Making fun of technology as an exercise toward not taking ourselves too seriously

I few months ago, I visited a retro video game convention in Portland with my oldest son. It was a lot of fun and seeing this canvas (which I loved) caused me to reflect on why I enjoyed it so much.

One of the things I find consistently funny is making fun of computers. I love how old computers allow us to do this while new ones, somehow, do not. They are too proud. The old computers were proud too, but also completely ridiculous. In hindsight, their shoddiness or tackiness is blaring and obvious.

I think our current technology is not different, yet we talk about it as if it were the fruit of the gods. Scan any recent headlines regarding Google, Facebook, Apple, Uber, VR, AI, for examples. We take them so seriously but are many of these things any less dumb than the Power Glove or some ill-conceived and buggy Atari game from the early 1980s? I think in thirty years we’ll be able to say they were the same sort of thing.