The Promise

We were all looking forward to the future.

It was a vast landscape of possibility and promise — the one we glimpsed on Star Trek, Lost in Space, and The Jetsons.Who didn’t want a robot that would clean the house?

What we got instead was a Roomba that gets stuck on the edges of flooring transitions, needs an unobstructed path, and demands constant emptying. For all our ingenuity, the machine is imperfect — yet we keep feeding it.

Sometimes it’s a gadget like the Roomba. More often, it’s the internet.

The Price

For most of my career, I helped feed that machine.

I’ve installed the servers that keep it alive, chased the elusive “five nines” of uptime, reduced MTTR, increased MTBF, and ensured ROI for customers. Now I help Scrum teams — small clusters of developers who write the code that powers the machine — and I spend my days trying to calm their anxiety when the demands become too much.

We are all feeding the machine in some way.

And in return, the machine has cheapened our lives. We are beholden to it, and it feeds us drivel — sometimes drivel in the form of blog posts. It’s hard to sit with a book or magazine without checking a phone for messages, pings, or updates. The big, glossy magazines like Life are gone. In their place: a flood of digital outrage and curated unreality.

Instead of admiring award-winning images on paper, we scroll through algorithmic ones online, wondering which are airbrushed, Photoshopped, or AI-generated. I recently saw a photo of the East Wing of the White House in rubble and assumed it was fake — until I learned it was real. That’s what the deluge has done: it’s broken our trust in sight itself.

We sit too much. We stream too much. Our homes are littered with chargers. We were supposed to be freer after “cutting the cord,” but every platform keeps raising its rates. We delete services, miss the shows, and crawl back. It’s a corporate ecology built on FOMO.

Neil Postman warned us.

Decades ago, he said the liberating stream of information would become a deluge of chaos — that our “information immune system” would fail, leaving us unable to tell value from noise. Sound familiar? Postman refused to use email, the internet, or even a computer, choosing instead to live among books and human beings. Imagine that.

If you’ve never read him, look up Amusing Ourselves to Death or Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology — though, ironically, you’ll find them online.

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The Reckoning

Sometimes I catch myself thinking, When I retire, I will …

As if life begins when work ends. Why am I chained to a desk forty-plus hours a week, saving my few breaks for doctor appointments instead of walks or laughter?

The machine needs.

The machine demands.

For most of my career, I helped feed that machine.

I’ve installed the servers that keep it alive, chased the elusive “five nines” of uptime, reduced MTTR, increased MTBF, and ensured ROI for customers. Now I help Scrum teams — small clusters of developers who write the code that powers the machine — and I spend my days trying to calm their anxiety when the demands become too much.

We are all feeding the machine in some way.

And in return, the machine has cheapened our lives. We are beholden to it, and it feeds us drivel — sometimes drivel in the form of blog posts. It’s hard to sit with a book or magazine without checking a phone for messages, pings, or updates. The big, glossy magazines like Life are gone. In their place: a flood of digital outrage and curated unreality.

Instead of admiring award-winning images on paper, we scroll through algorithmic ones online, wondering which are airbrushed, Photoshopped, or AI-generated. I recently saw a photo of the East Wing of the White House in rubble and assumed it was fake — until I learned it was real. That’s what the deluge has done: it’s broken our trust in sight itself.

We sit too much. We stream too much. Our homes are littered with chargers. We were supposed to be freer after “cutting the cord,” but every platform keeps raising its rates. We delete services, miss the shows, and crawl back. It’s a corporate ecology built on FOMO.

Neil Postman warned us.

Decades ago, he said the liberating stream of information would become a deluge of chaos — that our “information immune system” would fail, leaving us unable to tell value from noise. Sound familiar? Postman refused to use email, the internet, or even a computer, choosing instead to live among books and human beings. Imagine that.

If you’ve never read him, look up Amusing Ourselves to Death or Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology — though, ironically, you’ll find them online.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking, When I retire, I will …

As if life begins when work ends. Why am I chained to a desk forty-plus hours a week, saving my few breaks for doctor appointments instead of walks or laughter?

The machine needs.

The machine demands.

Postman had it right. I’m immersed in, annoyed by, and sickened by the very thing I worked so hard to enable. I scroll past ads for lives no one actually lives — phony faces, cosmetic simulations, headlines about celebrities suing each other. Wealth fighting wealth. Noise fighting noise.

AI has brought efficiency to science and process — but at what cost? What will we forget how to do? What will we stop being able to feel?

When does the music become static?

When do we become the noise on this planet and not the beauty?

Namaste,
Jude

Here’s a little bit of soul-soothing music for you. I hope it helps.