While trying to enjoy an outing with Linda to celebrate my birthday I was reminded how necessary it has become to stay vigilant about our use of technology. Allow me to explain. In the course of one day, we were told we MUST share our cell with Cracker Barrel in order to be texted our table was available, I was unable to find a parking space at my alma mater that did not INSIST I pay digitally, and to add insult to injury, when I tried to get a visitor pass I was DIRECTED to download an app in order to register my license plate!
Suffice it to say that I was extremely annoyed I could not find a single free parking space on the 700 acre campus of James Madison University (pictured above) so I could visit. Meanwhile, we waited at crosswalks as robots roamed the campus delivering food to students. All I can say is that if this represents the future, I do not want any part of it and I am prepared to resist it as much as possible. As I wrote at Viva la Resistance! just because the world is heading off a cliff it does not mean we must join it.
To place this experience in context, Linda and I enjoy visiting college campuses whenever we can and over the years have visited countless schools, including all of the New England Ivies: Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale. And that is not to mention other prestigious schools such as Bowdoin, Vanderbilt, Virginia, and our very own Washington & Lee here in Lexington. Never have we failed to find available parking on or close to any campus we ever visited and so being unable to visit as an ALUMNUS of my own school was infuriating.
I resent being forced to interact unnecessarily with machines instead of humans and being limited to digital options for all such interactions. What is more, I make it a practice to never scan Quick Response (QR) codes as they siphon one’s private information and even have been linked to parking meter scams in cities across the United States, among other dangers. All of which is to say that in this age of ever growing technological invasion into our daily lives it pays for us all to be extra vigilant and to resist it!