Written by Noah Maywar
Art by Noah Maywar
It’s Not Your Device, Your Wi-Fi is Fine, and the World Isn’t After You—You’re Just an Idiot. Respectfully, a fed-up programmer.
The digital death rate continues to rise year after year. Victims line landfills after being brutalized and discarded, victimized by verbal abuse, and finished off with full-blown tech homicide. The misuse of our devices is out of control. Offenders are not limited to out-of-touch elderly; even the savviest of programmers will waste hours screaming obscenities (all of which would be prevented if they had just read a user manual or documentation to fix their issue in a few minutes). Point being, ninety percent of the time, the problem is us, not the machine.
PROFESSORS AND CANVAS
Shockingly, software illiteracy is most prevalent in academia. Professors, often the heads of their fields, somehow still fail to upload a syllabus on Canvas by the third week of class. Additionally, they assume their students, who are using it for the first time, will pick it up immediately. People with PhDs and doctorates still believe computers are mythical creatures in a box. To our dear professors, programmers are not wizards and we would like to point you to the nearest 2 minute video explaining why the audio is not working.
CONTROLLER KILLERS
Gamers are some of the most digitally literate people. From modding games to having the most futuristic setups you can imagine; and yet, their reputation for sparking a blind rage after being frustrated or stuck on a particular part of a game precedes them. Often, gamers blame lag, hardware issues, or the game being bad for their habit of smashing controllers and cracking screens. Admittedly, there can be legitimate problems, such as stick drift; however, most of the time they are just bad at the game.
SMARTPHONE SLANDER
Despite being the most used technology in the world (or maybe because of it), myths and misinformation run rampant. Remember when Apple admitted to slowing down older phones to prevent them from shutting down unexpectedly due to aging batteries? Probably not; however, you may remember rumors of companies intentionally slowing down your phone to force an upgrade. The truth is they aren't. The only issue was that Apple pushed this change without telling users. Another conspiracy is that smartphones are listening to and storing everything we say. If you search "Is my phone-" one of the top ten results will likely fill in "-listening to me." There is no place on earth to store that amount of data or have the chance to process it for their needs. According to the International Data Corporation, just under eight zettabytes comes out to a cost of $370 billion. With .4 zettabytes being produced a day, it will only be 20 days until they have to rebuild and pay that amount again. This is an astronomical cost, even for the wealthiest corporations.
IGNORANCE ISN'T BLISS: MEDIA LITERARY (OR LACK THEREOF)
YouTube University and TikTok teachers can tell you a lot in under a minute, including misinformation. It is becoming increasingly more challenging to differentiate between fact and fiction at face value. A disparity of media illiteracy caused by an overreliance on unreliable sources, such as Reddit or other forms of social media that we have treated as infallible, has warped our ability to discern who might be taking advantage of us.
This phenomenon will worsen when AI takes a greater hold of the entertainment industry. We could train A.I. with only 20-30 images of a face since 2023. Deepfakes and complete fabrications of reality are at the fingertips of everyone with a computer. Those with mal-intent or an agenda to spread can do it by simply asking one of these free A.I. generative websites to make what they describe. We need to take more agency in what information we take in and take the time to understand what tools we use, and more importantly, what other people on the internet use.