Tis New to Thee

I step out of the dark bathroom. (Really, the light is out and we’re around 26,000 feet—pretty certain it’s the even numbers if you’re flying West.) Wandering back to my seat, I see multiple people using electronic devices, including one gentleman who is listening to an album of Iggy Pop’s.  I know this because his screen shows a huge picture of the man.

I sit down and start reading on my phone’s Kindle app.  I have accidentally purchased—one-click can be an evil thing on a mobile device—Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, which was on Brad DeLong’s reading list for this year’s Kauffman Conference.  I read an article that tells me that the Internet is bad for thinking, and the next one is by Paul Kedrosky, who claims he’s not certain he has Big, Deep Thoughts anyway. And I get to this:

[Disconnecting from the web] seems, instead, a public exercise in macho symbolism—like Iggy Pop carving something in his chest, a way of bloodily demonstrating that you’re different…

and realise that either seeking patterns in coincidence is a greater time-waster than the Internet will ever be, or it really is James Osterberg’s world and we’re just borrowing it.

Somewhere, Stiv Bators is laughing his ass off.