6.24.24

Filial piety. Confucian values. Honor thy father and thy mother.

Is focusing on trying to create a technological solution to help patient’s suffering from dementia a sort of pathetic middle-aged look-ma-no-hands tech bro atonement?

Throughout my youth and until I was around forty I constantly tried to bring technology into the house where I’d grown up and deploy it because I thought it would work well for people there. Upon reflection, I did the same thing at my father’s law firm, acting as the IT department during my teenage years.

I’d come over in my twenties and set up a new stereo or try to get a new printer or early networking equipment operational in their house. Remember those photo frames that would display low-rez digital pictures off a stick of RAM back when early digital cameras were thing? I’m sure there were several of those delivered to parents and grandparents alike.

And invariably all of this shit would end up in a corner gathering dust, unused, not-quite-working, because cutting edge tech (except for Apple products in the last decade) requires users who can fiddle with it until it works. And they all require someone to actually give a fuck about whatever it is supposed to do. And the digital native tech-utopian folks like me see these things and somewhat intuitively are able to cobble together an ecosystem where they work. But for people who aren’t like that, they are just quirky, expensive pieces of plastic and circuitry. And so they don’t work well, never become integrated into life, and they get pushed into a corner to create overpriced condos for spiders and their webs.

I expect I’m not the only person in my age cohort with this experience. So Best Buy dutifully sells a new batch of consumer facing electronics each year, which are joyfully given to parents and grandparents and for Christmas or birthdays, and set up while smoke from blown-out candles still fills the kitchen, usually probably with a faint whiff of annoying techno-superiority by the giver, who not so patiently tries to explain why the luddite recipient just doesn’t quite understand how cool this new whatever is.

It’s pretty easy to see the underlying psychology behind all of this, and it’s pretty easy to see why mostly (always?) these sorts of installations didn’t work:

Because who wants cold technological solutions to replace the attention paid them by the humans they love?

It’s easy to imagine that this whole thing is just some overly-complicated way of dealing with post Vic grief and guilt?

If so, is that the worst thing?

I guess people create things for lots of reasons.