"These are clubs I might be wise to decline every opportunity to join."

My friends host podcasts, but the technology supporting those baffles me. I sometimes think that I really should offer an audio version of my daily musings, but the gauntlet of interfaces separating me from that end reliably chases me off again. Somewhere in that chain, I encounter a Captcha barricade and I cannot for the life of me figure out what I'm supposed to be matching. They want a Pastword, too, and while they offer to allow me to reset forgotten Pastwords, that process, too, proves impassable. I experience technological damned-whatever-I-Do until I construe what seems their underlying intent. Perhaps they're paid for attempts to scale the ramparts rather than by whatever they dangle as possible inside. It's all hidden behind crude sophistications that leave me questioning just how smart our overlording technologists might not be. Nobody ever once designed an interface with me in mind.

I don't mind, or not that much. I acknowledge that I'm being left in the dust and also that I must not take this condition too personally. I also do not tweet, but on that count, I've never felt like I've missed much, considering what the papers report about what transpires there. It seems like a dandy place where we can conveniently mislead each other to turn brother against brother, technology vs. man. I am just what I am, hardly defined by my interfaces. I've left traces of myself all over the place without finding a technological home place anywhere. Even Apple left me behind ages ago, though I still cling tenaciously to my blog, which is not published on WordPress, and not only because of its particularly hostile user interface. I'm connected by bits of twine, yellowing cellophane tape, and splotches of virtual silicon caulking, my voice probably transmitting about as well as it would be if I were using tin cans and string, but I'm still playing my game.

Each upgrade proves to be an incremental downgrade in accessibility. Even my trackpad regularly betrays me, displaying pop-up menus when I'm simply trying to place my cursor, with no explanation of what those projected choices might mean. Transformation? Huh? I figure that layers of complexity hover just beneath the interface I see, and the glimpses I perceive squelch any motivating curiosity. I just wish that they'd go away. I used to do my very best writing when on an airplane, but that was before airplanes became cheap tickets and security queues, back when it was still possible to open a laptop while seated rather than just assuming the airplane coma position for the duration of a flight. That upgraded seat-back tray table won't hardly support a three by five card now.

Somehow, the craft persists in spite of all the help DreckNology's failed to provide for it. I adapt backwards given that forward fell out of the realm of possibility a half dozen releases ago. A time might come, though perhaps not in my lifetime, when technology advances beyond repeatedly failing to emulate chiseling individual characters in reluctant stone. I expect even that advancement to first appear behind an impenetrable firewall insisting upon a separate subscription which sits securely behind another impenetrable firewall. It will still likely be impenetrable firewalls all the way down, ensuring security of a sorts but elegantly denying access to almost everyone. These are clubs I might be wise to decline every opportunity to join. I'll be over here in my almost reliably accessible backwater while you're producing your regular podcast.

©2019 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #GlancingKnow, #PureSchmaltz