The Early Adopter

In the context of a conversation about the future of Generative AI the other day, someone called me an "early adopter". I considered it for a moment and decided that the term was almost laughably inadequate. I don’t merely adopt new technologies early, I aggressively seek them out and invest considerable amounts of time, effort and money on them while looking for interesting and effective ways to integrate them into my workflow and lifestyle. At least that sounds a bit better than saying I just have a thing for gizmos and gadgets that would shock the Little Mermaid.

I've never been shy about adopting new technologies into my life and overall I think that's a good thing, but there have been some mistakes, as well a few new technologies that stood out as being more requirement than elective. I want to talk about that as a prelude to exploring my thoughts about AI in my next post.

Vapor Wave v1.0

So yeah, let's talk about how I got started on my path as an early adopter. I've always been into tinkering with things to see how they work and if I can break them and put them back together again. But devices for creating music were the things that stuck out at me most.

I think I must have been around twelve years old when I saw my first toy synth at a Radio Shack. It had sine, square and sawtooth waveforms and a couple of filters and oscillators that you could combine to make various bleeps and bloops. Playing with this device, my imagination had been captured and I knew something massive was on the horizon.

A couple of years later I wrote a school paper about the future of electronic music. At the time, the leaders in the field included folks like Bob Moog, Ray Kurzweil, Wendy Carlos, Jean-Michel Jarre, Brian Eno and Mark Mothersbaugh… artists, engineers and innovators of the field who wanted to replace real instruments with digitized copies, make music out of the beats of hummingbird wings and the topography of coastlines, and create never-before heard sounds that were just as surreal and evocative as they were modern and exciting. You know, crazy people.

Reading that paper aloud at a regional high-school writing competition got me an award for creativity and my first real girlfriend... and that's how I knew I was on to something.

Soon after, I convinced my parents to buy me my a keyboard synth... and this was back when they were barely out of the “scientific instrument” phase. Why they agreed I will never know, but that old Sequential Six Trak was amazing... barely a half step out of the “patch cable” phase but with a MIDI real-time control capability that seemed magical. My second keyboard, a Casio CZ-1000, stored its data on a cassette tape. My third was a Roland Juno 106 and my forth was a Roland JX-10... I was hooked.

Of course, I wanted to listen to music in addition to creating it and there was fun new tech developing on the consumer side as well. I followed every new trend in music delivery, storage and playback that I could get my hands on from that point forward. I went from recording radio broadcasts on a cassette deck straight to buying a Sony CD “boombox” the year they came out… and experimented with MiniDisc, memory stick and, finally, pure digital players… ripping all my CDs to .mp3 and .aac files to play in WinAmp and on the original Rio MP3 player, back when they could barely hold a single album.

Nerd Cred

When it came to computers, I cut my teeth programming in BASIC on a Timex Sinclair 1000, did 3D rendering and MIDI sequencing on an Amiga 1000, played Dungeon Master on an Apple IIGS "Woz" edition and registered my own domain, hosted my own email server and published my own websites on a NeXTDimension Color I got at a very deep discount from the campus computer store back before Steve Jobs traded black magnesium cubes for the Bondi blue bubble.

I bought a first generation Apple Newton, and second and third gen Newtons too and I owned the first generation iPod, iPhone and iPad… the latter of which took me several years to find a meaningful use for. I still haven’t found the "killer app" for the Apple Watch I’m wearing right now, but at least it's lasted longer as a product than the MagicCap I had such high hopes for!

It's More than Technology, It's a Lifestyle

Technology has a social component too, which is impossible to overstate. For example, being fluent in computers and kind of a dork meant I was using real-time chat on a local BBS and online dating when that was considered scary and shameful (the first time, before it caught on, I mean), downloading memes and porn from USENET over a 1200 baud modem, learning about leet-speak before Prince started using the number 4 for the word “for” and rizzing Harajuku girls with emoji on my handphone before most people in America had even seen a dubbed anime or a flat screen TV.

The guy who made the website about smashing a Tamagotchi toy that received over 800 hate-filled emails and got featured on the Howard Stern show? That was me. The guy sitting in a coffee shop making cartoons in Macromedia FutureSplash on a Vaio laptop for Cartoon Network's online online division Wildbrain while everyone else was still drawing characters on cell paper, catching colds in offices and getting eyestrain from CRT synch roll? That was me too.

I bought a color calibrated LCD monitor from Silicon Graphics that cost me three months rent, ditched my SLR camera and slide film and went to Japan to buy the first digital camera I could get my hands on, and, after discovering VCDs in Hong Kong, built a home media server and ripped all my DVDs to stream video to my TV… back when most pro photographers were still drawing crop marks on contacts sheets, QuickTime was barely bigger than a postage stamp and your local Blockbuster Video was still stocking a hundred copies of Jurassic Park.

I could go on and on. And on.

The Revolution Wasn't Just Televised...

And speaking of big lizards and dying tech, the fact that I am not currently sitting on a dragon pile of bitcoin right now looking for suckers to buy my bag would suggest that I haven’t always been 100% right about which technologies were going to turn out to be hugely profitable scams and which were going to to be revolutionary. Nevertheless I feel I have been way ahead of the curve on all the ones that have really mattered like mobile phones, web sites, laptops and the rise of the lone wolf developer, SaaS and Cloud computing (fancy re-brandings of client/server computing from the 70s but still important), and the home creation and editing of digital audio, multimedia content, photography, 3D modeling and eventually non-linear digital video… all of which have radically changed the way we produce and consume entertainment, conduct commerce and interact with each other.

All Positive, Except When It Isn't

I've avoided some huge pitfalls... such as converting to Microsoft Bob, pre-ordering Duke Nukem Forever or investing in NFTs, but I’ve made some mistakes too, I must admit… I had more than one of Sony’s failed MiniDisc and Memory Stick player devices, got all into Bernoulli disks which nearly nobody else fell for, and even supplemented my NeXT’s magneto-optical disk with an actual WORM dIsk for backups. And speaking of expensive optical disks, I amassed a significant Laser Video Disk collection before giving that up, and I even bought a Super Audio CD player believing artists and publishers would back quality over portability. Talk about a colossal failure.

Do you remember those stupidly expensive “light field” cameras that could focus on several points at the same time? I bought two of those. I’ve also owned a couple of VR headsets which I rarely use and I invested pretty heavily into the idea of mesh networking which has, so far, gone nowhere. The only innovation I haven’t really gotten into this decade which may or may not actually become useful is 3D printing and that’s only because I don’t have the space for it. I did get one of those fancy ovens that cooks your food with really bright lights, though, which I still regret. I even owned a curved 3D TV. I think they made like six of those, ever.

Big ticket tech trends haven't escaped my attention either... I purchased a hybrid electric MINI Cooper, then traded it in for a fully electric MINI Cooper and then put a down payment on a Rivian… before coming to my senses, canceling it to get my money back and buying a regular truck from Vroom that could actually get me places I needed to go.

But even though I've turned bearish on EVs, I am still waiting on the bionic implants to come through. Having a built-in unconscious compass sense or the ability to just know the dimensions of a room at a glance seems like it would be exceptionally useful.

For Whom the Tech Tolls

In any case, I mention all this to set up a point which I feel will be important in next week’s post; I believe it is largely true that the people who have sought out and integrated new technology into their lives have tended to do better, both socially and economically, despite the occasional dead end, than those who haven’t. But there have been a few moments where it wasn’t really necessary to be an early adopter for cutting-edge technology to have a profound impact on your social, economic or emotional well-being… times where you didn’t have to go looking for a new technology to change your life because that technology came looking for you first.

Mobile phones were just such a technology. In America in 1999, beepers, pagers and car phones were primarily for doctors, drug dealers and douchebags… but by 2005 if you didn’t have a cellphone, you didn’t have a social life. And just as people were adapting to having a phone in their pocket all the time, the same thing happened again with the explosion of social media and smart phones between 2005 and 2010.

When something like this happens, when the technology comes hard and fast for everyone all at once, it’s not a matter of early adoption… it’s a matter of survival. If you don’t buy in and adapt to the new technology and it's downstream socio-economic effects quickly, you don’t merely miss the opportunity to get ahead, you risk getting left behind.

The Next Big (Vapor?) Wave…

I believe we’re facing another of these transitions in the next two to five years… and I’m sure you already know what it is. That’s right, Generative AI is coming for us and it’s going to be big… but let’s get into that in a future post.