Back in my university days, I used to haunt several bars and cafés near the university buildings with a few mates, students of literature and philosophy. We would typically choose a place to have lunch there at first, but often we ended up staying there all afternoon if we didn’t have other classes to attend. We would order more tea or coffee, study, compare notes, and so on. But the best part, the unforgettable part was the conversations. It’s that stage of your life where you feel you can make an impact on the world, where you feel you’re really understanding how the world works and you feel your intellectual ramblings can redefine entire aspects of society. You’re the generation ‘in charge’, you’re the thinker. Et cetera.
We loved to dissect theories, poetry, literary criticism, language, semantics, people’s behaviour… It was abstract at times, but also pragmatic and rooted in the here and now. During one of these conversations, I remember trying to link habits and interests. Or rather, trying to find a way to differentiate between interests mixed with passion, and interests tainted by habit. Don’t ask me why I had this urge. Perhaps my interlocutor was talking about interests and hobbies in a way I found too generic and shallow. I recall making drawings on a small Moleskine notebook, and talking about vectors. The interests+passion label had a big arrow pointing up, i.e. forward. The interests+habit label, instead, had an arrow on a circle, a loop.
And I know, it’s weird I still remember parts of this conversation so many years later, but my university days had a huge impact on my life, and so many details have remained with eerie vividness in my memory.
Anyway, at some point during that conversation, I said: Beware of loops. Loops kill you. With loops you don’t go anywhere. If you start feeling a loop, step back and try to refocus.
“You mean routines. You mean the routine,” said my interlocutor.
But some routines are just part of life, I responded. My parents’ work schedule is rather fixed. It sorts of creates routines for them. They have to go to work at these hours, so they need to organise their day this way, go to bed at a certain hour, wake up at a certain hour, and so forth. The loops I’m talking about are sort of a thing of our own creation. They’re more similar to bad habits, little addictions with little voices we love to hear the sound of… Am I making sense?
With hindsight, I think I was trying to push some variant of the concept of echo chamber. Now, when you look up the definition of echo chamber (I’m using the Dictionary app on my Mac for convenience), it says:
- an enclosed space where sound reverberates.
- an environment in which a person encounters only beliefs or opinions that coincide with their own, so that their existing views are reinforced and alternative ideas are not considered.
What I was trying to convey when talking about loops, if I remember well, was something in between these two meanings, the literal and sociologic one. Something like an environment in which a person becomes so involved and enveloped in their interests and reverberations of such interests, that they lose sight of the actual importance of such interests and simultaneously of the actual influence these interests have on their worldview. That’s why I was talking about bad habits and little addictions.
This long-winded introduction serves to explain the eureka moment I had a few days ago. When it happened, I immediately felt myself inside the core of that constant feeling of tech fatigue I’ve been experiencing for the past couple of years at least.
My interest in technology over time has been slowly but steadily transforming into such a loop. I was getting more and more frustrated because I kept feeling the effects of this process, without being able to pinpoint the cause. I had to step back and try to refocus. Only I didn’t step back consciously. I sort of found myself distanced from the whole thing like two magnets rejecting each other. Tech fatigue acted like a rejecting force getting stronger with time.
I am now in a phase where I’m renegotiating the importance of technology after the sobering realisation of the influence it has been having over my life for the past 30+ years, but especially in the past five years or so. If I’m sounding like those people who left a cult and feel that only now they can really talk about the cult because they finally see it for what it is, that’s because yeah, in part it feels the same.
There are other interests that can become loops and trap yourself into them, like a tornado vacuuming everything it encounters on its path. Another example might be photography when all you do is obsess over gear, spend an unhealthy amount of time in online forums (maybe engaging in foolish battles over what’s the best mirrorless camera or what’s the perfect focal length for street photography), spend an inordinate amount of time watching photography-related videos on YouTube, ingest so much ‘latest news’ and articles on the topic, and so forth. You end up completely absorbed in the ‘photography world’ and perhaps feel good in the process… except that now you spend 90% of the time in that ‘photography world’ loop, and 10% actually taking photos. Whenever you take a genuine interest or hobby and nerdify the heck out of it, you lose yourself in its reverberations (remember that revised definition of echo chamber above) and become consumed by it.
Don’t get me wrong, the pursuit of knowledge is a good thing. I’ve been intellectually curious my whole life. I love learning something new every day. What constantly pushes my curiosity is the idea that the more I know, the more I understand the world around me. But the way information flows today, the direction Internet and social media have taken today, it all points towards hyperspecialisation and obsessive-compulsive inflation of interests and hobbies. You become an expert in, say, military aircraft, and can recite all the specifications, background and development of the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25, yet you have no idea where Hungary is, or what Newton theorised in 1684, or how to spell certain words in your own language. I’m making silly examples, perhaps, but the point is, you lack a healthy general knowledge background.
Back to technology. The tech world today is particularly insidious because it’s become more than just an interest for many people. Given the way it has taken over in many aspects of our lives, it’s almost impossible to avoid its gravitational pull. It’s also almost impossible to prevent it from becoming a loop. The tech world is especially good at producing reverberations of its own shit. What tech companies and tech ‘celebrities’ do and say, the breakneck pace of tech news, the veritable oceans of digital ink produced daily to talk about such news, to comment on them, to comment on others’ comments on them… In Christopher Nolan’s 2010 masterpiece Inception, Cobb, the protagonist, is a skilled information extractor using the technique of entering the dream state and picking up valuable data and secrets from the target’s subconscious. During the film, we see a lot of this dream state. So many sequences that, if you were to stumble on the film halfway into it, you would believe were really happening and you would believe the characters are acting in the real world, and not in a shared dream reality. Sometimes the world of technology today feels like this. Some dimension that not only absorbs you and your time, but also alters your worldview and the way you think. And not always for the best.
I truly appreciated this article by Eric Schwarz back in November 2023 — or a ‘venting session’ as he calls it — and I hate that I’ve been so slow in acknowledging it here (I’ll probably address the reasons behind this latest hiatus in another post).
Eric’s piece is aptly titled, When It’s Not Fun Anymore, and if I had to describe what it’s about in short, I’d say it’s Eric’s analysis of what has accumulated over the past few years to make him feel ‘tech fatigued’. It’s hard to quote from it, because it’s all quote-worthy. So many things resonated with me:
I think being an enthusiast about technology by default makes one an optimist […]
Instead, we’ve sort of gotten into this dystopian, late-stage capitalism doom loop [Oh look, that word again. — RM]. There’s idiotic billionaires acting like they’re the saviors of society through vanity projects, rather than the useful work of actual philanthropists of the past. There’s sometimes the assumption that anyone interested in tech wants to be like that. Every company is focused on “maximizing shareholder value” to the point that any joy and humanity is squeezed out of products. There’s no respect for users when it comes to privacy and being good stewards of our data — I had that hell with trying to delete accounts with some companies. In short, the monetization people won out and sometimes it feels like there’s no room for art or care.
I’m tired of everything seeming to get worse and more expensive, followed by patronizing emails explaining that this is better for me. For some businesses, the argument is “you can save money by using our app,” yet it wants access to every aspect of my phone. I’m sorry, but fast food doesn’t ever need to access my contacts or photo albums. In the past, I’ve been passionate about streaming services, as it seemed to be the dream of à la carte TV and mixed two things that I’m heavily interested in: tech and media. Instead of focusing on quality and content, it was a race-to-the-bottom to get subscribers, a proliferation of generic garbage (I’m looking at you Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery), and then price hikes and more price hikes. Ad-free tiers only exist to sort of tease us, while the money to be made is in ad-supported content. While I haven’t entirely unsubscribed en masse, it hurts to see the direction things are going in.
In terms of privacy, it’s frustrating how everything is becoming an inkjet printer or smart TV—a device that is a more tech-infused version of something we already know, yet the manufacturer can make it creepy and subscription-based. […]
Beyond that, we’ve gotten into a routine of buzzwords being the only driver of technology. I’m the last person to hate on new ideas, but we’ve had instance after instance of a solution looking for a problem and it’s just tiring. Cryptocurrency is terrible for the environment and proponents seem to think it can replace money when way too many retailers still haven’t moved on from magstripe card readers. NFTs seem like a way for influencers to drum up business. Artificial intelligence has some utility, but it’s exhausting to hear every company try to cram it into their sales pitch—I sat through a sales pitch for PCs at my day job and the manufacturer was trying to sell their bloatware as AI that will make my job easier.
I apologise for quoting 80% of the article, but Eric really and succinctly sums up so many things that are just plain wrong with tech today. You wonder why we’re letting so much of this happen. My take is that many people are lost in the tech loop, lost in its reverberations, living the shared dream state of tech, jacked up in the Matrix thinking it’s the real world. Don’t think I’m passing judgment from my high horse here. Don’t think I’m being Neo or Morpheus (if we have to keep referencing the Matrix). Or rather, I am like Neo at his most confused phase in the first film of the franchise.
If you start looking at the tech sphere this way, the increasing loss of common sense in online discourse begins to make sense. I still remember the absurd back-and-forth with a guy in a forum, where he was going on and on about how amazing it was to control all lights in his house from an app on his smartphone, and how cool it was that his smart fridge was keeping track of his calorie intake. (No, really, you can’t make this shit up.) What do you do when the light app drops support for your phone model? What do you do when the startup making the smart light solution files for bankruptcy and shuts everything down? What happens when your fridge breaks or loses the connection to the Internet? were some of my genuine, down-to-earth, objections. He thought I was the crazy one. And anyway his solutions to those potential issues were essentially to waste more money to keep those ‘smart’ solutions alive. If the light app drops support for his phone, well, apparently he will buy a newer phone. Let that sink in. Then ask yourself who’s the crazy one here.
Again, I’m doing my best not to sound pretentious or holier-than-thou, but I’ve come to a point where I think more and more people need to wake up, take a step back, and refocus. This is not the kind of ‘tech detox’ I did in the past for some periods of time, and it’s not the usual Oh god I feel so overwhelmed by my tech news feed lately, I need to take a break kind of detox either. It’s more like distancing myself from technology’s constant siren song to distinguish between what’s healthy knowledge and what’s just the product of the reverberations of the tech loop.
At this point it’s fair to ask, So, what do you suggest one should do to distance themselves from tech in a good way? But I really don’t have satisfactory answers to that. I haven’t entered this extremely critical and distrustful phase towards the tech world by following a recipe or a method I sat down and devised myself. I just went progressively out of sync and out of tech’s orbit. Life coincidentally got in the way, too, by demanding a lot of my time elsewhere doing other stuff (work & worries, mostly, but not only that). So, less time to read my tech RSS feeds, very little time to watch tech YouTube, very little time to read tech news. At first I missed all of that quite badly. Now I distinctly feel that 90% of that was not really necessary — and I was already extremely selective of what I read and watched.
Of course technology is not something you just ‘leave behind’. And it’s not the kind of advice I’m implying here. When you’re looking at a map and you realise you’re too zoomed in, what you do is zoom out and still look at the map to have a better idea of the bigger picture, literally. You don’t close the Google Maps tab in your browser or your Apple/Google Maps app on your device and swear you won’t look at another map in your life from now on. So many things in technology are advancing and permeating society because so many people are led to believe (by the loop! It’s always the loop!) that such things are good and totally harmless and have no side effects and it’s all ‘progress’. Being tech-illiterate today is not wise and is the first step towards being taken advantage of. This renegotiating phase I’m currently in is rather chaotic, and it’s difficult for me to give meaningful suggestions. I’ll share a small portion of an email I wrote to François, a reader of this site, back in May 2023 in response to an email he wrote me asking about “ways to balance the need to stay reasonably up-to-date with breaking changes and that to put enough distance between yourself and The News™ to stay creative and productive.”
This was part of my response:
If I had to summarise, I think I’d say it’s a bit like when you’re on a diet. You remove many foods that — while tasty and somewhat addictive — aren’t ultimately nutritious and, worse, are bad for your health. What I’ve been realising over time with the tech world is that there is a lot of, um, ‘tasty and somewhat addictive’ noise filling the space and making the signal harder to distinguish and pick up. So I constantly try to filter out all the noise and focus on what I think it’s the meatier stuff.
One thing that helps is that I usually rely on selected trusted sources to stay reasonably up-to-date, so I don’t have to waste time reading a dozen different reviews or watching a dozen different videos about a product. There are exceptions, of course, especially when something potentially controversial appears. But at that point it’s clear that the matter requires more attention, and if it seems worthwhile to pay that more attention, then I’ll play along. Otherwise my attitude is more like “Yeah, okay, got it. Next!”
This, in retrospect, makes me realise I was already on the right path, but that was probably not good enough all the same. To stay within the metaphor, I thought I was doing great with my ‘diet’, but I’ve come to realise I haven’t lost that much weight, really.
Recently I’ve skimmed through a few blog articles talking about being optimistic about tech today, and I increasingly find fewer and fewer reasons to be so. There’s this overwhelming, nagging feeling that an increasing amount of things are getting out of hand, that greed is spreading from the top in so many aspects of technology, and too few people at the bottom are actually ‘voting with their wallet’, so their acts of protest are irrelevant in the grand scheme. Many are stupefied by the usual tide of latest-and-greatest gadgets. Many just shrug and don’t care, volunteering so much personal information and ‘productifying’ themselves in exchange for a small convenience in their daily lives. Being optimistic about tech ultimately means being optimistic about people and their will to jack themselves out of this Matrix.
Good luck with that, my sceptic voice quips, as Apple is about to launch Vision Pro, designed to further draw you in.