This time it’s not fatigue, but disconnection

For the past two months I’ve been busy in ways that, as it sometimes happened in the past, have left me sort of looking at the tech world from outside. It’s no mystery for those who have been reading this blog or have been following me on social media for a long time, that my enthusiasm for technology has been dwindling for a while — I’d say for at least two years, maybe more — with occasional sparks that have brought me back from a general state of tech ennui.

The terms associated with that word, ennui, like listlessness or dissatisfaction or even apathy make the feeling sound almost as if it mysteriously originated from within and your worldview is impacted as a consequence of that. But that’s not the case. At least, it’s not the case here. As I wrote on Mastodon the other day, I feel that my current tech headspace is a sort of limbo made of distrust and uncaring-ness. These feelings are pretty much reactive and defensive. They are a response to what tech has become and is becoming nowadays.

I was chatting with two of my best friends last week, and among the various personal updates, we touched on this for a bit, as they, too, have been feeling a sort of tech burnout as of late. And the image I’ve used to sum up my feelings on the matter was this — I told them, It’s like I’ve been playing this game called Tech for the past 30+ years of my life and I just don’t feel engaged anymore, but not because I got bored of the game — like it happens with many regular games. It’s not boredom or fatigue. It’s more because the game has gone through a series of updates that have ultimately made it so much worse.

Technology has been a significant part of my life since I was a young boy. First it was my fascination with digital watches and calculators, then the avalanche of the 8‑bit home computer era — Commodore computers, Sinclair computers, Atari consoles, the Apple ][ at a friend’s place, where he used to show me all the cool programs his engineer uncle was making for him and his younger brother. All this pushed me towards… more of this. I learnt BASIC and even some rudiments of Assembly code; with two other friends we made a couple of simple games for the Commodore 64; I felt drawn to this world and told my parents I wanted to pursue a career in technology, become an engineer and whatnot. Too bad that in high school I discovered I completely sucked at maths and that I was much more interested in literature, art, languages, and writing.

But tech changed in a way that I was still able to reconcile these different directions: when DTP, Desktop Publishing, was suddenly all the rage thanks to the Macintosh platform in the mid-1980s, I was right there, like a surfer riding this massive wave. I was lucky enough to be doing a bit of apprenticeship at an advertising agency, and for 3–4 hours a day I could have a little workstation (a Macintosh SE connected to one of the first LaserWriter printers) all to myself. And there I was, learning QuarkXPress, playing with text and words, getting passionate about user interfaces and the Macintosh in general. It felt like being immersed in an environment that had such an incredible potential. I was thinking of all the possible applications and contexts where machines like that little Macintosh I was using could be utilised to make a difference.

I went on writing but also designing books during my university years, using more powerful Macintosh computers and trying different software solutions. The World Wide Web was coming, and I realised at least part of its future impact already in the early stages, thanks to a chat with the father of a high school mate; he was an engineer working at CERN when Tim Berners-Lee was developing his idea to put hypertext and the Internet together. It was an unforgettable chat that helped me understand what was coming and how big of a deal it would be. And though some of this engineer’s specific predictions didn’t really materialise, there was this moment in our conversation where he would get quiet and with this air of ‘I’m going to say this carefully because it’s a really wild guess so don’t quote me on that’, he said to me: It [the Web] is probably going to be so effective and so ubiquitous it will ruin people’s lives. Well, Mr [REDACTED], here I am, 34 years later, actually quoting you.

The 1990s, my 1990s, were exciting — the Web, the CD-ROM, the multimedia projects, my first mobile phone, my first email address, my first engaging online with people across the world (my parents found my enthusiasm for that somewhat amusing, and reminded me that when I was in secondary school I hated the ‘pen pal initiative’, that involved an exchange of letters with other young students from abroad, and didn’t want anything to do with it). A dear friend of mine suggested I could mix my interest for literature, technology, and my fluency in a second language to do translations as a side job to have more financial independence as I was finishing my studies. Shortly after, it became my main occupation as a freelancer. I translated books, manuals, a lot of assorted tech documentation. I learnt a lot and absorbed a lot. While I still didn’t have a direct involvement in tech like, say, a software developer or a hardware engineer or a computer scientist, my relationship with tech was still pretty much symbiotic. And it felt good. Technology felt like a force for good, an ally that could really improve people’s lives. The huge impact it had on mine certainly felt positive. My job wasn’t making me rich, but it was giving me independence from the corporate world, a world I had experienced for just about 3 years, enough to realise we were tragically incompatible.

In the late 1990s I was an Apple evangelist, just as the company was nearing the abyss and was truly ‘doomed’. But then Steve Jobs saved it, and I found myself riding Apple’s comeback just like a surfer riding this massive wave. Tech-wise, the 2000–2011 years to me probably felt like the Swinging Sixties for the previous generation. The Apple ecosystem was getting stronger, the products were exceptional and fun. Around 2001–2005, my studio was littered with Apple products: an iMac G3, an iBook G3, a 12-inch PowerBook G4, older compact Macs and PowerBooks and peripherals; and when I was on the go I didn’t leave home without my iPod and my Newton MessagePad. I was full-in with Jobs’s vision of ‘the Digital Hub’. During those years, every thing Apple introduced, every direction Apple was taking, felt like genuine progress.

I had to wait one year and a half, and the next iteration of the product, before getting my hands on an iPhone, as the first-generation iPhone that was introduced in 2007 wasn’t available in my country and I didn’t feel like importing one from the US and jailbreaking it. So I had a lot of time to mull over it as I was stuck with a Sony dumbphone and my impatience was growing. As the media was talking about the iPhone success and impact, I couldn’t help but go back to that conversation with my schoolfriend’s dad about the World Wide Web back in late 1991. I couldn’t help thinking of what he had said: It is probably going to be so effective and so ubiquitous it will ruin people’s lives.

Of course it’s not that black-and-white. Of course the argument is nuanced. Of course a third-party iOS developer can chime in and tell me that actually it’s thanks to the iPhone that they’re putting bread on the table, and so forth. But something happened with the introduction of the iPhone. Something was put in motion. A snowball effect. Some kind of Pandora’s Box got opened. The App Store changed software and its value. Whether it’s for the worse or the better depends on where you stand. As a tech-savvy customer, I’m firmly on the for the worse side. The general devaluation of software brought on by the App Store market created the race to the bottom of unsustainable free or $0.99 apps, which in turn created the subsequent whiplash where everything was transformed into a subscription-based service. Whether that turned out to be sustainable depends on where you stand. As a tech-savvy customer, I’m firmly on the unsustainable side.

But these forces that have little to do with technology and technological progress have created two of the worst trends I’ve seen in a while, fused in one single strategy: monetise and weaponise. Putting the absolute pursuit of money and the general product weaponisation before everything else is, from where I stand, the primary cause of the disconnect I’m feeling towards tech today. At least towards most of the mainstream tech.

To be clear, I’m not that naïve and idealistic as to think that money shouldn’t be involved in this business. It always was and it always will be. But the problem today is the way money is involved. It’s all about this quest for infinite growth that has become an obsession in Silicon Valley and environs. It’s a model where a product isn’t created with the goal of being an excellent product people will buy because of its apparent merits and because it clearly has been designed to improve their lives. It’s a model where a product becomes a pretext, becomes bait to lock people in an ecosystem made of other products and of habits that are engineered to keep people hooked. And bait only has to be good enough to do its job.

In a sense, part of technology today has lost its ‘altruistic’ roots I felt it had in decades past. Products increasingly feel like they’re meant not to make your life better, but meant to make Big Tech people’s life better. Not to empower you, but to empower someone else. I miss the days where a new piece of software, or hardware, or even a service felt like a groundbreaking moment and something that could be so useful as to become indispensable and to constitute actual progress. Now I mostly feel distrust. Now I just see shallow hype and find myself routinely asking, What’s the catch? — and if it’s free, what am I actually giving you in return? (Spoiler: personal data, digital profiling).

And as someone who genuinely cares about technological progress, actual progress, it’s disheartening to see the effects of this growth-driven change in tech companies. For not only do a lot of products today feel like customer bait and little else, tech companies are also prioritising their profits over actual tech progress. ‘The future’ has become a trite narrative where technological advancements are little more than hyped concepts or half-baked ideas tech companies want you to believe are the Next Big Thing. Like ‘artificial intelligence’. Steve Jobs famously said that Apple was at its worst when business and marketing guys were at the helm. Well, now marketing people are leading the whole tech industry.

A tech industry that is gasping for air. Since naturally groundbreaking products are nowhere to be seen, the industry is doing its utmost to conjure up some. And big companies are using their legacy and reputation to make people believe that this new snake oil is really miraculous and is really ‘the future’.

I understand that we can’t always live in times of constant innovation. The curve that has been climbing for the past thirty years is flattening a bit, and we’re definitely experiencing a lull, a stabilisation phase after what’s probably been a saturation point. In an ideal world, in a sane market, tech companies would use this somewhat stagnant interval to improve their products, the quality of their software, the quality of their designs, focusing less on quantity and slowing down this mad technological pace they feel they have to maintain. Better quality and more reliability in products would certainly reinforce user loyalty and would unquestionably benefit the relationship with customers as it would help slow down this progressive erosion of trust we’re currently witnessing in various degrees.

This of course would happen if tech companies were to do what they used to do up until the 2010s — prioritise end users, customers, developers and, ultimately, prioritise technology as a means towards a better world for everyone.

What is happening with the monetise & weaponise strategy, instead, is this progressive fracture and disconnect between tech companies and regular people. A disconnect where people at various levels of tech-savvy feel equally at odds with the behaviour of many tech companies. I certainly don’t view tech as an ally or as something that should benefit me or improve my life anymore. More like a user of technology, I increasingly feel used and lied to by it; I feel like a mere instrument that exists to guarantee its survival — a battery, like humans are to machines in The Matrix universe.

And what’s worse is that other industries are getting increasingly comfortable with that monetise & weaponise strategy I was mentioning above. The mainstream gaming industry, which has weaponised fun and entertainment and monetised the hell out of it with online services, microtransactions, and gambling-like tactics that have turned players into ludopaths. The car industry, which has transformed cars into smartphones or tablets on wheels, and showered them with tech gadgets while almost forgetting basic stuff like offering vehicles that are pleasant to drive simply for the sake of driving and that can help people disconnect from a daily routine already drowning in tech and bad habits. Or basic stuff like providing a driving experience that is more focused on security than infotainment systems that distract drivers and passengers, and ‘smart solutions’ that dangerously lull drivers into a false sense of security (hi, Tesla!)

And the advertising industry, of course. Which probably deserves a 3,000-word piece all by itself. An industry that was full of creativity and proper visual art when I first got into it so many years ago, and which has gradually turned into an ever-spreading, intrusive, data-sucking cancer.

All this money-making tactics focused on growth at all costs are making these industries more and more self-absorbed, and are also draining the creative and innovative forces I used to witness in past decades. I see car companies like Renault being praised for introducing cars like the new Renault 4 and Renault 5, whose designs are essentially inspired… by past successful designs. Same with Fiat and Volkswagen. So many industries are weaponising and monetising nostalgia in a desperate search of ‘what used to work to win people over’, instead of trying truly new and fresh approaches. Same with films and TV shows and this ubiquitous insistence on remakes, reboots, prequels, sequels, franchises, and methods of consumption that are entirely focused on hooking the viewers — who cares if a story is original, or if the script is actually well-written and doesn’t insult people’s intelligence.

You may argue that these tactics are mostly working, because the public buys into them and regular people don’t seem really all that bothered with what the tech industry and these other industries are throwing at them today. Well, in part it’s because people really don’t have much choice, and many tend to choose the path of least friction when making tech-based choices — something tech companies are well aware of, given that they have worked relentlessly at eliminating friction for the past 15 years at least. In part the lack of viable choices comes from what I call ‘legacy loyalty’ and ‘legacy lock-in’, like when you hear people say something like, I know Apple is not as good an actor as it used to be, and I don’t like the direction it is going, but I’ve been using Apple products for so many years, I can’t just switch to another platform overnight, or I wish I could get rid of everything Microsoft, but I have to use their stuff at work, and so forth. It’s another thing tech companies have worked a lot to achieve: giving people the idea that changing platforms (and therefore habits) is much more daunting a task than it actually is.

In all this personal limbo made of distrust and uncaring-ness towards tech, I’m trying to find and trying to focus on whatever entity behaves like an exception to the mainstream. I’m trying to focus on products and software applications that are made by people who still care and even feel the same as I do about technology today. Valve’s recently-announced new products (the Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame) look cool and interesting. But what I find most exciting is that they all seem very focused. As in, designed with a specific purpose in mind, and in service of that purpose. Which, frankly, today is an increasingly rare sight in tech. Product design before profit design. No-nonsense offerings instead of hyped solutions. The Steam Frame doesn’t want to ‘revolutionise computing’ or be the perfect vessel for ‘spatial computing’. You can use it to play games from your Steam Library, or for specific VR stuff. That’s it. And it makes me more interested in getting one than the vague and pretentious Vision Pro.

Finally, I’m also trying to educate other people to look past all the vacuous hype tech companies and (some) tech influencers are putting before our noses. I feel I’m in a sort of ‘survival mode’ at present, a luddite who is not against technology, change, and technological progress — despite what some hate-mail writers may think. Rather, my idea of being a luddite is more like someone who keeps advocating that technology should be in our service, and not vice-versa. Technology seems to be on a path of eroding people’s agency, whereas I want people to have more agency and to be less ‘personal data fodder’.