Digital Echoes and Unquiet Minds
chrbutler.com
chrbutler.com
That's is pretty much what happens with anything tech nowadays. Because we see technology as a pure feat of rationality where in fact what we consume are nothing more than cultural artifacts, which will invariably reflect the fundamental problems of the society in which these artifacts are forged. In our case, in the Burnout Society, it's potentializing hyperattention.
For anyone else who wants to read a bit about the man, I found this very provocative:
https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-10-08/byung-chul-han...
I don't mean to dump on him, but he's mentioned so often now when subjects like this are brought up.
The truth, once discovered, ceases to be new. Does that mean the truth is not worth anything after an initial moment of discovery? Or (this is rhetorical, obviously), is it possible that the things that our mind tells us are worth pursuing/engaging and those things that are ACTUALLY worth pursuing/engaging are not always (or even OFTEN) commensurate?
But most of the time, we don’t actually fully understand things, and intimately reflecting on something will often yield new facets, insights you didn’t have before, and deepen your understanding.
I'd say truth is always being either discovered and recovered, and there's usually not too much difference. There's rarely anything new under the sun.
I'm with you on this.
He had one hit book fifteen years ago and now exists primarily as a meme. One doesn’t really see people deeply engaging with his arguments; they tend to agree that whatever the object of the new book is “a problem” and fill in the details with their own ideology.
Or maybe I’m wrong! I’d be interested in a link to someone actually taking him seriously, whether within or without philosophy.
On which platform is Han considered to be Chomsky 2.0? Any links to this, or to other "hip" critiques of neoliberalism, from him or others? Memes welcome.
Each time I find some small anachronistic way to be offline a little more I can feel myself relax just a bit.
A well lived life is not an exercise in optimization, but our phones lead us to live that way. So, I think I'm done looking for the best way to do things for awhile, and I'm going to focus on finding the most enjoyable way to do them.
However, the thing that finally did the trick for me was something called "brick" (https://getbrick.app/). It's basically an nfc tag, that works with a tiny app that uses Apples screentime API to either allow/deny list specific apps or websites. Once "bricked" you have to physically scan the NFC tag device to unlock those apps/websites. I used it to block the things I found detrimental, but which were too difficult to completely remove from my life. Then I put the device in my car.
Keeping it in the car makes scanning it a bit of a chore. Which means I have time to stop and think about it on the way to the car. This forces me to make a conscious choice, rather than automatically reaching for the phone every time there's a dull moment.
I hear there's another similar device called Unpluq that has more features, and works on Android as well, but I think it comes with a subscription fee. Brick is more just a "thing you buy once".
So even if I got 3 text messages, 2 missed calls, and other random notifications, the bar would show only one notification, and I would not get a sound/light. You'd have to click on it to see the actual notifications you missed.
You could, of course, have whitelists to let certain notifications through.
Best. App. Ever. It's great to be able to work or do whatever for hours, knowing that your phone can't interrupt you (unless someone calls, which they rarely do).
Sadly stopped working after some Android update. I'm sure there are similar apps, though.
And if the app is good, it will categorize it's notification types in a user-centric way and allow you to enable only specific categories.
The Whatsapp comparison doesn't make sense. Blackberry was a profitable B2B communications company with thousands of employees and deep hardware and networks expertise. Whatsapp was like 10 guys who never had a revenue strategy, who got acquihired by Facebook and were never heard from again.
I think the minis have a 5.4" screen, meanwhile the SE has a 4.7" screen. I own and prefer an SE.
>I do miss smaller phones, and especially a physical keyboard.
There's these "Clicks" but it's a rubber slip case that has an extended keyboard at the bottom. They're pretty hideous.
I also wanted a physical keyboard, so I waited and found on EBay a Moguls Mobile iPhone 6 Keyboard case, which actually fit the SE after I dremeled-out the camera hole a little! My rose tinted glasses were a bit strong though, because swype is faster than thumb physical qwerty.
I fondly miss when HTC was making innovative devices, when everything was up in the air. I had the G1, a mytouch4g slide, A Samsung Galaxy S relay. All QWERTY slider phones and all amazing experiences.
The 16e is the smallest phone in the current lineup, which is bigger than both.
I really like the 13 mini, I had been on Android since since maybe iphone 4. Not sure what I'll do when my current phone dies, I don't like having a big phone in my pocket.
I don't think it is the features, it is that too much information comes into the phone and then distracts us, because the senders of the information really want to you to listen to them.
If a "feature" is useful it is good to have it available when you NEED it.
Consider the feature "flashlight" on my phone. It's great to have it when you need it.
Or Clock. And Alarm. And Timer. I use them all the time.
There is a tug of war whereby I want most things to be silenced at night DnD. Even phone calls could be scammers and spammers
But I want the alert and only that alert to wake me.
A dumber phone in a simpler time would make this easy. Just leave it on full volume and call my number!
by the term "atomization"
I don't really feel any burden of this myself, I don't feel weighed down by the data generated by my actions. If someone else wants to clutter up their database with some useless info, that's on them. I mainly feel the "direct" burden of distraction.
It's the fact that online my data isn't ephemeral and someone COULD watch in the future, if they care - or deploy someTHING to do their watching for them - and I'm unsure of what will be cared about by "the powers that be" in the future. I'm sure someone could dig up my embarrassing ideas about music and religion from 30 years ago on usenet. But people probably don't care enough, and that data may or may not still be available. And there wasn't a ton of political discussion - and certainly nothing about (now) current politicians.
But right now, if I say "A sucks", it's probably saved online forever, and depending on where I say it, it's easily available to LLM-derived bots. Including to those currently tearing down civilization who might have taken a bribe from "A" without my knowledge to punish anyone who dislikes them - or who take a bribe from "A" in the future.
And "LLM agents" will be deployed to scour the 'net for such sentiments, find those who they can easily connect to a real identity, and possibly punish them retroactively.
At this point, I'm keeping my head "down" 100x more than I did just 6 months ago. Heck, I worry if even this post is too much and I'll regret it later.
I used to go online as a kid to "escape a not-so-great reality" (geek/nerd, not a great athlete, not popular, etc). These days, I long to "disconnect" to escape. But I'm a software guy, and if I get off the "keep up with the latest tech" treadmill too long, I risk losing my livelihood..
I don't mean that in any abstract or airy-fair way either, just matter-of-factly. It's a major cultural change. Kids often have no lived experience of privacy - privacy sometimes simply means social non-existence for them, and is thus deemed a non-option.
It's playing out in many areas now, as we've lots of people who lived before the internet, and at the same time, loads of human beings who only know a world of constant surveillance, a world of views = value, a world of constantly caressing your phone, pawing at it at every available opportunity. A world of quiet buses, people getting dressed up for their phone and pretending to go on a night out but never leaving their bedroom, other people at home in their bedroom on their phones liking that "story", etc etc.
It doesn't have to be a high stakes situation, sometimes small annoyances can add up
This one minute Youtube short, gives an example of a guy dancing, without regard to being watched. And how a large internet crowd reacted to him being shamed by others at the dance.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/n2rtYzzSgL0
I think we tend to focus on the negative effects of constant surveillance, without giving a nod to the positive once in a while.
Compromised smart devices has been leveraged to hurt people all around the world. Do you think you are immune?
A very low-key life would really help, but the next bored hacker is waiting for the right metadata to be combined and they will leverage it against you.
There are a very few people trying to engage with and process the philosophy in their own terms, but most people are discussing how to weigh and measure the author and how they would do things differently for their own self interest.
Our voices online are disconnected echos of our own basest selves. In real life, over a glass of wine I think most of the conversation here would be, naturally, more empathic and questioning and interactive.
Our digital shadows are very poor representations of our better selves, but they are and will continue to be used to measure us with each echo and each measurement straying farther from who we are, and who we were.
It's that there's a notion of a device that has so many features that it becomes "too useful." There is only so much time you can devote to so many features. Yet it's clear, for example observing the uptick in sci-fi computer interfaces in movies and such at the time, that crossing a threshold of "enough features" at once was useful at a certain point - having a pocket-sized Internet-capable device with a small-format camera that didn't suck for one thing.
There was also the essay posted recently that argued for a macOS release focused on bugfixes and stability over the disruption of new features with accompanying issues.
I've been wondering for a long time now, at what point will so much innovation have already happened since the 90s-00s that there won't be enough actually useful features to tack on to the next release of X thing except ones that solve problems we didn't have? Has that point already passed? I remember some iDevice releases weren't as notable upgrades as their predecessors for example.
In my opinion, if the AI revolution hadn't happened exactly when it did a couple years ago, this problem of diminishing tech returns would have been much more obvious than it is already. In fact, I think the current LLM rampage of sorts acted as a flood to fill the drought of incremental innovation that would have otherwise occurred.
We’ve been running on the remnants of research from the 50s - 70s for awhile now. Businesses have slow rolled the tech as long as they could, but the truth is, we’re at the end of the research that’s been accomplished. Given that and the exodus of researchers to go do things like optimize ads, I think the tech landscape will be fairly flat for the foreseeable future. Humans sailed for thousands of years before the steamship was realized. Our level of advancement over the past 100 years has been impressive, and there’s a lot we can do with it, if we don’t wipe ourselves out, but I expect this to be humanity’s current limit for the foreseeable future. I believe the next big breakthrough that is needed to realize a technical breakthrough is a societal one. We need to value education, research, and stop fighting with one another over every single thing that exists. Whatever form of society that looks like, will be when humanity finally breaks free of its limits.
What mechanism is capable of driving such a societal paradigm shift? It seems so abundantly obvious to so many rational, intelligent, informed people that one is desperately needed, yet it's seemingly impossible to imagine how we could possibly achieve it before the current global system of systems undergoes a full or partial collapse? The acceleration toward cascading failure leaves little time even to figure out how to slow everything down, constrain the powers that be, and begin to repair, let alone time enough to actually make it happen. From what I've observed, the Cassandras warning of the clear dangers of our trajectory have mostly resigned themselves to hoping they survive whatever cataclysm first befalls us and rebuild afterward. This seems ill-advised when the accelerationist elites hope for the same thing and are planning and preparing far more insidiously.
I feel like we're living in an era of mass derealization. As consensus reality crumbles into post-truth, we collectively disregard the sheer unfathomable risk we are taking by, on a planetary and historical level, moving fast and breaking things in prod with no version control. There is no planet B.
We are ready to leave behind the fantasy gods and turn our worship toward the very real molecule that defines us and everything alive around us, and to the unbroken cord of being that links each of us so improbably to the first creature in the primordial ooze.
I don’t know, if we had experienced it, we wouldn’t be in this conundrum…
In the future, it will be the same. Cultures cycle.
Our magic bullet this time around is AI. The possibility for it to create a unifying belief system that's like an infinite venn diagram of all the best parts of past, present, and future religions - and people are free to pick and choose.
Point is people need their spirits back
I think we've passed that point a while ago. 4K is a smidgen beyond what most eyes can resolve, the smartphone has not seen the revolutions the early years did for a long time (since iPhone X I guess?), VR did not bring the Metaverse, NFT's flopped. I suppose the cloud was a shift in how we do things though.
Before I read your last paragraph I thought you were going to comment on how AI was not the revolution that was promised. There's some use cases and it's amazing that the tech works as well as it does, but I just don't see the mass adoption in the numbers or around me at all.
I used to be wide-eyed and excited for tech. I was an early adopter of all manner of gadgets from the Palm Pilot to the iPad, but the phenomenon described in the article as well as enshittification and the constant hype trains have disillusioned me. I buy a phone because it does everything I need to do life admin and it takes nice pictures, but like the article describes I wish it wasn't a data mine and an attention draining rectangle. I feel like there's more people at work trying to drain my brain and my wallet than building cool tech.
Back when not everything was connected to everything else by default all the time, the avenues for stealing my attention just weren't there and selling me a gadget had to be done on its merits. Maybe that's why innovation in the sense of utility is down and out.
See the Light Phone III released this week.
Maps is also non negotiable, having maps in your pocket is one of the true wins of a smartphone imo, giving you freedom to explore.
It's interesting that there is no parallel drawn to the more bland and every effects of our actions, the non digital echoes, where buying corn soup at the supermarket generates data on which brand sold what to who (in particular if it was paid by credit card or with a loyalty number attached). Or how public service attendency is usually tracked in very rough numbers, so going or not to your local library has rippling effects. Or how choosing to bike instead of driving at a place will impact one's town urban policies etc.
We' be always been part of an ecosystem, and our mere presence has effects on it. Caring too much about it will becomes an unsurmountable source of stress, and I feel that's where kids getting a natural sense of it earlier on probably avoids these kind of very late waking up to reality.
RayBan Meta glasses is quite close to it, seriously.
Personally I'd want WhatsApp and Google Maps.
And if you want to deal with QR codes that redirect you to a restaurant menu or ticket ordering portal (I was visiting a country once, it had a long queue for visas on arrival, but it also had a QR code where I could get said visa online), it would need to have a web browser, well there you go, a portal to distraction has been opened.
And then there's a need to have the payment app for the WeChat-esque "Scan QR code to pay" payment system that exists where I live...
Everyone talks about this affordance in how it makes things better. People also talk about how digital information is easy to leak. But few seem to talk about it as a direct and irrevocable burden.
Smartphones can do everything. So now you have to put in a lot of effort for it to do less.
For smartphones though it is less inherent. You can make software that limits it so that a million people don’t have to go through the same procedure. We could make a real concerted effort towards that, as a society. But not right now. Because companies won’t make money from less attention or less things bothering people and whatever else. So we can’t do it as a society. Because there is no business model and that is what dictates what the projects that ultimately impacts normal people should be taken on.[2] But there will be projects though. There will be at least a dozen projets on GitHub that only software enthusiasts will use.
We could make a better world if we put our minds to it. A better world for normal people as well.
[1] Eight years from now some bot is going to connect this sentiment I’ve shared here, find similar sentiments from other accounts, cross-reference them with other similarities, and then maybe ultimately find out who I “really am”.
[2] Instead we can bicker about the usual anti-consumer topics. They chose this. They bought the smartphones. Huh, if people really cared they would have bought a dumbphone. What, they need a smartphone for work? To use their bank? Then they would have bought a dumbphone as well for their analog (relatively speaking) weekends.
I wish disabling automatic focus changes was a consistently available feature. I'd want that emergent windows, pop-ups, dialogs, or newly opened applications that had been loading in the background, are NEVER able to steal the windows focus.
It's been an instinctive rejection since a child; opening an app that takes some time to load, and during those seconds, keep writing some text in a notepad, only to end up with half phrase mistakenly written onto the program that finally loaded and stole the windows focus. I've always despised that behavior, really. Yeah, I'm fast in my interactions with my machines.
Er... the second-to-last one?