I DON'T DO COMPUTERS

One of my many vices is watching horribly inconsiderate documentary soaps about the trials and tribulations of unemployed (and usually not particularly smart) people, which to my dismay, are intensely entertaining to me. I couldn't tell you why that is. Most of the stars aren't just poor and shaped by this fact into unhappy and depressed people that it honestly hurts to see get even worse with every episode, but they're also deeply violently stupid.

A note on ableism here - nothing would be further from the truth to suggest that just because someone just doesn't have the intellectual capacities of a particle physicist they're somehow worth less as a human being. That's not what I mean when I say that people are stupid. All people with low IQs or whatever eugenicist metric you want to justify quantifying their apparent usefulness in society are still people, are worthy of dignity and respect, and are - more often than not - a lot more load-bearing to society than the software engineers and mathematics professors.

No, I mean something else. Stupidity has nothing to do with intelligence. Stupidity isn't intrinsic at all - anyone can be stupid. It all depends on whether you are willing to learn more about the world around you. If you engage with a natural curiosity, you will always find something to make you smarter than you were the day before. Stupidity is being in a state of arrested development, a stupor that leaves you unwilling to move forward as a person.

As a direct result, stupid people are usually bad people as well. They don't much care about the world or their place in it, rarely contribute to society in a meaningful manner, sometimes even actively prevent improvement in the cases of what I've come to call mismanagers, and are commonly - with exceptions - found in the C-suite of large corporations. That's not their only habitat, of course, but it would be remiss of me to not point out this connection, lest someone accuse me of just hating poor people. Trust me, I'm not. In fact, a lot of stupid people are very rich.

I work in local government, and don't care to specify further. I'm also a graphic designer, but that much is obvious from the interior design and the tendency to look at advertisements for minutes on end to come away with an opinion on the creator's typographic choices, but entirely without knowledge of the advertised product or service.¹

I'm not an IT person, but I know my way around a computer, and that has been enough to be my family's resident technologist for as long as I can think. I don't hold this against them, because after years of subtle training and conditioning they've become marginally better with computers than the standard user, a property that not only saves me time but also makes their computing experience better. I force every family member to use an ad blocker, and shamed them into basic password hygiene and media literacy.

These are the basics, and I don't know why we're not teaching them in schools, but that's a topic for another tirade. I don't consider them optional - if you don't know how to use a computer in at least the most basic sense, I'm not even expecting my Basics+ interpretation - because there's no job anymore that doesn't require some form of computer literacy.²

Back to my horrible documentaries for a moment, I said that a lot of stupid people are on display. This is because they're entertaining, in the way we like watching people slip on banana peels and fall, and the fact that they could solve a lot of their own problems if they simply chose to work helps to soften the blow to our conscious mind nagging at us for watching this poverty porn. We can square away the fact that we shouldn't be laughing through the screen separating us from their world. If I close the YouTube window, they cease to exist, so it's fine to gawk and laugh. Not true, of course, but that's not what this article is about.

To me, the most entertaining parts³ are when the subjects are confronted with an incredibly simple problem that could be fixed if they just picked up a computer. Often, but not often enough, they are encouraged by the show-runners to try and find work. If this happens, it only does with external help. Usually, the stars simply shake their head and say something to the effect of "Me, and a computer? No. I don't do computers."

This is an unacceptable answer to me, and if you're one of the few people that do think this: First, thank whoever showed you this article for printing it out, then start running, because you and I are at war.

"Oh, but Ruby, that's not fair! What if they're-"

I'm going to stop you right there because there is no excuse that I'm willing to accept here. I'm saying this again as clearly as I can: There is no excuse for not knowing how to use a computer.

Whatever reason you're thinking of, it's invalid. What if they're elderly? They can still learn. What if they don't have a computer? There's libraries that have computers, and you can probably find one at a thrift store for cheap. What if they can't read, write, see, hear, or move? There's assistive technologies, and of course, people that can help them. But categorically denying "the computer" as a concept isn't acceptable.

Let me make this clear. Choosing not to use a computer isn't a personal decision, it's a decision that impacts everyone. If you can only be contacted through snail mail and smoke signals, you are simply making life harder for everyone around you, and that's inconsiderate.⁴

Since I work in local government, every now and again I will receive considerable pushback for trying to turn a system to digital-only. Public transit in my city recently made a major splash when they decided to only sell train tickets electronically, and a small group of elderly luddites made a stink in the local newspaper about how "not everyone knows how to use a smartphone" and "it's discrimination".

No. It's not. The modern smartphone is one of the simplest devices out there, and you can literally go on the street and ask any person on how to operate it, provided you don't happen run into another stupid person. If you're not adapting, you're going to be left behind, and if that's what's currently happening to you, I couldn't be happier you're a casualty.

In every other field we are ridiculing people for not getting with the times. Remember the pandemic? Remember how we mercilessly made fun of the people who didn't believe in vaccines or the efficacy of masks? We did this because we agreed that their ignorance was going to hurt society in the long run. I propose that this same zeal should be applied to computer-deniers.

If you don't do computers, I'm simply not going to let you waste my time. I won't print out hundreds of pages of documentation or meeting minutes just because you can't be bothered to click the Google Docs link. You're making my life miserable because you don't care to do the thing everyone else does, and I don't recommend you spend your one life that way.

Especially unreasonable I think this excuse becomes when you see how devastatingly simple modern computers actually are. Yes, if your first and only encounter with the digital world was an IBM PC running DOS 2, or heaven forbid a BASIC machine, I can absolutely understand where your point is coming from, and I'm truly sorry that that happened to you, but I need you to understand it doesn't excuse the person you've become.

But they're not. Computers are complicated machines, granted, but all that complexity is abstracted away from the users. You don't even have to use the second mouse button on most modern machines anymore. You just move the pointer to what you think you want to do, and you click. If what you intend to happen doesn't, just try again. It's not going to bite. The only risk here is that I might whack you over the head with a tungsten pipe if you refuse to learn.

No, you don't need to become the next 10X engineer. You don't even need to know what a JavaScript is, although you definitely could if you were interested enough. All you need is a basic willingness to accept that you were raised in a world that essentially no longer exists, and that learning new things is how we survive. The start menu won't bite. You can do this. I believe in you.