James Gillray: The Graces in a High Wind
published May 26, 1810
published by Hannah Humphrey

"I hope never to become its master."

The incumbent uses Truth Social, a failed social media experiment in which he holds majority ownership, to share his lies with the world. I suppose a few of his postings contain honest renderings of his thoughts and feelings. Those elicit a near-universal Ewww response from most of the public, offering glimpses into an internal universe about which we imagine we'd be better off never knowing. But it's a given that everybody must employ tech to count these days. Those not plugged into the latest 'thing' seem hardly worth considering, and I'm little different other than the fact that I cannot seem to keep up. I resist downloading every promising new app. I have never once played a video game on any of my many machines, and not just because I do not know how to download and play any of the curiously popular video games. They belong to the class of experiences I've deliberately avoided engaging with, believing them to be the electronic equivalent of poison. I avoided Candy Crush like it was plague. Same with Wordle, whatever that entails. I'm the sort who can't absorb the rules and key strokes required to play because that sort of play feels like excruciating work to me. My eyes glaze over, and I become unresponsive.

I've likewise avoided learning how to operate Microsoft anything. I once possessed a pre-release of the initial release of Excel and Word. Once they were formally available, they had been so overloaded with unneeded features as to render themselves unusable. I gravitated toward a series of word processors offering fewer features and much greater functionality. MS employed IBM's business model and created IBM-like users, who also used to say: "you can get better, but you can't pay more." I chose to pay less and get more for a while, though the more monopoly-minded TEaCH companies eventually assimilated and eliminated each alternate application. Consequently, I can no longer open the files containing my enormous library of early writing. It's officially inaccessible for the ages. My first big learning about TEaCH was that it was an unreliable partner. It giveth with less enthusiasm than it taketh away. It doesn't care and won't. I am still learning not to take this understanding too personally. TEaCH enforces anonymity.

This subject is on my mind because I migrated into a new laptop this weekend. This involved one failed attempt and the intervention of our local Mac guy, who has still never billed us for any of the times he's bailed us out of some frustration. He's a good-natured no longer kid who works on his sabbath and therefore refers to himself as a Badventist. He took the old and new machines, had a Lightening® cable conveniently hanging from a cable tree in his shop, (he has a cable tree in his shop!) and told me he'd deliver the configured new machine in a couple of hours because he needed to run to another client near our home. The migration worked well enough that I'm creating this story this morning rather than railing about PastWords again. I did have to pull my blog's master file, all 1.34 GB of it, off the backup disk, but I had created backup volumes before delivering the old computer to be migrated away from. He also conveniently deleted two generations of duplicate archives I'd maintained, as if I would ever need to fall back to where I was in 2012 or 2016. I hadn't, and decided with this migration, I had just been being paranoid. My new terabyte of storage is not in any way straining, containing my libraries.

I have remained conservative in my use of TEaCH, as if I might remain a virgin even though I was sleeping in a matrimonial bed. I refused to learn to code on general principle. I strove to remain a naive user. I didn't want to spend my days executing workarounds that might only impress myself. I tried to use my machines rather than colluding with them to use me. It's easy to get too involved and even easier to get even more than too involved. I mainly restrict my writing to mornings so that I won't be tied to my keyboard in lieu of existence. My phone, which I also recently upgraded, distracts me enough as it is. I figure these machines are not just high tech, but are TEaCHing me something, though I'm not always entirely sure what that something might be. I remain the naive user I aspired to become, occasionally beset with mysterious failures. My new laptop has the labels worn off of precisely none of its keys. It also features the latest generation M4 chipset, which "boasts Apple's fastest Neural Engine, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, significantly surpassing previous models and other AI-powered devices." I will probably never employ this machine this way. I have tremendous excess capability, which is how TEaCH gets measured these days. It also has an RCA audio output port, an almost analogue throwback to the Bluetooth headset that always insisted upon limiting output to just beneath any audible level to preserve my hearing somehow, an effort roughly equivalent to closing the proverbial barn door after the livestock's escaped.

May my TEaCH remain mysterious lest using it lose the balance of its magic. I will never subscribe to Truth Social, and not only because the incumbent owns it. I also avoided Twitter and X, as if my sanity depended upon my doing that, and it might have. I have still not made a penny out of my interactions with TEaCH, which was also how I intended. I oppose advertising on the internet and only begrudgingly engage in online shopping. I grieve for a world where a transistor radio represented a little more TEaCH than I actually needed. I have never felt less connected than I have since I began my association with Social Media. I fondly recall when a bakelite telephone maintained the primal spot in the house, and each incoming call was everyone else's business, too. Cable brought more choices and much less satisfaction to viewing television, and adding color rendered it almost useless for entertainment, transforming it into a mere distraction. I feel unworthy of the technology I employ. I hope never to become its master.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #CHope , #PureSchmaltz