What you’re missing is that with these technologies people shift their impulse purchasing impulses…into impulse contact impulses.

I won’t call it “impulse communications,” because real communication involves more than someone spewing their random thoughts throughout the day, or hopping from shiny thing to shiny thing in the globalized role of cyberjunkie and attention-impaired novelty addict looking for the next fix of Distraction.

IRC, SNS, logging, Twittering, iDope–all these technologies exist to exploit people at the level of their emptiness, their hunger for contact, and their need to feel connected. They are exploiting people’s classism, the desire to feel part of an ingroup that excludes others, or the desire to compete to be part of that group. They are exploiting people’s willingness to hand over their time, their money, and their attention, just to escape the pain of avoiding sitting under a tree and doing nothing, and facing themselves.

These technologies do not fill human emptiness, nor constitute real relating. Like real fiscal prudence, real communication is not easy to come by. It requires a lot of a person, of the stuff that money cannot buy. But since the 1980s we’ve been stuffed fat and full of the idea that business models are everything, that we’re all in a big commercialized space, developing our brand and marketing it.

The reason these technologies exist is because someone(s) somewhere(s) are trying to figure out how to profit massively from the human ache for contact, and the terror of being alone in a society that has become heartless and harsh. This is how we end up with people who neglect their genuine human relationships, with all their messy spurs and corners, for virtual ones.

Of course creating even more distanced forms of contact, posing as essential communication, is just adding to human alienation. But try telling that to someone with an expensive new toy and the smug or thrilled knowledge of how to use it, who can’t go a full five minutes without checking their cell phone, or who think that being given, by a corporation, easy chances to pay to consume proprietary information content is “fabulous,” “GREAT,” “convenient,” or “AWESOME”!

I’d say that this technology is just another form of consumerism. Another set of shiny placebos for human loneliness that cannot be healed with things or pixels, but only with the simple, quiet, slow, enduring interactions that humans create person to person.

I don’t say that lightly: our household would qualify as in the top 1 percent of tech savvy, owing to our professions. But we refuse to use these technologies at home. Our home, our marriage, and our daily lives are too focused and present to be put at the mercy of the constant frivolous immature invasions of privacy and attention that these technologies depend on for their profits. We seek more rooted, grounded lives, and interactions with others. The noise to signal ratio of these automated attention-nabbing technologies is ridiculously high. You want us to use these technologies? Great, then pay US to do so, and then only within the boundaries WE set. We refuse to become technoslaves at the beck and call of any needy or impatient individual with an immediate itch they want someone else to scratch.

So it isn’t just that you can “download too much” and waste money. You are wasting your life. This is why we left Silicon Valley–the endless stream of hipperie, of frivolity, of wanna-be trillionaires looking for the next Killer App. Each morning for breakfast they eat people with iPods, with BlackBerrys, with Kindles, people who think Facebook is the ultimate and LinkedIn and YouTube and and and and and.

They keep calling us–the headhunters, the friends with businesses or IPOs or venture capital. But we broke free, and we’re not going back.

Just a warning from someone who was there, and escaped. As Prince once said, “Don’t be fooled by the Internet. It’s cool to get on the computer but don’t let the computer get on you. It’s cool to use the computer but don’t let the computer use you…. There’s a war going on. The battlefield is in the mind and the prize is the soul, so be careful.”

In closing, last autumn a young friend asked me how to know whether he was a user or an addict of his various expensive technologies. I said, throw them all out the window for a year, and see what happens. He looked at me with large haunted eyes and said, “Then I’m an addict, I could never do that.” Eight weeks later he told me he’d dumped it all. Soon after that he lost his gadget-slave job, because he refused to be on call 24/7…but then quickly found another job (far more suited to his genuine spirit and heart, though I didn’t say that). His friends and family ganged up on him at a neighborhood barbeque. “What do you think you’re doing?” one of his sisters demanded, furiously. “I never thought YOU would become some sort of stupid LUDDITE.” He replied, “I honestly don’t know what I’m doing. But after I’ve made the journey, and have had time to reflect on it, I’ll invite you over for dinner, and we can talk about it.” A few months after all that I asked him how he was doing. “I’ve lost a lot of friendships,” he said, “but what I’ve gained…I can’t believe I didn’t claim it sooner.”

My budget for Internet and e-mail is four hours per week. I’ve spent 20 minutes of it so far on reading this post and replying to it. I read The Simple Dollar from time to time as part of my ongoing search for Internet resources for people who haven’t figured out how to live a self-directed, frugal, prudent, focused life. It isn’t that I think these Internet resources will help them evolve in that way. It’s that they won’t listen to common sense when it comes from the mouth of a friend, a lover, a partner, a relative, an elder. They have to pay a few thousand bucks for the technology and software, and waste all sorts of time, before they consider a source credible.

My industry has been very very very successful in creating a global caste of gadget-slaves. It’s part of the reason I was able to retire at 45. You all handed my employers your time, attention, desire, and money. For some reason they kept handing money to me. It all went in the bank.

Epicurus

–Live unknown.–

Pretty cool stuff!!

What about when it is snowing outside and/or the library is closed for the long holiday weekend? Or when the kids are finally asleep after a really long day and you just want to relax with a good book but you didn’t have time to go to the bookstore/library? I don’t think Trent meant to imply that he or his wife dislike the library – in fact he has posted many times about how much he likes it. But the Kindle download makes it so you don’t HAVE to go if you can’t or don’t want to right now.

But being quintessential shoppers, we still like to shop. What we now do is go through stores, putting stuff in our carts and then we don’t buy it. We have the satisfaction of putting these items in our cart, and then we wheel around and think about it. And think about it. And think some more. Then we put the stuff back.

Or we leave it in the cart and go. That might seem a little lazy to you but it’s not. SOMEONE who works there is going to have to put it back. And that someone has that job and we are giving that someone something else to do. He or she is staying busy. So we figure we’re keeping Americans working in American stores.

It’s a double win. We don’t spend. And someone keeps busy at their job.

Happy New Year!

A lot of authors will make an app free for a few days to get some reviews. Once good reviews are in they add a price and people think “wow someone paid for this and was happy” .. tricky but beneficial for you if you have this program.

On another note, I’d love to see some ideas about what to do with the kids in the winter, when it’s viciously cold out. I want to encourage my 13 month old to be active, and I’d certainly like to be more active! Swings at the park are both cold and wet this time of year. She (and I) both get bored being housebound. I hate to traipse through the mall, because of being tempted to shop. Any other ideas?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK3O8N8S0GGP1DB

Also, try searching free kindle books in google. You might be surprised.

Maybe one thing that would help is to set some kind of limit- you can only buy two apps a week or something like that. Then you would have to think more about what you want to get and whether it’s worth it or not.

that’s brilliant, LOL!

I don’t agree, I have one and I have only spent a few dollars at the itunes store (on items that I would have purchased in a regular store anyway), the rest of my library comes from my personal CD’s that I’ve uploaded to my ipod. I don’t believe that is illegal.