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cory doctorow
veterinarian can certainly find a home in the horse barn.
For
me,
right-living
is
the
101-key,
QWERTY,
computer-
centric mediated lifestyle. It’s having a bulky laptop in my bag,
crouching by the toilets at a strange airport with my AC adapter
plugged into the always-awkwardly-placed power source, running
software that I chose and installed, communicating over the wire-
less network. I use a network that has no incremental cost for
communication, and a device that lets me install any software
without permission from anyone else. Right-living is the highly
mutated, commodity-hardware-based, public and free Internet.
I’m QWERTY-Amish, in other words.
I’m the kind of perennial early adopter who would gladly vol-
unteer to beta test a neural interface, but I find myself in a moral
panic when confronted with the 12-button keypad on a cellie,
even though that interface is one that has been greedily adopted
by billions of people worldwide, from strap-hanging Japanese
schoolgirls to Kenyan electoral scrutineers to Filipino guerril-
las in the bush. The idea of paying for every message makes my
hackles tumesce and evokes a reflexive moral conviction that
text-messaging is inherently undemocratic, at least compared to
free-as-air email. The idea of only running the software that big-
brother telco has permitted me on my handset makes me want to
run for the hills.
The thumb-generation who can tap out a text-message under
their desks while taking notes with the other hand — they’re in
for it, too. The pace of accelerated change means that we’re all of
us becoming wed to interfaces — ways of communicating with our
tools and our world — that are doomed, doomed, doomed. The 12-
buttoners are marrying the phone company, marrying a centrally
controlled network that requires permission to use and improve,
a Stalinist technology whose centralized choke points are subject
to regulation and the vagaries of the telcos. Long after the phone
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