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The Increasing Irrelevancy of Digital Technology

I’ll admit it, I’m a nerd. A geek extraordinaire. A pseudo-hacker-wannabe.

But I hate using digital technology.

Let me clarify: I love the idea of technology. But I can’t stand the way it’s being, and has been, developed.

When I was young, I devoured sci-fi books by great authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and so forth. I was absolutely enraptured by the idea of what technology could theoretically do. Robots, artificial intelligence, space travel, and all sorts of fantastic things. Along came Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Star Wars, and it seemed like our bright future was right around the corner. And you have to understand, we were all waiting for that utopia. We wanted it to become reality.

Then we started noticing the warning signs. George Orwell’s 1984. Films like Blade Runner, Ghost In the Shell, (the original, not the live-action remake) and even The Matrix warned us of possible ultimate end-game scenarios. It was exhilarating, yes, but also a dark foreshadowing of the consequences of technology.

Fast-forward thirty years. Now we have smartphones, internet-connected fridges, self-driving auto-updating cars, toasters that can tweet, and absolutely none of it does what I thought technology was supposed to do: make life simpler. The idea was that computers and technology were supposed to take care of the mundane things, so that people could get back to just enjoying life. But that’s not what happened at all.

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Macwards Compatible

I recently had a discussion about Apple products with a friend. As usual when I discuss Apple, it reminded me of how much control companies have over our overall technological experience.

I recently picked up a vintage Power Mac G4 (a Graphite G4 AGP, for those wondering), and the first thing I thought of was “what OS should I put on it?”

If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, you’d know that I’m a proponent of Linux, and I knew Ubuntu at one point had a distro made for PowerPC-based computers, so I started digging. And what I found kind of both disgusted me, and confirmed what I knew about Apple all along.

Time warp: I remember, back in the late 90’s, when they first introduced Mac OS X. It was a huge slap in the face of Microsoft at the time, because it signaled a transition to a “real” operating system, based on Unix. Which of course meant that it was stable, fast, and easily extended. And then of course, Apple took the very best things about Unix, locked them down, and made it into a proprietary platform that was (in some ways) worse than Microsoft Windows.

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New Directions

I feel like God is drawing me into wanting to do music ministry full time. I don’t know what that will look like yet.

I don’t know if that’s something I need to go back to school for, and I’m not really thrilled about that. It would be exciting, but at the same time… I don’t feel like I could do it with my current job.

I really like my current job, but I know it is not my life’s calling. I would much rather teach music and lead worship for a living. But how can I do that? I can’t just quit my job. Not yet, at least.

What would that (going back into music ministry) look like? How could I (understanding it’s not me) make that happen? Why is God showing me this? Why is God giving me a desire to make worship my career, after so many years of me saying “I will never do professional music ministry again”? Can I do that without sacrificing my heart? I want to be pure in motivation. I never want to make money worshipping. But I would love to be able to do that all the time.

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How Luxury Makes You Lazy

Luxury: a condition of abundance or great ease and comfort : sumptuous environment: something adding to pleasure or comfort but not absolutely necessary: an indulgence in something that provides pleasure, satisfaction, or ease


Merriam-Webster

Have you ever heard the phrase “Affordable Luxury”? The biggest rage nowadays is “affordable luxury” items. This is a marketing exec’s dream come true. But by definition, a “luxury” is something you don’t need: it’s something you want.

There are entire industries built around this tactic. Billions upon billions of dollars of stuff that people don’t need. Sometimes, you didn’t even know you wanted it until some salesman shows you. But all of a sudden “now you have to have it.”

What a crock of baloney.

The truth is, comfort is overrated. Convenience is overrated. Sometimes it’s better to work through something than just have an “Easy Button” (there you go, marketing in action…) Because when you do more, you learn more, and you make mistakes and grow. If everything is easy, then you never learn how to struggle through difficult things.

Sometimes people say “I’ve worked hard for this” as justification for buying something expensive or luxurious. But you didn’t earn anything that God didn’t give you the ability for in the first place. We don’t deserve it, we don’t need it, and almost every time, it ends up being all about us- and nothing to do with God.

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Things of Eternal Impact

Triangulum Galaxy

A while back, I started working through a book titled “The Nine Laws” by Ivan Throne. There’s a lot of philosophical content there, but one of the biggest things I really had to think about was the Third Law of Purpose.

Clearly, my purpose in this world is to worship God. This has been evident in my life for as long as I can remember, though as a child I didn’t know what it was to be used for. Everything I am passionate about, everything I am gifted in, every opportunity I have taken has led me closer to this realization.

I am a worshipper. So why doesn’t my life reflect that singular purpose?

I am distracted by non-essentials. I think one of the greatest crimes of our generation is pushing the idea that nothing has eternal value. And if nothing is eternal, then everything is temporal, and you might as well get whatever you can, right?

But there is so much more to life than “getting the most toys.” As a Christian, we know Jesus (the Ultimate Sensei) was focused on things of Heaven, not of Earth. He knew the mundane things we care about have no lasting impact in the spiritual realm. Repeatedly, He spoke “What is the Kingdom of God like?” because people naturally have no clue.

Which parts of my life have eternal impact? Which parts of your life have eternal impact?

My job? My writing? My music? My prayer life? Where do I see God moving, and where do I want to spend my time?

I’ll be honest, I don’t see God moving much in my job. I work in an office. It’s nice, I like my coworkers, and I like my job. But it’s not a ministry. It’s not serving God as much as it’s serving my family and myself by providing a wage.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with providing for my family. But despite people telling me “that’s a ministry!” I never feel like it is. It doesn’t fulfill me, it doesn’t provide opportunities to minister, and it doesn’t fulfill my purpose- to be a worshipper.

I don’t know where God wants me to be just yet. But I’m praying that He shows me where I can minister, and what that will look like. I’m okay with going into ministry full time now; but for years I wasn’t. I remember telling God “I will never do worship ministry for money ever again” because I’d been burned so many times.

There’s something to be said for that, though… most churches I’ve been in didn’t have worship ministry as much as they had music ministry. And just because you’re playing music in church does not make it worship. Not even close!

No, I don’t want to be part of “music ministry.” I want to worship with everything I have. No restraints, like King David. Holding nothing back. This is true worship. Most churches have never seen that, and wouldn’t know what to do with it if they did.

But I’ve seen true worship, and it’s changed me. And I’ve discovered it’s an honor to help train other people to be worshippers as well.

This is my life’s purpose: to worship God with complete self abandon, and train up others to do the same.

This is my eternal calling. This is my purpose.

Everything else in my life is secondary: I need to live like it.

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Cardboard Boxes

I was recently having a discussion with a friend about certain churches teaching very poor doctrine. We talked about Word of Faith teachers, faith healers, and the root of why the modern church is so enamored by it.

If you’re here reading this, and you’re involved in a church (or listen to a preacher) who teaches that it’s God’s will that everyone be healed, and that you just have to receive it- please understand that I desperately want this to be true, but it’s not biblical.

There will always be people who defend these preachers, mostly because they accept their word over the Bible and sound doctrine. (People who do this, by definition, belong to a cult.) People want insta-faith healing and prosperity to be true. But God’s will isn’t a toy that we can manipulate.

There are plenty of websites out there that can rip apart the Prosperity Gospel with scripture all day long. Just do a search. One of my favorite teachers who calls out these charlatans is Mike Winger. You can check out his Youtube channel here.

But really, if we expose Prosperity (aka “Health and Wealth”) preachers, there will be a dozen more that pop up in their place. To fix the problem, you need to expose the root of the sickness- because it’s obvious people who want to believe it will flock to it.

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Taking Out the Trash

Once again, I was alerted to the fact that my WordPress site has been hacked once more… I don’t think I’m really surprised at it any more. There’s so much going on, and between PHP, MySQL, and WordPress, there’s tons of exploits that allow people to take over a website.

Thankfully they didn’t delete everything. Which reminds me… time to make backups again.

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Brave New World

As I posted about previously, I’ve decided in my feeble attempts to remain modern, hip, and “relevent” I’m diving into trying WordPress’ new Gutenberg editor. There will be some things you might notice, like drop caps and such. You may see some spacing or paragraph types that look weird.

On my end, things look much different. There aren’t any controls to modify blocks, other than adding colors or external CSS classes… which means I would have to learn CSS to be able to make any use of these blocks.

There’s no “more” bar to insert, there’s no font options, no settings to modify. In essence, the editor has changed from a word processor to a graphic layout editor. And as I said, I’m a writer… not a coder. But I discover when you click the magic “+” button between blocks… holy cow, there’s everything!

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Blog Woes (and Other First World Problems)

A big part of having a blog is writing stuff. And as a semi-serious writer, I don’t really have a lot of time to mess with stuff that’s gimmicky. I need something simple, effective, and trouble-free.

For writing blog posts, I normally would use the WordPress editor- until I discovered they recently replaced it with a piece of garbage something called the “Gutenberg Editor.” I’ll be honest: the new WordPress Gutenberg block editor is extremely frustrating and unintuitive for me. And I’m not alone. As for now, you can install a plugin that lets you revert back to the classic WordPress TinyMCE editor (why do I even have to manually install something for that??).

But the absolute worst part of this whole disaster is that WordPress admins and developers absolutely don’t care at all that everybody hates it. This alone is enough reason to give me pause.

Realistically, this is a huge PR disaster for Automattic. They have gotten so much negative press for this, they’d have to be blind not to realize this mandatory rollout was a huge mistake. It even caused their Accessibility lead developer to resign.

I’m not a web developer or a programmer- I’m a writer. I don’t do custom coded plugins, I don’t use custom media types, I don’t mess with CSS or PHP unless I have to, and even if I did, there are already plugins that handle all those functions.

I don’t use WordPress.com’s commercial products- I use the open-source software backend to run my self-hosted site. I feel like they should be free to develop whatever they want for paying clients as need be, but the backend should have been left alone. It’s painfully obvious they only were considering their commercial clients, and not the thousands of developers (running millions of sites) that use the backend in different ways. Even with thousands of pieces of feedback saying this was a bad idea, they went forward with it anyway.

However:

In an attempt to not sound like a whiny brat, I’m going to actually try to make something good out of this. I understand why WordPress.com changed their editor to compete with other layout-driven website designers like Wix. I understand that the old editor had issues. I know there needed to be improvement (even if I vehemently disagree with the direction they went).

So in order for me to fully use the Gutenberg editor, it will require me to learn what it can do, and why. Only then will I be able to give constructive feedback to hopefully make it better for people like me, who don’t care about all the developer stuff and just want to write.

Going forward, I will be documenting my foray into the Brave New World of blocks and web developing and all that stuff, even if only for me to be able to have a well-reasoned argument as to why I don’t like it. Who knows, I may even throw in a tutorial here and there as I learn how to use it.

But really, isn’t writing supposed to be fun and enjoyable? It kind of makes me wonder if WordPress was trying to make blogging more difficult. I don’t appreciate them trying to force me to become a developer (or having to pay someone else to). I just want to write.

We shall see: time will tell. The proof is in the pudding. And all that stuff.

(But I’m still a firm believer in “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”)

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Write Or Wrong?

For the last few weeks and months, I’ve been pondering how to deal with my growing list of things to do. I’ve started thinking about what I can do long-term, and what that would impact in my daily life. And as I discussed previously, there’s no end of things to do, and everything I do takes away from something else.

But when I shift my focus long-term, things look a little different. Playing music (even part-time) doesn’t seem to be a reasonable thing for residual income. I probably still would do it because I enjoy it so much. But long-term income, probably not. That would require a lot of travel, working through weekends and missing church (and my family) a lot.

In comparison, writing fiction novels is something I could see myself doing long-term. It doesn’t require a lot of travel (though going to conventions could happen). It can be done whenever I want, however I want, and can eventually bring in residual income.

It would require a lot of work up front, however. If I made any money, I’d have to incorporate again (which I’ve done before) and it would mean filing taxes quarterly, keeping track of everything for deductions, and a lot of work that isn’t actually writing. Continue reading “Write Or Wrong?”