Is there a douchier title in technology than “Evangelist”? It should conjure up images of people on street corners passing out fliers for a church, political party, or other organization you don’t want to join, and who will yell at you if you brush them off. It’s excessive, and it’s polarizing. Though a lot of us want to tell the world about what we love—that’s half of what social networks are designed for [1]—the problem is that, unless it’s a specific social context, nobody wants to hear about it.

That’s what makes the idea of the “Evangelist” so obnoxious. I say this as a happy member of the Cult of Apple, but one reason why Apple users are so often mocked is the evangelistic fervor with which they freely promote their company’s products at the expense of other things, often without prompting. [2] If it’s annoying when people do it for free, how annoying is it when someone is being paid to do it? The problem is that, the instant money enters the equation, a person’s credibility is potentially compromised. The hand that feeds is also a hand that holds the leash, or the rod.

It’s why John Gruber is skeptical of Apple’s hiring of Kevin Lynch as VP of Technology. Working for Adobe, and promoting Flash on mobile devices was parroting the company line. He may have believed it, he may not, but I’d trust an independent partisan over a corporate partisan any day—which is why I trust Gruber. Apple may hook him up with review units and inside info, but he earns his living the hard way. Kevin Lynch is doubly boned here—if he really thought Flash was a good mobile technology, he was wrong. If he was just parroting the company line, he’s dishonest, which makes for the worst kind of evangelism.

Evangelism in technology is merely marketing taken to an extreme. It’s an attempt to put a name and a friendly face to an entity that has no face. No technology company is innocent here—the evangelist is an established business practice, for better and for worse. Too often, the evangelist is pushing a product that is known to be sub-par, brushing the flaws under the rug. The skeptical technology user needs to be aware, and to poke, prod, and otherwise see past the curtain of whiz-bang buzzwords to see what lies within, lest they get suckered. As dangerous as it is to be a naysayer, total buy-in to the evangelical crowd us just as bad.

More than 2,500 miles from Silicon Valley, in a small home office with a dog bed under the desk, sits a man on the cutting edge of the apps boom.

The Wall Street Journal on Loren Brichter

The man does amazing work, and he lives in my home town. Not much more to be said, though hopefully you can actually read this with The Wall Street Journal’s ridiculous paywall. And if you want to challenge me at Letterpress, my username is, no surprise, sanspoint.

Everything new has its detractors. It was Douglas Adams who said something along the lines of “Anything invented between when you were 15 and 35 is new and revolutionary and exciting, and you’ll probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.” Douglas was right in sentiment, though the numbers are really more of a rough estimate. There are plenty of young detractors, and plenty of older early adopters. It’s really a question of mindset.

We see this at play when any new, “disruptive” technology hits the scene. It’s one thing to be a healthy skeptic, and if technology is going to be a major part of your life, it’s to your own benefit that you maintain a certain skepticism before adopting anything new. It’s the only way to maintain a level head, and not get suckered in by the pundits, paid shills, and hype any new thing brings. Ask anyone who has gone blind into the latest new thing and gotten burned if they wish they’d listened to someone with a different opinion.

Maintaining healthy skepticism, however, can easily get you lumped in with the naysayers and doomsayers, the sort who are in Douglas Adams’s second category. These are the sorts of people who say “the Internet is destroying human interaction,” or “eBooks are the first step to Orwell’s dystopia.” There is always a kernel of truth to these outlandish claims, going back to Plato’s claim that the written word would result in people becoming unable to remember things. It’s not that, with writing, we can’t remember things, it’s that we often don’t need to—a subtle, but important, distinction. Claims of information overload and decreased attention, maladies associated with the Internet, actually go back to the rise of the printed book, if not before.

Behind such claims are various motivations ranging from sheer skepticism gone wild, to fears of lost control over certain segments of the populace. Some are founded, some are not, and yet we live on. Separating the valid arguments from the invalid, or frequently absurd is a task that burdens all of us, and it is very easy to fall victim to skilled rhetoric. Speaking of the Internet and isolation, all one needs to do is point to your prototypical computer geek—an introverted, quiet man and spending hours in front of a glowing display—and your point is made. You could also use that prototypical computer geek as an example to the opposite, pointing to his rich social life communicating with people all over the world, just from behind a keyboard.

I’ve heard this reply myself: “But, those people don’t exist!” If so, then who’s typing the messages? Even a Markov chain generator needs input. [1] We often use technology to do things we’ve always done, just in new ways that seem alien by comparison. Writing with a pen and paper isn’t a massive leap from styluses and wax tablets. The principles behind a typewriter are not difficult to understand. Pushing buttons on a piece of metal and seeing glowing letters appear on a display that doesn’t have any physical connection to the buttons is.

When you think about it that way, a great deal of the doomsayers arguments fall flat. A new way to do something can displace the old way, but it doesn’t remove it completely. We still talk face-to-face, in the real world, and no clever application or piece of hardware [2] will ever undo that. The simplest technologies and the most complex technologies often exist side-by-side. It’s the solutions in-between we see that get knocked by the wayside by whatever’s new, and then only if it’s truly good enough. The difference between a skeptic and a naysayer is that a skeptic can be convinced with evidence. A naysayer can’t.

Google recently announced it would be shutting down its popular Google Reader service on July 1st. To say this decision has not been well-received is akin to saying the invasion of Iraq was not well-received. So far, Google has not seen fit to respond to the desperate pleas of RSS junkies looking to keep their fix, but has committed several new developers to Orkut. Reader is the latest popular product to be shut down by Google, and arguably the most beloved.

I recently got ahold of Google’s roadmap for the future of their platform, however, and we can expect a lot more panic among the Internet community, and soon. Google will be shutting down Google Groups in October of this year, followed by Google Voice, Analytics, and Trends in 1Q 2014. Gmail, and Google Apps will be sunsetted in 2Q, and by the end of 2014, Google will drop its search feature to focus completely on web advertising, Android, mobile advertising, Google+, Orkut, and stupid looking wearable computing.

Okay, that was obviously satire, but it’s becoming clear that if you rely on Google for anything they can’t monetize or sell ads through, you’re going to be up shit creek before much longer. [1] It’s increasingly clear that Google sees itself as merely a purveyor of ads, and that is informing its entire ethos from here on out. Every product decision Google makes should be viewed in our eyes through the filter of “How can Google use this to sell ads?” Android and Glass? They’re just ways to sell mobile ads based on what you’re doing, when, and where you are. It might not be as bad as this parody video from when they announced Glass, but it doesn’t seem far off.

Advertising, itself, is a necessary evil. As long as people need to know who provides a product or a service, and as long as people providing products and services need customers, we will have ads. A great deal of the things I access for free are supported in whole, or in part, by ads, including my favorite podcasts, a vast number of online comics, various independent bloggers, and the occasional social network or two.

And all the Google services I use, or did use until they shut them off.

The only alternative to the ad arrangement is a paid service, whether pay-to-play, or freemium. [2] These things are unlikely to stick around without some sort of income to keep the lights on, the bits flowing, and feed the people doing the hard work. The Internet is not a charity. What I object to is when the relentless pursuit of profit comes at the cost of what brought everyone through the door in the first place. It’s as if your favorite burger joint doubled the prices and started serving Grade-B beef and soggy fries.

There are many reasons this happens, but the biggest is that Wall Street demands year-over-year increases in revenue and profit, so that the value of stock goes up. For a company like Google with one major source of income (ads, of course), this means cranking up how many ads they can sell, and cranking down anything that doesn’t help them sell more ads. They call it “spring cleaning,” but that’s just a good folksy euphemism.

The worst part is that Google is sticky. I can’t see myself abandoning Gmail for anything at this point. I use Google Voice religiously, simply for free texting, as the actual carrier rates in the US are extortion. Google is the best company at providing products that we want to use and see ads while using it. That was the deal we thought we made. These products are worth us giving up our usage data, our personal information, our wants and desires to be sold, because we get something in return that is of equal or greater value to what we surrender.

Now, as I struggle to find something to replace a lynchpin of how I do my job, I’m not so sure Google is that company anymore.

Technology is often viewed as a means to an end. If you ask an ordinary person what a computer is for, they might not be able to tell you, but looking at how an ordinary person uses a computer tells you everything. It’s a means to entertainment: playing computer games, or watching cat videos on YouTube. It’s a means to communicate, with status messages on Facebook, emails of photos to family members, or—if they’re really up on things—video calls to loved ones too far away to see in person. Come tax time, a computer is an accountant. The technology is merely a tool.

A tool is anything that allows us to accomplish a task with less time or effort than it would take us to do without it. A spear is an easier way to hunt an animal than using our bare hands. A car lets us travel faster, and in more comfort than by using our feet. A computer allows us to solve math problems faster than own brains, pencil, and paper—and fundamentally, everything is a math problem if you look at it the right way. [1]

Those of a certain bent, however, see technology as a thing unto itself—something that they can bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate to serve our own ends. These are the people who make the software that makes a computer so useful for the ordinary people, creating the games, the tax preparation software, the e-mail applications, the Facebooks, and the YouTubes that make owning a computer worthwhile for a large and ever-growing segment of the population.

Every so often, one of those ordinary people becomes fascinated by more than what they can do with the technology. They want to know how the technology works. They seek to learn, they seek to understand, and then they seek to control it and make it work for themselves. It’s through this process that the true value of technology in any form is unlocked. We go from being the beneficiary of a tool to a wielder of a tool, and from a wielder of a tool to creating new tools, whereby the process begins again with a new generation.

Not everyone is going to program, design, build or engineer. To assume so greatly underestimates both the potential applications of technology, and the willingness of the average person to want to control things. A mistake technophiles make is to assume that everybody, in some way, is like them, or can become like them. The person who seeks to control technology does so because they are wired to want it. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a beneficiary of technology without control, and we should acknowledge that. The ones who want to bend technology to their will, to make and remake the tools, end up benefiting the rest of us.