Getting Off the Carousel

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43 Years Ago — 1980

I was 8 years old in 1980.  My grandfather was Benjamin Balogh, Jr.  I lovingly called him “Pop-Pop.”

When I was younger, I used to sit on his lap and access the MITS Altair 8800 from his kitchen.  The MITS Altair 8800 was in his basement, and he ran twisted pair up from the basement and into the kitchen corner.  He put a LSI ADM-3A terminal on his kitchen counter.  It was a beautiful and masterful work of engineering.  The cabling was clean and routed through the wall with the terminal block for the twisted pair mounted into the woodwork of the kitchen counter.

The LSI ADM-3A terminal connected to power and communications cleanly.  You’d enter the kitchen and think that the computer was part of the kitchen and wasn’t some untidy mess or an afterthought.

Of course, it took me years to realize this.  Decades before Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) and the modern ethernet we take for granted, my grandfather had cleanly and elegantly networked his house.  In 2023, while some home builders do offer built-in ethernet ports running through the same conduits as your power and phone, it still isn’t common.  Most people settle for either ethernet cables strewn about their house from their fiber ONT or cable modem to their routers to the computers, or one fewer strand of cable and Wi-Fi.  I can’t even say I put this same amount of thought or effort into networking my own house.  But my grandfather did.

In 1980, I was 8 years old.  By Christmas of 1980, he upgraded from the MITS Altair 8800 with LSI ADM-3A terminal to a beautiful TRS-80 Model III under the Christmas tree.  Again, he networked his house, but this time he ran the network to a corner of the living room behind the fireplace and sitting area.  The sitting area was still the focal point of the living room.  Conversations, rest, and time together with family still came first.  But there was a computer tucked away on a small desk with a TRS-80 Model III, a phone, and an acoustic coupling modem to rest the phone receiver on the modem!

In December of 1980, using dialup on CompuServe cost $10 an hour.  While playing tic-tac-toe and a textual grid-based version of Star Trek was so much fun on the TRS-80, it was talking to others on CompuServe that really interested me.  There was a world of others to talk to, also on their computers, whom you could talk with, leave messages for, or play games with!  It was magical!

I don’t know about about your childhood.  I guess mine was “average” for the son of two working parents in the 1980s.  My mom had remarried.  I had two younger stepbrothers from her second marriage.  Since I was already six years old when she remarried, there was an age difference between my brothers and I.  Not only an age difference, but a “parent difference”, since my stepfather felt my brothers were his, but I was the kid from the previous marriage.

I guess he loved me?  Honestly, to this day, I cannot honestly tell.  I think he did.  Since I was a “weird kid”, he sometimes rudely or unpleasantly asked me “are you on drugs or something?” because I was quiet and taciturn.  It’s not because I was being rude, but because by that age I already had something of an idea that I was alone and different from others.  My mom had remarried, I never really felt like I was his son in the same way as my grandfather treated me.  Parents, when they love their children, actually bond with them and dote on them.

Thomas Foreman never really bonded with me.

You might argue he did dote.  At times.  I still thank Dad to this day for helping me out when my first relationship flared out terribly and I needed his help escaping what was becoming a terrible and an abusive relationship.  Tom understood me while my Mom questioned my loyalty and ethics.  I understood both their perspectives.  I also understood my ex- and my betrayal of her in leaving our relationship.  From each of our perspectives, we are never wrong, and it is other people who are the issue.  It’s always others who are mistaken or need correction.  I’ll be honest, I was wrong.  So was my ex-.  I loved her, but we were wrong for each other.

So long story short, I learned to be alone.

I sought solace, comradery, and relationships from the other side of the computer screen.  Behind the glow of a cathode ray tube lay a world of other people with similar interests as me who wanted to talk with me!  We could talk about Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, the best cartoons to watch on a Saturday morning, whether Transformers have sex and what copulation between two robots would look like, and where do baby Transformers come from?

Oh!  Remember earlier how I told you that my Dad would ask me “are you on drugs or something?” 

In a supreme bit of universal irony, it was not me he had to worry about, but his own children whom he sired and raised that he needed to worry about.  My worst vice was for financial idiocy which would come to haunt me several times over my lifetime, but my two younger stepbrothers did learn about the wonders of alcohol, marijuana, and heroin before they graduated high school.

In the giant scope of things, it’s often that which we accuse others of that we are most guilty ourselves? Tom was a lifelong alcoholic who raised three boys, all of whom had troubles themselves.  It’s true; the vicious cycle repeats, the sins of the father do become the sins of the son.  All three of his children would struggle with financial lessons while his wife (my mother) would ravage and deplete her finances by doting on her two youngest sons.

33 Years Ago — 1990

So, by the time I graduated high school, completed two years of college, and joined the United States Air Force, I learned that there was a magical world online that understood me even if my own family did not.  I turned to that world for comfort and solace, to seek understanding and to be understood.  Using Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), I met many wonderful friends over the years.  The years became a decade, and some of them I still stay in touch with and we’re still friends today.

23 years Ago — 2000

By the year 2000, the world got turned on its head.  With the attack on the twin towers, the nationalism and flag-waving that ensued, and rapidly advancing technology in smartphones and social media, the next ten years radically changed how American society works and interacts.  I was no longer the lone wolf for spending vast amounts of time online, I was now just one among millions and soon to be billions entranced and enthralled by the glow of a computer screen.

The glow of a cathode ray tube (CRT) had been replaced by the glow of a liquid crystal display (LCD) and later light emitting diodes (LED) as our monitors became better, higher resolution, first much bigger (giant HDTV screens!) and then much smaller (portable smartphones!).  Now everyone was online, and no one was truly aware of the people physically around them sharing the same physical space as them.  We were becoming oblivious to each other as we “found our own tribes” online.

13 Years Ago — 2010

Work it harder, make it better
Do it faster, makes us stronger

More than ever, hour after hour
Work is never over

Work it harder, make it better
Do it faster, makes us stronger
More than ever, hour after hour
Work is never over

— Daft Punk, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (2001)

…and here our story picks up pace.  Nothing truly changes, but the pulse quickens and the heart accelerates!  Can you feel it?  Are you not entertained?!  The carousel began before I was born, but it’s spinning faster now.  CompuServe yielded to America Online (AOL).  Everyone was on AOL and AOL disks (and later compact discs) were everywhere.  AOL fell and yielded to MySpace, Friendster, Tumbler, Twitter, Facebook, and dozens of other social media outlets that promised to connect people in ways we never had before.

3 Years Ago — 2020

The pandemic changed life as radically as the twin towers did, but while September 11th was solely an American event, the COVID pandemic changed life on a global scale.  Everybody became shut-ins.  Everyone who could work from home did work from home, while those poor “essential employees” continued to work in the same places we abandoned while withstanding the worst of social labor.  It was nurses, educators, garbage collection, restaurant workers, retail, Uber drivers, Amazon warehouse employees, and Amazon delivery drivers that kept the economy running and society humming while people stayed glued to their computers at home.

Now — The Parasite that Feeds

In 1990, my high school physics class had to do a presentation on someone who influenced us and radically changed the world.  Many of my fellow students chose people like Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Carl Sagan, but I chose Jaron Lanier.

Jaron Lanier was the brilliant mind at Atari Research and VPL Research who along with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, Xerox/PARC, and William Gibson (“Neuromancer”) , we can thank for our current understanding and expectations of Virtual Reality.  I was amazed and enthralled with Jaron’s vision of Virtual Reality, and I wrote my paper and presentation on Jaron’s vision of the future.

My class loved it!

My physics teacher HATED it!

When I asked why my physics teacher detested my paper and presentation so much, he answered me “People are not ready for virtual reality.  People cannot even handle actual reality.”

Once again, it seems I caught a glimpse of the future that later came to pass.  Jaron Lanier became a musician and outspoken critic of Facebook, Twitter, and the Social Media engine that divides us as the algorithms of “getting the most views! getting the most likes! spending the most time!” becomes increasingly predatory.  Human beings are social creatures, but the online culture we created that is financed by time spent on a single site and most number of “likes” has idolized celebrity culture and “influencers”.  An influencer has no tangible product or service advancing society or the common good, and yet children would rather be a YouTube star or Twitch streamer than an engineer, a pilot, or an astronaut?!

In our headfirst race into celebrity culture, adoration, tribalism, and desire for acceptance by others while reviling anyone not of our tribe, we created monsters.

Politicians learned to play us against each other.  People learned to use our tribalism to raise themselves, deify themselves, and denigrate others.  Both the 24/7 news cycle on television and media, and the incessant need to be wanted on social media rewarded the most garish displays, the most violent acts, the most ostentatious statements… whatever it takes! …to garner views and attract people to following them.

We learned from each other that to be accepted, we need to remain true to our tribe.  We need to shout our virtues and decry anyone who does not agree.  We stopped listening to each other.  We stopped compromising.  We ceased to be civil.

But it doesn’t need to be this way.

How many “friends” do you have on Facebook?

How many “followers” do you have on Twitter?

If you delete your social media accounts, out of the hundreds or thousands of people you can friends or followers, who will truly notice your departure?  Who will lament your absence in a week from now?  In our ceaseless race for entertainment, adulation, and acceptance, we have the attention span of Mayflies.

And so, I got off the carousel.

Jaron Lanier and Jason Allison Fogleman were correct.  People are not ready for virtual reality, we can hardly accept actual reality.  Once we learn to be kind and civil and compromise with each other in real life, maybe we’ll learn to be humane online?