Post #35: A Late Adopter's Manifesto

4 June 2023

As a late adopter on principle, I make a point of not staying up to date with the latest trends, so I have no idea how current fashions might understand the term. Whatever ideas it may suggest these days in other contexts, I am not writing in response to anyone, but merely outlining some ideas and directions of my own, whether or not they coincide with those of others.

It's not that I'm a technophobe or a Luddite. As I have stressed several times, I cheer every advance in medical technology, in particular, with great and sincere enthusiasm. I started using Macs at pretty much the first chance I got, in the early nineties, and only parted company, very reluctantly, for a few years in graduate school when I could not justify paying the premium. I kept my penultimate MacBook for a dozen years, out of love for the thing and on account of the unusually fortuitous circumstances under which it came to and stayed with me. When I upgraded two years ago, it was without undue nostalgia, though I am still keeping faith with Catalina and Jony Ive…

When it comes to cell phones, it is true, I pride myself more on my history of late adopting: my very first such apparatus was a Motorola, if memory serves, back in 2006, after an obstinate decade-long resistance. By the time I got my first iPhone, a hand-me-down i4 that my roommate gave me in 2015, not having one meant not having a social life either; so I capitulated, my poverty and not my will consenting, as it were. And you know what, despite all my reservations about what the buggers are doing to our Culture (capital K, anyone?), I not only reconciled myself but became friendly with the machine.

Three years ago, I was thrilled, when I traded up to a used i6s, to see what marvels the new and improved magic wand could perform, and only the other day, for my birthday, when I exchanged that one for an i11, it was much the same thing: I was amazed to the point of expecting others to be dumbstruck at the very sight of the device I was carrying. (I repeat: an i11.) I require no more evidence for the truth of Freud’s dictum that we have been transformed into gods by dint of our technological prowess—gods with prosthetic limbs. Best of all, I am getting the full benefit of all this wizardry, every couple of years, without having to brave the eye-watering price tags on the new models—and also without any trace of envy (so far) towards owners of the newer and more sharp-edged boxes. It helps. One day when the hype has cooled sufficiently, I will probably upgrade again and perhaps once more to similarly cheerful effect.

So what does late adopting do for me? Well, first and foremost it gets me off the merciless treadmill that is the need to have the latest. Not much peace of mind to be had in that direction, I’m afraid (see Post #26: Monkey Mind). Second, it lowers costs, no trivial consideration considering the tags in question. Third, I get a real choice in what I wish to switch to, and feel the benefit of the improvements all the more keenly after I’ve given them time to accumulate for a few years.

There is more to it still: the strategy is also more in keeping with my overall philosophy in life. Buddhism, for all its latest technological accoutrements, is nothing if not a case of late adopting; ancient thought is too, as are my intellectual affinities with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It gives me access to “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” as Albert Jay Nock defined Culture (in the old-fashioned upper-case sense, unthinkable without books) in his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man—he too a self-conscious throwback to earlier times and correspondingly ill at ease in his own. “The effect of keeping good company in literature,” Nock wrote in the same work, “is exactly what it is in life, namely elevating, bracing: it makes one stronger and better. Keeping bad company, on the other hand, is disabling, while keeping indifferent company is a waste of time. In books one has the best company in the world at one’s command, if one knows where to look.” I could not agree more.

Thanks to what one can still find in older libraries (long digitalized), even if ever fewer of us care to look there, I have friends from across the centuries; they don’t answer the phone, it is true, but I can get them to text back, so to speak, because I‘ve gotten to know them well enough, through their books, to have a pretty good idea what they will say in any given situation where their ample experience and expertise applies. Not only are they often wiser than my contemporaries—on neglected points at the very least—they also write and speak a lot more eloquently. The fact that we are ahead of them in so many ways should not make us flatter ourselves that we are so in all…

Nietzsche was another case of purposeful and programmatic “untimeliness,” as he liked to call it (not least in his early “Untimely Meditations,” from which I translated the selection that I mention in Post #16). Certainly this self-declared “sapling of ancient times” bore ample marks of his native nineteenth century, and so it must be with all of us, who cannot but be children of our times. But that is not all we can be. Unlike other species we really are able to choose our own ancestry to some extent, not in terms of biological and societal descent, but along the equally important dimension of what Goethe called “Wahlverwandtschaften,” chosen relations—and these we can find among any human beings that have ever lived and left a record of their doings.

In this incredible breadth and depth of possibilities, and not just in our latest advances and accomplishments, is where I see the true greatness of mankind. I am not at all disposed to scorn the advances; I find them deeply impressive, awe-inspiring even, and I bow to all who have made them possible. What I ask is only that in addition to their novelty, they stand the test of time. It doesn’t have to be decades or centuries, but let’s talk about the latest trends in a few years and see which are still considered worth taking seriously by anyone then.