Little Sam

So when I was 4 years old, I did tap and ballet at a little studio down the street from where I lived. I don't remember much of that time (I was, you know, 4), but I do remember our recital a little bit. Mostly I remember being backstage before the performance. My most vivid memory of that night is standing backstage behind all of the curtains and looking at all the ropes and pulleys that made up the whole of the equipment on the stage, and it was fascinating to me. I didn't know what it was, but seeing how it worked behind the scenes was so fascinating to 4-year-old me.

Growing Up

Sam In The Choir

When I was in 3rd grade I joined the school choir. I wasn't particularly fond of singing, but it was an interesting experience. I actually vividly remember thinking I sounded like shit during the audition, but I still got in (really who's going to cut an 8-year-old from the choir). I only remember little bits of that time in rehearsals, but I do remember one thing in particular: the satisfying sound of being within the choir and just being able to bathe in the sound of everyone. I also remember our recital then too, outside in the brutal cold of a Florida winter (joke). I remember being fascinated by two things in particular: the lights and the speakers.

Sam In The Musical

In fourth grade, I had since moved back to New Jersey from Florida and one thing that everyone had to do as part of our project for music class was to be in the winter concert. I was one of the elves in A Pirate's Christmas and I have to say I killed it. I remember having a lot of fun then. Again, I also remember the fascination with what was going on behind the scenes. I found the prop rooms interesting, I found under the stage interesting. It was all really cool, but I didn't really have any way to express why I thought it was cool.

Summer Camps

One of the things we (my brothers and I) ended up doing was the summer theater camp at school and this is where I started to do more behind the scenes stuff. I was one of the sound operators for our little performance that we did at the end of the two week camp. We broke up into cast and crew and worked independently on making everything happen. While the cast learned their lines, figured out their blocking, and started building the characters they were going to be on stage, the crew got to work building the sets, setting up the speakers, getting the lights all hung and plugged into the system.

This was the moment I fell in love with doing stage crew work. It was behind the scenes, it wasn't flashy, but there was a lot of really cool stuff going on that people seemed to take for granted.

Sam Joins The Band

Okay so I started learning bass guitar when I was 11 or 12, we didn't have the time or money to do the year-round lessons at school, so we just did it for one of the semesters of music lessons. How did I start playing bass guitar, you ask? Well years before we had gotten LEGO Rockband for our brand new Wii and we had only a couple of instruments, so I would play bass instead of guitar. My appreciation for the instrument was the same as my appreciation for the tech crew—it wasn't flashy, but it was interesting and an important part of the band.

High School Sam

When I got to high school, I kept doing all of this stuff. I joined the drama club, I joined the bands (jazz, concert, and marching), and again, I was still the kid who wanted to do the tech crew, I wanted to be the one doing all of the supporting work. In fact, my first day in drama club I ran both the light board and the spotlight (which were not close to each other) to help one of the student directors get an idea of what they wanted to do for lighting.

At this point, I've been doing theater work for over 4 years—longer than even the seniors who started in high school, and I wasn't afraid to jump right in and support the directors. Later that year I became a technical consultant on the production staff for the next set of senior directors. Something that had never been done for a student my age.

Throughout this time I also did more work in the band, I worked closely with the directors to the point where I was helping doing the budget and getting busses scheduled for performances along with the band director. I was staying until 11pm (or later) after having spent a full day at school, done rehearsal with the drama club, and gone to swim practice (because I was also a varsity swimmer all throughout high school) working with the band director on ways to improve the band and get the administration to care more about our program.

"You haven't actually talked about technology at all at this point...are you going to make a point?"

Yeah so my point is, I grew up in dance, choir, theater, and band. I spent more time at school working on these clubs than I did at home with my own family. I had started looking at music schools, going to school to be a theatrical technical director, and I was working at a theater in a neighboring town putting on concerts and performances all the time. I had every opportunity to go into a creative field and be able to actually feasibly support myself doing so.

But I didn't do it.

The Unsung Hero

Throughout every single one of these experiences there was one thing that had always fascinated me: technology. Every single step of the way, technology was there supporting the things that I loved doing and helped us do all of this creative work. From the computers that ran the mics and lights during the musical to the microphones and speakers that I jury-rigged to the marimbas one night before a competition so the mallet percussionists could be heard. It was always there.

When I took music classes, I always found the MIDI keyboards interesting, I found the fact that DAWs like GarageBand and Logic served as a playground for me to mess around with different sounds and bits and pieces of music. The technology was the constant, underpinning all of the different things that I loved to do. It wasn't flashy, it wasn't always appreciated, but it was important, and it's what made so much cool stuff possible in my life.

Technology As A Way To Improve The World

In every stage of my life, I've been fascinated with the technology that helped me life a fulfilling life. Whether it was the computers that we used to make all the lights and sounds work, or the systems that make busses and trains run on time and in a coordinated manner, or even if it's just something as simple as the little tap to pay terminal when stopping for some boba at the local cafe, technology has materially improved the world in which I live.

There's a lot of discussion around about how technology has become a means to an end for exploitation, and that anger and fear has bled out into the world affecting everything and everyone, and it hurts to see it happen. I hate seeing technology misappropriated and shoved into people's faces in order to make a quick buck. That's not the world that got me to fall in love with technology. This was the world of small minded individuals clinging to power.

While this reality of much of the technology that we deal with from day to day, it's sad to see people lose touch with the ways that technology has improved the world around us—the thing that I fell in love with years ago as I helped my dad replace the motherboard in a computer when I was 6.

There's a lot of shit going down these days, but that cannot and will not take away my appreciation of my electric kettle that always heats water to the perfect temperature for my tea that I got from a little shop one town over. It doesn't take away the fact that I can share what I'm reading with people via my little e-reader without even having to try. It doesn't take away the little app that I use to know when the bus is coming so I don't get to work late. Some money-grabbing corporation cannot take that away from me.

That's why I spent so much time learning about technology. It's the thing that powers the world in thankless ways. It's the thing that gets your prescriptions to the pharmacy, it's the thing that helps a doctor recognize a pattern of issues over time for a patient, even when most of their records live at a hospital thousands of miles away, enabling life-saving treatment while they're far from home.

It's the thing that helps people like me share their thoughts and ideas with the world from their apartment. It's the thing that brings the music that I write to the world. It's the catalyst to my creativity. And that's why I will always appreciate it, even as I'm pulling my hair out cursing the computer for doing something I didn't want it to do and thinking about a life where I just work on a farm and go off-grid.

Even through all of the shit that's been going down in the world, I still push to bring new technology to the world because I've spent my whole life watching technology get used to materially improve the world. And that hope and appreciation cannot be taken away from me by the people in power or the angry mobs on the internet.