Shen Wei, Ye Zun, and technology: a fanwank

[extrapenguin]

...because a bioengineering professor really should know how tech works.

Their childhood is easily explicable – Ma Gui and Fu You have some spaceship tech still there, with the salve and all, but that must've been restricted to the upper classes and Shen Wei and Ye Zun were poor homeless orphans struggling to survive; I don't think they'd ever have been in a position to access high-level tech as kids. Ye Zun's life went from bad to worse at the rebel camp, which doesn't seem to have tech, and Ma Gui and Fu You seem to have kept Shen Wei away from the spaceship tech, including the Hallows.

Fastforward 10k years. Ye Zun, sure, he's too busy seething in his pillar to really notice the proliferation of technology into Dixing (like the barkeep's sound system), especially if it was more recent, but Shen Wei? He lives on the surface, he's a professor of bioengineering, how the hell did he get his post if he can't submit funding applications online?

Thus, my theory: Shen Wei has a number of privacy/exposure-related concerns wrt mobile phones (they leave a log of their position) and went full on into the text-based hardcore security nut thing as camouflage of the real reason he doesn't want a mobile phone. He can't use Windows, but he has his own install of Tinhat Linux and runs everything 100% text-based. This means he's lacking a few of the things bystanders would class as tech knowledge signifiers (smartphone, ability to use Windows), so e.g. the SID all think he's a fossil from the time of the dinosaurs who can't use a single piece of technology. And he is a colossal troll who knows he can only correct this misconception once, so the SID will keep thinking he's just bad at tech ... until one day a case happens and he sits down at the suspicious Linux laptop and touch-types a terminal command without even looking at the references, ideally while in Envoy getup, and makes everyone's minds explode.

(Then Zhao Yunlan gives Shen Wei responsibility for configuring the wifi at home, and regrets it later when he realizes all the security measures Shen Wei slapped on.)

Comments

[airawyn]

That actually sounds a lot like my dad, who's a mathematics professor that doesn't even own a home computer. He has a Linux box at work and can do everything he needs on that, but he doesn't know anything about cell phones. He could learn, of course, but he's never bothered. And you know how it is when you pick up a brand-new piece of tech - it takes a little while to learn the interface, so if you're used to a command line interface, you might appear ignorant if someone shoves a smartphone in your hands and expects you to run an app.

And yeah, the amount of tracking info on a modern phone could really trip up someone who likes to, say, teleport places. So it's in Shen Wei's best interest to avoid a lot of tech, even if it makes him look a little out of place.

[extrapenguin]

Nodnod. I don't know how work computers go at Chinese universities – here, a lot of places give laptops instead of desktops, so it's possible he could have computer access at home.