In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More
A summary (no AI, I actually read things then summarise them):
The digital world is the real world - It’s where most people in Western society spend most of their personal social time, and a lot of other time (e.g. work)
But it’s shit. It wasn’t always shit, but it is. Platforms don’t do what you want them to do, or even what they used to do. Cory Doctorow’s enshitiffication describes one mechanism, but really the problem is the rot economy - a mindset that causes technology providers to consider only growth and profit over anything that might be important to real people
This has made technology (and by extension much of everyday life) traumatic. As a tech savvy person you may be aware of some or all of this, including the effects and motivations, and may even be able to avoid some - but by being in the readership of this article, you have to acknowledge you are in a privileged minority
Take the example of someone buying one of the most sold laptops from a big retailer - a common and necessary way for large numbers of people to access the digital world. By the time you fight the kludge of Windows with its integrations and bloatware and updates, then try and use a browser on this underpowered machine, you’ve already been bludgeoned into accepting that everything digital is just terrible, with no way of knowing or understanding that this is not your fault
This is not a trap you can easily escape, and any suggestion that these users are to blame because they bought cheap technology is just another example of the lack of economic awareness and empathy that lead to recent US election results. Similarly, blaming users for a lack of digital literacy when the technology is actively thwarting them would be inappropriate
So what’s the answer? I don’t know. At the very least we need to be empathetic, be aware, and raise awareness that this is happening. Why is this important? Because the digital world is the real world, and it’s being stolen from us
I appreciate your clarification that this is your summary and not a generative AI one. I find that LLMs are actually pretty terrible at summarising, because it turns out that summarising is more than just “make it shorter” (I say this as someone who finds succinctly summarising papers to be one of the hardest parts of academic writing)
Do you find that doing summaries improves how well you’re able to process and retain information, possibly leading to deeper introspective insights down the line?
Very well summed up imho! Thanks for taking the time to do this, kind stranger!
Thanks. While I was hooked, I had a feeling most people wouldn’t commit to such a long article
My favourite quote:
Aside: I swear to god, if your answer here is “get a MacBook Air, they’re only $600,” I beg you — I plead with you — to speak with people outside of your income bracket at a time when an entire election was decided in part because everything’s more expensive.
As if Apple wasn’t just as much a part of the problem as the rest of them.
