Should We Decouple Technology from Everyday Life?

I recently won a water bottle in a raffle.<p>It looked nice, stainless steel, big (probably 2 liters). When I unwrapped it, I saw a QR code that said &quot;Instructions.&quot; Weird, why would I need instructions for a water bottle? Then I saw a large rubber plug in the bottom.<p>I realized with horror, it&#x27;s a bluetooth enabled heating&#x2F;cooling element controlled by an app I&#x27;m supposed to download. The heating element is huge, takes up half the volume of the bottle. So now this water bottle:<p>1. Needs power. 2. Needs an app. 3. Has less water capacity.<p>All so it can just do the same thing as a normal insulated bottle and some ice cubes.

I don&#x27;t have a problem with technology. I have a problem with technology trends that are irrational.<p>For example the smart phone. A physical button or even alexa is easier to turn off the lights. A smart phone menu is just stupid.<p>I want to decouple stupidity away from technology. That&#x27;s not possible though. Most places where I worked... just a exploring the code for a couple minutes I encounter something stupid. So it&#x27;s an impossible endeavor. Stupidity is intrinsic to humanity and since humanity builds technology, stupidity is therefore intrinsic to technology.

The problem I see is that technology is not made for human life, it is made for money. Money was supposed to be the proxy, not the whole enchilada. There&#x27;s so much low hanging fruit that will never get fixed because it has low monetary value but would help daily life. It&#x27;s a lot of the little things that add up and compound. But you can&#x27;t nickel and dime your way up because it&#x27;s small things in big controlled platforms.<p>I&#x27;ll give an example. At my university each term we do a &quot;survey&quot; to communicate what we want to teach. It has such brilliant questions as &quot;for what academic year&quot; that has a single option and &quot;what you previously taught&quot;. There is no caching, so you answer these questions over and over.<p>Or how about every time I import a calendar I get a new copy of a holiday calendar and this doesn&#x27;t automatically merge.<p>There&#x27;s a million things like these that are small but take tons time and add frustration. They are small but they add up and combine. A million things that take 0.1s but you do every day will still take up your entire day. It just seems we get more and more of this while we&#x27;re trying to make the next big thing but can never do when we think one quarter at a time

Maybe this is a privileged outlook, but I&#x27;ve decided that each piece of technology needs to earn its place in my life, and I&#x27;m going to use it deliberately for a specific purpose, if I deem it to be worthy. The smartphone has not earned it yet.<p>Im not going to live in an apartment that requires a smartphone to get into the door. That may involve me making sacrifices, I don&#x27;t care. You have to draw a line somewhere. If parking somewhere requires an app, or eating at a restaurant requires a QR code, <i>I&#x27;m just going to go somewhere else</i>. I&#x27;m not going to chain myself to a smartphone just because society is addicted. Just like I didn&#x27;t take up smoking back when everyone around me smoked. And when I do need to use my phone, I pick it up, use it for a purpose, and then put it down. No idle, passive scrolling allowed. No notifications. DND mode 24&#x2F;7. It is not allowed to interrupt me with a call or a message. When I stop work, the phone goes in a drawer until tomorrow. When I go on vacation, the phone gets packed deep in the emergency baggie, or just not brought at all. This autonomy requires a little sacrifice, and stings a little if you&#x27;re not used to it. But, ultimately I think it&#x27;s better for my health, both physical and mental.

It looks like a better title for this article would be &quot;Should We Decouple Phones from Everyday Life?&quot;<p>And my answer to that is: absolutely.

&gt; ...visit a friend in Washington DC ... an apartment complex could never be occupied by an Orthodox Jew like me (since I cannot use my phone on Shabbat and the holidays), because at every turn the most essential tasks are accomplished with a smartphone.<p>IANAL, but that sounds like some sort of lawsuit and&#x2F;or PR disaster just waiting to happen.

I think the interface is key. Typing is a different interface than writing. I’ve heard writing things down improves your recall much better than writing, and I’ve found this to be true. But digital text is just so inherently useful. What I want is notebook that looks and acts exactly like a notebook but I can later edit it on a computer, search it, sync it, etc.<p>Yes, I know remarkable and other products exist, but they really don’t act exactly like a notebook. You can’t flip through the pages or dog-ear them. You can’t just hand a reMarkable off to someone to borrow or keep, it’s a $700 investment that’s tied to your online accounts. It has a battery life, and you need to have WiFi around to sync.<p>In a truly perfect world I would just be able to lay my $5 paper notebook infused with nanobots or other such future magic onto a smart surface on my desk and my computer would automatically read the contents.<p>Obviously we are a long way off, if it’s even possible to make something like that practically, but that’s the kind of interfaces I think we should work towards - computing so efficient and subtle you don’t realize it’s digital.<p>I kind of hated the movie <i>Her</i> but I thought the scene where the main character is designing something by just sitting down at his desk and talking to the computer conversationally was really cool. We can probably get close-ish in the next 10 years with all this fancy AI.

Being old enough to straddle the manual and the automated world (48 this year), but absolutely loving technology (so I feel I haven&#x27;t entered my &quot;get off my lawn&quot; era yet), I find myself looking for ways to augment, not replace. Of course, that&#x27;s as much working in technology for 20+ years (and knowing how it&#x27;s not magic and how things can fail) as much as it&#x27;s good sense lol.

The thing is we can&#x27;t wholly give up our devices and apps, because so many peoples&#x27; professional and social lives depend on them. So we have to manage it. It&#x27;s more like a food addiction than alcohol, since alcohol, you can live without.<p>I wrote about this here.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vonnik.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;how-to-take-your-brain-back" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vonnik.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;how-to-take-your-brain-back</a>

We&#x27;ve had technology for 150 years now and much has been positive. Consumers could be encouraged to favor quality , responsiveness &amp; longevity .<p>Cars &amp; appliances have regressed into unreliable, overstimulated and unpresonsive disasters. Much of this is how they are marketed and sold. Cars seem flashy until you own it for a few months .<p>It&#x27;s up to consumers to make a choice.

I just bought a car battery charger, a soldering station (not the crazy thing with the RTOS and the apps, standalone and basic), a spare charging cable for my FLIP-PHONE, an Arduino, some MOSFETs and a capacitor&#x2F;resistor assortments.<p>It&#x27;s too late for me to decouple technology from everyday life. Best go on without me. I wish you all luck.

I need to use fire (technology) in my life or I&#x27;ll die in the cold.

The cynic in me finds it hypocritical for this article to be published on the internet (major technological feat).

I feel that this is a basically reactionary perspective, despite the author&#x27;s assertion that it is not.<p>Doomscrolling, like drug addiction, is largely the product of the holistic social-biological environment of the actor. People generally do not intentionally throw away stimulating, happy, healthy lives to become destitute drug addicts, and a comparison of opening a parking payment application to being offered alcohol seems hyperbolic.<p>Smartphones are in many ways materially superior to carrying stacks of paper, just as driving a car is usually materially superior to horse-drawn carriage. It is materially inappropriate to allow the Choice of horse-drawn carriage on the interstate highways. These technologies do require increased infrastructure and investment (that interstate), perhaps, but this is the way the human body itself is laid out: a network of interdependent, largely centralized organs. Compare to a simpler life form like a yeast. Less &quot;infrastructure&quot;, but also less going on.<p>I do agree with some of the sentiment of the author. It is not very libertarian of me, but in my opinion, some increased top-down regulation of social networks might be necessary, i.e., KYC. The ability to hide behind aliases to publish whatever you want without any &quot;skin in the game&quot; seems to have decreased the level of coherence overall and permitted for neurotic anti-reality perspectives to proliferate. If government regulation of behavior and chemicals is appropriate, government regulation of garbage information probably is as well.

I&#x27;m just gonna throw into this thread that when I bought a car, I deliberately demanded a model with a physical, metal key. Software is for things that are supposed to be flexible but don&#x27;t really need to be reliable. For things meant to be reliable but not necessarily flexible or changeable, get hardware.<p>And if someone&#x27;s giving you software where hardware belongs, ask what flexibility they&#x27;re getting out of it.

I&#x27;m intrigued. We should think about this more.