Where we are with computery technology at the moment is not only dangerous but outright irresponsible – things are complicated and manifold, things are badly explained or just not explained, things are lengthy and boring
There’s not many people who would tolerate this sort of abuse of their attention, with the exception of technically-inclined computer programmers and other such people who in earlier days might have been motorcycle obsessed, tractor obsessed, bridge and tunnel engineering obsessed, music theory and performance obsessed, astronomy and astrology obsessed system addicts – that’s a specific type of person with a specific hole in their lives filled by being obsessed with a system of some kind, and that phase only lasts a short while of their lives before which they were incompetent and after which they’re too tired and knackered to give a shit about that sort of crap because none of it really mattered after all
The dangerous aspect is the prejudiced assumption that everybody is interested in this sort of stuff and is invested into learning about it, knowing about it, and being fluent in it enough to actually participate in it as a common currency of the day – it isn’t, only for those computer programmer types, whereas for everyone else, it’s just boring and abstract and poorly explained, clearly the babblings of an inadequate personality with too much time on their hands and a deficient sense of when to give up
The bad thing is that our attention is being presumed – it is taken for granted that our interest is there, our attention is going to last long enough for it to make sense, and that we even see any kind of incentive in pursuing this meaningless babble long enough to see a potential result – for most normal people the answer is no, we’re not interested, no, you don’t have our attention for free, and no there’s no apparent incentive leading to a result that is useful – all we see is the hindrance of an unhinged philosophy-like uselessness of system on top of mechanism on top of system on top of mechanism, all too reliant on anyone’s memory to work more than once – nobody can remember any of that stuff unless they’re obsessed to the point of it being a character defect, and that’s the bad thing – assuming everyone is like that
#attention #interest #disinterest #intermittence #periodicity #incentive