Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Toys For Tots

Not necessarily dumbing down, but infantilizing:
Google claims you’ll enjoy holding its tablet, reading books on it and playing games, because the size is better for all of those things. Of course that means watching movies is a diminished experience.*

How about writing? Or creating a podcast? How about building a website or putting together a serious photo portfolio?

People don’t want computers that do anything anymore because people don’t want to do anything anymore.

The worker drones will always have their spreadsheet generators, but when they come home they want something deliberately too simple to run Excel.

And that means their kids won’t have access to the computing software and hardware necessary to create things beyond sophisticated finger paintings. And the nation will slowly get dumber and collapse in on itself. Meanwhile the country that builds nearly all of these devices, China, is pumping out spaceships and people smart enough to build them. Oh well. We can import those people, and use their math skills to put a rover on Mars as long as Beijing keeps buying enough of our debt to finance the project.

*We did not spend many dollars for a large high-definition television (& added monthly money for cable service)  so we can pay Netflix even more each month to watch crummy movies on an insanely expensive toy w/ a postage stamp-sized screen while dropping a load. Yet millions of Americans, already so fucking stupid you can't dumb anything down any further for them, have. You deserve what you get, suckers.

4 comments:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

The worker drones

Honeybee science fail.
~

Weird Dave said...

Who said anything about honeybees? (At least their colonies show some intelligence.)

Substance McGravitas said...

Really you've got a better shot at being creative with Google's thingie. Android's more open than iOS.

But if you think a kid who's curious isn't gonna make either of those things do something awful you don't know kids.

M. Bouffant said...

Open The Androids! Editor:
Are the kidz going to make it "do" something awful or just "find" something awful?