Technology has always held a special place in my life. Growing up, I watched my father hunched over his early PC, then lugging around a massive laptop, teaching himself Adobe programs with the same curiosity that drove him to understand how everything worked. He was an early adopter not for the sake of having the latest gadget, but because he understood that the right tools could make life not just easier, but richer and more fulfilling.
That distinction matters more now than ever.
For most of human history, technological advancement served a clear purpose: to reduce the burden of necessary work so people could spend more time on what truly mattered. The plow meant farmers could feed their families with less backbreaking labor. The printing press meant knowledge could spread beyond the wealthy elite. Even the personal computer, for all its complexity, was meant to amplify human capability.
Somewhere along the way, we lost the thread.
This year's Consumer Electronics Show offered a sobering glimpse into where the tech industry believes we are headed. Daniel Cooper of Engadget captured it perfectly: "To me, the vision of the future on show here is equal parts solitary and infantilized."
The showroom floors were packed with robots designed to walk our dogs, feed our children, and clean our homes. AI assistants to answer our phones, transcribe our conversations, and write our emails. The industry has even coined a term for this future: Ambient Care, technology that surrounds us, encompasses us, does our living for us.
To be clear, assistive technology for the elderly, those with chronic injuries, or people with accessibility needs can be genuinely transformative. But that is not what is being marketed to the masses. What is being sold is convenience at the cost of capability. Ease at the expense of engagement. Automation in place of animation.
Before Western contact, Hawaiians did not call themselves Hawaiian. We called ourselves Kanaka Maoli.
This naming pattern appears across indigenous cultures worldwide. From the original inhabitants of Turtle Island to the peoples of the Amazon, from the steppes of Eurasia to the islands of Oceania, indigenous groups almost universally identify themselves as "the people" or more specifically, "the people of this place."
In Hawaiian, Kanaka means mankind or people. Maoli means real or genuine. Together: the real people, the genuine people.
But the word Kanaka itself holds a deeper teaching.
The most common interpretation breaks the word into Ka Naka. Naka means "to quiver, quake, tremble, shake." Not just physical movement, but the fundamental motion of existence itself. Molecules vibrating. Electrons bouncing within cells. Leaves trembling in the wind. The expanding motion of the universe. The electric spark of human connection.
Movement is what separates the living from the dead. The animate from the inanimate.
This is not poetic metaphor. This is fundamental truth embedded in language.
Mark Twain once observed, "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
The majority is racing toward a future of sedentary consumption. Ambient care that requires no effort. Robotic assistance that demands no movement. Curated content that needs no seeking. The promise is comfort. The cost is our humanity.
Your ability to move, to act, to engage with the physical world, to feel the full spectrum of human emotion in your body (joy, fear, anticipation, love, challenge, despair, hope) is not a luxury to be optimized away. It is the essence of what makes you human.
The tech industry will market this future to any ideology, any demographic, any income level. Political affiliation makes no difference. Everyone gets the same invitation to recline in the massage chair, voice-order meals to robotic assistants, and watch algorithmically curated streams while muscles atrophy and aspirations fade.
This is the moment to choose differently.
Those unfamiliar with Hawaiian culture often assume it is solely about respect for tradition, about preservation and reverence for what came before. While that is part of the picture, it is incomplete.
Hawaiian philosophy also embraces revolution. It honors disruption.
Kamuela Enos articulates this beautifully: "In the kānaka maoli worldview, we lived with and revered disruption. The extreme isolation of our ancestral society organically embedded resilience to be the very core of the entirety of our political, economic, spiritual and social frameworks. This reality spurred our ancestral systems to optimize a collective, circular, and regenerative economy, with the end goal of accruing mana (life force or healing power), which was measured as the bequeathing of abundance."
Hawaiian ancestors understood what modern culture has forgotten: stagnation equals death. The capacity to move, adapt, disrupt established patterns, and begin again is what sustains life at every level, from the individual to the collective, from the biological to the cultural.
This understanding is not about rejecting technology wholesale. It is about rejecting a specific vision of the future, one that asks us to surrender the very things that make us fully alive.
Being Ka Naka (the quivering, the shaking, the fundamentally alive) requires intentional resistance to the forces pulling us toward passivity.
It means choosing movement over convenience. Choosing engagement over ease. Choosing presence over distraction.
The prescription is simple, though not always easy:
Get outside and move your body with purpose. Walk. Run. Hike. Swim. Chop wood. Carry water.
Build things with your hands. A fire. A fence. A garden bed. A piece of furniture.
Connect with other humans in physical space. Meet friends. Make new acquaintances. Smile at strangers. Embrace your family.
Let yourself feel the full range of being alive. Scream at the top of your lungs. Dance without caring who watches. Dig in the dirt. Climb a tree.
Shake. Tremble. Quiver.
This is not nostalgia for a pre-technological past. This is about claiming a fully technological future that still honors what makes us human.
The choice is not between technology and humanity. The choice is between technology that amplifies our humanness and technology that replaces it.
Hawaiian language and philosophy offer us a framework for making that choice. When we understand ourselves as Ka Naka, as beings fundamentally defined by movement and animation, we can evaluate every technological offering against a simple question: Does this help me move more fully through the world, or does it ask me to move less?
The robots and AI assistants and ambient care systems will keep coming. The marketing will grow more sophisticated. The promises of ease and convenience will multiply.
But underneath all of it, the truth remains unchanged.
Movement is what separates the living from the dead.
Be Ka Naka.
Think Hawaiian.