8.6.24 - The case for being an insane luddite
I've been on a luddite kick recently and sometimes it gives me pause.
I print a lot of my document to mark them up, even though I have an iPad pro with apple pencil.
I smoke cigarettes when I want a nicotine buzz and refuse to buy vapes (I bum them off friends when we're out and about).
I mainly used wired headphones with an old iPod.
I increasingly have no regular social media presence.
I rely on print sources more than online articles for information.
I handwrite most things.
I shoot film rather than digital.
I have old hardware (mostly) for my desktop setup.
As far as this tiny enterprise right here, I try to minimize my reliance on intermediary platforms. I use a google sheet for the mailing list because its more secure and easy than collecting subscriber emails elswhere, and I use cloudfare for hosting, but that's about it. No Wordpress, no Square, nothing, this is straight HTML (to be fair some of it was quickly written with ChatGPT, I'm a lawyer not a computer engineer).
Eventually I would like to self-host and set up the architecture to manage mailing lists on my own (not hard but too lazy right now).
This all begs the question, "why? why on earth are you doing all of this?"
Well I answered some of those questions in a previous post: 7.16.24 - Why build a website like this
But there's also more to it. I swear to god I'm not a psycho in real life, I have spotify and instagram and all of that, I use imessage, I wouldn't be caught dead with an android phone.
But there has to be spheres of life where you retain continuity with the past, where you can see how things really work, where how content is made and how our world works isn't entirely abstracted away in the digital ether.
I asked my little cousin how a camera works, she's in High School, and she genuinely could not answer outside of the fact that she knew that somehow, it had something to do with computers and a lens taht gives what its in front of it to the computer.
I feel that as soon as computers gets involved, people start thinking of things as a black box, it may as well be magic. There's something deeply troubling about this, which makes me think of the eloi from the H.G. Wells book the Time Machine——a race of infantile beings surrounded by advanced technology from previous generations, but that they do not understand.
I feel that AI, which is something of a blackbox even to smart people, only accelerates these trends.
If we're going to embrace the future without losing our humanity and our capacities, we need areas of life where we arbitrarily limit ourselves and connect with our past.
Building a website with just HTML pages on my computer and a single CSS file helps me understand how the world works. I feel like a participant. Shooting film helps me appreciate just how magical capturing an image is, and makes me a better digital photographer.
Downloading music, curating it, sorting it, putting it on my iPod makes it feel tangible and valuable. Just like getting dvds from the goodwill and popping them into the player.
Having printed notes on my desk makes the information feel like an object that I have dominion over, that I can lose and edit, not something "out there."
I suspect so many problems with ADHD, anxiety, recall, focus, etc. among Gen Z has something to do with their worlds being displaced into the digital ether. When I see how my classmates keep their class notes on google docs I see just a complete cessation of control. You don't even own your own thoughts. You are hosting it on a server somewhere for someone else to protect and manage.
Usually they'll say something like, they don't want to lose it, what if my laptop breaks, etc. Well first of all, you can back-up your local files, second of all, we've operated for centuries where information was somewhat vulnerable. That's life. Is the tradeoff in agency really worth just a tiny bit of risk mitigation? What about the tradeoff in retention? I simply cannot believe that storing something online viewable only in browser maps into your memory the same way having a physical notebook does. Can't be the case.
Our brains know what ownership is. We feel it in our bones. We use hotels differently and rental cars differently. It has to be the same with information.
And there's also the fact that productivity hasn't massively increased since the digitization of workflows and the internet, which seems like a puzzle, but not really. We've made things faster but people slower and information recall harder, meaning we need more agents to coordinate and communicate the movement of information.
What we could achieve with a filing cabinet and a secretary I'm sure requires more specialized workflows with more people today. Because of the internet. The internet and digitization does strange things to our brains and our workflows.
Anyways, there's no going back to the past in the market-world. As far as how you do things at your job, how kids are forced to do things at a public school——these will be determined by impersonal forces of allocative efficiency. They'll stop teaching the kids cursive. You'll have to do your timesheets on some SAAS and your expense reports on another and use a VPN to log onto your work computer remotely and all sorts of shit. Your life and how you work will be abstracted away, specialized into teeny tiny pieces spread across the globe, your output will dissolve into the digital either and the global marketplace. Complete alienation.
But in your personal life, you can smoke a ciggie, you can shoot film like a loser hipster, and waste time building a stupid HTML site, and you can slow everything down, and you can be an agent in the world. You can own some tiny, insignificant process, like making a photo album for your family, end-to-end. But you have to emrbace a little bit of autarky, and be a bit of a luddite to do it.
Cheers,
knxnts