The Poetry of Technology
Tech Tuesday, the reflection of technology for the past week, that I have held in my hands, as many as the grains of sand in the river Ganges.
Hardware –
- iPhone 12 Pro
- Basic Windows 2 in 1 touchscreen laptop
- iPad 10 with Apple Pencil
- Powered gimbal
- Tascam portable stereo recorder
Software
- ChatGPT
- Descript
- Snagit
- Procreate
- Da Vinci Pro
- Izotope RX10
- Midjourney
- Sora
Mediums for output
- Patreon
- Spotify
- Personal Website
- YouTube
- Threads
- Bluesky
Not everything
This is not everything, but a grocery list of the basics, physical stuff and then digital particles whereby thoughts and ideas move from me to you. These tools aren’t poetic, and grimy troubleshooting looks an awful lot like frowning while staring at a screen some short arm’s length away. But without the tools, there is no story, right?
I have no pen and ink and am writing on no paper. I have not shown up on your doorstep with a one-shot diary in my hand, giving you my life’s book of essays, selling you the only tactile version of my reality, in hopes that you’ll exchange to me enough money that I pay off my many debts. I owe so much for food and shelter, these days when I have borrowed from the social animals’ time and energy, so I could work on crafting emotions to entertain you while similarly giving myself cosmic therapy. I am not in an amphitheater and you are not in chairs, waiting for vibrations in your ears louder than the ones coming from your neighbors. We have no conduit for you to listen to me when we are both present and touchable. And how bored would you be listening to first drafts of speeches, and how unpracticed, me, not having the opportunity to mold the words better before releasing them into the wild like flocks of asymmetrical birds with cold feet? How blessed are we these days? It’s easy to forget.
Art, Art, Art
Art, art, art. So threaded with technology! It’s so simple to take advantage of it. Exploit it without gratitude. Assume that it’s granted because we live in this age and time, a forever menu of distractions. Don’t like this one? Choose the next, a flicker away. Because of this competition, details can get lost, surely. The rush to put stuff out before a thorough analysis is real. And the rejection is real. And the acceptance is often comparative, and not as vital, feels more performative, because, you know, the ego, and not the stardust, are top of mind.
The Short Path
The short path gets shorter and shorter and shorter, the speed and ease that we can tell our stories. The stories, which are, because of the speed, now become more like – just vibes. Shocks of energy, either pleasant or unpleasant, coming in waves while we perceive the world around us through our illusive veil. It’s not even a secret these days! Wasn’t even a secret in the old days, when mystics, gurus, and yogis, pre-electricity, said the task was to turn inward, to find mental health through the incessant suffering, purging attachment to our fabricated desires.
The Great Tragedies
But now we’ve gone backwards and forwards and backwards, in the name of progress, in the name of technology, and have the beautiful methods to fix all the world’s greatest tragedies so long as we fix ourselves first, dig up the roots of anxiety, unease, memory, and prediction.
And that list of tools above, the hardware, software, and mediums for output. What else could I possibly dream of? Nearly instant access, light speed, to carve the greatest stories out of electrons, and at the speed of a few pushes of some few buttons, but also through the chaos of billions of other people with those pushes and those buttons, altogether as many as the sands in the river Ganges – who would like to sit with my book’s pages, and hear the recording of my voice, in the amphitheater with no seats? Of course, the modern poet, both written and verbal, eventually realizes the greatest, richest, most sublime writer, speaker, narrative guru, in the world of technology, is the professional marketing agent. Thus to step up, to rise above, it’s the cover of the book, the title of the novel, the image of the audio floating to your brain from your ears, that is the only way through the tunnel. To pay the debts. Easy to forget, or deny!
Grit and Endurance
The list of tools above, with some variation, are freedoms and prisons, nectar and poison, always in balance, like geography, history, and imagination, but some kind of Western Grit, or Eastern Endurance, both self-servicing monikers probably translated poorly between halves of a whole, will create the final In-Yun, and after 8,000 meetings, passing each other on city streets through the ages, we’ll set and discuss how we met, through technology.
