The April 17, 2006
PinFeed Almanack
Take 2

  
  Another fortnight, another Almanack.  (I know it's only been a week, but I
  don't want to raise expectations.)
  
  I see pinfeed people.  They're everywhere.  They only see what they want to
  see.  They don't know they're pinfeed. (Apologies to Mr Shyamalan.)
  
  Most of us enjoy technology, and progress in general.  Even in our most
  fervently nostalgic moments, we wouldn't want to go back to a New York infested
  with cholera and swimming in horse manure, or an industrial age of twelve-hour
  days, six-day weeks, child labor and coal pollution.  And it only gets worse,
  venturing backward in time to an idyllic age of unreliable handcrafting,
  subsistence agriculture, illiteracy and disease.  Technology has rescued
  a vast proportion of the human race from lives that were 'nasty, brutish and
  short'. 
  
  And yet, we have deep misgivings about the direction and pace of progress.  It's
  not a new feeling, but it's become progressively more urgent since the days of
  Stop The World:  I Want to Get Off.  We have great control over the play-lists
  on our ipods, but not so much confidence in EZ-pass, electronic voting, or the
  security of our credit records.
  
  Unease, when it hasn't morphed into outright fear, expresses itself in humour
  and mild resentment, so we come up with terms like 'BlueTooth Fairy'
  (apparently, a cellphone user obsessively and publicly chattering into his
  bluetooth headset), and 'Blackberry Jammer' (a frantic multitasking emailer). 
  
  My own little conceit is an inverse formulation, in that it's offered with
  empathy, even affection:  'Pinfeed'.  I define it as, 'an adjective describing
  one who accepts an arbitrary level of technological development but resists
  further progress'.  It appeals to me because the term doesn't carry any really
  derogatory connotations, and I fancy that I can almost understand what a pinfeed
  printer does, with its tiny hammers banging noisily on the ribbon to make
  various patterns of ink impressions.  But who really 'gets' a laser printer? 
  Oh, sure, I use them and I'm not going back, but I keep an Epson JX-80 in the
  basement, just in case.  Of course, most pinfeed people constantly adjust the
  level of 'acceptable technology'.  We're not really backward, just a little
  slow, and we'd like it to be slower.
  
  I'm curious how many people would admit to such a self-classification.  Only a
  small handful of Technologists (with a capital 'T') really embrace the extreme
  possibilities of robotics, genetics, and nanotechnology; they are definitely not
  'pinfeed', and they could probably build a laser printer from junkyard scrap in
  a couple of hours.  For the rest of us, the pace of change is frightening, and
  we spend a lot of time and energy looking for reassurance that things aren't
  spinning out of control.  That's what drives my recent reading list: 
  
      - Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling
      - Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics
      - Jared Diamond's Collapse
      - Jane Jacobs' Dark Age Ahead
      - Karen King's The Gospel of Mary of Magdala
      - Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near
  
  I recommend all of the above; they're authoritative, well-written, and each very
  different from the others.  They deserve a review page, but I probably can't
  contribute anything that hasn't been said better elsewhere.
  
  The problem is that there is absolutely no reassurance from the economists, or
  the theologians, or the social scientists.  Mostly they don't venture a
  pertinent comment, being content to share their expertise regarding the past,
  rather than speculate on the future  But when they do prophesy, the message is,
  'We're out of control already, it's going to get worse, and if we're lucky we
  won't live to see the consequences of our profligacy.'
  
  Kurzweil is different.  He's a Technologist, and he wants very much to reassure
  us that the Singularity of which he speaks is both inevitable and beneficial. 
  I'm not yet entirely comfortable with his conclusion that it will be beneficial;
  that may take awhile.  But in the weeks during and since my reading of The
  Singularity is Near, I've been looking for confirmation of his assertions of
  inevitability.  They aren't loud or frequent, but Intel and IBM and MIT are all
  saying that he's right. 
  
  
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