[at_a_remove]

This resonates with me. Two different people at a job dubbed me "The Technological Luddite" because of, among other things, my lack of a cell phone, the absence of a Facebook page, pointing out where the "all you have to do is ..." algorithms break, and so on.

I will admit it, I prefer the downslope of the Hype Cycle. I choose boring technology. At the end of the day, I am trying to solve problems, and playing with new stuff often doesn't pay out for solving those problems.

I related this once on another site: we had this process that was heavily manual and the people performing the task would want this part at the end automated, or maybe a reminder email at the end, or some instructions here ... can we just do that part by computer? Bit by bit, the process maxed out on automation.

And then the people who asked for the automation were fired and replaced with minimum wage intern types. Also, the final product was inferior but hey ...

I think technology can be marvelous but we often do stupid things with it, ending up in unemployment and some crap results, like "American cheese."