Grow a spine you wimps
Are you as tired as I am of these people who whinge on about the Web being too big and free and open and rich for their fragile little brains to cope with?
After centuries millenia of restricted access to knowledge being something every hipster should be heard moaning about, it’s now suddenly cool to complain that there’s just ‘too much information‘ out there and that you can’t cope. Yeah man, it’s just too heavy. It’s like you could spend all day every day online, but you still can’t take it all in and it’s completely ruining your life, and making you feel worthless.
To be fair, it’s the same type of people now complaining that there’s just too much knowledge who always tell you – unprompted – about the the unearthly hour they got up as a way of asserting their moral superiority over anyone who got up at a more sensible time. They’re the same people who never miss an opportunity to tell you how many days they’ve had without any sleep because they are SOOO busy, and how little they’ve eaten… ever. Now, the Web offers these idiots a new opportunity to demonstrate self-worth – through another melodramatic and yet pointless piece of self-denial. But it’s better than that, the Web also provides a massive new audience of of gullible fools people to bore on to. people to bore on to.
I had to check to see if this article from the NY Times website was some sort of hoax – it’s called “Stop Your Search Engines” (headline writer possibly suffering from Continual Partial Attention disorder). In it, they describe an Apple Desktop App called Freedom - created for people who feel the need for a “strategy” to help them deal with the temptation of the modern world’s super-abundance of knowledge.
It works like this.
I can’t believe anyone wasted any valuable moments of their lives programming Freedom. Your modem and your system preferences will both do this. You do not need an App. And there is also this button on all computers that just turns them off. If you that’s not good enough for you but you live inside the M25, then why not DM and I’ll come round your house with a baseball bat to smash your equipment up.
I call this programme of self-realisation ‘Total Freedom’ and it costs £50 a pop. Drop me a line.
15 comments
haha – I was only today trying to remember the name of this very app so that I could download it and get on with writing a presentation that’s been hanging over me.
It’s not about the web’s superabundance of knowledge but about the superabundance of distraction – Cory Doctorow discusses it eloquently here http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html
http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html
So today I’ve written about 1/3rd of the presentation, played around with geo-location on layar and mobnotes, refreshed twitter a few times and arranged, shot and uploaded this image http://img405.yfrog.com/i/dscf1002y.jpg/, sent a few emails, etc etc
http://img405.yfrog.com/i/dscf1002y.jpg/
Now I’m going to download Freedom and try and finish the presentation. You know where I work – I guess I’ll keep an eye out for you and your baseball bat ;-)
Shall I paypal you the £50?
Seriously though, I totally agree. What an idiotic concept. Maybe if the people building Freedom didn’t spend so much time conceptualising and building useless crap they wouldn’t need an application for disabling their internet connection. This is definitely an example of more is less. Much less.
Keep ranting.
I completely agree. The programme Freedom is a joke. However there’s a much more interesting discussion in this that we’re perhaps missing out on.
I once read the following passage in an essay on Jean Baudrillard’s “Transparency of Evil” and found it very interesting:
“It’s the reality that information cannot be transmitted fast enough for the business world. There is a never-ending, always-increasing demand for speed: faster computers, faster bandwidth, faster processing. The result of this obsession for speed is the conclusion that “faster communication”
somehow equals “better communication,” that the information being transmitted is of such priority and significance that it must be available as close to instantaneously as technically possible.
The speed with which data can be transferred comments on its importance and value. If a business is to be as efficient as its technology, its human resources must keep the pace of its technical resources. The cessation of information is, from some managerial viewpoint, the cessation of work. For a computer in such an environment, interaction in excess of what is absolutely necessary slows the process, interferes with the flow of other, more important information.
As far as the computers are concerned, there is no time for silence.The same is true for the employees. As with computers, people are compelled to provide a similarly constant stream of data, afraid to take a moment to think. Anything less is inefficient, slow, bad.”
That’s in my mind the real topic to discuss – don’t you think?
Perhaps you offer a platinum service where you go round and anesthetise them with Ketamine and remove a few non-vital bits of their cerebral cortex with a spoon?
Everything has a purpose. That freedom application can help procrastinators. The same way that burp.fm I found on this site can… not help them.
Tempted to using the ‘gullible fools’ tag on this post.
Great article on writing. Long though isn’t it? I found myself glazing over.
Can you pay the £50 upfront?
T
Yes – please send the money immediately.
Don’t know. I’m a bit extreme on this kind of stuff. I think people will cope, and find more and more advanced ways of coping – including getting rid of these slow old meat-bodies and augmenting ourselves with machines… bring it.
That’s an interesting suggestion Mike. Thanks.
Imagine turning Freedom ‘on’ just as some robbers break in… watcha gonna do then??
Couldn’t agree more with you. It’s an unnecesary app based on guilt
Cheers Tim,
Just what I needed was a good rant to cheer up my day :-)
p.s. £50 not included
I imagine Tim arriving in a ‘Total Freedom’ van which is belting out a bad computerised version of Greensleeves … all the kids in the neighbourhood running from blocks around because they know some electronic equipment is going to get bashed into hundreds of pieces. This could be a defining growing-up memory for thousands of kids and I reckon this type of community building exercise is worth way more than £50. With a local govt partnership and some crowd-funding, I see a whole new business… spin-off shows, a documentary, ‘Total Freedom Tim’ merchandise… ;).
I want to make it clear that Total Freedom is purely a money thing for me. There are no lofty motives. It’s a very simple deal. I smash your stuff up. You pay me £50.
Well according to the many articles on app piracy currently there is a very distinct possibility that all those hours slaving over any app might be a total waste of time, well if your trying to get rich anyway – but then the idea that someone might try and steal an app that shuts everything down is funny anyway. Like a unintended virus.
Do you have a site feed? I cant see one, maybe Ive not used Freedom enough yet?