Holger’s weblog

When geeks lose touch with reality…

September 8th, 2009

I admit that I’m a huge fan of TechCrunch, they have great authors and do a wonderful job reporting from the world of tech startups. Usually their articles are quite insightful and they often hear about products and deals way before the mainstream media. But at times they do get a little bit carried away. Michael Arrington, the site’s founder and one of the principal authors, is probably the best example. If you read some of his articles and don’t know anything about him, you would be forgiven for filing him under “complete nutcase”. The whole series on how we need to stop the “barbaric tradition” of shaking hands was bad enough (sounds a bit like a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder to me, which I don’t have a problem with as long as I’m not being told that my behaviour, which is normal and polite to the majority of people in my culture, is disgusting), but yesterday’s article about how he would love to wear a “life recorder” makes me seriously doubt his sanity. His whole line of reasoning is that, since we already put so much information about ourselves on the internet, this would be a much smaller step than the privacy abandonments we have already gone along with. So just because I have opened up selected areas of my life for others to see, the step to opening up every private moment is smaller than that? That’s sort of like saying that since you’ve already ruined your body by smoking, it’s only a small step to take heroin. Yes, sometimes it’s a long way to the cliff and only a very small step to falling down, but the sane people stop at the edge of the cliff and realize that it would be foolish to take another step.

That’s the problem with technology geeks today – sometimes they get so carried away by the possibilities that they fail to see the utter stupidity of doing everything just because it can be done. And then they wonder why nobody takes them seriously anymore. So unless Michael suddenly claims that his article was some kind of satire (it doesn’t sound like one and given the enthusiastic comments by his readers, I doubt they thought it was – and I worry a little bit about the world I live in…), his future articles, no matter how good, will mean a lot less to me. Good thing TechCrunch has a few authors who appear to be more in touch with the real world…

Entry Filed under: Technology