Theater, politics and technology join Geniocity.com’s range of topics

To Geniocity.com’s newest bloggers, welcome!

And to our readers, I’d like to invite you to enjoy the first posts of Terrence Spivey, artistic director of Karamu House; Leonard Steinbach, cultural technology expert; and Seth Rosenberg, politics writer, whose insights and particular senses of humor will make reading about the latest innovative twists in their fields both eye-opening and entertaining for all of us.

I look forward to many more such introductions, as we at Geniocity.com continue to expand our range of subjects and writers and our means of connecting you to the creative cutting edge. We don’t want the communication to be one way, either. We want to hear what you think – about individual posts, about Geniocity.com as a whole and about the directions in which inventiveness is taking humanity.

Thanks for being part of the conversation and the adventure.

Technology kills

Except for transportation and e-mail, I’m not at all sure that technology is saving us any time.

Everything is a do-it-yourself situation now, from filling your tank to activating your credit card to setting up software processes. And every task requires you to master – or wearily ignore, at your peril – a crushing number of complex facts, steps, legal and financial details.

We’re now spending at least as much time trying to figure out the terms and conditions of online access to our own bank accounts as we used to eat up milking cows, carding wool and making our own soap.  I’d bet we’re all on hold for longer each year than it used to take to raise our own cotton, clean and comb the bolls, spin thread, weave our own cloth and sew clothes from it.  

Everyone talks about the ease of accessing everything online, as if you didn’t have to suddenly earn  doctorates in website function and commercial contracts just to apply for electronic ad-payment services.

Ease? That’s bitterly funny bull. For an entrepreneur like me, it’s the most discouraging thing imaginable to know you have to find your way through this unfathomable tech hell alone in order to perform tasks that used to be fairly straightforward and accompanied by friendly, in-person guidance from neighborhood experts. 

The situation is going to backfire on the economy.  (As if our economy needed any more damage). The time loss, the microscopic complications, the bewilderment, terror and frustration, the mistakes and the enormous stress entrepreneurs suffer in trying to cope with technologized versions of standard tasks will eventually stop them from even thinking about creating businesses.  

Entrepreneurs have to be technologically up to date in order to compete. Yet many of us can’t afford to hire expert help and we either can’t get through to, or comprehend, the “help” provided online or by phone-accessed tech support. So we spend hours and hours trying to accomplish computer tasks that could, and use to, be done much more efficiently another way. 

These processes must be simplified and clarified or more and more start-ups are going to fail and people will lose all desire to be entrepreneurs. Starting an enterprise will become like running for U.S. president – a job that’s gotten so expensive, so physically grinding and so psychologically torturous that the few people attracted to it anymore tend to be rich and dangerous head cases. The chances of a mentally healthy person with good ideas signing up for that get closer to nil all the time. 

That’s why, if even simple businesses continue to turn into forbidden zones of frightening technological mystery controlled by a specialized class of abstruse and remote gatekeepers called IT experts, initiative  and creativity are going to die. People may still start out hand-making and hawking great pound cakes or T-shirts door to door, but if they’re at all successful, pretty soon they’ll have to cope with the dark universe of online processes just to get their sales-tax filed and their supplies ordered. They’ll end up on the phone navigating automated systems six hours a day.

And then they’ll decide that it’s easier to clean cotton bolls for a living.