I’ve loved digital technology as long as I’ve been alive. Growing up in the analog world of the 1980s, I was excited by every bright light and new world opened up by a digital display. I was so excited by what computers could do that, before my family owned a computer, I wrote out the code for a text-based computer game on an electric typewriter. Circa 2000 I would physically go to the Apple Store to watch the live-streamed Steve Jobs keynote introducing new Apple products, even when I wasn’t planning on buying one soon. At a family Christmas event in 2011, I became clear that educational technology was the right non-faculty career choice for me, when I realized everyone else had left the room while my wife’s uncle and I had a heated discussion about operating systems. After all that I doubled down and got a master’s in computer science.

That’s why it pains me deeply to say: I’ve become a techno-pessimist.