[FRIAM] the Commons and Convenience

[Gary Schiltz]

I know that's true for me. It seems so foreign to me to watch a movie or
read a book set before the 1990s, where someone have to park their car to
try to find a phone booth in order to make a phone call.

On Tue, Nov 12, 2019 at 9:52 AM Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

>
> > Steve writes:
> >
> > <   It is also hard to give up "convenience", once habituated toit.   I
> can
> >     barely imagine tying up a hardwired phone line to get 300 or 1200bps
> >     internet service today... I think I'd probably do without somehow.  I
> >     once walked, ran, rode my bike miles and miles to get where I needed
> to
> >     go (school, work, etc.) but now that I have been conditioned to
> jumping
> >     in a heated/AC car and driving 60-80 mph with a good quality sound
> >     system and dozens of radio stations, hundreds of CDs ripped to the
> hard
> >     drive and Bluetooth audio to allow me to chat with family and
> friends or
> >     do some business or listen to a podcast, I'd have a hard time even
> going
> >     back to driving 55 or having to leave my windows down to keep from
> >     feeling a little hot on a warm day, much less live with my own
> singing
> >     or a small handful of scratchy AM stations.  >
> >
> > There's no need to fall back to a 300 baud.   Even a small community of
> ~ 20k people can build a fiber optic network -- an example is my dad's
> town.   There's no need to drive 55 mph or even drive.   High speed rail in
> China and Japan exceed 200 mph.   This is the shortsightedness and lack of
> imagination in individualism:  To deny or not even notice that many people
> have the same exact needs you do.
>
> I'm not suggesting we need to fall back to any of those things, just
> reminding myself that my expectations tend to grow monotonically but
> conveniences do not, they are often herky-jerky.    Technology for the
> most part is a "ratchet",  barring an apocalypse, we don't generally
> lose or forget what we have learned technologically, but we DO seem to
> forget (and have a hard time relearning) the social/cultural things we
> apparently once knew.
>
>
>
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