Spent a good hour tidying cables today. Three boxes full of them. You can do a fairly good review of what came and went in the past four decades just by explaining the hows, whys and whats of these cables. How we used to load software from audio cassettes. Peculiar items needed to get early modems to work. Dozens of cables from things that had caught on, so the cable was in all sorts of gadgets, and peculiar cables from technologies that failed. It is easy to understand all those people that simply announce they have had “enough”.
“I don’t even try to keep up anymore” announces a friend. Yet straight after that he wants me to help set up something on his smartphone. It makes no sense. Sure, at times, gadget mania gets out of hand. And we have all failed in predictions or made bad buying decisions. But tech is life. Since some ape picked up a branch and whacked another ape, we always look for better ways of doing things. Faster. More fun. Think different and all that. At worse because we get bored of the old stuff.
“Why on earth do you do that to yourself?” Another friend wondering where I find the patience to try and hack my kids’ latest game, or set up something peculiar on my home network. Tinkering is a way of life. Looking for better ways to live. Tweaking and adapting. People complain about how technology is distancing us from nature but we are simply adapting. Charles Darwin would be proud of my cable collection.