Added to «College, 2008» section

004/codex-004.tex

@@ -191,8 +191,87 @@ The one thing I remember very distinctly about the writing methods course was th
 
 I could not have been more wrong.
 
+Our instructor asked how many of us had any experience creating websites. Only three of us raised our hands: a middle-aged woman, a young woman still on Plan A, and myself. Half of the rest of the class had mildly panicked looks on their faces. 
 
+Our instructor sent the three of us into a small computer lab at the end of the classroom to star making plans while she explained to the rest of the class how to create a web site. Of course, if you leave three students alone in a room, they're not going to get any work done—they're going to sit and talk. It doesn't matter what their ages are—work is just not going to be a priority for them. It simply won't be on the list of things to do.
 
+As it turns out, the older woman and I both had experience creating websites from scratch and the younger woman (the one of us who was still on Plan A) had once set up a forum for her gaming community using phpBB. Which is not quite the same thing as setting up a website, but close enough. It's better than nothing. She also spent quite a bit of time talking about "leetspeak" which had somehow passed me by—perhaps because I have never been much of a gamer.\footnote{Everything I read about this makes me feel that is either something that is pretty cool or the most annoying thing in the world. I can't quite make up my mind.}
+
+Still, this left some twenty-odd young people on the other side of that door who were utterly clueless about how to create a website, and judging by the looks on many of their faces, were more than a little nervous about the prospect.
+
+I mention all of this because what I often heard then was young people are \textit{so} good with computers, that they are \textit{so} comfortable with computers, and why wouldn't they be? After all, they grew up with them. In fact, the term that got bounced around a lot in the education world at the time was ``digital native''. It was just assumed that young people could do anything with computers because they had grown up with them.
+
+Well, I had grown up with computers, too, only I did it twenty-five years before these kids did. Only the computers I grew up with did not have GUI or a mouse. They made you think a little bit more than modern computers.
+
+But it is not the presence or absence of a mouse or a GUI that means are good with a computer. A lot of kids my age also had Commodor 64s and all they did with them was shove a cartridge in the back and play games. This in no way prepared them to know how to set up a spreadsheet in VisiCalc to balance your checkbook.\footnote{Which was one of the very first things I ever tried to do with a spreadsheet. It is not nearly as easy as one might think.}
+
+Again, I blame the educational industrial complex here, which I believe is where the term ``digital native'' came from. (And again, this is a feature, not a bug, of capitalism. The main goal under capitalism is to just extract as much money as you can from the people around you, and it doesn't really matter if you are correct or not. Your only value is determined by how much wealth you bring to the shareholders.)
+
+Growing up with a computer in your house doesn't mean that you'll be an expert at anything and everything digital any more than growing up with a car in the driveway means you'll know how to drive it, let alone change the oil or rebuild the carburetor. It's a completely false assumption.
+
+So what does it mean to be ``good'' with something? Especially with computers? This experience of being segregated into a little room almost twenty years ago because of something I new while those around me didn't has marked me in some way. It's taken me a long time to actually figure it out, and it boils down into two main concepts.
+
+The first is that capitalism (and one of its most pernicious offspring, social media) deliberately blurs the lines between being a \textit{user} of some technology and being the \textit{product} of that technology. (Protip: Do you see ads on your content that you can't control? Does the algorithm tell you whom it shares your content with, or how it determines that? If the answer to those questions is ``no'' then you are not a user, you are a product. I could say more about this. In fact, I already have, and will probably say more in the future.)
+
+Second, there really is no such thing as someone who is ``good at computers''. This is like ``being good at sports'' or ``liking Asian food''. The concepts of ``computers'', ``sports'', and ``Asian food'' are really too large to be considered as a single entity. There is really only ``being better at this one particular thing than everyone else in the room''. 
+
+In fact, the person who is good at computers generally has only three characteristics that make them that way.
+
+First, they are not afraid to experiment. They know how to \textit{undo} things, or they know to experiment on a copy of the file. This is easier to do on a computer than in the analog world because the physical costs are so low—it's basically just your time. You can make an unlimited number of copies. But if I'm trying to figure out how long to cut a board to build something, I don't have an endless supply of those boards. Ideally, I would like to make a single cut and get it done in one go and not have to go back to the lumber yard because I cut the board an inch too short.
+
+Second, they are good at recognizing patterns. This means that they don't need to reinvent the wheel each time; they can look at a new problem and see if it is similar to an old one and whether it's possible to adapt an older, tried and true solution to this new problem. ``The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.''\footnote{Eccleiastes 1:9} Yep, all our new problems are just iterations on our old problems. 
+
+Third, they are good at searching the web for a solution. This is easier now than it was twenty years ago because the web is simply so much bigger than it was then. There is an art and a science to this, so much so that we used to use the term ``google-fu'' or ``search-fu''\footnote{Like ``kung-fu''. Get it? Sometimes we are tiresome people.} But all this really means is knowing how to construct a search query that does not return superfluous answers. In the old days it was largely knowing how Boolean functions worked. These day, artificial intelligence is probably going to screw this completely up. (Or they already have—I recently saw a screen clip of an AI bot recommending adding half a cup of glue to your gravy to thicken it up. I'm sure this would work, but it would not be the gravy you are looking for.)
+
+I can give a couple of examples here. At my old job, we received planning schedules from our customers on a weekly basis. Our material planner would print and enter these into our system and it would give us an idea of how much production we needed to run each week. 
+
+One of our customers upgraded their planning software and what had been a twelve-page easy to understand report suddenly became a report running to well over a hundred pages that was full of irrelevant information and multiple empty columns. 
+
+I noticed that this information could be downloaded as a \texttt{.csv} file, though. So I created a spreadsheet that would allow you to import the \texttt{.csv} file, and which would then use VBA to get rid of all the information we didn't need, sort all the data in a way that made sense for our purposes, and then export the entire thing as a pdf file.
+
+Because it worked (and worked \textit{well}) I was lauded as a guy who is ``good with computers'' (which largely overlooked all the expertise my coworkers made use of every day as they did their jobs—which were largely computer based). The truth is that I knew absolutely nothing about VBA going into this. I just used those three characteristics—a willingness to experiment, an ability to recognize pattersn, and a determination to search the web until I found the solutions\footnote{Or enough different solutions that I could put bits and pieces of them together until I got to where I needed to be. Every bit of software out there bears more than a passing resemblance to Dr. Frankenstein's creation, once you look beneath the hood.} I was looking for—and created something which worked. 
+
+But does this make me an expert at Microsoft Excel or at VBA? Hardly. I mean, it did to all those people who saw this spreadsheet in action. But I didn't view myself as someone who was good at Excel or VBA. I just viewed myself as someone with a dogged determination to keep experimenting until I got it right. To me, the idea of someone who is ``good with computers'' is \textit{very} relative and not at all absolute.
+
+Proof of this came in the form of an engineer that we hired out of his early retirement. He said he was not good with computers, and he was not. (He was adequate to the task required, though.) But he showed me a trick that I have been using ever since.
+
+One of my many frustrations (and indeed pretty much any spreadsheet program) has always been that if you need to edit the data at the end of the cell (where I am most likely to make a mistake) is that it's always a two-step process. Either you click on the cell to select it and then click in the formula bar to move the cursor to the end of that data, or you have to click on the cell to select it, and then click again on the right end of that cell to move the cursor. (If you click in the middle of the cell, then that's where the cursor ends up. Who is in charge of this stuff?) 
+
+Just writing all that gives me a headache. It's no wonder people so often give the side-eye to not just Excel but to most Microsoft products. (As they should.)
+
+But this engineer—who said he was not at all good with computers and then went on to both  prove and disprove that assertion—showed me a trick that I use to this day. If you have a cell selected (and I use cursor keys rather than a mouse to navigate around a spreadsheet 90\% of the time) all you need to do is press the F2 key and the cursor will automatically move to the end of the data in that cell, where you can then use your keyboard to do what you need to do.
+
+This was sheer genius! And yet I had never heard of it. If I had known this ten years before, it would have saved me so many mouse clicks so much frustration. 
+
+So in this instance, this engineer, who viewed himself as anything but ``good with computers'' was indeed very good with computers, simply because he knew something I didn't. 
+
+\vspace{\baselineskip}
+
+\noindent{}Here's another example. At my current job we have an Excel form that we use every single day. It basically does three things: 1) It collects any findings we discover in an experiment. 2) It adds those findings to a database so that we have metrics to measure analyst performance by. 3) It generates an email to send to the analyst in question so they make corrections. 
+
+The VBA that runs this form is absolutely huge—it's at least two orders of magnitude greater in size than any amount of VBA I have ever authored. 
+
+To my way of thinking the person who is responsible for the maintenance of this form is a \textit{true} VBA expert. My level of expertise comes nowhere near theirs. And yet, they still insist that they are not an expert, that they are just really good at searching for solutions on the web, at recognizing patterns (especially in error messages), and they just keep experimenting until they get it right. (Sound familiar?)
+
+But I am still able to do little bits here and there for other people—creating forms that generate a pdf and then automatically attach it to an email, for instance. (I've done this a couple of times for my boss, and the people on the other end have been suitably impressed, so I've added this skill to my resume. Imposter syndrome be damned!)
+
+The number one characteristic I've discovered that is shared by all people who are generally viewed as ``good with computers'' is \textit{confidence}. Not knowledge, not skill, not experience. \textit{Confidence}. Although it's true that confidence comes from knowledge, skill, and experience. But I've met a lot of people who have knowledge, skill, and experience\footnote{How can you \textit{not} have experience with computers in 2024, when even Amish people have cell phones? It's because you can either choose to recognize that they are a part of your experience and roll with it, or refuse to acknowledge them and fight a losing battle against them.} but they still lack confidence and thus are not seen, nor do they see themselves, as being good with computers. I've had to coach a lot of people like this over the years and while it's easy to give someone knowledge, or experience, or skill, it's almost impossible to get them to put those three things together into confidence. It's really something they have to gain on their own, and they either do or they don't. 
+
+Likewise, I've seen people with far less knowledge, far fewer skills, and far less experience who are considered to be ``good with computers'' simply because they are confident. The fact is that sometimes they are good because that confidence gives them the determination they need to do just one more web search (or ten more) or to try just one more thing (or ten more things) to get where they need to be. They start with the attitude that it can be done, and that all they need to do is to keep hacking away at the problem until they find a solution. They don't just sit there and moan and complain. They experiment and innovate. They ask for help in the right way.\footnote{And yes, there is a right way and a wrong way to ask for help. I've written about this before, so perhaps I should write about this in a future issue.} 
+
+Most importantly, they keep going.
+
+And that's what I ultimately like about Linux—it encourages you to keep going. You don't get to a point where things are hidden away behind a proprietary brick wall. Everything is open source, right down to the core, and you can dig as deeply as you like. The only thing that's really holding you back (besides your attitude) is your time and money. But for me to even talk about these things would mean that I would have to do a deep dive into the many faults of capitalism, and that's not what this zine is about, although I do touch on that tangentially (or not so tangentially) from time to time.
+
+That is really my biggest disappointment when it comes to computers. They were supposed to be the great equalizer, because everybody would have access to the same information and the same tools. But it hasn't worked out like that at all. We commodified everything. I look around me now and I thoroughly understand the reaction that the Taylor character had at the end of the original \textit{Planet of the Apes} movie: ``You maniacs!'' he yells when he sees the ruins of the Statue of Liberty on the other side of the Forbidden Zone. ``You blew it up! Damn you all to hell!''\footnote{This is an authentically great film by the way. With a script cowritten by Rod Serling and based on a novel by Pierre Boulle (who also wrote \textit{Bridge on the River Kwai}) and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (who also directed \textit{Patton}) how could it not be? I highly recommend it.}
+
+Yep, we blew it all up so we could create value for the shareholder. We're not quite at a ruined-Statue-of-Liberty-on-the-beach point yet, but we are, I fear, very close to the end. We could have done better as a species, but we didn't. As Stephen King says of his generation, ``we had a chance to change the world but opted for the Home Shopping Network Instead''.
+
+The optimistic side of me says that it's not too late, while the pessimistic side of me says that it is, that we are past the tipping point, but we just don't realize it yet. I'm just note sure.
+
+In the meantime, I'll keep doing what I'm doing. I'll keep writing, I'll keep striving to do better.
+
+And I'll keep hoping.
 
 
 \section{Today}