature of a thing, its being goodness and truth, determine reality, but the sheer act of a will. e.g. Schopenhauer. The problem is overemphasis on the will leads here, where we are divorced from the world as it really is. If I decide entirely what is true, then I can decide what is true then I can weigh 600 pounds and declare myself healthy. I can say I'm a cat and force my employer to provide a litter box. 
 
+#OK Computer, Goodbye
+
+My laptop broke the other day. It was third laptop that's broken on me this year. Perhaps I am having a bad year. MOre likely laptops are. Most consumer gadgets are crap these days. Everyone knows this, I know it better than most given that I test consumer gadgets for a living. Did I have a bad run of laptops? Yes. But the more laptops you have, the more bad runs you're going to have because consumer gadgets are crap.
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+Anyway after the third one died I did not have a backup. I was forced to borrow my wife's MacBook Air (which has outlasted 8 PC laptops[^1]. I am not a Mac person. I was, but then at some point I felt constrained by MacOS and switched to Linux, which let me do things my own way, however I wanted. Going back to the Mac was disorienting. The keyboard shortcuts are different, I needed to fix things I didn't on Linux. It was rough. 
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+And, even once I did get things working inn a way that didn't drive me crazy, I was sharing the laptop. My wife tutors students 3 hours a day most days. During that time I had nothing to work with.
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+And I loved it.
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+I hate screens. I stare at one far too much. I have too. This is the compromise I make for the ability to live the way we do. It's a compromise I make knowingly, gratefully even, but it is still a compromise, with negative trade offs.
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+What I did not realize is how much time I was spending staring at a screen when I did not need to be staring at a screen. It's deceptively easy to tell yourself you're working when you type a few words but then when you're done, you just "look something up real quick" and then next thing you know you've spent half an hour researching the best way to some weird thing you'll probably never do anyway. 
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+This is my vice anyway. I know I have it. It's part of what makes me good at my job, but it also leads me to spend more time than I need to staring at screen. 
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+This got me thinking about that old axiom, if you don't have it, you don't need it. Do I really need a laptop?
+
+## Once And Future Luddite
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+I hated computers as a kid. Didn't like video games. Didn't really interact with a computer other than to type up school papers. That was true all the way through college. Even then, when all the nerdy people I knew were hanging out on the proto internets of BBS and tk, I just didn't care. I was out rock climbing, body surfing, writing, and playing music. Those were the things I obsessed over, screens didn't have any appeal. I wrote in notebooks. I recorded music to tape. Why would I need a screen?
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+This continued until about 2001, when, through a variety of coincidences, blind luck, and, I've always assumed, some coffee spilled on keyboards in the offices of a place called Wired, I was made apparent to me that I might be able to make money writing about things that happened on screens. I happened to be standing outside a shoe store on Broadway in Manhattan when I realized this, which is an odd detail that I feel is somehow meaningful, though I haven't yet figured out how it's meaningful.
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+Whatever the case, at the time this door swung open I was a chef running a restaurant, working 60-70 hours a week in a hot, stressful kitchen. I loved it, but it was a lot of work. The idea that I could make money without leaving the house was an absolute revelation. Sign me up.
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+So I pulled out my then girlfriend's Macbook and started figuring out how to build stuff on the web. About as fast as I learned it, I wrote about it for Webmonkey. That was possible back in those days because there wasn't a lot to learn and there weren't that many people learning it. 
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+The rest as they say, is history. I wrote for Webmonkey on a freelance basis for the next four years (while traveling the world for some of it), and weirdly, I started actually building things on screens. That became a second source of income, but it also because a kind of obsession. 
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+At first it was just staying on top of what was happening, what I needed to write about for Webmonkey and what I could use to make this website better. I started off with shared hosting accounts, but before long I was working with real servers, both virtual and bare metal (clients). I kept going deeper down into the stack as it's known. I wrote about this recently for Wired if you're interested in that journey.
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+Suffice to say that in the end I became quite capable of doing just about anything with a computer. The Luddite had succumbed to the screen.
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+But the more I shared my wife's laptop, the more I realized I didn't care anymore. I don't want to think about technology anymore, my job no longer requires me too, so why am I? In the end it felt like an addiction. 
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+Maybe that's too strong of a word, but it had compulsive elements, born of that weird combination of boredom and ease, that reminded me of drinking.
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+What if... I just didn't get a new laptop?
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+So that's what I did. Or didn't. 
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+I got all the data off my hard drive onto an external SSD, which I plug into my wife's laptop when I need to edit photos or videos, which turns out to be pretty much the only time I need a laptop. 
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+The rest of the time I write on my $75 tablet or using the family iPad.
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+The iPad is especially compelling because I don't like it. There's no way to hack it. It's a highly managed, father-knows-best-style device that's the antithesis of what I liked about computers -- bending them to my will. Oddly enough, this makes the iPad perfect for how I want to live now, with less time spent on a screen, less time spent thinking about digital problems, more time spent with my family, working on projects that exist in the real world. Projects made of wood, and metal. 
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+[^1]: Before you think, wow, this guy spends a lot of money on laptops, understand that I only bought 2 of those 8, the rest were loaners sent to me to test. But they all really did die in one way or another while the Macbook keeps going.
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 ## 7 years on the Road
 
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