Computers are not revolutionary, smart phones are revolutionary. Said by me, with apologies to Che Guevara who said “Medicine is not revolutionary, sanitation is revolutionary.

I was listening to NPR (in the car while running errands, I think). Two people – a guy and a gal, as my dad used to say – were talking about Social Media and the use of algorithms to drive traffic and how they are changing. The woman said something along the line of, “All of sudden, I’m getting tweets made by some rando guy with only three followers.” The use of some rando guy as a descriptor on NPR took me back, and I am still thinking about it.

I love that our language is still changing so rapidly, that it is so pliable, so malleable, and so alive. I wonder if they still have it – and I’m not going to look it up – but the French used to have an Office of Official French or something like that. I remember it was installed when the French were still coming to grips with English becoming the global language and words like le weekend were starting to contaminate their language. The French establishment feared that the French language would fade in importance on the world stage, joining other languages like Tagalog, K’iche’, or North Frisian, drifting into insignificance.

While I don’t think that will happen soon, France’s power and influence is waning and will probably continue to wane and making an official way to speak French will not help. Nobody thinks English is insignificant because it lifts words like patio, loot, powwow, or cookie, from other languages. Like sharks and Love, culture and its language has to keep moving forward to survive. Something, I’m glad to say, English is still doing.

Several days ago, Michele was talking to me about a couple of young people she is working with on a project. They had been working with several tools that allowed them to more easily collaborate. It occurred to me that they grew up with smart phones and the constant connection to everything that smartphones provide. They are on their phones with their friends or associates – or social media – all the time time and that means they are connected all the time.

I’m starting to hear the expression late-stage capitalism increasingly; now I realize it’s gone rogue and is showing up everywhere. Late-stage capitalism implies a couple of things. Capitalism, like everything else, has cycles and it will die out. Maybe capitalism was great, but it doesn’t work now. The phrase almost always says that capitalism is at the core of the inequality rattling our society right now. But I’m not so sure. I think the problem is not Capitalism, per se, but too much individualism and not enough concern for the commonweal. In many ways, kids being on their phones all the time is a reaction to that individualism and the isolation that individualism promotes. They are not as isolated as their forebearers, they are part of a new, growing collective.

Lastly, without trying to figure it out – which is fairly easy – follow this link to a restaurant and guess what country it is in. I was surprised. https://lucky.ua/en/#0s