Techno-burnout. Neo-Amish. Anarcho Buddhist. Crypto survivalist. There doesn’t yet exist a label for the group I’m moving into, but I’m certain it’s a group and I’m sure I’m not the only one in it. We are the people who what to throw up when someone talks about adding internet connectivity to a toothbrush. We’re not luddites (in the old fashioned sense), we’ve just been embedded in tech so long that we can immediately see the downsides of any new product. We’re the people who’ve spent years in the trenches, the bleeding edges of tech, so much time that we’re shell shocked. We’ve seen too much, man.
Young men and doe-eyed civilians can still be enlisted in the glorious vision of a smart home that reacts to voice commands. All we see is getting locked in our own bathrooms because the SmartHomeAppTech company got hacked (maybe they have to pay ransom (in crypto, of course) to free all their customers and regain control of their cloud account). Or maybe SHAT ran out of cash and went out of business. Or maybe the credit card used to pay for SHAT’s month service expired and we forgot to update it. Or maybe an update to the software that ran our lightbulbs wasn’t compatible with SHAT v0.3.7. Or maybe our power went off and some junior developer thought the most secure thing to do in that case would be to use the final joule of reserve power to lock things down.