Where have I been?

This is probably one of the longest hiatuses I’ve taken from updating this blog. Over the years the frequency of my articles has indeed been decreasing, but I typically managed to write at least a couple of pieces per month. I’m surely stating the obvious, but for an article to appear here, three main conditions have to be fulfilled:

1. I have something to talk about, something to say. Ever since I started writing online, this has been a guiding principle for me. I don’t like filler content. I don’t like updating for updating’s sake. If I have to link to some other content and throw a one-line comment, I’ll just use social media.
2. I feel I have something useful to add to the conversation. Having a subject or an idea for an article isn’t enough for me. I also need to feel that my opinion or perspective on a certain topic is worth sharing. Half-hidden by the huge amount of chaff in the tech world, one can find some brilliant tech writers and commenters out there. I read them before thinking about adding my contribution. I often agree with them, and on many occasions I think they’ve already said what I wanted to say more effectively and succinctly than I could possibly convey. When that happens, I usually refrain from posting.
3. I have time and will to commit to writing and publishing a piece. I’ll briefly remind you that English isn’t my first language, and while I’m very fluent and while I ‘think in English’ when I’m writing, the time I’ll spend writing and editing a 2,000-word article is likely to be longer than what it would take an English-speaking tech writer to accomplish the same task.

During this hiatus, that has lasted all March, all April, and half of May, none of these conditions was fulfilled. An unexpected surge in my workload, combined with days of illness (nothing too serious, just a prolonged flu-like cold and cough), took all my time and energies. I also had to take care of some personal business that involved a quick yet exhausting trip abroad, so there was that as well.

But there was also another important factor in the mix — a general sense of ‘tech fatigue’ and lack of enthusiasm towards tech-oriented topics. For the first time in years, I also stopped reading tech stuff, letting my feed reader accumulate dozens of unread posts.

This period of tech detox wasn’t planned or sought after, at all. It just happened — and frankly, I’m glad it did.

Really, nothing more than notes

Sometimes, when choosing a title for an article, I’ll use the term ‘note’ as synonym for observation, opinion, remark, implying that there’s something organic and organised tying all these notes and observations together. But in this instance, what follows are nothing more than quick thoughts hastily recorded during spare moments. They’re impressions. Fragments. Feelings I wanted to share, not observations of a tech expert assembling a careful, well-documented essay. Keep this in mind as you read along.

Lack of real forward movement

Lack of enthusiasm for technology lately seems to be connected to the feeling that general progress — true progress, not what headlines scream at you — has slowed down to a crawl. I’m Gen X, so I have lived the transition between pre-Web world and what we have today. The 15 years between 1993 and 2008 were wild compared with the 15 years between 2008 and 2023. I know you can point at many awesome things that have appeared in the last fifteen years, but so many things happened between 1993 and 2008 that were or felt like huge breakthroughs, while a lot of stuff between 2008 and 2023, as great as it is, feels mostly iterative.

I don’t expect leaps and bounds everywhere all the time, of course. I actually believe that tech today needs more periods of lull, so that existing hardware and software can (ideally!) be perfected and improved upon. But what bores me to no end as of late is all this buzz around certain trends that are advertised as ‘progress’ and ‘the future’ — augmented reality and artificial intelligence, to name just two — which I think are way overblown. Little substance, lots of fanfare.

Digital toys

A tweet from back in March — So much tech today feels more focused on the creation of ‘digital toys’ more than on innovation that can actually, unequivocally positively help and advance humankind. And [I feel] that a lot of resources are being wasted on things whose real usefulness is debatable, e.g. self-driving cars. 

A lot of unease I’ve been feeling in recent times boils down to what I perceive to be a widening disconnect between the tech sphere and the world at large, the real world that is going to shit and down the drain day after day. 

The tech sphere looks more and more like a sandbox for escapism. Don’t get me wrong, some escapism is always good and healthy as a coping mechanism, because otherwise we would be in a constant state of depression. But — and I may be wrong here — the kind of escapism I feel coming from the tech world is the sort of ‘bury your head in the sand’, ‘stay entertained and don’t worry about anything else’ escapism that want people to remained hooked to gadgets and digital toys in ways that at times feel almost sedative.

Frictionless at all costs

Recently I wrote on Mastodon — We are so hell-bent on eliminating friction in everything that anything with any trace of friction is considered ‘difficult’, ‘complex’, ‘unintuitive’. An acquaintance recently told me that they tried to open an account on Mastodon and found the process ‘daunting’. I’m all for removing friction when it comes to repetitive, mindless tasks or unnecessarily straining labour. But some friction that stimulates your brain, your thinking process and acuity should always be welcome.

I’ve often seen the smartphone described as an extension of our brain because it gives us instant access to all kind of information. Just don’t confuse ‘extension’ with ‘expansion’. Don’t get me wrong, smartphones and their multitude of apps are undeniably useful for retrieving information on the spot: you’re watching a TV series and you recognise one of the actors, but can’t remember their name or which film or series you saw them previously. You open the IMDb app and quickly look that up. You can also search Wikipedia; you can access several different dictionaries and thesauri for terms you encounter and don’t know; you can use translation apps and services to have a quick and dirty translation when you encounter something in a foreign language you need or want to understand; and so on and so forth, you get the idea. Maps and turn-by-turn directions are something I myself heavily use on a frequent basis, and have been a godsend whenever visiting new places. 

But all this isn’t really an expansion of our brain. We may indeed retain some of the notions we’ve searched, but otherwise it’s mostly a flow. We’ll forget about that actor again and we’ll look IMDb up again. Our sense of direction won’t really be improved and we’ll check Google Maps or Apple Maps again for places we already went through. It’s an accumulation of trivia, not knowledge. Smartphones and this kind of ever-ready access are like eating out every day: extremely convenient, but you won’t learn to cook.

Self-driving cars: tons of spaghetti thrown at the wall, and nothing sticks

I have this perspective on the idea of self-driving cars, and nothing so far has made me change my mind — they’re emblematic of everything that is misguided about tech today. This mentality of wanting to ‘solve’ a problem that really didn’t need a solution (or didn’t need a high-tech solution) by throwing an outlandish amount of technology at it, and solving very little in the process. While any step further introduces a whole new set of problems that need to be addressed. How? Why, by throwing even more technology at them, of course. Self-driving cars advocates will tell you that the noble goal is to reduce car accidents and make people safer on the road. That’s nice and all, but I think a more pragmatic (and cost-effective) solution would be to educate drivers better.

Getting a driver’s licence should be a stricter process instead of what amounts to a quick tutorial on the basics of driving and traffic rules. And people should really get rid of nasty habits while driving, like checking their smartphones all the time. Speaking of, I can’t shake the idea that a lot of tech bros just want self-driving cars to entirely eliminate the friction of having to drive themselves, so they can go places while fiddling with their smartphones, tablets, laptops, what have you. Just call an Uber, dude.

As for making people safer on the road, for now, just open a browser and search for “Tesla autopilot”…

AI and drinking the Kool-AI

There is nothing magic about AI, ChatGPT, and all this stuff that’s popping up everywhere like mushrooms. Computers were invented to process data faster. With time, computers have been getting faster and faster, and we have fed them more and more and more and more and more and more and more data. The result is that anything would seem ‘intelligent’ after such treatment. Once again, there may be truly good and useful use cases for AI, but so far I see a lot of people who seem happy to have a tool they can use to think less. Another shortcut that eliminates friction in ways that don’t look healthy to me. I’m not averse to technology or the many conveniences it affords today, but again, I firmly believe we shouldn’t remove that particular kind of friction that stimulates us to use our head and think for ourselves. Do we really need an AI assistant to search the Web, when we can basically find anything by simply using natural language in a query? Are we becoming this lazy and apathetic? One of the worst dystopian illustrations I’ve seen in recent years are the humans in WALL•E (watch the film if you still haven’t, it’s both really entertaining and edifying).

Augmented Reality: mind-goggling!

Do you see AR goggles or glasses in your future? Not really, as far as I’m concerned. I am indeed curious to see how Apple is going to introduce their AR goggles and what kind of picture they’re going to paint to pique people’s interest. I’m very sceptical overall. While I don’t entirely exclude the possibility of purchasing an AR or VR set in the future, I know it’s going to be for very delimited, specific applications. VR gaming is making decent progress finally, and that’s something I’m interested in exploring. But what Facebook/Meta and Apple (judging from the rumours, at least) seem interested in is to promote use cases that are more embedded in the day to day. 

Everything I’ve read so far points to ridiculous stuff, however. This idea of people wearing AR goggles to engage in videoconferences set in virtual shared spaces with hyper-realistic avatars of themselves is, again, one example of needless tech nerdification of something that can already be done without throwing additional technology at it: regular videoconferences where people can look at their real selves as they talk with one another! It can’t get more realistic than this, and no one needs to buy an expensive appendage to achieve the same task! Seriously, I can’t wait to see what kind of use cases Apple will promote to make their AR goggles a compelling product. I still think the whole Google Glass fiasco has been an excellent example of the line people draw when it comes to wearable technology in an everyday setting. Ten years have passed since, and I don’t think anything has really changed in this regard from a social standpoint.

Coda: How have I been?

Apart from a period of illness, I’ve been fine. Like I said, this hiatus and tech detox interval wasn’t planned at all, and while I hated not having the time to write and publish anything here, I enjoyed being busy elsewhere and ignoring tech news and the Latest Hyped-up Thing for a while. There was work to do, books to continue reading, music to listen to, a novel to continue writing, and a chapter in my life to finally close after many bittersweet and some painful memories. Many thanks to all who reached out to ask me how I was, and apologies if my silence here made you worry. I’m back, and as sceptical as before, if not more.