Another dated reflection on technology — this is Gary Snyder’s poem Why I Take Good Care of my Macintosh Computer, which I can’t find a date for but which internet archive records back to 2003.
Because it broods under it's hood like a perched falcon Because it jumps like a skittish horse and sometimes throws me Because it is pokey when cold Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents Because it is flighty Because my mind flies into it through my fingers Because it leaps forward and backward is an endless sniffer and searcher, Because its keys click like hail on a rock & it winks when it goes out, & puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts; And I lose them and find them, Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly layed out and then highlighted, & vanished in a flash at "delete" so it teaches of impermanence and pain; & because my computer and me are both brief in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates, Because I have let it move in with me right inside the tent And it goes with me out every morning We fill up our baskets, get back home, Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.
I’ll forever be grateful to have been born in the internet age. In some ways, I’m a product of my parents, of my childhood friends, and of the Colorado towns I grew up in — but most of all I’m a product of the internet.
Computers opened up the entire world to me, and as an adult, most of my interests and tastes and habits and values have come from the world that they revealed. I think the internet did for me, as a young person, what world travel or moving to “the big city” did for young people in generations past.
And I’m thankful, too, that the internet will be with me for the rest of my life. When I imagine growing old, and perhaps living in a nursing home, bedridden with nowhere to go day in and day out, I feel much less alone because I know I’ll have a laptop, and thus the world will still be at my fingertips.