When I was a kid, the word nerd was an insult. These days, everyone and their mother is a self-proclaimed nerd and I believe the word has become distorted beyond recognition. I suppose I consider myself a nerd as well, though my definition doesn’t quite align with everyone else’s. I don’t care for comic books, for example, and I refuse to watch superhero flicks. I lean more toward the technology enthusiast side of nerd-ness. Let’s just call me a tech enthusiast.

 

Well, there’s a problem with that term, too. There seems to be this notion out there that a tech enthusiast is someone who is an early adopter and always waiting to hop on the next tech trend. I find this highly objectionable. Technology is akin to evolution. Mutation and natural selection are both essential for evolution to function. In biology, the overwhelming majority of mutations are either bad or neutral and the process of natural selection will weed those ones out while selecting for the positive mutations. Many of the tech trends we see pop up are simply mutations and, in theory at least, technology’s own form of natural selection will weed out the bad ones.

 

Sadly, corporate greed, marketing, and human stupidity often intervene in the world of tech and we often get a very unnatural selection. Someone who enthuses about whatever crap Silicon Valley cranks out is not a tech enthusiast, they’re just a tech sheep. A true tech enthusiast possesses the extraordinary faculty of critical thought. They’re able to intelligently evaluate new tech trends and decide which ones actually have something of merit to contribute to society. A true tech enthusiast is often someone who spurns new technologies when it is evident that they are inferior to the technology they are attempting to replace.

 

We true tech enthusiasts are living in a dystopia these days because there is so much stagnation and regression all around us. People today are constantly choosing convenience over quality. You see it a lot with how they consume music. They listen to lossy streams over Bluetooth, which itself is a lossy standard, and no one gives a shit about actually having a good listening experience. They listen to “smart” speakers by manufacturers who threaten to brick your speaker if you don’t agree to their new privacy policy and no one ever stops to ask if the actual speaker portion of the speaker is any good because I guess they assume that all speakers are built alike. For the record, my speakers didn’t come with privacy policies. I prefer not to pay for things I cannot own and do not control.

 

In the world of hi-fi, the “audiophile” community is abuzz with excitement over the latest R-2R resistor ladder and multibit digital-to-analog converters and output transformerless tube amplifiers, all of which are basically ancient technologies now but still hold their own and more against the newer delta-sigma digital-to-analogue converters and solid-state amplifiers that now dominate the market, providing a more natural listening experience that doesn’t suffer from “digititis.” There’s a whole vinyl revolution going on right now and people are spending more on their headphones than ever before, all of which I see as a backlash to the complacency with which the masses are consuming music today.

 

You see it with the Internet of Things. People put “smart” locks on their doors that manufacturers unintentionally brick with faulty software updates or the manufacturer of an Internet of Things garage door opener intentionally bricks a customer’s product because the manufacturer didn’t like the review the customer posted on Amazon. In the DIY computer market, the only thing that constitutes as innovation these days is when a manufacturer finds new ways to cram more RGB LEDs into new places because no one gives a flying fuck about performance anymore and they just want their PCs and associated peripherals to induce seizures.

 

Let me reiterate: Being a tech enthusiast is about the ability to think critically. Look around you. LG is engineering POLED screens for Google‘s Pixel 2 XL that suffer from wicked burn-in; meanwhile, I’ve been saying for years now that it’s not prime time for OLED due to the burn-in issues. My mother has an OLED television set with the CNN logo burnt into the bottom corner. I only encouraged her to get it because I was able to get it for her at an absurd discount when they were still going for $6K a pop.

 

Microsoft‘s DirectX 12 seems like a great idea until you learn that you have to be running Windows 10 to take advantage of it, or, in other words, install literal malware on your computer so you can use the new graphics API that has thus far demonstrated few instances of meaningful performance gains over DirectX 11 in any game. Windows 10 is a huge problem because the uninformed will simply install the latest version of Windows and assume it’s the best while a tech enthusiast with a critical mindset will recognize it for the malware it is. Windows 8 was such a disaster from a GUI perspective that many are just glad to get away from it without realizing that Windows 10, while boasting a more intuitive default GUI, is a thousand times worse and more diabolical than Windows 8.

 

I’ll go on about these things and so much more in future posts. I just wanted to clear the air and stress that a tech enthusiast and a neo-Luddite are not mutually exclusive because being a tech enthusiast is about appreciating the technology that actually works, that actually has merit, and that provides the best user experience. I’ve held this belief since seeing my schoolteachers and professors struggle with technology in the classroom as a young lad, when technology was often revealing itself to be more a distraction in such instances than an asset.