What Happened to Tech’s Magic?

Get. Off. My. Lawn.

I’ve been pondering something for a while now, but have held off “thinking out loud” about it because I was worried I might sound like a guy yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. But f*ck it, this is my site, and I think it’s time to air this one out: Technology isn’t delivering on the magic anymore. Instead, it feels like a burden, or worse.

For decades, digital technology delivered magical moments with a regularity that inspired evangelical devotion. For me, the very first of these moments came while using a Macintosh in 1984. Worlds opened up as that cursor tracked my hand’s manipulation of the mouse. Apple’s graphical user interface — later mimicked by Microsoft — was astonishing, captivating, and open ended. I was a kid in college, but I knew culture, business, and society would never be the same once entrepreneurs, hackers, and dreamers starting building on Apple’s innovations.

And build they did. From that point onward, the magic continued, sometimes in massive leaps (like the Mac itself), sometimes in smaller ways that built upon those leaps. One such example was my first interaction with desktop publishing software, in 1987. Learning how to work with that software turned me from college hack to professional media creator, and I never looked back. What I didn’t imagine was what the tech industry would do to the media world I was so eager to be a part of…