Walking Off Tech Training in Austin
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| The amazing downtown Austin Public Library |
The beginning of February I had the privilege of spending several days in Austin, Texas, as part of a technology training. The training at the Texas TECA conference was excellent, though the dominance of companies trying to sell us a product as education was overwhelming. I am always put off by how much control a handful of companies have over our personal and school lives and often wonder why we don't question it more than we do.
As I fight daily against kids addicted to phones and games on their Chromebooks, I think we have taken tech a step too far and need to pull back a bit. What we need is more analog and offline. Some schools are going back to textbooks and paper and I don't think that is such a bad thing. Simple tool making apes that we are, the digital world is too much for us to handle, so how do we think AI is going to be anything better?
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| The paved Shoal Creek Trail runs for miles from the library through the central city |
The weather was perfect, mainly in the mid-60s, which is ideal walking temperature. Walking is my favorite thing to do when visiting a city. I put in twenty to thirty miles while there on streets and trails. I don't wear a tracker because those tools take away from the experience by making it an exercise in quantification, not exploration. Also, other than pulling out a map app to spot-check my location, I don't use a phone for navigation; instead, I enjoy puzzling out my path from the urban geography. My walks between and after sessions led to a hike around Lady Bird Lake, a vacation from downtown to the Capitol and university, and trails along creeks in and around downtown.
The most shocking thing about downtown Austin is the amount of homeless people. I always think of Lakota chief Sitting Bull when he traveled to big cities around the U.S. and was shocked by poverty, which was unknown in his culture. What was most jarring was the juxtaposition of new skyscrapers rising from the ground while a homeless encampment sat at its base. It made me think of the cyberpunk trope seen throughout the genre of the gritty neon-lit lower city of the ordinary people in the darkened canyons of the buildings that house the elite. In downtown Austin, it feels like that city is already here. Walking through the quaint, older, low-rise buildings that make up the entertainment district in downtown Austin, nicely dressed revelers stepped around people experiencing distress who were everywhere. It was an unsettling dystopia that gave all the privileged revelry a sinister sheen. Like Sitting Bull, I came away unsettled and disturbed because the heart of a booming tech hub, flush with money from the shiny promises of the technorati shows the ugliness of its true face by the destitution everywhere on the streets.
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| My hotel in the center of the bohemian area of the city was great, but the juxtaposition of this glitzy wealth with the lines of homeless just a block away was unsettling and made me feel like a privileged asshole |
The highlight of my walking reveries was the Austin Public Library, a macrocosm of everything a library should be. While the interior spaces were terrific, and I will let the photos speak, the seamless blending of the exterior with the waterfront and creek trail connected the library to the city through biking and walking along pleasant off-street trails. While the library featured a rooftop garden, the only thing that could have made it better would be the garden and park spaces directly outside.
On the cruel, cold streets of glitzy Austin, the library seemed like the most humane thing in a culture of extremes of wealth and poverty.
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| Artwork at Austin Public Library |
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