I was updating plugins this morning on this blog, because that’s what responsible people do, and noticed that I haven’t written here in a while. I also noticed there was a post in draft that had never been published. It was from March of 2014. Would I write it differently today? Probably. There’s likely a reason I didn’t publish it. I have no recollection of why. I decided to just hit publish without editing, except for this intro. Let’s just call it a visit from a ghost of my blogging past. 
***
This is a classic scene from The Matrix.
We’re living in a form of the matrix.
The end result of the introduction of new technologies is a change is what we perceive as real. We begin to see the world differently than we did before the technology was introduced. It’s inevitable. “Embedded in every tool is an ideological bias,” Neil Postman wrote in Technopoly, “a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.” Twenty years from now, we are likely to not recognize this world we live in today.
This movie scene came up in a casual business conversation the other day. “There is no spoon,” was said in joking as we discussed the relative merits of a product being pitched. It struck me that in our version of the matrix our spoons are the shiny objects peddled to us as the next thing we can’t live without, or that our businesses won’t survive without. We are in a constant state of barrage about the wonders of technology, the internet, etc. And most of these have only marginal relevance to the quality of our businesses, let alone our lives.
The truth is, there are no shiny objects. And we should be bending them as we see fit, not being bent by them.
But you knew that already.
