On the way to work this morning I was thinking (again) about my use of technology. Appropriate use of tech. That kind of thing.
The fact that I was thinking about it (again) is indicative of a problem.
For most of my life, up until probably 10 or 15 years ago, when you bought a product or service you just looked at it and decided if you needed or wanted it. Mac or PC? Which one do you like. Churches Fried Chicken or Kentucky Fried? What mood are you in and what chicken seems like the right one to eat?
We didn’t have the internet to let us know if the CEO of Churches was a scumbag. We didn’t know if the head of the computer company had frequented Epstein’s Island. We didn’t even know that island existed, much less what depravities and crimes the world’s elite were committing there. Walmart, of course, had completed much of its project of destroying Small Town America, but Amazon had not yet crawled from the primordial ooze of tech-bro-genesis to kill off brick-and-mortar stores.
I find that now I spend a lot of time thinking about my use of technology and my choices about commerce in general, evaluating them against an ever-shifting rubric of acceptability. What does it say about me, in my own mind, if I buy a new MacBook vs. a PC? What if I use Bluesky vs Twitter?(that one’s actually easy). Am I a bad person if I each Chik-fil-A every so often, given their politics?
And here’s my problem. I don’t want to be a person who just doesn’t care. At the same time I realize that maybe my poor human organic brain and the psyche it generates are not equipped to be on constant alert for this stuff. In short — it is exhausting.
After deleting all social media from my phone over a month ago, I find that I’m not really missing it at all. I’m especially not missing the constant invitation to drama and outrage. I don’t miss Instagram at all. I don’t miss Mastodon at all. I look at the Bluesky account for my gaming podcast once a day, and have no compulsion to check it more often. I’m barely using Facebook at all. This leads me to believe that a massive part of the cognitive overload problem is the damned cellphones. This is not a surprise.
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