{"id":13309,"date":"2015-03-26T12:34:36","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T12:34:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/too-much-time-on-his-hands\/"},"modified":"2015-03-26T12:34:36","modified_gmt":"2015-03-26T12:34:36","slug":"too-much-time-on-his-hands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/too-much-time-on-his-hands\/","title":{"rendered":"Too much time on his\u00a0hands"},"content":{"rendered":"

mostlysignssomeportents<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

\n\u201cThat guy has too much spare time\u201d is one of the most odious,
\nintellectually dishonest, dismissive things a person can say. It
\ndisguises a vicious ad-hominem attack as a lighthearted verbal shrug.
\nThe subtext of the remark is that the subject\u2019s passions \u2014 this remark
\nis almost always directed at someone engaged in some labor of love \u2014
\nare so meritless that their specific shortcomings don\u2019t even warrant
\ndiscussion. The subtext is that any sane person who considers these
\npassions will immediately see their total worthlessness. To direct this
\nremark at someone is to utterly dismiss their personal fire and so their
\n ability to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy.\n<\/p>\n

\nIt\u2019s a substitute for thought. It\u2019s a uncompromising line between art
\nand junk, between personal enrichment and navel-gazing. Whether it\u2019s
\ndirected at some model-train otaku who has reproduced, in miniature, a
\nfantastic landscape that she brings to life with the flick of a switch
\nor an obsessive collector of breakfast cereal packaging whose house is
\nwallpapered with gaudy enticements to tooth-decay, the slur brooks no
\npossibility that the speaker has failed to appreciate some valuable,
\nfulfilling element of the subject\u2019s hobby.\n<\/p>\n

\nMaybe this irks me so much because everything I care about is dismissed
\nas a waste of time by most of world, or was, until recently: Science
\nfiction, the Internet, blogging, gadgetry, vintage tchotchkes, Disney
\nparks, etc. Really, is there anything fulfilling about life that didn\u2019t<\/i>
\n start out on the fringes, didn\u2019t start out as a waste of time? We love
\nto trot out hoary chestnuts from history where some long-dead expert
\npredicts the imminent demise of computers, or radios, or cars, or public
\n transit, or bicycling, or television, or indoor plumbing, or
\nmicroscopy, or the space program, but we never seem to notice that our
\nmodern world is full of similar dismissals of fun, fringey pass-times:
\nrobotic Lego, Versus MP3 mixes, TiVo, fanfic, blogging.\n<\/p>\n

\nOf course, some of this stuff will surely be relegated to the scrapheap
\nof history. Some of it will \u201cfail.\u201d But who can say what? Who can say
\nwhich technologies and movements will be the enduring delights of
\ngenerations to come, subject of PhD theses and documentary films, and
\nwhich ones will be merely charming but obscure footnotes?\n<\/p>\n

\nThe genuinely disruptive, novel artefacts are by definition<\/i> unpredictable. This fact is at the core of the doctrine of Fair Use: We don\u2019t know<\/i>
\n what innovations the world may come up with in the future, but we know
\nthat the fewer restrictions we put on tomorrow\u2019s innovators, the higher
\nthe likelihood that they will come up with something marvellous that
\nwill be to all our benefit. <\/p>\n

So, let\u2019s cut \u2018em some slack. The next time you meet some person who is
\nutterly captivated by some undertaking that completely mystifies you,
\ngive him the benefit of the doubt. Hold back on your instinctive
\nimputing of excess spare time and hang the obsession in a tickler-file
\nin the back of your brain to pull out and think about in the shower or
\nthe post-office line. If you\u2019re very lucky, a little of that delight may
\n rub off on you, too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

mostlysignssomeportents: \u201cThat guy has too much spare time\u201d is one of the most odious, intellectually dishonest, dismissive things a person can say. It disguises a vicious ad-hominem attack as a lighthearted verbal shrug. The subtext of the remark is that the subject\u2019s passions \u2014 this remark is almost always directed at someone engaged in some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-3sF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}