Technoethicist

Per­haps you know the feel­ing: so many thoughts, so many half-baked phrases, not quite sure how to put it all on paper, mind going crazy with hyper-links to all the other still-doughy ideas of the last for­ever.  Per­haps you also know this end­ing: no writ­ing accom­plished, many pages surfed, beers ingested, feel­ing of failure.

A good friend once told me how to deal with this prob­lem. “Just get over it and write, already.”  My coun­ter­ar­gu­ment didn’t hold much water, either.  “Who cares if you can’t fin­ish?  I get dis­tracted all the time by other ideas.  I always see ways of mak­ing this exact point bet­ter.  Just don’t fin­ish it.”

Just don’t fin­ish it.  Holy.

Yes, it makes per­fect sense.  What is ever fin­ished on the web?  Isn’t that what makes the inter­net seem so human?  It’s always in a state of revi­sion, of con­tin­ual growth.  Today, this tech­noethi­cist finally embraces her medium and gives into the hyper­links (men­tal and dig­i­tal) and vows to give up on com­ple­tion.  Fel­low mem­bers of the ADD gen­er­a­tion, who needs to fin­ish when you can—