5.27.26 - Law School is Over + Bar Summer Breakup With Big Tech
Law school has ended. I bookended my time with one week at an externship I liked, and then went on a three-day bender in Atlantic City with my girlfriend and college friends (back to real life).
I have a lot of thoughts on law school and what I learned, but reflection takes time, and there is little of that. I have decided that my bar summer is for three things:
(1) Breaking up with Big Tech (2) Health-Maxxing (3) Studying for the Bar.
The first is clearly the topic of this post. My deep discomfort with the centralization of technological capabilities, capital, and modes of thinking and expression are a leitmotif on this blog. It has been one in my life at large. I remember the moment I first saw an iPhone--it was right in front of my fireplace of my childhood home. I remember specifically playing with the pinch and zoom feature of the photos app endlessly. Although I was pretty young (seven or eight years old), I already clocked that this was a fundamental break from anything I had ever seen. My first emotions were wonder.
The next memory is probably a couple of years later. Maybe 2009 or 2010. So around the age of ten. I remember that, in my mostly affluent suburb, almost every adult had an iPhone within a year of my parents getting one, and that they usually updated with every other generation or so. Because of that, I can roughly time things. When the iPhone 3G--with that gorgeous, rounded glossy back was out--I recall that owning a smart device was still almost entirely restricted to adults. I had a large family friend group at the time, as well as neighborhood and school friends, and I don't remember any kid having something like that. Kids a bit older than me had those text keypad phones (which I would get by the time I hit sixth grade, in 2011). I remember handheld devices being almost entirely absent from interactions.
Then, at one family-friend dinner party around the time the iPhone 4 came out, I remember looking around and seeing all the kids sitting around the edges of the dining room floor, playing on their iPod touches. I remember feeling an instant wave of dread and disgust, and explicitly calling people out on it. The age-range was between like 7 to 14, and almost everyone was playing Papi Jump or some other dumb early iPod touch game huddled next to one another.
Ever since that moment I remember thinking that these things are just bad. I was a hold out on getting an iPhone. I didn't get one until right before freshman year of high school, which I recall was later than my peers. I remember thinking "what can I do on the iPhone that I can't do with my slider phone?." But I think some combination of peer pressure, FOMO, and wanting to use social media like Facebook (which I didn't hesitate to use or find bad at the time at all) convinced me to get it.
But by Junior of High School, I had my first major aversion to how I was using the phone, and I swapped my iPhone for a Samsung Galaxy because of some combination of aversion to Apple's "closed ecosystem" and wanting to reduce usage. I remember that I kept an old, simless iPhone at home as a secondary device that I would use at times for imessage and the like. Ultimately, I think I just found the whole setup stupid as my screentime did not lessen, and I reverted to an iPhone before college. However, at some point in college I bought a blackberry style dumb-phone, and I would move my sim to that phone during long-stretches of the summers and again keep the iPhone as secondary device.
This all ended once I entered the workforce after graduation, and the hassle of the setup wasn't worth it. I was back on the iPhone wave. By the time I entered law school, I was pretty much a normie when it came to tech usage again. I had a new instagram account after nuking my old one, a new facebook account to do basic functions like shop facebook marketplace. I had a LinkedIn. I slowly reintegrated out of necessity and laziness.
The next major luddite phase was the summer after 1L, when I launched this blog. Having secured employment for the following summer, I immediately nuked LinkedIn, I did a mass instagram purge, and other similar efforts. I bought an iPod nano that summer as well, mainly so I could go to the gym and take walks with music without my phone.
After 2L, I found it necessary to uncouple further, and I bought a new 45 supported flip phone, with the intention of complete unlinking. This proved impractical due to some 2FA requirements and certain school attendance apps. The flip-phone, once again, was a secondary device which I could forward calls to or take on walks or to the gym. For the most part I was still tethered to my smartphone.
This is all to say, I've been in a war against the machine and taking very deliberate steps to break free from smartphone dependence and dependence on Big Tech for a long time now. This is just the latest chapter.
Since I am unemployed until school, not part of a school, and don't currently have an expanding social circle, this is the perfect time to completely break free and deliberately design my relationship with technology.
I enter the latest chapter of this war already having won many battles: - For the most part I don't consumer short-form video, except I sometimes accidentally end up on YouTube shorts - I don't spend very much time on actual "social" media at all. I hardly log on to instagram, I never log on to Facebook or snapchat. - Most of my data is primary local now and iCloud and Google Drive servers are just redundancies or backup
But there are still battles I keep losing: - I spend too much time browsing X dot come, which has become a horrible website - I compulsively check email and messages, and have a undying anxiety of missing important information - When I can't formulate a game plan of what to do, with anything, or hit a roadblock in thinking, I instinctively seek out passive media consumption like scrolling X or browsing YouTube. This has become an embarassingly deep groove in my brain.
The thing about these battles is that I lose because I'm constantly forced to play on enemy terrain. To do any basic function to participate in society I have to open my email app, or the safari app, and be inundated by invitations to distraction. Even going onto my computer, the feeling is off a blank space with "apps" on it, and even if my intention is to read a PDF, the dock is just a few finger moves away, its always RIGHT UNDERNEATH the window I'm on. The tight bundling of entertainment, communication, and work functions is a disaster for my thinking.
All at once I can be anticipating messages from my friend groupchats, checking twitter, writing an email, reading a journal article--its horrible.
This motivated me to create an electron based "UI" for my computer which I will share in full in a future post. I've spent a lot of time on it, and I've found it incredibly effective at changing the way I work and think.
When I open my computer a shell-command automatically starts and electron opens and I see the following links in text:
"the hard drive" "world wide web" "email" "chat" "write" "applications" "terminal"
Each of these describe what the pages are, and each page is in a unified, stripped down, two tone theme with no images or graphis except for some cute ascii animations. The World Wide Web page is RSS feeds and a wikipedia browser, and has a smaller link to a very limited browsing capability. The browsing app has a few white-listed sites I can go to directly, like the New York times. But if I want to enter my own search term or URL, an AI-policed "surfing session" begins. It asks for my objective (e.g., study for civil procedure), and then each time I visit a new url, it compares it against the objective, and if it isn't aligned, it blocks the site (social media is presumptively blocked, but I can ovverride this with a convincing explanation to my surfing-guide, and then a two minute wait period). This uses Claude API credits, so I'm genuinly tolled for my aimless surfing sessions. It forces intentionality.
"Write" is just a fileviewer and a way to edit markdown files. "Chat" is a wrapper for signal messages which is super stripped down. And so on and so on. There are a couple other design philosophies, like I have no multitasking abilities (except spotify or some RSS feed podcast can play in the background) and there are no windows. And the toolbar has a dropdown notepad accessible at all times. And my underlying Mac OS is hidden as much as possible--I can't reach the dock or anything without fully quitting the electron app.
Anyways, the whole point of this whole UI is to be extremely intentional with how information reaches me, and how I can reach information. We spend so much time on computers in the modern world, and its a bit insane we have to look at a UI that someone else designed with not our best interests in mind, but to make money. Think about all the hours you spend looking at an App grid, looking at a scrollable feed, looking at a desktop environment that feels a bit too open-world. How would you design a UI designed to cultivate focus? To reduce your dependence on others? That's what I'm trying to do.
Right now, a new dependence might be building on generative AI tools however. I don't have an easy answer to this, because I wouldn't be able to build this without Claude. I've just built it with a lot of documentation, and so that any function that uses AI (like my AI-policed browsing) is non-essential or can easily be traded for a competing or local model. But I suspect the level of access ordinary consumers have to these capabilities is limited in time. It's too good to be true. In the near future, all the compute is going to be tied up, or the product is going to be severely degraded by being bundled with other shit that's meant to hurt me. But right now, Claude Code is something like a miracle product. And I'm going to use it as much as possible to build things that will help me remain sovereign long after I lose access to it. That's the plan anyways.
Aside from the UI I'm building, I'm moving to my email to Fastmail hosting of my own domain, I've quite Apple Notes (now its just text files that I can read through my electron UI or Obsidian), and I'm quitting the Microsoft suite of products and replacing them with open source alternatives.
I have about two years where I can be super autistic on how I use technology. I have my bar summer, then a clerkship in bumfuck nowhere for a year. My goal is that, whenever I get a real job--whether its with government or a law firm afterwards--I will have become like one of those old people who don't have basic technological capabilities and everyone else kind of has to work around them. Like when you walk into a chinese restaurant and they only take cash and don't have a card reader. Or those really high-up people who don't have emails and their assistant just manages shit for them. Or Christopher Nolan.
If someone asks me to use my phone for a QR code, download an authenticator app, or have a smartphone for work, I want to be able to just say "sorry I can't."
Cheers,
knxnts