Upgrading the Operating System - computing the future?

I wrote this into my local Mac User group - but it felt worthy of a wider view and while initially referring to specific computing environment is a comment on our times - as well as chiming in with a recent news article on Time Berners-Lee and internet hate.

- - -

The only hassle with 'trying out a new Mac OS' is in any changes effected in that system that then are lost or have to be redone or undone in reverting.

Having IMAP makes email independent of the process. But there are all kinds of potential problems that can occur or have to be kept track of. One thus has to become a master strategist in laying out a course of action - or perhaps just enjoy other things as a strategy of not opening a can of work unless there really is a concrete desire rather than a passing fad of curiosity.

When I moved up a couple of notches from Snow Leopard (Mac OS10.6) there were things I lost and things I gained and after a bit I got used to workflows without the one and took for granted the other. An underlying narrative of this is of the fading of the excitement around unfolding of emergent future of feature, significant speed ups and storage increases. But instead; a sense of an ever moving complexity that whilst seemingly simplified in a certain kind of interface is in fact a fragmenting and distracting influence to even try to keep up with.

So the general trend is to just use the particular app or function without really learning much in terms of exploring and expanding a knowledge base. In fact one just 'g++gles up' now for almost anything and earns a sort of work-around 'try this try that' mode of a navigational sense of what will likely work. And probably not bother to really understand what the problem was if it can now be worked round - because life-time is the one bit of the OS that cannot be 'upgraded' to a larger, or more powerful version.

Time spent in something enjoyable doesn't require anything else to justify itself.
The relationship of computing to time is perhaps founded on particular golden examples of 'saving immense amounts of time'. Typesetting > Copy and paste. Accounting ledgers > spreadsheets.

But there is something in the WAY of it that becomes a Faustian Pact, in which powers are added us that yet we become addicted and enslaved to or corrupted by. Oh I know this seems strong language - but the addict is the last to own their condition and the seduction of power flatters the self. I found myself writing that believing our own stories/lies is the basis of corruption - which is a loss of a clarity of perspective and appreciation often associated with humility and compassion.

When I first bought (and met) a computer I got a Mac primarily because I gained a clear intuitive sense that I would spend time IN a more enjoyable virtual environment. (I had no direct experience of computing before I bought one - having been a refusenik/luddite until then).

I felt a real appreciation of the programmers and developers and engineers that had created a human friendly interface that was NOT the imposition of a requirement to fit into a soul-less mechanism and at that time NOT operating as a coercive marketing platform/parlour. So I had a naturally good feeling for the Mac - and for Apple (the two were different).

Apple remade themselves via Jobs 2.0 and are not the same company.

One can make personal mythological play out of such corporations of service-framework or rival protocols, but just look at the hatred that comes up from such modes of identity in the public domain!

Tim Berners-lee wonders why there is such hatred online (recent news). It is all a matter of identity as invested in 'for and against' - instead of identity yielded in 'both and'.

Will humanity destroy its world/self? ...Perhaps.
But I see the basis from which it operates as a disintegrating 'platform' - and that means becoming free of its compulsions as a result of dissociation.

Metamorphosis operates in many cases as the growing of the new within the old with a process of emergence through the process of apparent death.
Parasites operate similarly but as an invading or consuming violation of the host rather than as the reintegration of the Life of the host into new form.

Maybe that's the nature of a choice - as to whether to operate upon wholeness in attempt to exploit it for an identity over and against others - or to operate within wholeness as a unique but integral facet of its nature.

Upgrading one's 'operating system' then serves a true integration of, rather than 'adding' to a limited and limiting code-base.

The consolidation of power-struggle in the world drives an inherently globalist agenda in which the very few dictate for their gratification upon the very many, but only an integrated appreciation of power can inherit the Earth as true life time shared.

One doesn't have to love or hate Apple to engage or assert one's relationship as a customer and a fellow human being to all those human beings in Apple or its associated communities, in making choices that grow a capacity for choice rather than give it away.