The physical friction of everyday life—the time it took Isaac Newton to travel by coach from London to Cambridge, the dead spots of walking to work (no iPod), the darkness that kept us from reading—has disappeared, making every minute not used productively into an opportunity cost.

ESTHER DYSON
Editor of Release 1.0; Trustee, Long Now Foundation; Author, Release 2.0

As technology increases, so does our dependance on it. 'The things you own, end up owning you'. This is definitely an interesting concept; since my cohorts seem to be discussing efficiency, I figured I could throw in my two cents.

I spent the night entirely alone in the physical sense, but at any given time I had two or three electrical devices that are supposed to help me work more efficiently. All of these devices conveniently kept me in contact with other humans so that was nice. I stopped by starbucks to finish up some writing that I've been doing (gasp! away from the blog). My laptop (read: large PDA) rode shotgun for addresses, my phone came along for comfort, and my iPod rolled deep for artistic/aesthetic gratification. Imagine my surprise when I didn't get all my writing done...emails, text messages, inspirational song shuffling all kept me from my intended goal.

I'm increasingly mobile, yet bogged down by the devices that are allegedly freeing me. It's really quite a paradox. We had black(crack)berries over the summer that served as both a leash and an opened gate. It was nice to get away, but we could never get too far. They were invaluable for certain tasks, quick fixes to documents and such; they were totally killers in long meetings and such. Trust me, brickbreaker is much more fun than listening to Sergio lecture on valuation techniques. It's often found that people spend so much time on their blackberries that they completely miss the topic of the meeting. The epidemic has become so bad that some firms are taking crackberry privileges away in meetings, but breaking for 10-minute email breaks. Blackberry is the new cigarette. How chic.

If I don't stop dropping 'Fight Club' lines and theory into this thing, I'm going to start worrying myself.