I'm a tech-loving member of the Zazzler Militia

So I’m sitting in my CS 142 class today and during a lull in the lecture, my good friend pulled out his netbook and tried to check something on the internet. Well, sort of. See, the CS department's wireless went down today during that class, so he was marooned without email in the middle of a lecture. i shook my head and silently berated the foolish CS techs who had allowed such an elementary slip up in the Normal Workings of the Universe to take place. later, as I was walking across campus, I whipped out my iPod touch and decided to check my email. Sort of. See, i got through the whipping part okay, but then I realized that I'd need to first authenticate and by the time I got done authenticating, I'd probably be next to a different building and a different network and then I'd just have to do it all over again. "Not worth it," I said to myself. Later on in the day, I went to "getdropbox.com" and downloaded a file that currently is synced to a shared folder on the computer at home. Sort of. See, I had turned my computer off inadvertently before the syncing was complete, so the folders were named correctly, but the whole project was not in there. "Stupid computers and their slow connection speeds," I thought. "Why couldn't it have uploaded faster?"
So I’ve decided that I’m rapidly becoming a technology brat.
Despite my best efforts to maintain my own naiveté, I'm becoming the faceless, technology consuming, non-appreciative, self-entitled, THEM (related very closely to those girls in high school who complained because their brand new BMWs were the wrong color). I hated those girls. They didn't appreciate the wonder of the German engineering they were given. Heck, they didn't understand how many hours of working at a minimum-wage job it would take to pay off a brand new BMW ($40,000 / $6.50 an hour = 6,153 hours... that's 769 days of 8 hours a day or a little over 2 years. Oh, and that's without taxes. Take THAT, you crappy BMW-driving girls.).
Anyway. My point: Technology is A-Mazing. I don't even know what the heck authentication IS and here I am complaining about having to do it TWICE so I can check email... while walking... on a device the size of an index card. What is wrong with me? I remember a day on my mission when I was riding on a bus in downtown Toronto. The advertisements were all about a new phone that could play mp3s. "Holy heck," I thought. "What is this world coming to?! I've never even owned a cell phone and now you can put music on them?" When I got home and got my first cell phone, I specifically looked for one that could play music and i was not disappointed. But now, I've gone on to greener pastures and I have a BETTER phone with TWICE the memory of the first one. Most of the time, I don't even register that I'm plugging my head phones into my phone. Let me repeat that: MY PHONE. Yeah, and my phone doesn't even have wires that connect it to the wall; it works by sending digital signals through the air where they mysteriously are picked up a by a "cell site" and then transmitted on wires made of glass that's spun finer than my hair to another wireless site where it's broadcast to just one of the thousands of phones in the area and the person on the other end doesn't even have to shout. I mean, come ON! That's incredible.
But no, I'm turning into a technology brat. I roll my eyes when wireless networks mysteriously shut down and think of nasty things I could say to the techs that are running them. To be perfectly frank, the wireless network in question is probably maintained by guys not much older than me that know about 1% more than I do on the subject of "authentication" ("Okay, all you need to know for this job is that when this error comes up, just push cancel cuz it's no big deal. But when THIS error comes up, order pizza, cuz you're going to be here a while fielding angry phone calls."). I try to keep a sense of wonder about me, but darn it, sometimes I just want to take the technology for granted.
Technology is definitely a part of my generation. It’s not even something that’s a part of my sister’s generation (the lost Facebookers, as they’re called). I talked with my mom yesterday about the potential problems that one might encounter because pictures of previous boy/girl friends are posted on Facebook. I explained to my mom that Facebook stalking, while it is an approved form of communication in many circles, is not "acceptable" because it's "creepy." So even if you do happen to Facebook stalk a girl you met the other night at a party, you're not allowed to use that material in making judgments because (a) it would be creepy if the girl found out that you'd been doing that and (b) people in real life are often very different than their Facebook status updates. Isn't that a weird conversation to have with your mother? but it's very definitely a big part of my life now. I not only have to maintain my good name in real life, but I also have to maintain a good online presence. If you google "Jonathan Urie," the first thing that comes up is my Facebook page (the second thing is a review for the CD Reflections of Light, a new age piano cd composed and recorded by Jonathan Urie of Canada, but that's beside the point).
But I still am a little old-fashioned, I think. I don't know, maybe my kids will roll their eyes at me someday because I didn't propose to their mother over text messaging, but that's how I am. I enjoy a good face-to-face. I'm the kind of guy that wants to hear directly from a girl that she's got a boyfriend. As far as I'm concerned, Facebook isn't a legitimate source of 'real' information. You can be anyone you want there.
But anonymity has its advantages. For example, have you heard of zazzle.com? Quick summation: zazzle.com uses a new screen-printing process called dye sublimation and as a result, can put just about any design, picture, graphic, or whatever on anything else. So, you can design your own custom stuff! And if you want to buy one, you can buy just one if you want to. There's no minimum bulk order that you have to make. You just upload your design and in a couple of days, you can be riding on a skate board that has your face on the bottom. But wait, it gets better: you can post these products in your own personal little store (zazzle.com/jonathanurie if you don't believe me) and when people buy them, you can set how much of a royalty fee you want. It's a minimum of 15% (I think) for each product, but that means that if someone buys your $20 shirt from your store, you get 2 dollars. The customer gets the designs they want, the creator gets a stall at the global bazaar that they can link to (see above), and if you can pull it off, you can buy two 99 cent chicken sandwiches at Wendy's every time someone buys your shirt. Am I Abercrombie? No. But I sell shirts that are just as cool and they're guaranteed to be more unique. I sell what I want to sell, you buy what you want to buy and the economic wheels keep on turning (Okay, maybe not all of my designs are as cool as Abercrombie's, but I'm a one-man show and Abercrombie has all of China designing for them).
I recently watched a video by the author of The World is Flat and he painted quite the economic landscape for people. Suddenly, the world's marketplace is no longer tilted in favor of the United States! Suddenly, we have to compete with China! Indians (in India) are taking our telemarketer jobs! Doctors in Bangladesh are reading our x-rays! Watching him, I realized how very easily national policies can turn to protectionism as a way of keeping competitors out of the way. But for some reason, I didn't get quite that feeling as I watched him speak. As he spoke of this "flattening" of the world, i couldn't help but think of my little corner of the zazzle.com domain where MY STUFF was being sold to whoever wanted to buy it. Maybe I'm naive, but I got a little giddy just thinking about it.
I, Jonathan Urie, am now in direct competition with Xiao Chen Xu of China for that computer programming job, but I'm also competing against Abercrombie and Hollister and Mossimo and a bunch of others that are in the same clothing market as I am now. Sure, my market share isn't that great (something on the order of .0000001% as of yesterday's newspaper), but that's beside the point. The real giddiness-inducing part of all of this is that I can be whoever I want to be. ME. Yep, that's right, I don't have an office, I don't have a team of designers, but I am clothing designer. I can compete with the Big Guys. Shoot, I don't even have to become a Big Guy: all it takes is an army of zazzlers and suddenly, you realize that the shirt you bought the other day for $40 is not the best deal. And each one of the zazzlers goes out and buys 2 99 cent chicken sandwiches and everyone's happier. I know I'm being a little over simplistic in all of this, but I like to err on the side of dreaming big.
So I will continue to fight my growing tendency to be a technology brat, but at the same time, I'm going to continue to pay my dues to the zazzler militia and who knows, maybe one day I'll go to Wendy's and buy a regular burger.