Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

My father was an analog man.

The grandson of a charcoal burner (yes, that was a thing), the son of a cement truck driver, my father was an artist by passion and a lithographer by trade, back in the day when his trade was not far removed from actual litho-graphy, i.e., etching graphics on hunks of limestone (like the one I still have, pictured, right).

As his life progressed, the world moved from Ford’s Model T to Tesla’s Model 3, from The Great Depression to The Great Recession, from flying across the Atlantic to flying to the Moon and Mars, and from the wireless and talkies to smart phones and streaming video. Yet through it all, he managed to never use a computer, even when his industry embraced the technology of digital scanning, imagery, and on-demand printing. The closest he got to the digital world was a DVD player (which he rarely employed, preferring broadcast television) and his little clamshell phone (which he used only in emergencies, and often not even then).

By contrast, I cut my teeth on Star Trek and moonshots, bought The White Album six times (twice as an LP, then in 8-track, cassette, CD, and digital formats), was an early adopter of e-readers, and ended up in a career programming the same computers my father eschewed. In the Venn diagram of our two personalities, there was only the thinnest of intersections, composed mainly of Mel Torme, Walt Kelly, Herb Caen, historical fiction, and an introvert’s love of stillness, solitude, and quiet moments. Beyond that, we were intellectual strangers, and as the world became increasingly more technological, the distance between us intensified. 

This hit me today, as I began testing my latest work project. It’s a massive series of SQL queries that gather data for market analysis. It links a dozen tables of data in a variety of ways, building six segment views, each with about nine queries that utilize several sub-queries. All told, there are over 160 queries/subqueries in 18,000 lines of code that extract, aggregate, and summarize nearly 15 million rows of data into a hundred or so categories, all in under twenty minutes. It’s been a mind-bending exercise, a massive problem-solving exercise, and (when I do sleep) I’ve been literally having nightmares where I have to code my way out of the fix I’ve found myself in.

That last paragraph would have made my father stare at me in a combination of consternation, wonderment, and horror. A thought bubble over his head would read “This is my son?” Computers were quasi-magical to him (as sewing machines still are to me), and not to be trusted. To him, computers were an incomprehensible idea wrapped in an ever-changing fabric that seemed to defy the very laws of nature. They amazed him, confused him, and scared him.

And he was right. They are all that; all that and more.

The difference between us, the distance between his world and mine, was defined by them, especially as, in a bitter, ironical twist, the prevalence of computers began to isolate him from everyone else. When all the world speaks in code, a man of language is made mute.

My father was an analog man.

I am not a wholly digital man, but I am a bridge to the next generation, which is completely, utterly, unabashedly, and passionately digital. And beyond them? Beyond the digital generation, what? A quantum generation? A generation that is technologically integrated, that merges with technology, a technology no longer of wires and circuits but of neurons, HUDs, and interfaces? As in all history, it is a process, a path, a progression that we will not abandon.

Already I see the distance between myself and the young people I know begin to form, stretch, widen, deepen. Just as I spoke a different language than my father, their speech is becoming ever more cryptic to me. In subtle ways, the speed of their discourse begins to outstrip my abilities to keep up. The patterns of their lives diverge from those to which I’ve entrusted my path, and with new patterns come new attitudes, different priorities.

I’m not complaining; I’m merely observing. There will come a day when I will be left behind, as my father was. I won’t embrace that separation as my father did, though. I will do my best to keep up, but falter and lag, I will, without doubt.

I only hope that, when I find the isolation creeping in, I’m more comfortable with it than he was.

k