I would like to submit a proposal of a common thread for your consideration. My common thread is “actual uselessness”. I’ll try to explain as I also find it hard to articulate.
I am constantly struck by how ridiculous it is that politicians and central banks and corporations are always talking about how we need to “grow the economy” even though that growth consists almost entirely of completely vapid, unnecessary consumerism. Nothing is actually growing anymore. Smartphones haven’t gotten “better” in a functional manner for a decade practically. Home computers seem to be worse now in both tangible and intangible ways. Cars are full of software and feature bloat very few people actually care about. The “growth economy” is really just a constant bubble of bloat wrapped in “innovation” propaganda. After all, it’s not like people wouldn’t buy food or home furniture if we had a sensible steady economy.
Technology is increasingly becoming the same way. My dad and I run a contractor business. We have a CRM that is our customer database and has built in features for estimating, ordering, a mobile app for taking on-site photos, etc. But, it isnt cheap and then we always end up having to pay even more for the integrations. Pay extra to integrate with quickbooks which is another huge expense in and of itself. Pay extra to be granted the ability to take electronic payments. On and on. Its a replacement for a secretary, and the overhead all this software involves eliminates the money many small businesses could use to hire a secretary. But it takes a lot of time to upkeep and keep jobs moving through the workflow, not to mention the fact that it has features that just don’t translate to electronic form all that well like job progress boards that honestly are still better being done a big whiteboard on the office wall where everyone can see it. Oh, and then there’s the constant technical issues and bugs and dealing with customer support and the fact that if I send an email through the system it seems to be blocked by spam filters on the customer’s side far more than if I just email through my Gmail client, so I end up sending emails through my regular client server and then having to remember to copy paste the emails into the customer job file in the CRM so I have a record of the emails in the future if necessary. And if Im in poor cell service the mobile app doesnt work, forcing me to do things in the field by hand and then upload it all later. I cant tell you how many times I’ve wondered how much easier my life would be if I just had a good secretary and a file cabinet.
Every time we make a new technology it is always a replacement for a living, breathing relationship with something, and there is always a hidden consequence. We also always lose a bit of autonomy and self-sufficiency to the company that controls that technology. We built tractors and replaced horse and ox. And now our farmers are in debt up to their ears and practically enslaved by the tractor manufacturers. Not to mention the harm industrialized farming has caused as we lost our living connection to the soil and came to see it as just a chemical concoction.
Social media said it would connect us, but it replaced us, now quite literally as it is overrun by bots and slop posted and interacted with almost entirely by AI. We built dating apps and now we have a relationship crisis that is threatening the very population sustainability of our countries and have yet more single, lonely people than ever before.
We built the telephone, and then email, and then that devolved into texting. We lost romantic letters and postcards and the very skill of long form communication with those close to us.
We built cars, and banished people to sidewalks and destroyed the interconnected hum of our cities and the ability to just walk somewhere safely and relatively peacefully. (Something that struck me when I lived close to Tokyo for a few years was how many areas of a large city could be bustling with life and yet be peaceful in the absence of high speed car traffic. There was one area in Yokohama I remember in particular where there wasnt really any road access, just a huge walkable area between towering skyscrapers where most people would arrive in the train and walk to wherever they were going. You put thousands of people in that area and it still wasn’t “loud”.) For a brief moment in history, car culture gave a subset of the population something to bond over, but even that is largely gone now and most people seem to just view the car industry with exhausted resignation as cars have become massive financial burdens that one is required to own in most cities.
Yes, there are many technological advances that have been positive and that maybe we can decide that the loss of connection to our living relationship to whatever it replaced is worth it. But, so much of what we are replacing now never actually needed replaced and the technology is “actually useless”. CRMs replaced secretaries, but a CRM can’t actually autonomously keep the office and its organization ticking along like well oiled machine like a secretary can. It replaced file cabinets and paper forms, but costs far more than paper ever did, and god forbid you ever want to migrate to a different CRM, you’ll probably have to pay somebody thousands of dollars to help you do it.
Social media was entirely unnecessary from the start. People made friends back before it existed, more and better friends than most of us do now. Sure, it maybe helped certain people connect with other they wouldn’t have had access to in real life, but it has also connected probably far more people to others they shouldn’t have or would never have been forced to have connections to in the real world. We didn’t have a loneliness crisis we were trying to fix, we caused the loneliness crisis when we said “you know that living breathing thing we call friendship and a social life? Let’s insert technology into that, which will of course destroy it because thats what technology always does”
We just continue to sever our connection to every living, breathing aspect of our lives with technology. It feels awful because it is awful. Human life, actual living life, IS connection to other life. Technology can only sever that, and a few positive use cases doesn’t offset the actual consequences we can see in basically every technological advancement. We are disconnected, unhappy, lonely, unfulfilled. Every thing human, even our creative endeavors, is being infiltrated by AI. We gave up real social life for online social life and now we are being replaced there by bots and everyone is left stranded on an island in a sea of “convenience and interconnectedness”. Technology, every technology, from the steam engine to the solid state drive has a consequence and replaces a connection we had to something living. Destroy enough connections and we aren’t really living anymore.
My personal disenchantment moment with YouTube was when I set up a new account in 2018ish, and looked up an album with an orange cover. I then was recommended 6 videos with orange covers.
The hedonic treadmill continues apace. Perhaps the gears will jam for a couple years someday.
Also, you are writing about the same exact thing I wrote this Substack about, namely, that Silicon Valley operates like Big Oil except with overt psychosis since everything's made up and the points don't matter.
>Seriously, Facebook can literally perform unethical psychological experiments on hundreds of thousands of people, and there’s nothing you — or anyone else — can do about it.
my latest example of this is how all the podcast creators are starting to make videos to go with their podcast because the big podcast distributors like like Spotify punish them if they don’t, even though all these creators would rather just stay pure audio because they think it yields better shows because guests feel more comfortable
I would like to submit a proposal of a common thread for your consideration. My common thread is “actual uselessness”. I’ll try to explain as I also find it hard to articulate.
I am constantly struck by how ridiculous it is that politicians and central banks and corporations are always talking about how we need to “grow the economy” even though that growth consists almost entirely of completely vapid, unnecessary consumerism. Nothing is actually growing anymore. Smartphones haven’t gotten “better” in a functional manner for a decade practically. Home computers seem to be worse now in both tangible and intangible ways. Cars are full of software and feature bloat very few people actually care about. The “growth economy” is really just a constant bubble of bloat wrapped in “innovation” propaganda. After all, it’s not like people wouldn’t buy food or home furniture if we had a sensible steady economy.
Technology is increasingly becoming the same way. My dad and I run a contractor business. We have a CRM that is our customer database and has built in features for estimating, ordering, a mobile app for taking on-site photos, etc. But, it isnt cheap and then we always end up having to pay even more for the integrations. Pay extra to integrate with quickbooks which is another huge expense in and of itself. Pay extra to be granted the ability to take electronic payments. On and on. Its a replacement for a secretary, and the overhead all this software involves eliminates the money many small businesses could use to hire a secretary. But it takes a lot of time to upkeep and keep jobs moving through the workflow, not to mention the fact that it has features that just don’t translate to electronic form all that well like job progress boards that honestly are still better being done a big whiteboard on the office wall where everyone can see it. Oh, and then there’s the constant technical issues and bugs and dealing with customer support and the fact that if I send an email through the system it seems to be blocked by spam filters on the customer’s side far more than if I just email through my Gmail client, so I end up sending emails through my regular client server and then having to remember to copy paste the emails into the customer job file in the CRM so I have a record of the emails in the future if necessary. And if Im in poor cell service the mobile app doesnt work, forcing me to do things in the field by hand and then upload it all later. I cant tell you how many times I’ve wondered how much easier my life would be if I just had a good secretary and a file cabinet.
Every time we make a new technology it is always a replacement for a living, breathing relationship with something, and there is always a hidden consequence. We also always lose a bit of autonomy and self-sufficiency to the company that controls that technology. We built tractors and replaced horse and ox. And now our farmers are in debt up to their ears and practically enslaved by the tractor manufacturers. Not to mention the harm industrialized farming has caused as we lost our living connection to the soil and came to see it as just a chemical concoction.
Social media said it would connect us, but it replaced us, now quite literally as it is overrun by bots and slop posted and interacted with almost entirely by AI. We built dating apps and now we have a relationship crisis that is threatening the very population sustainability of our countries and have yet more single, lonely people than ever before.
We built the telephone, and then email, and then that devolved into texting. We lost romantic letters and postcards and the very skill of long form communication with those close to us.
We built cars, and banished people to sidewalks and destroyed the interconnected hum of our cities and the ability to just walk somewhere safely and relatively peacefully. (Something that struck me when I lived close to Tokyo for a few years was how many areas of a large city could be bustling with life and yet be peaceful in the absence of high speed car traffic. There was one area in Yokohama I remember in particular where there wasnt really any road access, just a huge walkable area between towering skyscrapers where most people would arrive in the train and walk to wherever they were going. You put thousands of people in that area and it still wasn’t “loud”.) For a brief moment in history, car culture gave a subset of the population something to bond over, but even that is largely gone now and most people seem to just view the car industry with exhausted resignation as cars have become massive financial burdens that one is required to own in most cities.
Yes, there are many technological advances that have been positive and that maybe we can decide that the loss of connection to our living relationship to whatever it replaced is worth it. But, so much of what we are replacing now never actually needed replaced and the technology is “actually useless”. CRMs replaced secretaries, but a CRM can’t actually autonomously keep the office and its organization ticking along like well oiled machine like a secretary can. It replaced file cabinets and paper forms, but costs far more than paper ever did, and god forbid you ever want to migrate to a different CRM, you’ll probably have to pay somebody thousands of dollars to help you do it.
Social media was entirely unnecessary from the start. People made friends back before it existed, more and better friends than most of us do now. Sure, it maybe helped certain people connect with other they wouldn’t have had access to in real life, but it has also connected probably far more people to others they shouldn’t have or would never have been forced to have connections to in the real world. We didn’t have a loneliness crisis we were trying to fix, we caused the loneliness crisis when we said “you know that living breathing thing we call friendship and a social life? Let’s insert technology into that, which will of course destroy it because thats what technology always does”
We just continue to sever our connection to every living, breathing aspect of our lives with technology. It feels awful because it is awful. Human life, actual living life, IS connection to other life. Technology can only sever that, and a few positive use cases doesn’t offset the actual consequences we can see in basically every technological advancement. We are disconnected, unhappy, lonely, unfulfilled. Every thing human, even our creative endeavors, is being infiltrated by AI. We gave up real social life for online social life and now we are being replaced there by bots and everyone is left stranded on an island in a sea of “convenience and interconnectedness”. Technology, every technology, from the steam engine to the solid state drive has a consequence and replaces a connection we had to something living. Destroy enough connections and we aren’t really living anymore.
I actually have a few ideas along those lines! Stick around. I think you’ll like what you see.
This is really, really good writing.
Thank you so, so much.
My personal disenchantment moment with YouTube was when I set up a new account in 2018ish, and looked up an album with an orange cover. I then was recommended 6 videos with orange covers.
The hedonic treadmill continues apace. Perhaps the gears will jam for a couple years someday.
Also, you are writing about the same exact thing I wrote this Substack about, namely, that Silicon Valley operates like Big Oil except with overt psychosis since everything's made up and the points don't matter.
>Seriously, Facebook can literally perform unethical psychological experiments on hundreds of thousands of people, and there’s nothing you — or anyone else — can do about it.
Of course there is. You can stop using it.
also waiting for how Substack enshittifies
my latest example of this is how all the podcast creators are starting to make videos to go with their podcast because the big podcast distributors like like Spotify punish them if they don’t, even though all these creators would rather just stay pure audio because they think it yields better shows because guests feel more comfortable