Tran|Script

When I first saw the tweets flowing about the iPad presentation I was skipping, I half-jokingly said what I’d rather have is a Timex/Sinclair 1000.

But it was a weird moment, because I then went and go a link to an image of the TS-1000 and it all came flooding back. It was a huge emotional rush. Not to get too sappy, but it threw me back to a moment in time where I became the person I am now, sitting in front of a TV screen writing Basic loops, and playing rudimentary games in 1983, typing in some piece of code that would simulate the Towers of Hanoi that my Dad printed had photocopied for me from god-knows-where. And when I looked at the iPad image after that, it didn’t make me angry as much anymore as just sad.

I didn’t fully understand that until I just read Payne:

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.

Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the “hacker era” of digital history. Now that consumers and traditional media understand the digital world, maybe there’s proportionally less need for freewheeling technological experimentation and platforms that allow for the same. Maybe the hypothetical mom doesn’t need a real computer. As long as real computers stick around for people who do need them, maybe there’s no harm in that.

Wherever we stand in digital history, the iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent from my own. There’s nothing wrong with that; people make consumer decisions every day based on their values. If I don’t like the product that the iPad turns out to be once released, I’m free to simply not buy it. These things have a way of evolving, and I won’t preclude the possibility that Apple eventually addresses concerns about the openness of the device.

For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home.

Amen.