Neither does my watch.

I’m glad that some technologies are not connected. We spend too much time connected. (Seems odd to blog about that). I struggle with the juxtaposition of my career (IP networking) and my desire for a less connected, more intimate world, where people know each other personally, instead of via online connections and avitars.

I struggle with the fact that technology is the solution to and the cause of so many of the world’s problems. Take climate crisis for example. Technology is largely the cause of the climate crisis, starting with the industrial revolution. Over time our technological world has created more and more waste. We still do not have a good mechanism for dealing with waste. This is where my toaster comes into the picture.

At one point it was a highly advanced piece of technology. It obviated the need to toast your bread over an open fire. Originally, toasters were constructed primarily of metal parts, which could have been easily recycled (though they weren’t). Today they are made of metal and polymers. Now, the technology exists to recycle every component of the toaster. We can recycle plastic, vinyl, copper, tin, aluminum, steel, etc. But we cannot simply recycle the toaster. To do that I’d need to take it apart and even then it might not get recycled by my local authority.