A rant about how ignorant people who don’t understand how difficult things work assume they run on magic and supernatural make-believe.
As technology advances, the sheer number of things that have to simultaneously function increases exponentially as they stack on top of one another, forming increasingly complex devices and services—far exceeding any level humans can intuitively comprehend.
This results in many people believing they work using magic, failing to appreciate the sheer complexity of something as “simple” as loading an image from the other side of the world onto a device you carry around in your pocket and displaying it in less than a second (or less than a tenth of a second, thanks to CDNs and reverse-proxies) without the need of any cables or bulky antennae.
How can one not constantly be in awe of how all this technology is even functioning? Just half a century ago none of this was even remotely possible, yet, nowadays, something as miraculous as this is considered “simple” and classified under “basic functionality”.
Yet so many complain and lament about the most trivial of issues like pages taking more than a second to load, their app crashing once in a blue moon, or some other minor error forcing these unfortunate souls to have to… god forbid, restart the app.
Imagine if you lived just 50 years ago (oops, many people are indeed older than 50), could you even begin to trace how the very device in your hand works using only knowledge from then? From the tiny, nanometre-sized transistors in the processor so small and so dense they enter the realm of quantum mechanics and brush against limits of physics, could you trace just how many things have to go right at the same time in order to load a simple image from the internet onto their screen?
Conversely, how many ways could it have gone wrong each time? And why do they not? It’s simply incredible how everything works nowadays, with devices so complex even the tiniest amount of damage can cause them to cease functioning altogether.
To throw a fit when something doesn’t go right as “promised” is a comical approach that fails to appreciate the sheer complexity of modern technology. Sure, it would be better if my internet doesn’t go down from time to time, or if my applications never, ever crash, but that’s not realistically possible, is it? Given just how much has to go right at the same time, not all of which necessarily under anyone’s control. I remember a period when one of the submarine cables required repair and all traffic had to be rerouted for a game I was playing, causing almost 100ms of additional latency.
100ms! Blasphemous! I paid for high-speed internet, why isn’t it working as promised? If it wasn’t for the lag I wouldn’t have lost to that noob. I demand an explanation!
This world doesn’t work on promises—technology is not literally magic that does whatever you wish for it to do. One of my main gripes with the fantasy genre is the ubiquity of “healing magic”, as if the magic is capable of knowing what a “healed” state looks like using the power of… what, mind-reading, genetic sequencing, time manipulation…? Healing magic is one of the most innately-ludicrous abilities and it’s absurd how it’s almost always regarded as “basic”.
Just like how people regard complex technological functions as “basic” even though the devices have no idea what you want to do, let alone a mind to understand what they are doing themselves—they can’t tell if they’re functioning or not, they just function according to their program. If it works, it works, if it doesn’t, it just gives you a “goddamned error message” instead of trying to fix itself for you.
Thinking intuitively and taking things for granted using the power of ignorance and lack of thought is why so many of the younger generation are so entitled especially when it comes to the different services and technology available to us in our modern world. They know that these things work—they don’t know how they work, and more importantly, they don’t care that they don’t know.
Their complaints are reminiscent of parents promising their children to buy a toy, coming back empty-handed after an unexpected car accident, and watching their child throw a tantrum while screaming “false advertising”.
Yes, even when people are not paying for something, they still decry “false advertising”. Such is our younger generation nowadays, thinking that their existence alone is valuable to others and lamenting about privacy and targeted advertising as if that makes them perfectly just in their otherwise absurd demands.
Just because one doesn’t get awestruck whenever they browse a video on their tablet or feel impressed by the miracle of video-calling someone over the internet every single time doesn’t mean it justifies the ignorance that leads to never being able to do so—just because people don’t randomly hit others on the street because they know the repercussions doesn’t mean I’m justified in not knowing the repercussions simply because I don’t randomly hit people on the street.
Even so, should I not, at the very least, be aware that I shouldn’t do it? Should people, at the very least, be aware that modern technology is far too intricate to be taken for granted even if they don’t know precisely why it is so complex?
Adddendum: I wonder how long it’ll take before someone spins my argument into saying that everything constantly breaks all the time. No, they don’t, but none of that is evidence that they’re guaranteed to work by divine intervention.
In addition, none of this is saying they’re supposed to break all the time or that we all don’t deserve technology, rather that the line between acceptability and unacceptability is often incorrectly-drawn. There are still standards to hold, and nobody should be making promises they can’t keep, but accidents and unforeseen circumstances still happen; we should be more understanding of that. A webpage taking two seconds to load should not trigger the same reaction as a website going down for 6 hours.