In a recent discussion on the Aftermath Podcast about the ill effects of the current AI hype cycle, one of the editors said something that really resonated with me:
I love the computer. — Chris Person
This was in the middle of a rant about how these snake oil salesmen are ruining the space he loves with their insatiable avarice and, as much as I’d like to add my voice to the chorus of technologists who are legitimately angry at this social crime being committed, I’m going focus on that specific quote.
Because I, too, love the computer.
In The Beginning
It all began with a curious box that my mother brought home from work. Sometime when I was around six or seven we were living in Dølihagen, a suburban area near Jessheim, itself a small town in Norway. The area was less populous then than it is now, having ballooned in size since they opened the new international airport nearby, and my memories of it are a sparse mix of playgrounds, muddy fields, and a sea of homogenous buildings.
We had moved there after the death of my father, from a large house my parents had build next door to my grandparents, to a small flat on the lower ground floor where my mother, my brother, and I all slept in the same room. My mother flitted through a series of workplaces and eventually landed a job in the ministry of foreign affairs, a position that was going to send us to the Philippines. I don’t remember much of the preparations leading up to the move, but one experience is burned into my mind: the day she brought home the computer. From the moment she unpacked and set it up on the dining room table I was enthralled.
This daunting and foreign machine was fairly typical for the early 90s and was a tool she was given to aid in her new work. It was an IBM 486 DX6 running Windows 3.0 (later Windows for Workgroups 3.11), housed in a business-grey tower adorned with green LEDs and an beguiling turbo button. It came preinstalled with Paint, SkiFree, and Solitaire, and would become my portal into a new world wherein I would find friends, hobbies, and a career. It was eventually equipped with a sound card and CD-ROM drive—my mother damning whomever had coined the term “Plug & Play” during its installation—and I have countless memories of time spent exploring all it had to offer. Nearly two decades after that first introduction, a therapist would speculate that my interest in computers could stem from how it was a rare point of stability in a life where I ended up leaving my home and my friends every few years.
The Smell of Ink on Cheap Paper
As I had the pleasure of being drawn into the world of computers in the pre-Internet era1, my experience of discovery is inexorably linked with the enthusiast print media at the time. Magazines like TEKNO and Geek, and eventually Incite PC Gaming and PC Gamer, gave me insight not only into the hardware and software that so enraptured me, but a culture which I yearned to be a part of. My interests revolved mostly around gaming, but I would pour over any and all computer-related publication I could get my hands on. I understood very little but I was desperate to learn, and thoroughly explored the floppy discs and CDs that came along with the magazines. Through these publications I picked up the slang and the overlapping interests, and found myself building an identity around what it meant to be a “geek”, a “gamer”, or a “computer guy”. Having revisited some of those magazines in recent times shows how crude, misogynistic, and adversarial a lot of the writing was, so although they provided me with a lot of self-discovery I’m glad I outgrew that mentality.
It would be easy to say that it’s just nostalgia that makes me lament what was lost in the transition to the Internet, and it’s not like print was spared the rot of capitalism that has made online geek spaces into ad-ridden, engagement-maximising cesspools. But I am glad that I was able to do my initial discovery in a world devoid of pop-ups, auto-playing ads, click-bait, and incessant pleas to “like and subscribe”. Print media was slow, imperfect, and filled with a callous toxicity that still permeates the hobby, but, as I have espoused before, there is something unique in the kind of writing that was done by a full editorial team and meant for permanently printing on paper. All that being said, as much as I loved the magazines I collected, they pale in comparison to the endless font of knowledge which was about to enter my life. For what better place is there for a kid with a voracious appetite for niche information than the wonderful World Wide Web?
An Era of Self-Discovery
In my early teens we moved to Malaysia and I started attending a school which had a permanent Internet connection available to students. I had had a brief introduction to use of the Internet at my former school, but having it available on all computers and free to be explored was a boon to a tech addict like me. My exploration was wide and deep, and I can recall reading film reviews on GeoCitites sites and playing early Java-based games hosted by ISPs. I printed hundreds of pages of SNES walkthroughs on the library printer, and downloaded pixelated photos of naked people to a collection of floppy disks, spurred on by rebellious peers and the ravenous needs of my burgeoning sexuality. I went everywhere and did everything I could.
Magazines were still the primary source of new information for many years after this, but browsing the Internet became my favourite way to spend my free time. It felt as if disappearing into this digital world was giving me a real connection to the alluring culture I so desperately wanted to be a part of, and though I felt lost in life but I found myself in the Net. I lived close enough by the school to bike over whenever I wanted and the computer labs were open on weekends, so instead of spending time with peers I would spend it happily exploring all the kinds of places I had read about in the magazines.
By the time we moved back to Norway and then further out to Colombia I had become so deeply embedded into the Internet that I would spend entire weekends in my room by myself. I explored forums and chat rooms, and toyed with all the things I could get my computer to do. At this point I had also thoroughly surpassed my mother’s technical capabilities and was regularly switching out components that I had researched and purchased myself. When a pirated CD of Planescape: Torment exploded in my CD drive, the frustration was mixed with the glee of getting something shiny and new to add to this grey tower that was becoming an extension of my ego.
I had become one with the machine, and all my interests revolved around the computer. There was only one final puzzle piece to add: programming.
Not Exactly a Natrual Talent
My first time programming didn’t go very well. One of the magazines I had featured an article about this new thing called Java that was getting a lot of buzz, and I wanted to try out for myself. Unfortunately, the necessary compiler was on the accompanying CD, which hadn’t survived my brother and his friend using it as frisbee. However, having had much success with experimentation so far I decided to try something that would probably work: I copied the code from the magazine into Notepad and saved the file as .exe instead of .txt.
You don’t need to have a lot of technical understanding to imagine that this approach didn’t work. Despite having read the article multiple times I hadn’t quite grasped the concept of compilation and, as far as I understood, I just needed to write the correct incantation into a file and tell the computer to execute it. In hindsight it’s funny how close I was to a working solution if only I had known about shell scripts, but this was a failure and caused me to not make another attempt for several years.
Eventually, thanks to a class in school and some industrious friends, I became well versed in programming. I got familiar with Java, tried my hand at C++, and dove into PHP when that hit the scene. By the time I graduated from the International Baccalaureate programme I had received an honours in Computer Science, naturally moving on to taking a Bachelors in Computer Science from the University of Oslo. It’s been many years since I first tried to rename a text file to an executable, and since then I’ve made dozens of programs in a myriad of different languages2. I’ve had jobs ranging from assembly line website development3 to working on audio playback engines and I still enjoy “slinging code”, although maybe with a little less gusto than I once had. During my university days I spent so much time making websites and games that it resulted in me failing a lot of my classes, so there is clearly a love there which has kept me going.
A Life Well Lived?
Computers have been a large part of my life since that fateful childhood encounter with a mysterious and noisy beige box. My understanding of its inner workings and the culture around it did a lot to shape my interests and personality in my formative years, and I doubt I’d be the same person if I hadn’t had this as my main interest for so long. Now as I am sliding graciously4 into middle-age I can see the effect it has had on me, and I can confidently say that I have no regrets. Considering the comfortable and invigorating career I got out of my passion, I would also say that getting into computers in the early 90s was a really smart move.
But things feel different now. I can relate to what Chris Person said when he expressed his frustrations about how these slick conmen are using the technology I adore as tools for exploitation and disempowerment. The Internet, built by idealists on a foundation of openness and community, has become a mire of dark patterns and gardens with ever thicker walls, desperate to keep people within an ecosystem where their attention is the prized commodity. I’ve witnessed a nerdy space full of nerds be invaded by marketers, callous capitalists, and “brogrammers”—exaggerating the worst, most toxic, aspects of geek culture in their pursuit of money and power. I’ve poured hundreds of hours of work into open source projects only to have it all be scraped into a plagiarism machine and then aggressively sold back to me. It feels that the hope I had for the future technology could give us, the naïve and starry-eyed fantasies I fostered in my youth, has been eroded when faced with a reality where the thing I love can make a lot of money for people who don’t care for any of it.
Then again, it’s not all bad. We’ve come a long way from the time when computers were seen as expensive and exclusive tools, and the unwelcoming domain of elitist men. Programming—with the empowerment that it brings—is more accessible than ever and there seems to be a strong cultural shift in the techie spaces away from centralised services and onto federated, self-hosted, and in many other ways more free alternatives. The Internet seems to becoming more and more locked down, but us weirdos will just stay in our weird corners and will find means to circumvent any restrictions put on us. My affection towards technology made me an ostracised outsider when I was younger, then it condescendingly made me into a “rockstar”, and now it’s looking like my peers are ushering in the end of civilised society. So I’m ready to go back into being just some strange guy with strange interests, doing silly things people don’t understand and don’t care to.
Because, man… I love the computer.