New

I’m not sure if this will sound like me… I don’t know who you think I am. But I have grown tiresome of all things ‘new’: New cars, new phones, new foods, new “ways to connect”, they are (mostly) all crap now.

New cars are full of spyware, confusing and unnecessary controls, comforts that no one asked for or needs, not to mention a price tag that warrants a different echelon of new but delivers only on old promises.

New phones are equally cumbersome in their capabilities and lackluster in their ‘new’-ness. What could you possibly need that much compute, and that much screen to accomplish? No extent of ML integration and diction will ever morph the mobile phone into a competitive “productivity” device - at least not until we’ve lost the plot completely.

New foods are simple. New formats of old favorites to our psychology, but still the oldest enemies of our physiology: sugar, salt, fat, dense and liquid calories. Nothing new to see here.

New “ways to connect” might be the funniest of them all. I wonder how many more methodologies we must iterate on before we realize that the biological bandwidth limitation on human connectivity is a feature not a bug, and is immutable. Any change in that lies squarely within a single node on the network. And the irony of technology “connecting” people generally drives them apart in the aggregate - further both from themselves and from others.

New now means no, for me. No, I don’t want it. Odds are, it’s crap. Call me crotchety but I sift through piles of new, only to appreciate the old. So for that, I can thank the new. But I want the old; the tried and true; the black and blue. To hell with the new.