Daily Writing
LLM reflections Ⅱ
…Art.
The world of the artist and creative will be forever impacted by the multi-modal application of this new technology. Like when pigmentation democratized paints, Microsoft Word unlocked a treasure trove of shared writing, and Adobe launched a new genre of craftsmanship, the arts and AI are on the verge of breakthrough. Already, authors are writing books and researchers are prompting informative summaries on ChatGPT. Every minute, a never before seen image is generated using DALLE-2 or MidJourney while the integration of these tools is speeding up freelance creative’s processes tenfold.
Legal battles of profit and provenance of the images, texts, and ideas generated by these tools is underway. These rulings matter, but not as much as what these tools will do to artistic spaces. The zeitgeist has shifted. New tools and new kinds of work have proven a point more than ever before: anyone can make art. The startup cost continues to diminish as the impact you can make when pairing tools within digital spaces continues to multiply. New generations, more than ever before, will reach for an instrument to create something beautiful. And we’ll all be there to enjoy it.
Economy.
Forecasted efficiency “booms” in technological productivity are not entirely overstated. LLMs will be one piece of the puzzle to restore the internet’s ability to be that long-foretold “boom” and clear the clutter of our screens by optimizing bespoke workflows. AI can’t create publishable articles from scratch but will provide researchers with summaries of relevant information. It won’t replace doctors but will streamline patient note generation from electronic medical-record entries. This will not impact the existence of certain jobs, but it will shift the operations of these jobs.
The surge in AI-powered tools has given awareness to the multitude of capabilities in all industries. Scientists are able to expedite research processes and come up with “alien” ideas outside the scope of human reasoning to attempt. Engineers can run simulations and calculations through a series of pre-programmed tests with massive datasets behind them. An amateur like myself can prompt chatbots for aid in creating website elements without any coding experience (many areas of this website were designed that way). LLMs give the curious mind a laser beam of focussed processing to point at whatever problem vexes them.
The risks are high: AI researchers have a conversational probability of doom (“p (doom)”) because of the dangers these algorithms pose. The need for unity on legal and ethical fronts is paramount: LLMs have the potential to bless or curse every industry, person, and area of life. But there is hope. More expert than Google, more collaborative than Youtube, LLMs are the next step in the future of the way we learn, work, and create worlds.
LLM reflections
Time for some reflection. Now that the hype cycle has plateaued. Now that the court cases are underway. Now that culture has said its piece and innovation has responded in kind. What are the stakes for ethical technology in this evolving world of large language models?
Misinformation.
We have to start here because of what these tools are… The Center for Humane Technology best relates our first contact with Artificial Intelligence. It was an interaction we tragically lost: the assimilation of ad-powered social media platforms into our society. This was an adoption fraught with ignorance, naivety, and false promises. Content curators, in the form of what we began to charmingly call “the algorithm,” became able to know us better than we knew ourselves.
Our second contact with large language models (LLMs) is in a pitched battle with pieces and factions strewn across a global board. LLMs are personal knowledge prediction engines. More than Google that showed us the web, more than “the algorithm” that served us ads, these seek to satiate our hunger for information. They tenaciously do this at times to our detriment.
The “lab coat effect” appears to apply to VC-hyped softwares as everyone from students to lawyers accepts a chatbot’s text as truth. The apt term “hallucination” is a benign example of LLM’s shortcomings. Getting the Eiffel Tower’s height wrong or misattributing accolades is harmless in isolation. What these mistakes will impact more and more are the intentional distribution of convincingly falsified information. Scammers, governments and guerrilla marketers. These bad actors will use LLM’s gains in efficiency and comprehension to turn profit and public unrest to a new level…
Education.
Years of tired, overextended, and too few students has taxed learning in the West. The unwilling partnership with technology has not aided the situation up to now, but simply smoothed over the cracks that were soon to break open. AI brings opportunities for the growth and improvement in areas where iPads, teaching softwares, and Google only complicated education. LLM-powered homework tutors, reflection with an AI partner, multi-lingual interpretation that benefits the reader and writer. The possibilities (and trajectory of AI in the industries students are bound for) are revolutionary.
The issues most raise is a short-term one. Homework assignments no longer work, essays written outside of class cannot be vetted, students becoming mindless “regurgitators” like LLMs. The hope of most innovators transcends these fears. With a truly disruptive technology used by all under twenty, the bubble holding back old education from new innovations may finally have to burst. When homework breaks for good, we’ll see conservators turn inward to shore up prohibitions or we’ll see innovators look to what the world is becoming and prepare a way for their students in the future...
create | consume
We live in a time when traditional media is being viciously usurped by new media. More than half of Americans entertainment comes from streaming and social platforms. Young adults are likely to scoff at the idea of cable and network television. Box office numbers have fallen far behind view, subscriber, and patron counts on alternative platforms. More kids today want to be Youtubers more than they want to be astronauts or scientists. There is a felt need to be seen in this rising generation.
Shaped by social media and parented by screens, the next generation has been taught about a cycle of create and consume. With the accessibility of a movie-quality camera and the ubiquity of film-making education online, anyone can join this dance and become an artist. The rise of the part-time Youtuber and combination of work and play in this space marks a new path for creativity and sufficiency.
Consumption can either fuel creation or paralyze an artist. It’s a necessary part of growing a project and finding inspiration, but it’s dangers are many and hidden. When we get in a pattern of sitting and watching, we lose the things that makes us artists, creators. The tool that enabled access to learning and abundance becomes the thing which restricts our ability to develop and share our work.
The design of platforms and devices seems to be at odds. When we see the “Create a post” button right next to our feed, crossed wires lead to indecision which always becomes the choice of the house: browse, scroll, consume. Our moment of doubt, insecurity, or fear can push us right back into the stream of content created… not by us.
Many creators choose to do their art in closed systems. Non-smartphone cameras, non-laptop typewriters, non-consumptive creator tools. They silo off practice from participation. This is the strength of analog tech like a journal. It allows you the focus and uninterrupted time to build worlds. Flow can only be found in the single-tasking focus brought about by the ruthless elimination of distractions (there’s a reason website/app blockers grew in popularity with the rise of online media). For the creator looking to tap into this prolific era’s resources, finding this space is essential.
For those who eschew the creative impulse, what is your relationship to this inevitable cycle? Are you creating from your consumption? Does beauty flow from your abundance? Or does energy find its way to you at the end of a line, cut off from further cultivation in the river of creation?
Find your voice by hearing the voice of others, but don’t dwell here. Build a system that opens your time and energy to the creation of something that matters, simply to you or generously to others.
current with eternity
My tendency is to write about with grim malaise and skepticism at the future. I write of the dangers, misuses, and perversions of technology in our culture today. So quick and able to write of the bad, the good is swept away like breadcrumbs. Their trail being lost and hope of redemption being hidden.
Part of this is due to the widespread writing from those, like myself, critical and concerned with the direction of platforms, devices, and subcultures. When we imbibe pessimism, we inject it in our work. This problem is true for anyone living in the current digital ecosphere that encourages emotional over intellectual participation. Our feeds (both digital and analog) become the composition of our attitudes. And our attitudes become the tenor of our lives.
The truth is that life can be filled with abundant goodness not simply because of prohibition around devices. Fullness can be found in the careful restructuring of technology, knowing what it strives to be and helping it reach peak potential…
What do you really need from a phone? Communication, navigation, audio-entertainment. Is the rest just clutter? What alternative devices could augment your simplifying?
Could carrying around a pocket journal and pencil reshape your relationship to Google, note-taking, and information? Would your work benefit from a unique approach to knowledge-gathering that couples patience with permanency?
How does the entertainment in your life form you? Does the world of analog technology offer a healthier path to wholeness? Entertainment seeks to keep us current with world events, celebrities, and moments, but would recreation like reading and writing, music and painting keep you current with eternity?
Though it’s hard for me to admit, more important than quitting social media or getting rid of your smartphone is how we intentionally craft a life around values and people. So much can be extracted from the perks of instruments. Just as so much can be lost by the pitfalls of devices. Explore the effects, understand the history, and judge the baggage of integration as harshly as you can. Find what works for you, but ensure technologies are additive. It’s a choice we make, but it becomes something that makes us.
tools of our tools
To simplify the complex technology that is work, we must unpack the dual premise that, all work is predicated on the use of certain tools, and more importantly, that and all tools are elaborations of two original tools:
the shovel and axe.
Work is rooted in the act of turning something (material, ideas, value) into something else through activity. Work cannot be accomplished without the use of a tool. If you're an accountant, your tools are GAAP, financial technologies (money, debt, credits, and so on), and spreadsheets. If you're a plumber, your tools are the accoutrements of most tradesmen (a wrench, plumb-line, and, importantly, the education and skills required by the craft). Even more esoteric or abstract lines of work like philosophy, teaching, and preaching still use tools like cognition, reasoning, pedagogy, and exegesis. These disciplines each require a technology, whether developed through linguistics or material, to function.
For the second premise, we have to go back.
Leopold writes that when our earliest ancestors created the shovel, they became "givers" as they could plant trees or dig wells, posts, and foundations. When the axe was invented however, pioneers of work became "takers" as they chopped down those trees and unmade what was made.
These paragons, which certainly maintain primeval ancestors, designed the behaviors every technology follows: to give and take (this doesn't omit the potential for a shovel's misuse in attacking people or undermining structures, nor an axe's in creating grooves to loft scaffolding or chopping wood to supply lumber- these categorizations simply represent the philosophical intent primal tools indicated about the desire of humankind in labor).
The invention of language allows for fellowship in the same breath that the invention of class names the “plebeian” to strip away dignity. The printing press gives access while barbed wire takes interdependence. The Industrial Revolution rushed forward with the invention of the assembly line. This tool gave collaboration a new meaning but worked alongside labor tech to subjugate citizens to the clock and whistle. The era of efficiency began, but we didn't seem to be leading the charge.
At the end of the Industrial Revolution, Thoreau went so far as to call people "tools of their tools." Pre-modern civilization after the industrial revolution doubled-down, developing education and accreditation around people's ability to use tools well. An entire system of colleges, teachers, and thought leaders geared up a generation to be engineers and material scientists within every field. This was the direction economy, politics, and society ran through the 20th century as everything from entertainment to status roles to social justice was shaped by the tools individual's chose to wield.
The Digital Revolution, of course, changed everything.
Work became rooted in turning bits of information into more palatable, salable, and visual indexes of information.
Our tools became coopted by software. Our infrastructure became controlled by a cloud connection. Our interaction in the physical world became superfluous to digital education and social media's wholesale substitution. Our seasons became dependent on quarterly earnings and turnover, and our days became dominated by scrolling.
It's been said that if you don't pay for the product, you are the product. Even if we opt-out of certain platforms, we live in a world run by our tools, and those tools turn us into a commodity by mere osmosis with culture.
Smartphone owners are simultaneously the advertisement and the user. You are the unwitting developer team and update recipient. You are the vital extension of the product more than it is the extension of you.
You are a tool of your tools.
We once used tools with artistry and brilliance to create and reshape the earth. Dreaming larger than life, we shot for the moon and landed among the stars. Simple shovels were used for a day then set down to rest with no sovereignty over us. Now a device that fits in pockets controls our waking and sleeping with digital precision and ruthless abandon. When our work became under threat of “tool rule”, we still had weekends and nights to seek reprieve. In a world of digital devices, this escape becomes harder and harder to find with every device added to our ecosystem...
time unwound
Hour by hour. Day by day. We measure down to the second. We live by the minute. Never before has the history of civilization been as closely tracked as it is today. Digital calendars, algorithm-enhanced watches, virtual assistants pushing us from event to meeting to task. Our conception of time, and by extension space, is shaped by our interactions with technology.
“…no two cultures live conceptually in the same kind of time and space,” writes Lewis Mumford, the cultural historian and prophetic voice who best captured the development and technology and civilization up to the Computer Age. Our ideas about what time is differ greatly from those cultures not inundated with notifications, schedules, and maximization. Time is money, money is power. Versus time at the heart of existence.
At the beginning of all Jewish philosophy, time is one, eternal. Its division into seven days saw six become subservient to the one set aside for Shabbat Shalom (Sabbath peace). It taught Hebraic minds of the primacy of time over space. Abraham Joshua Heschel aids us: “The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments…” Money, power, and information are not the ultimate ends by which we “utilize” time. An architecture is created of time that encapsulates moment, experience, and encounter.
This too differs from certain indigenous people’s view of time. Robin Wall Kimmerer explains, “Nanabozho’s people know time as a circle. Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself… all things that were will come again.” Gratitude defines a culture in this conception of a time that returns to itself. When all the world is a gift in motion, your schedule becomes an open hand, waiting to give back as much as you receive.
The newest American experiment has been about reengineering our lives to a new kind of time. One defined by the habits of adding and saving time, closing it within boxes and looking to remove the constraints of “lesser hours” spent. It becomes a commodity to be spent, not a gift to be experienced.
The trouble with this paradigm, as is always the problem with deeply ingrained ways of thinking, it its end. The only logical conclusion of commoditizing time is commoditizing relationships, work, and our planet. A pernicious worldview takes hold; the unconscious habits therein are impossible to excise without first drawing out the demonic thought patterns rooted deep (“demonic” in our insensate desire to gain the power of gods without the love, prudence, and discipline of gods). Wendell Berry agrees in his exhortation that we must, “begin by giving up any idea that we can bring about these healings without fundamental changes in the way we think and live.”
The language of “spending time” and “earning an hour” must cease to so profoundly shape us. Our practice of treating time as a tool must make way for a restoration of time as sacredly cyclical, eternally evocative. Humanity’s hope is in the splendor of Sabbath, the blessing of a gift economy, and the restoration of time in the natural order of things.
We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things…
go light | a testament |
Secular historian paints a striking picture about the revolution that was the christian faith during the first four centuries. Tens of thousands flocked to the way of a dead, celibate, middle eastern teacher. Most changed every part of their lives because of what they came to know. The method through which this rabbi’s message and call was distributed was not typical. His followers didn’t begin a marketing campaign of propaganda or apologetics. They didn’t pair off and seek to convert three Romans for every christian at the time. Their was no mass gathering to ostentatiously announce the plans for the continuing ministry.
“They made the grace of God credible by a society of love and mutual care which astonished the pagans and was recognized as something entirely new…”
They lived in such a way that begged the question.
What’s the lesson here? The obvious thing to learn is that your life is the grounds for a message. Whether that message is cultivated or unintentional is up to the decisions you make. Our internal life is reflected in our external life, so even those choices we think no one can see are on full display in how we act, look, and speak. If you have a message to share, if you have a product to sell, if you have a desire to fulfill, the way you live your life will be all the marketing you need (for good or ill).
The less obvious lesson is that certain kinds of lifestyles have a magnetism to them. People recognize change and are drawn into a different story uncoerced. Deviation triggers double-takes. This is a pattern of technological innovation as much as it is a pattern of historical movements. The question we must ask is, “which direction of innovation do these trends go?”
The new, sensational, and addictive no longer turns heads because it’s commonplace. Every week “disruptive” platforms trying to eat TikTok’s lunch appear. “Novel” AI integrations circulate touting increased productivity, life-hacked profitability, or “insane (try inane) click-through-rates.”
The radically ordinary operates on a different kind of attention. A “slow attention” that works its way into the zeitgeist, not through flashy time-grabs or influencer click-bait, but through unique, relational investment. The person able to integrate technology in a way that prioritizes personhood over productivity draws a crowd. The crowd begins small. It sees something valuable and nudges its friends. They begin to gather and yearn for deeper experience. It makes a change and shares the results.
This has been my experience with choosing a divergent path. The slow grind of hearing testimony and becoming a testament works its way into every community to bring about thriving change.
//go light
getting to the bottom
In productivity and business spaces online, a great deal of attention and work is put toward unpacking the proposition of technology as a tool for organization, ideation, and execution. As someone deep in this niche, I’m generally a fan of the tips and tricks shared. I get sucked into the Desk Tour and 7 Habits Youtube videos. I grew up on Tim Ferris books and the historical concepts of optimization and efficiency blended with tech.
The trouble is that tech may be good at getting us on top of things in the short term, but it’s woefully deficient at getting us to the bottom of things in the long term.
Shallow ties and bad-faith conversation tactics abound in our digital forums. Our tools afford us a cursory review of these documents or those articles. They show us just enough of the widest possible range to prompt the feeling of comprehension without ever forcing us to undergo the laboring of comprehension.
There’s a reason a college degree, experience at a job, and valid certifications are still so highly valued today: the process in attaining these things through struggle forms a person. Skillshare courses or years spent chronically online don’t lead to wisdom. Technology tends toward the bitey, the quick, and the contextless. Without our feet firmly planted on the solid ground of deep research, earned experience, and a life of connection, we will fall prey to staying atop the waves when the true treasure is on the ocean floor.
the innovation bargain of technology
Publicly,
every technology unlocks a new class of responsibilities and starts a race that will end in tragedy if uncoordinated. We only learned about the right to control personal data when social media companies began controlling them for us. A new set of liabilities arose with terms, conditions, and legalities aflame. Big Tech fought to control their perch in user’s lives and conscientious objectors spoke up against targeting and manipulation. This fight is still underway… but it doesn’t look good for you and I.
The race around social media is remarkable and at the forefront of the battle for human attention and dignity, but everyday, innovations uncover signs of new sets of harm. The proliferation of AI chatbots in all spheres show how accelerated distribution through API’s and social media can skyrocket a tech to ubiquity. Short-form video content reignites the race to feed upon user attention and causes every platform to shift their model in favor of virality, scattered-attention, and the obliteration of context. Whether tragedy or transformation comes of these tools depends on our ability to understand them and coordinate a prudent response…
Personally,
devices make a proposition to us. A trade of talents, an exchange of encumbrances. “Now, you’ll be able to do this, but not that. You’ll no longer have to do this, but you’ll start having to do that.”
This bargain is predicated upon the innate human god complex, the inbuilt desire to perform magic with our minds. There is an age-old ache within all generations of inventors that reaches for the impossible. In an attempt to transcend our heavy hands and broken bodies, we shape the resources of our world to bend around this impulse. But magic comes with a cost. Like the proverbial touch of gold, our innovations can come with a heavy, personal toll.
When Google was invented, we gained the ability to summon any bit of information with a query. Simultaneously, we began to lose the ability to remember and understand the information we so desperately sought. We no longer had to wait to know an answer until we could return to our books and libraries, but we now have to know that answer at once, regardless of context, company, or consequence.
If we examine the technologies we have adopted, what bargains do we find we have made? Have we traded away parts of our humanity, time, or attention? Do we feel the ache of buyer’s remorse about integrating devices that seem to numb the ache increasingly less over time? Would we go back and make a different trade if we knew what it would cost?
a rule of life
Early followers of the itinerant Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, took on the lifestyle and practices of their teacher through what became known as a Rule of Life. A set of formative practices relating to their days, careers, and relationships that sought to unify body, mind, and heart under the instruction of his (and choice other’s) ideals.
This may seem archaic and stifling to you, but here’s the truth:
You already have a Rule of Life.
Whether you are aware of it or not, you live by a unique set of rhythms. Your time is always divided into buckets (hap-hazardously or intentionally): work, relationships, meals, play. The ways you spend your time may ebb and flow from week to week, but, for the most part, your life follows a set of programmed rituals.
The questions you should be asking are:
…from where did I receive these rhythms and routines?
…are these habits in line with my values?
…can I change my ways?
Technology tries incredibly hard to avoid answers to the first and ensure the last two are ‘no.’ Over the course of just a few decades, without thinking, we have reoriented the structure of our lives to accommodate and encourage the needs of technology.
The home was once centered around a fireplace or hearth. Couches didn’t face a black screen and make room for chords and speakers connecting our senses to virtual entertainment. Our pockets weren’t overstuffed with a too-large device that begged our attention with sound and vibrations. Our desks and bookshelves housed time-tested wisdom, writing and reading tools, and debris from the life of intellectual explorers.
Our environment engineers the trajectory of our life and a technologically engineered environment has nefarious ends. Techno-optimists will laud the efficiency and connectedness of devices but where is the proof? Our society is closer to war and spiritual collapse with each year since social media and smartphone’s took the main-stage. Work hours have not decreased as was once predicted and a malaise remains over our general satisfaction with the life-hours we spend grinding away at tasks. Our great-grandparents would expect our happiness levels to be through the roof, but the mental health crisis tells a different story. Have we created an environment perfect for technology but harmful to humanity?
What can we do but reclaim our spaces, reframe our time, and rewrite our habits? Can we pen a new way of life to match our striving for those values that matter most to us? Will we be formed under the instruction and rule of technological or higher powers in the end?
love letter to books
Google built an LLM-powered summarization feature for the web that scrapes a page for reader bullet points. This move prompts my thinking about other design choices of the internet that compose its character.
How often do we use a look-up function to skip past content and find our treasured answer? What do we miss with the flick of the wrist’s motion to a conclusion unearned? Where is our attention pulled by a side-loaded advertisement in the midst of deeper understanding? The internet’s limitless and distracted perversion of knowledge into what we call “information” stands in direct contrast to its profound and liberating predecessor that bears few similarities.
Books require patient, intentional, intelligent attention to glean the same “information” but are about so much more. Reading is a journey for two. Author and audience partake in a transformative labor to do more than simply digest words. Words from books stay with us long after we’ve read them. Whether consciously or not, we live our lives from the effort we expended in taking the time to understand a vital truth, go on an epic quest, or become humbled by another human’s experiences.
From page to page, we are aware of the great struggle in its making. When we hold its outer bindings, we sense the wisdom of an entire lifetime, career, or era packed between our fingers. As we begin the first page, we realize that this act of beginning anew could change our lives in lasting ways.
A book has never been merely a book as the internet is not simply the internet. They are both collections of human knowledge that are designed to create environments for us to do two things: thrive or detach.
premature assisted living
As children, we believe the world revolves around us. Ideally and historically, the growing up process is a shift from self-centeredness to selflessness. To find ways to give our life away. To seek practices to increase our impact in the world. To create space for others to grow beyond where we fall. The aging flight path winds up pulling our orbit back down to the realization of reliance. Incapability becomes our MO. Dependency our posture.
This process of reliance to independence back to dependence is natural and good. In its proper place, the idea and practice of assisted living for the aged is an essential maturation process for those learning how to step away from the throne they built for themselves in life. The process of “giving our deaths away” as we once did for our lives is the flowering of the fine wine in the human experience. Its predecessor and constituents (“middle life” and caretakers) are, in their proper time, both the reward and lesson of living.
Maturity is found by staying in middle life and not slipping into a premature assisted living. Dealing with uncertainty, navigating nuance, controlling our desires, and healthily channeling our emotions are the challenges we encounter. Our response is our cartography.
Too many “adults” today could plot themselves far to close to the extreme ends of human journey. The infantilization of the West has been correlated to a number of recent shifts. The ingredients of a premature assisted living are general incontinence which brings about the need for a personal caretaker and sees the slow decline of mental and physical capabilities.
I would propose the pervasive adoption of digital technology conjured up these ingredients in us all. So often touted as a “personal assistant,” our devices have shaped the way we interact with work, relationships, and the natural world. We are aided by a host of predictive technologies that say, “you don’t have to know, I’ll know for you. I’ll recommend, curate, and understand, so that you don’t have to.” These decide what we watch, hear, and see. They tell us who to message, date, and follow.
Our reliance upon them has brought about a mental and spiritual dissoluteness. The moral bankruptcy of our public figures and celebrities relates a juvenile picture of modern character training. The physical well-being of Americans has never been so poor. Could it be possible that our society has entered a premature decline with a sedative called “the smartphone?”
Without conflict and the challenges of encountering the real world, maturing is impossible. Video games and 24/7 entertainment on social media siloes off neighbor from neighbor and destroys our communities. Erasing the unknown, we are left to steward the power of gods without the practiced wisdom and prudence of gods.
This deficit will continue so long as the education we receive and distribute fails to provide cultivation for the virtues and promotion of the arduous good. If we cannot course correct the journey of a core subset of our rising leaders, our state will be in peril and our hearts will be forcibly swayed into a technological submission inevitable for those who give up their faculties in favor of convenience, comfort, and conformity.
go light | affordances |
In design thinking, affordances are those functions which a tool immediately presents as an option to users. For a hammer or screwdriver, the grips are self-evident while the business ends afford at least a guess at what the device could be used for. A blunt, metal end urges our minds to smash (so much so that “hammer” eventually became the operational verb of this act in symbiosis with early stone-headed tools). A pointy, grooved end leads us to look for a place to insert its pattern while the octagonal grip insinuates a turning motion with the holding wrist.
Affordance are everywhere. Door handles that say “push” or imply “pull.” Indentations on keys that are satisfyingly discovered to be buttons when clicked. These work in tandem with the human body to allow us to function without thought.
The digital world uses transposed design language to communicate its affordances. Swiping pages like a book, receiving haptic feedback from clicking icons, double-tapping things we like (which feels neatly gamified in its insidious simplicity). For fifteen years, our minds have slowly adjusted themselves to the point of rewriting our ability to interact with those analog tools like the hammer. The disappearance of shop class and the rise of the “knowledge worker” betoken a clear shift in priorities.
The issue arises when we try to ask, what does a smartphone afford? Said with zero hyperbole: everything.
A phone is meant to be a communication device. We downsized landline and rotary phones over decades to allow portability for our more urgent conversations. But these became something else. Maybe we took all our smart and put it into the phone, leaving you and I with…
Upon your very first start-up, smartphones present more than a few things. Messages, calls, maps, forecasts, internet, cameras, movies, and games. Jump into the app store and welcome to infinity. Decision fatigue, analysis paralysis, option inundation- these become our water, pings, notification symbols, and vibrations become our air within which we (dry) drown.
Were we ever meant to have this many affordances at the swipe of a finger? Would we expect affordances like these to prompt anything but the chaos, polarization, toxicity, inattention, and unrest we have today? Are we intent on lagging behind the intelligence of our devices in this incessant off-loading process?
Should we instill our phones with wisdom as we uninstall our intelligence, or should we create more tools whose affordances respect our anthropology and restrain our god complex?
//go light
revolution and redemption
Scholars believe the first seven centuries of the second millennia to be a period of slow fermentation in which materials, essential knowledge, and technical philosophies began to coalesce around certain hubs of industry. What came next transformed human history forever. Industrialists of this era launched a revolution that reached every part of society and learning. Sigfried Giedion, a historian and architecture critic from the twentieth century, said this of that period:
“Invention was a part of the normal course of life. Everyone invented. Every entrepreneur dreamed of more rapid and economical means of fabrication. The work was done unconsciously and autonomously. Nowhere else and never before was the number of inventions per capita as great as in America in the 60’s of that century.“
With key ideas in place, inventors took the matter of shaping history into their own hands and introduced technology that was the bedrock of society for the next two centuries of growth. The assembly line and manufacturing processes, coal engines and automotive transportation, steel-making and the creation of skyscrapers- every part of our modern day environment was generated in a scant two hundred years of innovation and growth. Ford, Vanderbilt, Taylor, et al. These built the world as we know it.
An accelerated pace of scholastic and globalized friction has brought us into a new inflection point in history. The digital, biomedical, and AI revolutions have teed up what will be our next great reshaping. Our technical waters and spirit of innovation is the most favorable environment since that long gone revolution.
What powered upheavals of the past was a clear commercial incentive. “How does this stimulate economic growth? Where does this get our bottom line (says the devout capitalist)?” Writers like Wendell Berry and Edward Abbey seen “growth” in their time and said “an infinitely greedy sovereign is afoot in the universe, staking his claims,” and “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
We must have a greater incentive than this kind of limitless gain.
Berry tells us to look the the land, Abbey to look within. Both to save those parts of the world that are undervalued, written off, and incapable of producing for themselves. Technological innovation is not the path to this kind of redemptive growth, but rather human innovation, on the scale of individual virtues and character-training. We cannot innovate our way out of our problems. The road lies through the path of hard introspection and the realization that the world can only change if we change ourselves to aid it.
grayscale
It’s one of the simplest changes you can make.
It’s an essential practice for every device I use (phone, computer, tablet watch).
Its benefits are the impetus for devices like Remarkable and LightPhone’s decisions to build an e-ink screen.
Turning your screen to grayscale (black and white) turns off the seductive allure of its design. Our brains are enthralled with color, variation, and luminosity. Think of the maximalist Candy Crush, with its addictive explosions and vibrant characters, and realize your devices are engineered to create the same neural links. Time-on-device is the goal that consumes the minds of those in Silicon Valley. As may have noted, you are hopeless to think mere willpower is sufficient to resist the combined attentions of super-computers and techno-capitalism. We need practices. We need control.
Turning your phone to grayscale for the first time is involved enough that your non-trivial effort can stick. It’s non-invasive enough to not warrant attention from your limbic system. It’s noticeable enough that you catch yourself before scrolling, zoning, clicking the next grayed-out link.
Our lives are not meant to be lived within the four corners of an Apple product. The change the world needs is sometimes restrained by one person’s inability to put their phone down long enough to see their calling.
Take this moment to protect your future-self’s time.
Stop what you’re doing and turn your phone to grayscale.
linguistic entrenchment Ⅲ: digitally defined
Where do we turn for news in the world, truth about life, and connection to other people?
Information, worldview, community. We seek these through the gentle clicks and haptics of our keyboards. Through the glow of a screen on a Google search. Through the infinite scroll of a media distributor’s feed.
The internet is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself.
The implications of this idea are multifarious…
How the internet presents the world becomes the model for how the world presents itself.
The internet created social media platforms to “connect the world.” Instead of connecting the world, it created a new one that incentivizes “connection” through parasocial relationships. Even those we know offline are commoditized in this alternate reality as “likes” and “friends” through simple, dopamine-releasing design features. This reductionism seeps into our interactions with nature, travel, and learning. The model for online growth prompts users to ransack their experiences for whatever content available.
How the internet licenses truth becomes the way truth seeks to be licensed.
The destruction of context, doxxing of characters, and denial of grounds to have a conversation have reached a heightened prevalence in public discourse. From its early days, the internet proffered answers to infinite queries through one-line searches and, in return, one-line answers. Hyperlinks add to the mess as they propel readers through a series of strung-together texts to gain only that information necessary to understand their original probe from the barest extraneous details.
The syntax of the internet is speed and always has been. Efficiency is the goal that devours competitors who race to create the (next) fastest micro-processor or software bump. This is the conduit truth must travel to reach each pair of bored, inattentive, sluggish eyes. This same channel eviscerates dialogue. As the medium dictates the message, so too does the prudent user find themselves at odds with any attempts at serious, analytical discussion.
How the internet interacts with its constituents becomes the way its constituents interact with each other.
We are torn asunder from locality to centrality. Forgetting our sense of home, globalization and the internet age lure us from good-faith communication and tight-knit community in tandem. We’ve all felt it. Increasing hostility across ideological lines. Decreasing tethers to common points of connection. The subtle impression that the device and network in our pocket knows us better than the person across the table ever could. We await Cupid’s Kiss from convenience-tech that caused the slumber from which some never wake. Like Psyche in her mythological slumber, we become “a corpse asleep” drifting down a digital Styx…
linguistic entrenchment Ⅱ
Innovations in spreadsheets were designed by colonialists to measure the time of slave workers and optimize productivity. The clock was created by monastic devotees intent on fixing their time around prayer. In Phaedrus, Plato writes of an Egyptian king, Thamus, appraising the work of a god of science and magic:
Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function…
Today, spreadsheets power businesses, small and large, to spread wealth, create infrastructure, and manage the production of new parts of culture. The clock dictates a rhythm of work that relentlessly oppresses both ends of the wealth gap.
Not even those who invent a technology can be assumed to be reliable prophets…
- Neil Postman
If history is written by the victor, what should we know about our tools? Could those who gained mastery first have shaped language that circles them? How did the dissemination of access to innovation change our perspective on it?
Ford pioneered to demonstrate mastery of the stopwatch. His use of Fredrick Taylor’s time-motion studies created a new playbook for industrialization still in use today. Time became money in his conception. And this idea trickled down to play out its hand throughout the rest of western society for a century…
linguistic entrenchment
You must first dig the roots to chop the tree…
At the root of most ideas is language. We find ourselves entrenched in ways of doing because of our ways of speaking. This is largely because of the obvious: we can’t have discourse without language. So many parts of culture are shaped by definitions that have settled into the sub-strata of societal norms. “Time is money”, “money is power,” “seeing is believing.” These are accepted not because of their veracity, but because of repetition.
When we reach for answers, we look to the practical, present, and pervasive. Meanwhile, the thoughtful, true, and time-tested lay unused in a history book or philosophical treatise. In the midst of uncertainty or crisis, to which do we turn?
The dangerous race of technology is worsened by language that is itself part of the problem. This cycle persists because of the nature of technology. Postman argues that, “because of its lengthy, intimate, and inevitable relationship with culture, technology does not invite a close examination of its own consequences.” An innocuous malady entrenches language that perpetuates a willful ignorance.
Death begets death begets death…
Vicious cycles are defined by their titular adjective. There is a cruelty to falling into a pit with slippery edges of our own making. By its nature, information glut increases everyday. Without barriers, language models “improve” to sow more misinformed or shallow data throughout the internet. Exponentials we see daily extend our struggle through the chasm of understanding.
The betrayal of provenance we embrace should be a reminder of what is essential. Language is essential. It’s also what we make of it, so we must remake those parts warped by our folly into something better.
Forgetting is essential to learning,
just as exhaling is essential to breathing.
Breathe out, then in.
Find the self,
then lose it once again.- Pierce Brown
resistance and dreams
What do you want?
Because dreams are essential to create a life. Think about it. Meditate upon it.
Where are you getting your vision of what philosophers have commonly called, “the good life”?
We all receive a vision of what we want our life to be from somewhere. We are passed down a vision from our parents or a story we read when we were younger. We find teachers along the way who endow us with their wisdom for the journey. We hear about injustice and create counter-narratives to strive towards.
Throughout the lives of many who are privileged enough, we ask this question and we choose. We choose to pursue the vision we have crafted with everything in us. Or we choose to ignore the relentless pull of our dreams in favor of mediocrity or complacency. Right now, you’re choosing. Choosing to fight for what you believe or lie down in the face of resistance.
Many of us wake up one day and find a false vision painted for us by technology. We see our decisions and habits have formed us in a direction we do not want to go. Our life is not in line with the hope we once had. Our day is filled with reductive or downright harmful nonsense. The lull of technological innovation trends humanity toward comfort and inaction. We stall out as our machines throttle on.
In the midst of this realization, responses vary. Many allow resistance to continue to wash over them and dictate their choices. They see it continue to run their lives fully unaffected by the novel truth they once knew. Resistance becomes the song they sing with the constant refrains we all know too well (I won’t remind you).
The incredibly lucky among us, though, find people. They discover that to their left and their right are others who, in spite of resistance pounding on their door, wake up everyday for something. Whether it be a vision, a dependent, an injustice, or a wonder, they fight to bring their visions to life and bring others along for the ride.
If you find yourself as one of those who lucked out, who was truly blessed enough to have someone nearby clinging on for both of your dear lives, fight. Fight resistance because the dream is worth it.
Technology is resistance, people are dreams.
analog tech
We’re in the midst of a great upheaval and advance in the use of digital technology.
Language models are embedded ad nauseam into tools that, daily, transform the worlds of work, art, and philosophy. With each newly released API, we argue for more reliance on computers and their accoutrements. With every billion dollar investment, we chart a path further from the world of those antithetical technologies that, for so long, intentionally gave us less than we knew we could want.
A polaroid cannot be uploaded to the cloud for safe-keeping. Nor can a record player skip to a specific song with ease and exactitude. A typewriter has no backspace. And a cinematic projector does not have streaming services built-in for your viewing pleasure…
These (alongside journals, analog watches, and radios) are the last bastion of an age dying a prolonged death. Their charm now only appeals to hipster Zoomers and die-hard Boomer’s as the lure of digital superpowers entice the majority. These tools are called antiquated and inefficient.
Interestingly, the argument against every one of those is also the reason for it. (Just as Michael Scott said his weaknesses are that, “I work too hard, I care too much, and sometimes I can be too invested in my job”).
A polaroid is made sacred by its singular, tactile nature. A vinyl listener enjoys the effort and experience of the whole album. A typewriter discourages confusion between the edit and the creation. The projector forces movie-goers to place greater value on the film as a piece of art and not a commodity…
These designs are enriching. They bring us back to ourselves and abuse us of the notion that we can be gods.
But we may be at risk of losing these gems entirely. As the printed word has decreased in cultural and economic value in our time, these analog technologies are seen as less “productive” or “practical” and simply as luxury items. We have inherited the insatiable craving to upgrade all our tools and “pour water in already-thin soup.” More and more innovation on the tech-scape hemorrhages our focus from work on the ever-growing problem-scape. Digital tech rushes along the path of increased integration and activation with no heed to externalities and no concerns about the purpose of infinite growth.
In its wake stands the world of analog, often only sought after for its nostalgia or aesthetic, never its utility. In today's world of instantly immersive experiences and personally automated interactions, analog tech is a fly in the ointment, a crack in the canvas, as Doyle might say. Record players and typewriters are quirky oddities at best, clunky clutter at worst. With unlimited access to crystal clear audio, the practice of setting a record and dropping a needle seems ineffectual and cumbersome. A lack of spellcheck and a 'backspace' key is impractical, so a notebook pales in comparison to its feature-rich descendant in numerous software forms.
Aesthetic, nostalgia, and awareness are ephemeral qualities that matter in the face of all-consuming digital machines. Convenience has proven to be fatal, multi-tasking a lie, and productivity a fleeting end in itself. The tactile, "realer than real, truer than true", beautifully imperfect nature of these now antiquated tools is on offer to us. The cost is a paradigm shift.
Analog tech can be defined, though it has never been of enough worth to do so, as a tool that differs from digital technology because of two vital factors: friction and restriction.
Friction is a trait we have been conditioned to believe is bad. In actuality, it is neutral.
In popular habit-forming literature, some of the best advice has to do with decreasing friction to lower a task's startup cost. Place your running shoes by the bed, lay a book atop your nightstand. The design of your environment in these examples diminishes friction to produce smooth and reliable on-ramps for new habits.
The same advice cautions its readers to increase friction around habits they want to rewrite. Avoid keeping sugar-filled foods in the pantry, leave your phone outside your bedroom at night. These are road-blocks to bingeing foods and entertainment that typically do not net positive in our lives. Friction is a tool to be applied or removed as needed.
A smartphone, like all digital technologies, is coded on the promise of efficient and effective operation. We know a Google search will bring an answer to our screens within milliseconds. We send text messages with the expectation and desire that our need to connect with another soul will be met rapidly.
What we don't often do on digital technology is deeply mull through and analyze information for nuance and wisdom. The invention of the search bar and Search Engine Optimization created a new language to permeate our online interactions. We all have developed a natural understanding of how to manipulate a browser window for the information we need. Very quickly, I can find 9 summations of Tolstoy's War and Peace that detail the author's thoughts on classicism and wealth without ever having to encounter the man himself. Nicholas Carr writes about the shape our minds have taken and the loss we feel only three decades into our hubris. "O'Shea, a philosophy major, doesn't see any reason to plow through chapters of text when it takes but a minute or two to cherry-pick the pertinent passages using Google Book Search." Reduced friction for supra-human ability (but we'll return to this idea in a moment).
The world constructed around us is filled with conveniences to numb us in the dull moments. Streaming Netflix and Podcasts increase our streaming hours and replace analog tech like the projector and books. Spotify and Apple Music have increased our listening hours, but decreased the number of us proficient in playing the instruments receding further into the background.
With the ability to choose from age-old or day-old art, entertainment, and information, we are quick to believe stories of our supremacy in the natural order. Enter, restriction.
A typewriter only types. A record player won’t play CD’s or stream Apple Music. A journal will stay empty until you put in the work to manually write in your thoughts.