Tech: A long standing love affair

Nerd culture may be mainstream now, but it was not always that way. In a moving piece for Wired, Paul Ford details his love story with tech.
No one loves tech for tech’s sake. All of this was about power—power over the way stories were told, the ability to say things on my own terms. The aesthetic of technology is an aesthetic of power—CPU speed, sure, but what do you think we’re talking about when we talk about “design”? That’s just a proxy for power; design is about control, about presenting the menu to others and saying, “These are the options you wanted. I’m sorry if you wanted a roast beef sandwich, but sir, this is not an Arby’s.” That is Apple’s secret: It commoditizes the power of a computer and sells it to you as design.