Category: Technology

The horrifying digi-children of the future

No, I like small children. I really do. I’m always staring at them out in public, grooving on how these teacup humans are transparently emotional, so openly interested in the world. Then one day I was walking down the street and I saw a kid in a stroller, couldn’t have been more than ten months old. And I could see her little pudgy hands up in front of her face, and I thought, “How funny, she looks like she’s holding a phone.” Until I got closer and saw she really was holding a phone. I went around the corner and into a café, where I met the husband of a friend, who was breakfasting with their two-and-a-half-year-old son. At a certain point he gave the boy his phone to keep him quiet. “He’s better at using it than I am,” he observed to me. The next weekend I was on a bus behind a mother in her thirties and her lively toddler son. I was impressed by how present she was with him, how intelligently they conversed. But she started talking with another adult, and when he kept interrupting she dialed up a game on her phone and gave it to him. Read more

Some real machinery inside our guts

I had a day where I saw two movies. It was a Sunday in August, and a life-change sort of thing was happening, or continuing to happen, that made me want to get out of the house. My priority was “Hitman: Agent 47,” which unfortunately proved quite negligible. But first I went to a 10:25 AM showing of “The End of the Tour.” This two-hander about David Foster Wallace was so moving to me, I started to cry about fifteen minutes in. Read more

Quote of the day

My ancestors left Mexico and came to America to make a better life for themselves. One day, I hope to leave Twitter and to do the same.

—Vicente Lozano

I have been tweeting a good deal. (Because of my schedule I tend to tweet and walk, which so far has not gotten me into any accidents.) I’ve found that Twitter feeds my ego and starves it at the same time. I love how Vince can articulate the moral ambiguities of this Matrix-like world in a hundred and forty.

The smartphone of my friend

This device recently responded to an e-mail of mine as follows:

So ad a. Generation how so you move forwards withheld rag line tad line thing could be s

Sent from my iPhone much worse! Where’s the hope. In that ?

The next day I was at a cafe, and the cute young people at the table next to me were wondering who made the latest “Star Trek” movie. They knew it was the man responsible for “Firefly.” So the tall one picked up her iPhone, held it close to her mouth, and said, “Who made ‘Firefly’?” There was a split-second’s pause, and then the phone said, “Joss Whedon.”

I fear for us.

A technology not yet perfected

Fran Lebowitz:

Someone just showed me an iPad, and he showed it to me, and he said: “Fran, you could get this. Look how easy this is.” I thought, this is much easier. I’m going to wait until it really works because at the point when it really works, it’s going to be a pad of paper. As soon as it becomes a yellow legal pad, I’m set.