The Computer Wore Menacing Boots

"I was hoping the people of the world might be united by something more interesting, like drugs or an armed struggle against the undead. Unfortunately, my father's team won, so computers it is." -David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

Part of me might be a luddite or technophobe. I'm not really sure. Its strange because I enjoy studying technology and media. However, some part of me fears computers while the other reveres them. It all sounds strangely pious.

I think it all has something to do with growing up in the dust belt. As kids and teenagers my friends and I tended to focus more on blowing things up and covertly causing mayhem then playing computer games or talking to perverts in chat rooms.

I have a clear memory of my friend Drew and I liberating some elderly macintosh computer monitors from our old elementary school. We were around 14 or 15 at the time. We took the computers to Willow Creek Park, to a massive sand stone tower built in honor of the adventurer Zebulon Pike. We hauled the monitors to the top of the tower, dodging wine cooler bottles and rude stains and scrawled suggestions along the way. Then we chucked them off the top. Watching them smash was one of the highlights of my high school career. Somewhere between smoking my first real cigarette and my first crazy girlfriend. I think this story is fairly indicative of my technological love-hate relationship.

I dabbled in gaming for certain. I tended to disappoint my nerdier friends, however, by getting side tracked during all night game-a-thons. I found it more interesting to off members of my own team and sneak out of the house then to stare at a screen all night eating absurd amounts of popcorn and making inexpert sexual jokes.

In college I became the owner of a laptop. Apparently. It tended to get left in my dorm unused. I had a printer, but it was never- to my knowledge- plugged in. I was a patron of the dusty computer lab in one of the older buildings on campus. It had a certain anachronistic je ne sais quoi. Took me back to my Pike's Peak tower days.

My shiny laptop was eventually pulverized by my roommate in a skateboarding accident. How fitting is that? Computers and I seem to have this sort of a relationship.

I got interested in Free Culture. More for arts' sake than technologies'. I picked up a few techie tips along the way, though. I read Lawrence Lessig and met lots of people with hands covered in popcorn stains who wore shirts exclaiming "Show me your Wits!" I minored in media and cultural studies and spent a few thousand hours a month on Facebook. After a long fight, I'm half ashamed, half-releaved, to say...I entered the matrix.

I still suck at using Excel.

We've come a long way. Sort of. Some of us anyway. Maybe not me.