Pete's Log: Freedom
Entry #2696, (Random Crap)(posted when I was 46 years old.)
I have some half-formed ideas based on a recent post by Professor Alan Jacobs. Instead of waiting until I have the bandwidth to fully explore and express those ideas, I'm just going to dump them here as is.
When I got my first car, I felt an incredible sense of freedom. Yet when it comes to transportation, I think I now get a greater sense of freedom from a good public transit system than from a car. Our recent trip to Munich reinforced that feeling.
Professor Jacobs quotes from a 1974 book that laments what becoming passengers has done to us and then observes that you could liken "devices" to "vehicles" and "passengers" to "users" and the book's complaints would feel at home in our current era. He concludes "For those of us who live under technocracy, to contemplate the previously dominant technology always feels like sniffing the air of freedom."
But what I'm left wondering instead is what is the digital equivalent to public transit? How do we find freedom with our devices in a sustainable and equitable manner?
Like I said... half-formed ideas...