It all started long before Mr. Robot.

WarGames, maybe. By then, Atari and Space Invaders had taken over my world, saving quarters by playing video games on the family tv. A friend whose dad was a doctor had a portable computer in a briefcase, monochrome green text, circa 1981 or ’82. But WarGames in 1983 shined a bright light on the possibility of a curious smart kid connecting to, and changing, the whole world from home. You would need a computer, not just a video game console. And a 300 baud modem (faster, if you could get it). But as Matthew Broderick showed, once you had those, anything could happen.

Finding free, as opposed to pay by the time used, phone numbers to call and play text-based video games or search around for a backdoor to NORAD became an obsession, which led nowhere. I didn’t win the games, refusing to cheat with help from friends or spend the amount of time required to figure it all out myself (homework and chores and playing outdoors with friends and riding bikes to malls and sports were also required in order to live); I never found an unguarded entry into the national security complex of the U.S. (or any other nation for that matter). If I had, I would have been too terrified to go in. They might catch you, and if that happened, who knows what they were capable of? The “they” of course being “the government,” always the bad guy in these imagined scenarios. Which government? Soviet? U.S.? Federal? State or local? Something unknown, secret? Didn’t matter. The government was scary and bad; just ask E.T. Or Luke Skywalker.

Probably the closest I ever got to hacking into something I wasn’t necessarily supposed to be in was during freshman year at UT Austin. Almost no one had a computer in their dorm, but I did. Along with a dial-up modem. I noticed something when I was searching through the physical card catalog of one of the university libraries, cluing me in to the fact that an “online” card catalog existed. All I needed to do was find out how to access it. That I did, and once in, was free to look at library holdings from my dorm room.

Looking back, I am certain that anyone would have been allowed to do so, even though it wasn’t publicized as a student resource as far as I knew. But at the time, it felt like I had discovered something secret, something I wasn’t supposed to know, even though it was harmless. And I didn’t like that feeling. I thought, “hey, the library should try to keep people who aren’t supposed to be there OUT! What if somebody DID something?” I didn’t know it, but I was blue team long before the term likely existed.

The aversion to seeing things I’m not supposed to see has never ceased, but the thrill of making something do something other than its stated intention has always remained. Whether it was punching in a sequence of buttons on an early TiVo to display different menus and options, or installing a different OS on my computer, the feeling of doing something that most people would not attempt has an indescribable exhilaration that isn’t accessible on the well-worn path of doing what everyone does. That’s the only thing that explains someone who was attracted to the TRS-80, the Commodore 64, Macs at the time when the company was about to go under, BeOS, Sun Solaris, Windows Phone, and Linux. I wanted what other people didn’t; once Apple and iPhone became dominant in the social conscience, I was no longer interested. If you want me to run the other direction, all you need to do is catch on with the mainstream.

Two things that I’ve discovered over the past 2-3 years are Linux and Mr. Robot. These will NEVER catch on with the masses; they’re too strange, too out there. They require a LOT of open-mindedness and leavings of comfort zones. There are things in Mr. Robot that are just hard to watch, and I wouldn’t, if it were just to glorify them or for some other gratuitous motive. They are part of a reality that is hidden from me, but that nonetheless exists. It’s eye-opening, in the same way that seeking out what is actually happening in, say, Syria is. Americans will never see the full, tragic story, or really any of the story anymore, of what is going on in that part of the world unless they actively seek it out. Isn’t it strange how coverage of Middle East conflicts has completely ceased? Make no mistake, they continue to rage. We just aren’t being shown. It’s uncomfortable, it doesn’t sell. But we need to know, because if we don’t, then we can’t hold anyone accountable for the continuing government atrocities being committed by Syria, Saudi Arabia, and others (there we go with “government = bad” again) or demand change. Which is why eleven years in, nothing has really changed in their civil war, nor in Yemen.

If you’re looking to see how the other half (or 2%) lives, give Linux a try. Choose your fighter: I’ve gone with Ubuntu, the most mainstream of the distros. The one featured most heavily in Mr. Robot is Kali Linux, which comes with tools geared toward people who are accessing networks and systems that they may or may not have the rights to access, or “penetrate,” whether hired by companies as network security testers or for other, more nefarious purposes. If installing a second operating system is too much to ask, try watching Mr. Robot on Amazon Prime Video. And if all else fails, if you REALLY want to open your eyes, do a little online digging and take a look at what’s going on in the Middle East, in Africa, in Asia, wherever. You really have no idea, and that, dear reader, is completely by design.

My daughter is home from her first semester at college. It’s wonderful to be able to hop in the car and run to Starbucks with her, just like the good ol’ days. Great one-on-one time, no worries, just her and me.

She did the driving this time, and I asked my phone a question about something that we were discussing. She immediately jumped all over me, in a good-natured mocking sort of way, for “talking to my phone,” which “NOBODY does, dad. Except you and two of my friends who always try to talk to Siri and it always fails.” This is a point I have made many times over the past couple of years with my Pixel and Pixel 2 phones: Google users use their voices, iPhone users don’t. Why? For the simple reason that Siri sucks and Google Assistant is great and voice is vastly superior to typing on a tiny glass keyboard (yes, even an XL phone screen is tiny compared to an actual computer keyboard).

This also reminded me of a post I did not write just after Thanksgiving. Walking by a big, printed canvas photo hanging on our wall that was taken in March 2014, I was struck by the memory of having shot it with my Lumia Icon, a Nokia Windows Phone that had an AMAZING 20 megapixel PureView camera with a Zeiss lens. The detail and color on that 16×20 print are spectacular. Again, this was almost 5 full years ago. The phone was white, just like the Pixel 2 I recently sold in exchange for a Pixel 3 XL, and the feel was pleasingly similar to the Pixel 2 in the hand. Along with the camera, the 441ppi 1920 x 1080 AMOLED display was simply stunning (Apple’s newest phone, the XR, has a 326ppi 1792 x 828 LCD for comparison), as was the responsiveness of the entire system. It was a 5-inch screen, an incredible jump in size from the iPhone 4S with Siri that it replaced, and handing it to my iPhone-toting family invariably drew a mix of mocking and disdainful reactions. “You are SO weird, dad!” But then I’d bark out a few Hey Cortana voice commands, and the phone would actually do what I told it to do. Miraculous! And oh, what Microsoft taught the world to do with typography as UI! Apple customers take for granted the use of different font sizes throughout the iOS experience, which replaced gaudy “skeuomorphic” (only die hard Apple devotees, as I once was, would be familiar with such terms) design elements of previous iOS versions. But Microsoft often shows the way for others to follow, thanks to its decades of time, talent, and treasure that have been poured into basic research including anthropological studies by actual Microsoft-employed anthropologists, and that was definitely the case with Windows Phone and its beautiful typography. People’s attention can be wrangled and focused by the simplicity of clean typography with overarching elements being bigger than the ones that can be further drilled down to.

It saddens me to contemplate what so many iPhone users miss out on, just because they have to use what “everyone else” is using. The things being accomplished by Google through software, through artificial intelligence, in computational photography, are insanely next-level, especially compared to Apple’s phone cameras. Most people know that “Google phones are better at low light photography,” but in practice, every time we are out at night, the iPhone users insist that we use my Pixel for the group pics. It is worth going out of the way to find and harass the Google phone guy into taking the picture, rather than anyone using their own iPhone. Which, of course, I am very glad to do, because nothing bothers me more than suffering through embarrassingly bad low-light iPhone photography when a simple year-old Pixel 2 would have made all the difference. The iPhone users are aware of the picture-taking inferiority of their devices, but mostly unaware of the other shortcomings. This is especially true for kids, teens, and college students, but also for run-of-the-mill people who simply don’t care about the latest and greatest. As long as it’s got an Apple logo, they know their star bellied sneetch status remains inviolate. As long as the message bubble is blue and not green, they are safe. As long as they are paying 20% price hikes over last year for the privilege of changes or improvements that are indiscernible to 99% of them, all is well. Yes, I know “trust” and “Google” and blah blah blah. But if anyone believes Apple is not collecting more than is known or suspected by its users, I would venture to guess that they are mistaken. No, it may not be as much as Google. And Facebook is beyond any of this, so I leave them out of the discussion entirely. Even if an iPhone user is giving their money to Apple instead of Google or Samsung or LG, they are still being tracked by every app or website they use on that iPhone, so it really does not matter in the big scheme of user privacy considerations.

What I am talking about is the pure joy of experiencing the latest technological innovations from the greatest technological innovators, Microsoft and Google. I really do wish Windows Phone had survived, because I truly loved the Windows Phone tile-based UI, with the ability to customize both the size and placement of individual app tiles on the screen, something that still cannot be done in either iOS or Android. If this is what we had 5 years ago, what would we have now, if full-fledged development had continued? One can only wonder.

An IBM PCjr was not a Commodore 64. An iPhone was not a Blackberry. An iPad is not a Mac or a PC. The PCjr, while far more useful than a Commodore 64 for things that were rapidly becoming more important than easily programming sprite graphics in the exact same way it was done on the C64, or using an already-purchased Commodore cassette recorder to save programs, was a bitter pill to swallow for a 14-year old boy who cared nothing about IBM-compatible Okidata dot matrix printers. I didn’t care about writing papers that I could print out for school; I wanted to do what I had taught myself to do, the way I had taught myself to do it, and I needed a C64 for that. Soon enough, however, the capabilities of the PC changed the daily existences of millions, even billions, of people around the world, and the C64 (along with the PCjr) was eventually, inevitably, left for dead.

I also recall years spent in a corporate environment with people who were more obsessed with their Blackberries than any teenager with an iPhone. The thumb-operated physical keyboards blazed away at all hours of the day and night, at desks, during meetings, around the house. Then the iPhone came along, and it had NO KEYBOARD BUTTONS. How IDIOTIC! It may seem hard to fathom for those who did not witness it firsthand, but for a long time, many Blackberry loyalists completely eschewed iPhones. But what the iPhone COULD do, once understood, changed the daily existences of millions, going on billions, of people around the world in the years that followed, once again relegating a beloved technology to the graveyard of gadgets past.

Will the same be able to be written about the iPad vanquishing laptops with desktop OS’s when the annals of tech history are updated at some point in the future? No one can answer that (yet). I can state that I am banging out the letters that form the words which convey these thoughts on an Apple Magic Keyboard paired wirelessly via Bluetooth to a 10.5 inch 2017 iPad Pro, alongside an Apple Pencil which is soon to tap the Publish button in the WordPress interface above and to the right. I have the iPad oriented vertically, in portrait mode, rather than in the traditional pc landscape orientation that is preferred by so many. It is my personal preference to closely replicate the experience of writing in a portrait-oriented pad or notebook, which I am able to freely exercise due to the fact that this is an iPad, not a laptop. The device also affords me the unreasonably delightful experience of slowly flicking the page up and down with the Apple Pencil to linger over what I have written as I write, then to touch the screen with the Pencil tip directly where I want to make a revision, all without having to grasp a mouse and hold buttons down while some primitive, non-True Tone screen featuring Stone Age refresh rates jerkily scrolls up or down as it impatiently waits for a mouse button click to engage a disembodied pointer icon for insertion of a cursor to make a change.

For more than a few iPad users, the choice of device/screen orientation is often removed, dictated by the Apple Smart Keyboards attached to their iPads, forcing the horizontal layout of the screen. Many others simply prefer landscape mode, likely as a subconscious vestige of years of traditional Mac or PC use, or perhaps due to the iPad Pro’s split screen that can be enabled in landscape mode for exceedingly useful multitasking capabilities. In fact, as I sit here typing in portrait mode, contemplating said utility of landscape split screen while I ponder a synonym for the word “beautiful” that I  employed in the preceding paragraph, I just rotated the iPad into landscape and drug a Safari tab over to split the screen and look up a better word than “beautiful.” “Delightful” is much better. There, the change has been made.

And now, after scrolling through my words for one final pass with a screen possessing a buttery smoothness that is still, if you pause to consider it, almost impossible to describe with words, an incomparable experience that is available on no device other than the iPad Pro, I use the Pencil to touch the Publish button.