OK Computer, Goodbye

My laptop broke the other day. It was the third laptop that’s broken on me this year. Perhaps I am having a bad year. More likely laptops are. Most consumer gadgets are crap these days.

The third laptop that broke was my own laptop, not one I was testing for work. I didn’t have another to use. I was forced to borrow my wife’s MacBook Air (which has outlasted more PC laptops than I want to talk about).

I am not a Mac person. I use Linux, which lets me do things however I like. Going to the Mac was disorienting. You do not do things how you want. You do things how Apple wants. The keyboard shortcuts are different, I needed to fix things I didn’t on Linux. It was rough. Even when I did get things working in a way that didn’t drive me crazy, I was sharing the laptop. My wife teaches students 3 hours a day most days. During that time I had no laptop.

And I loved it.

I hate screens. I stare at one far too much. I have to. This is the compromise I make for the ability to live the way we do. It’s a compromise I make knowingly, gratefully even, but it is still a compromise, with negative trade offs.

What I did not realize is how much time I was spending staring at a screen when I did not need to be staring at a screen. It’s deceptively easy to tell yourself you’re working when you type a few words and then when you’re done, you just “look something up real quick” and then next thing you know you’ve spent half an hour researching the best way to do some weird thing you’ll probably never do anyway.

This is my vice. I know I have it. It’s part of what makes me good at my job, but it also leads me to spend more time than I need to staring at screen.

This got me thinking about that old axiom, if you don’t have it, you don’t need it. Do I really need a laptop? I wouldn’t if I didn’t have one.

Once And Future Luddite

I hated computers as a kid. Didn’t like video games. Didn’t really interact with a computer other than to type up school papers. That was true all the way through college, the late 90s. The birth of the internet. Mostly skipped it. When all the nerdy people I knew were hanging out on the proto internets of BBS and mailing lists, I just didn’t care. I took a look, but most of the time I was out rock climbing, body surfing, writing, and playing music. Those were the things I obsessed over, screens didn’t have any appeal. I wrote in notebooks. I recorded music to tape. Why would I need a screen?

This continued until about 2001, when, through a variety of coincidences, blind luck, and, I’ve always assumed, some coffee spilled on keyboards in the offices of a place called Wired, it was made apparent to me that I might be able to make money writing about things that happened on screens. I happened to be standing outside a shoe store on Broadway in Manhattan when I realized this, which is an odd detail that I feel is somehow meaningful, though I haven’t yet figured out how it’s meaningful.

Whatever the case, at the time this door swung open I was a chef running a restaurant, working 60-70 hours a week in a hot, stressful kitchen. I loved it, but it was a lot of work. The idea that I could make money without leaving the house was an absolute revelation. Sign me up.

So I pulled out my then girlfriend’s MacBook and started figuring out how to build stuff on the web. About as fast as I learned it, I wrote about it for Webmonkey. That was possible back in those days because there wasn’t a lot to learn and there weren’t that many people learning it.

The rest as they say, is history. I wrote for Webmonkey on a freelance basis for the next four years (while traveling the world for some of it), and weirdly, I started actually building things on screens. That became a second source of income, but it also became a kind of obsession.

At first it was just staying on top of what was happening, what I needed to write about for Webmonkey and what I could use to make this website better. I started off with shared hosting accounts, but before long I was working with real servers, both virtual and bare metal (clients). I kept going deeper down into the stack as it’s known. I wrote about this recently for Wired if you’re interested in that journey.

Suffice to say that in the end I became quite capable of doing just about anything with a computer. The Luddite had succumbed to the screen.

But the more I shared my wife’s laptop this summer, the more I realized I didn’t care anymore. I don’t want to think about technology anymore, my job no longer requires me too, so why am I? In the end it felt like an addiction.

Maybe that’s too strong of a word, but it had compulsive elements, born of that weird combination of boredom and ease, that reminded me of drinking.

What if… I just didn’t get a new laptop?

So that’s what I did. Or didn’t.

I got all the data off my hard drive onto an external SSD, which I plug into my wife’s laptop when I need to edit photos or videos, which turns out to be pretty much the only time I need a laptop. I manage all that with a super nerdy tool called git-annex, so it’s not like I gave up on tech entirely, I just thought, why not live off a drive instead of a screen? It’s the data that matters right? Not the device. The need for the device is just marketing.

I’ve been writing more on paper again, even for work. When it’s time to type things up, or when there’s something that’s just easier to do digitally I use my $75 tablet or an old iPad the whole family shares (and hardly use).

Not having a laptop is perfect for how I want to live now, with less time spent on a screen, less time spent thinking about digital problems, and more time spent with my family, working on projects that exist in the real world. Projects made of wood and metal, governed by things like physical limitations and weather, requiring sweat and blood and maybe even bone.