The Cult of TTFL (Trust The Force, Luke)

I am a geek. I know it. You know it. I love it. I make my living being a geek. I grok technology. I love to try all the new stuff, I write Perl scripts to automate my bird feeder. Ultra-geek.

And I've been doing it a long time. Ran a BBS in the 2400 baud modem days. Got my first Internet account in 1985, made my first Usenet post in 1989. I'm an Internet OG (old guy).

But I am the very first of that generation that was born into the non-digital age and raised in a slowly-accelerating age of technology. I'm old enough to remember the first color TV my parents bought. I predate cable TV, microwave ovens, MTV, Nintendo, Pong, Asteroids, Mario Brothers, Apollo, astronauts on the moon, personal computers, cassette tapes, 8-track tapes, music Compact Discs and MP3's.

I wrote my first computer programs in BASIC and stored them on punched paper tape. My first workstation was a shared-use TTY terminal (no glass tube, just keyboard and typewriter/paper interface) and a 300 baud acoustic modem to a mainframe computer. I learned COBOL on a MicroVAX in college.

In other words, I have a foot firmly planted in both worlds.

And I'm no Luddite. I don't long for the Good Old Days(TM), I enjoy technology and all that that implies. OK, I enjoy a few Luddy pastimes, but come on, they're not that bad. Just film photography and bowling, really. OK, I collect old cameras, but I have a digital camera too, honest!

I worry about the generation that came after mine. Those twenty-somethings who grew up in a world that had already largely absorbed the fact that everything would be computer-controlled or assisted from that point on.

My parent's generation distrusted computers.

My generation has respect for computers, but doesn't think they're all that.

My niece and nephew's generation thinks that anything that is NOT computer-generated or controlled is untrustworthy. And that unbending trust in technology just creeps me right out.

They're the TTFL (Trust The Force, Luke) generation, and they're scaring the hell out of me.

If a computer tells them that 2 plus 2 equals 5, they're not going to get out a pencil and try to figure it out for themselves. They're not even going to suspect that 5 might NOT be the answer - curiosity about such things has been bred out of them.

I was arguing why an auto-focus camera was not always right. Sometimes, it can be fooled into giving an inaccurate result. Silence. Stunned, surprised, disbelieving silence.

This cannot be. The auto-focus on a digital camera is computer-controlled. It cannot be wrong. If it says that an image (no longer called a 'photograph', by the way) is in focus, then that's what it is. Any appearance that the resulting image is not in focus must be due to other factors. It could not be that the auto-focus could be wrong. It would be more likely that the item being photographed was fuzzy than that the camera botched the job.

I made the mistake of insisting that *I* can focus a camera better than an auto-focus lens, most of the time.

I feel like John Henry. But I won't let that Steam Drill beat me down, no, no. I'll die with this SLR in my hand, Lord, Lord. I'll die with this manual focus camera in my hand.

If these kids' clocks told them that it was noon at midnight, they'd be laying on the beach with sunglasses on in the middle of the night - no way could the clock be wrong, must be something wonky with the sun.

These are the people who want computerized voting. What could go wrong? Technology doesn't make mistakes. There won't be any of those pesky 'Hanging Chad' problems when the technology weenies are running the elections. The answer may not honest, but it will be definite.

Technology is great. TTFL is Bad Mojo.

Winding a Watch is Cool,

Wiggy