On Personal Impact — Advanced Old School Revival

Table of Contents Jump to Page in Support

I’m 41 years old, as of writing this.

That makes me an “elder” millennial. I think it’s important to recognize that the millennial generation is the first generation of “digital natives” to have regular access to the Internet and computers. I grew up in a poor, shitty part of Florida best known for the X-Box murders and retirement communities, so I wouldn’t say my access was regular, but I was always fascinated by computers.

Technically it's called the "Deltona Massacre"

My earliest memory is probably playing SimCity on those colorful Apple computers at elementary school, or maybe Super Solvers: Midnight Rescue about a weird kid that solves math problems in a haunted house, at the Deltona library. Or, maybe Oregon Trail at Friendship Elementary; I can’t remember which. My grandmother knew I loved technology, and thinking back to the portable word processor she bought me that I learned to type on (weirdly the keys were in alphabetical order), I never realized how much she sacrificed to make it possible for me to be able to use said technology, being that she raised me on a maid’s salary.

In my teens, she bought a thirty-pound terminal running DOS for $200 from a pawn shop, so I could play with its text processor program and print my stories on a dot matrix printer. I do not know how many years of my life I spent typing on that machine, scrolling through file directories in DOS, wondering if somehow, miraculously, I could get it to develop a graphics card so I could run the floppy disk containing Crystal Castles that came with it.

In Walmart, I would play that stupid arcade pinball game that comes with Windows 98, and idly browse through Windows Explorer directories, curious about their contents. I had my first taste of a computer connected to the Internet with a dialup modem at my friend’s house, whose parents were disgusting hoarders, and we’d sit amidst trash and lurking cockroaches under the blue glow of Netscape Navigator, transfixed.

I remember creating my first website in Microsoft Publisher (which at 60 megabytes spanned across forty-two 3.5-inch floppy disks as a multi-part archive) that I extracted at my friend’s house to upload on Homesite, a free web host at the time. It took a week to extract without fail (back then, if any part of the archive was corrupt, you had to redo the whole thing), biking back and forth to their house in the 90-degree Florida sun, and when we finally got it online, the service shut down a week later.

When I got a car, I would bring my Dell tower to high school so I could work on Macromedia Flash and Adobe Photoshop, which my instructor Ms. Morgan introduced me to, with the intent to prepare me for the digital workforce. I will be eternally grateful to her for teaching me how to use technology as a tool to translate a creative vision into physical reality. I always thought of technology in this way, whether it was my friend Jenna’s TalkGirl that we recorded radio plays on in our childhood, or a GeForce 2 series video card helping me edit video footage in college.

I write all this because I want you to understand my perspective on technology in general. It is not a neutral perspective, by any means: in fact, access to technology lifted me out of poverty.

Because of the digital work I did in high school and my financial need, I was granted the Gates Millennium Scholarship, which covered my college tuition in its entirety. In college, I worked in a media lab under a technology director named Gerry Ewing (as well as a bunch of other part time jobs), who treated the various departments of our school as clients. He taught me what it meant to be a tinkerer, a creative services provider, and problem-solver. He was a fearless negotiator who approached technical problems as exercises in creativity. My favorite stories he told were about how he had to physically cut film to put together videos at AT&T “back in the day,” under severe time constraints. He was not afraid of technology; technology excited him. And so technology excites me too.

Whenever I turn on my computer to work on something, I think back to the first time I saw the trailer for Jurassic Park on TV.

I was filled with absolute wonder at what I was seeing. As a child then, I (naively) wanted to become a film director, to create things like those dinosaurs, to inspire in others that sense of wonder that Spielberg inspired in me.

But we carry a lot of our dreams with us into adulthood—for me, filmmaking, poetry, and novel writing—and lots of them die along the way, out of economic necessity, and for plenty of other reasons.

Even so, the desire to create things that inspire never dies.

It festers.

It is a disease of creatives.

If left untreated, it will kill us.

← AI Use

Page 8 of 18

On the Present Moment →