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No focus, no fights, and a bad back – 16 ways technology has ruined my life (theguardian.com)
74 points by Brajeshwar 8 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 72 comments



"And I’m here to tell you that when you ­forsake modern technology the world ­generally refuses to take part in the experiment. You find this out the first time someone behind a ticket ­window looks you in the eye and tells you to just ­download the app."

This happened to me twice just last week: first at a museum when I asked for a map and was told they simply didn't have them anymore and I'd have to use my phone, then at a restaurant where it was the same story. Browsing a menu on a phone is a really poor experience, it's just not enough space to see much at once and that's even without accounting for whatever awful navigation they built. This isn't a big problem, but it is worse than how things used to be and nobody likes when technology makes things worse.

It reminds me of how rail stations have moved to digital signs. In the past there were kiosks displaying a paper map of the rail lines, and there were other kiosks displaying ads and other things. Well now there are new digital signs that cycle between the rail map and a bunch of ads. It's a worse experience, it makes pulling up the app seem pleasant by comparison.


Earlier, when restaurants wanted to increase prices, they had to reprint all their menus. So there was at least a small barrier to jacking up prices.

Now, with online menus, they can basically slowly keep increasing prices any time without any cost to them. No wonder they love it!

The worst thing is most of them don't even have actual responsive websites. It's just a literal PDF download that you now have to keep panning left right on a tiny screen.


> The worst thing is most of them don't even have actual responsive websites. It's just a literal PDF download that you now have to keep panning left right on a tiny screen.

I could almost get into it if it were a large screen tablet mounted at the table, with a great UI, where you just tap, tap, tap out your order, hit submit, and poof your drinks and food arrive. Pop in your credit card to pay, and off you go! At least make good use of the digital user interface. Reduce inefficiencies like the wait staff having to make dozens of trips to collect your drink order, come back, take your meal order, come back, take your credit card, return your credit card.

But, no, they digitized the only part of the restaurant that already was working pretty efficiently in physical form.


That’s exactly the experience with McDonalds here in Ukraine. Mind blowing how modern it is.


I've seen videos of exactly this at restaurants in Japan. In some of them your food even arrives via tableside conveyor belts.


Some all-you-can-eat sushi spots in Toronto have these too!


I always wonder about entering credit card details on those random self-order ipads...


I would probably never visit the restaurant with app only menu. It's weird for me that someone had such an idea and still would call the place a restaurant. I know I am overblowing it but it's just mind-boggling to me.


You're not the only one; see:

>The QR-Code Menu Is Being Shown the Door

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/dining/restaurant-qr-code...

https://archive.ph/exWjB


I sympathize with your concerns, but I also understand why museums are eliminating paper maps. Museums are trying to be more "green" and those maps always resulted in a lot of solid waste and litter.


And it is a cost savings. You don’t see as many green initiatives that impact the bottom line.


Promoting reusability could be possible. Give people maps and offer a spot at the exit for them to be dropped back. Use that recycled paper type of paper so that it anyway looks trashed up at first use itself.


Modern museums also change exhibits from week to week, sometimes from day to day. Maintaining accurate hardcopy maps is unnecessary work. Updating an online map is the efficient way to go.


Now museums are green but I'll have to pay $500 for a new phone every two or three years plus cellular data (Seems to average $70/mo for unlimited data in US?) and these costs pay for cellular stations and electricity and electronics that become garbage after just a few years. Is that really greener?


sunk cost for museum


They can still put a large map on a wall. Minimal waste and very useable


I actually like the digital menus, and ordering through a website. IDK why people get so worked up over it.


Ah yes the digital-only menu, one of more idiotic cargo-culting moves (although not sure who they are actually following here, maybe just general zeitgeist). I try to politely suggest that this is their weak spot when paying and tip accordingly.


I would just walk out and find a different restaurant. Restaurants are a dime a dozen, and we rarely go out specifically to a particular one. Fortunately I have run into just one restaurant in my life that did not have paper menus and there was a different one that looked great across the street. Problem solved.


The waitstaff who receive tips aren't the ones who make menu format decisions.


Pushing back against digital-only menus is a good thing, IMO. But the person you're tipping likely has zero control over this.


Unfortunately the incentive structures of tipping are all over the place anyway.

Of all the people in the restaurant that contribute to my experience eating out, the waiter probably offers the least differentiation (in my humble opinion). It's just a transport layer for the order. The food is made by line staff, the menu is designed by someone else. The overall music, lighting, ambience, decor is someone else. But culturally, the waiter is the one we are expected to tip.


Embedded in that culture is the fact that the wait staff is often (legally) paid far less than the other people involved, and that their survival depends on those tips.

The pricing of the meal is what pays for the music, lighting, ambience and decor.

I'm not saying any of this makes sense, or that I think it's a good system, but I know too many people who rationalize poor tipping because they disagree with a system that the wait staff has no power to control.

I want the system to change, but I also don't feel that it's right to protest against it at the expense of the people least able to do anything about it.


Eh I do have to say this is grandpa yelling at the clouds territory. Printed menus tend to be fair expense, especially where you have 3+ daily menus and weekend menus. Couple that with items that go out of stock a digital menu that stays up to date is great.

Should the place have a few menus printed out on paper, probably. But the number of people that demand paper is rather low.


Now in fairness, some of these are fair; having to pass capchas is a pain. But more are self inflicted; nothing makes you hit reply. And some...

> I can remember a time when it was considered ungentlemanly to check the factual accuracy of a statement made by a drinking companion. You were just meant to counter their argument by presenting specious facts of your own.

Really? Your objection to technology is that people suddenly have to contend with accurate information!?


I don't know you're old enough to remember this (or if you swung in those circles) but 30 years ago if you went to the pub you were swimming in a sea of unverifiable half-baked facts. If someone asserted, for example, that kangaroos had fighting fangs and you countered with, "no, that's the llamas" the truth could only be found after a hard crawl across time and space to a physical library. It was a vastly imperfect system, but at the end of the day, lack of that answer was harmless and it meant there was something to fill up the conversation. In fact, I'll tell you this with full confidence and politely not google it: The Guiness Book of World Records was created to fill just that niche, because the people who first noticed this phenomenon were working for a beer company.


'30 years ago if you went to the pub you were swimming in a sea of unverifiable half-baked facts..'

30 years ago this was limited to pubs though.

And, even today, the most renowned restaurant guide is a tyre manufacturer.


> 30 years ago if you went to the pub you were swimming in a sea of unverifiable half-baked facts

Now, the Internet is a vast sea of half-baked facts with millions of echo chambers that discourage verification.


Do note that the entire article is written in a humorous tone. I don't think the author is trying to take this deadly seriously.


Concur, I think the subtext is that polite (gentlemanly) company focuses on the conversation and not technology.


I've felt this way for a long time, but for a slightly different reason.

I like talking to my friends, I like intimate conversations. When a question comes up I don't really want the answer. Sure truth and facts are nice, but what I want is to hear what someone else thinks about the topic. Taking out a phone and searching for the answer doesn't just resolve the dispute, it breaks the person's train of thought and stops their mind from wandering to new places.


Remembering, explaining, and occasionally bluffing, is a lost art. It used to get me pretty far, being able to recall things and infer things and connect things, using only what was in my head when the moment presented itself.

Nowadays, outside of a Jeopardy! stage, when does anyone even need a memory?


To remember what they don't know and how to Google it


The Guinness book of records was specifically designed to settle pub debates. I'm sure people at the time has similar reactions.


I think it’s more that it used to be conversations were about emotional release, social dynamics, and general bullshitting, rather than rigorous fact checking and court room like adherence to rules of evidence.

Which hey, I get. Been there, done that.

Personally, the reason I did it (and ended up stopping) was due to persistent narcissistic abuse, and attempting to stop/control it without being able to leave - and later (after a lot of therapy) realizing i could just have listened to my gut 90% of the time, and just left/or not listened.

Turns out, PTSD and social conditioning is a bitch though.


Yes. It's unwanted in some situations. A fun debate turned into a tiresome recital of Wikipedia. Thanks internet.


yes! theres no discussions, or trying to figure something together and all little fun that can come out of it


Exactly. The instant someone turns to their phone to check something, it ruins the conversation completely. The whole point is the conversation, the banter, the talking; not on the factual accuracy of some trivial thing.


The problem I find is that the people I "argue" with often have no interest in the facts. Just this morning a friend on FB said the Biden administration has "devoted himself to undoing the everything that the previous administration did"

I replied with the below, and I expect to hear nothing back.

> I'm super curious about that claim: apart from undoing things like detaining families and children, what would you say the current administration has done to "undo" something the previous administration did? I'm especially curious if you think these were "undoing" acts of the previous admin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Rescue_Plan_Act_of_20... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Investment_and_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipartisan_Safer_Communities_A... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act


For context this is a weekend-edition light entertainment article for a "Life Unplugged" section.

This author mostly writes semi-humorous self-deprecating stuff for the "Life & Style" section of the paper, so don't take it too seriously: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/timdowling

Not that we can't have a serious conversation about the topics of course.


I believe this is a personal problem of the author. I see a lack of self-control and self-determination where he is doing more of what his social group and technology want/enable rather than what works for him. For example the 77 tabs: how is that useful? The tech makes it possible but doesn’t endorse or require it and they don’t make money off of it. I find tabs become useless once there are more than eight or so in a window. I prefer to break out work streams into separate named Chrome windows that I can minimize and maximize when I need to. And also I still get into plenty of fights at bars but maybe that’s just me


I see the problem as us with our puny brains and relatively weak incentives against big companies with a small army of PhDs and huge incentives.


I think it's more a case of Jevons Paradox. I work on Chrome, and many of the things we've introduced have been out of a genuine desire to make some task easier or solve some problem people had. But when you make it easier to do that (for whatever "that" you're speaking of), people do so much more of it that they wind up in a worse conundrum. I can cite half a dozen concrete examples of this that we have metrics for, from js speed to renderer memory use to tab count.

It's easy to point fingers -- dumb author, evil greedy company -- but the truth is generally more mundane and more perplexing: bad outcomes often arise from everyone involved trying to do reasonable things.


blaming the author when systems are designed to hit every dopamine and weak spot is not a fair fight.


Its not like it was a great mystery 20 or even 30 years ago that too much sitting on one's ass in front of computer or generally being physically very passive is a disaster for your health, whole routines were suggested not only to avoid carpal tunnel and in some nations whole offices did morning exercises.

Seriously, in 2024 there is no excuse... but folks without any discipline/resolve like to take weak shortcuts in their lives and then complain when unavoidable results eventually come in.


1. Read books, they require you to concentrate. Use computer to take notes and if appropriate, run code samples, look up technical details, check historical facts, etc.

2. Fix posture with one of many back support options and a good chair. Write 'posture' on a sticky and slap it on wall. Get light exercise frequently.

3. uBlockOrigin and NoScript on Firefox allow you to selectively block all kinds of login pages and cookie permissions and so on. Often wrecks page functionality, but then you can click on different scripts in NoScript to see which ones are needed.

4. You want something that causes your Zoom meeting to freeze up while claiming a bad WiFi connection is the issue. Here we are: https://github.com/abagh0703/turn-off-wifi

5. When going to pub, turn off phone. If the FOMO is unbearable, don't go to pub, and maybe get therapeutic help.

6. Avoid IoT smart products, they're mostly a scam with bad security protocols and terrible interfaces.

7. & 8. Mute, block, ignore. Don't follow the shiny red ball.

9. Switch to using an editor like vim with autocomplete turned off to improve your typing.

And so on. I suspect the author was subjected to the Apple-Microsoft brainwashing propaganda program at some point, in which technical tinkering was discouraged and acceptance of the closed corporate ecosystem was encouraged, and this is the result.

It's as if someone asked 'what's eating?' and they were told, 'well, you go to McDonald's and press the button for the thing that looks good, and then you eat it.' Learning how to cook your own meals - i.e. not taking what's on offer from the corporate conglomerate - is a much better and more satisfying option.


It's easy to write off some of these complaints as silly - a fair bit of them are distinct problems of the author's own making, or just gripes that the world has changed, but a few of them do seem to be large issues with far reaching consequences.

The attention span issue and the constant deluge of psychological torment in the form of doom and gloom are two that I recognize every day and have had to make deliberate and sometimes limiting choices in my life to intentionally avoid.


After realizing the iPhone was good for some things (ie, paying bills, reducing paper mail with PaperKarma), but terrible at maintaining focus, I first switched to a Punkt phone. However, finding that was unreliable with AT&T and lacked navigation capabilities, I switched to a Nokia 2780 flip phone. Call quality, texting, camera capabilities, podcasts, and Google Maps are all there. Within two weeks, something strange happened. I found myself able to sit through a magazine in a sitting. I was able to read a chapter of a book. I fell asleep reading books. Truly, these devices have a place, but we know deep down they are a net negative. So now I keep my iPhone on WiFi, but powered down, and use it for some things, but not everything. I download my news and books onto an offline Kindle and read with the device faintly glowing suspended over my head on a phone stand and connected to a page turner. Fall asleep this way and it is not difficult to read multiple books each week.

I got my attention back, and you can too.


This sounds so tempting. I really wish I could have a phone that does a few simple things: Maps, Spotify, WhatsApp, Telegram, GPS tracker for running. That's really all I want on my phone. Does the Nokia allow for all of those? If so, sounds like it might be time to ditch the iPhone. Doubly so if there's a dual sim model, though I can get by with just one and using my iPhone when visiting America.

Edit: Just checked, can't add WhatsApp, etc to it. sigh another potential option gone


You can disable notifications on your phone very easily (per-app granularity on an iphone)


some of these resonated with me so hard. Like the password one and robot one. I rarely read other people's opinions - they usually fall in fixed categories and you can pre-generate them anyway. Its also not useful to walk through reasoning on the internet since the factual accuracy is questionable. As such, I dont have trouble with stupid people on the internet (tbh i find them adorable). I rarely even read comments on HN these days and hopefully nobody reads this one either.


Sorry


> 8. It’s given stupid people unfiltered access to each other’s opinions

This is a big problem. Previously, 'the mob' only came into being when things got really bad. Now it is a constant (virtual) presence.


I think that ship sailed with the invention of radio and TV.

Heck, that ship sailed with the invention of the printing press (tabloids).


Compare the ease of writing a comment on the internet to getting oneself on the radio or tv. The former is vastly easier, as all of us here are demonstrating


Kinda.

In those mediums (even tabloid press), there is a lot of centralization and control, combined with limited reach for any random nutter, combined with profit incentives that push towards relatively median behavior.

For instance, running a publicly accessible Radio and TV station requires compliance with extensive regulations, and to have significant reach requires significant (fixed) equipment and capital. Which makes that person easy to find, and with something significant to lose.

Cable reduces regulation, but the ‘easy to find, and something to lose’ problem is still there to some extent. PPV type rules limited that somewhat, since because the content wasn’t public it reduced a lot of liability (“if you don’t like it, don’t buy it!”) and coupled the liability they did get with actual money to offset it.

So, if someone wants to be doing it for long, they need to be able to make enough money off it (be providing something of value) to pay back equipment, and not be pissing people off enough they are incentivized to hunt them down. While giving out the content to the public for free.

Tabloids did change that dynamic a little, but have a similar issue of how to get paid/money without getting too much blowback. And the reach is limited to a small area, so unless they get distributors or the like, it’s a similar type of issue.

The internet changed this dynamic a lot - someone can run a website/service in any jurisdiction (and banning it is hard), and it can connect people globally (so potentially near infinite audience!) with very little extra work. It cuts out all the middlemen. It’s also relatively inexpensive in capital and work hours for a ‘info bit’ to be distributed compared to any other medium.

The hardest part is figuring out how to get paid, and if you can do that you’re doing pretty good.

Interestingly, social media is essentially a sweet spot here.

They get to disclaim liability for the actual message, while being able to algorithmically pick the messages with the most engagement (typically the most incendiary!), with relatively low equipment costs, and then get paid by ‘volume’/turnover (aka ads).

It’s like being a stock broker or market during the 20’s stock market boom, collecting commissions and pushing the craziest options to the most gullible.

Fascinating, really.

And in a similar vein, the abuses there did end up creating a huge economic collapse and the SEC.

In this case, I suspect it will end up creating a huge trust/attention collapse which will cause significant economic re-ordering (and contraction) as people stop doing transactions because they are getting scammed/stolen from.

Possible economic contraction too as a lot of things revert back to older ‘known good’ behaviors due to reduced risk appetites.


I'd prefer that than having some kind of censorship of the Internet.

Enter your IQ to allow access to Wikipedia ...

Societal changes such as free education might improve the situation, not more segregation.


> 6. I find it increasingly hard to turn things on

> Or you may have faced a similar reckoning in an unfamiliar shower, or standing before a seemingly ordinary hob. The relentless development of new ways to turn things on has led us steadily away from the intuitive and toward the wilfully [sic] enigmatic.

The rest of the article seems to be complaining about post-iPhone technology, but showers have been weird since at least the 80s (probably earlier, but speaking only from personal experience here).


«14. I have consistently risen to the level of disorganisation that any new technology allows At the time of writing, I have 77 tabs open on my browser”

Huh, before computers I can remember 77 open notebooks scattered across my bedroom. Nothing changes.


I feel the typing thing, tho. I was never a great typist, but it was much, much faster and more accurate than I am now. A big part of it is because of mobile keyboards fucking up my muscle memory and perpetuating bad habits.


“But thanks to Zoom, Google and FaceTime, there is simply no reasonable excuse for not making an appearance at a meeting.”

I know this is dependent on situation, but “I am traveling” is a reasonable enough excuse. If you’re in a remote office with other workers who are on same meeting, yeah, you probably shouldn’t miss that meeting. Otherwise, “I’m traveling” is reasonable enough.


And we're just getting started. Hold on, the next hill's a doozy!


Every time I see someone use the word “doozy”, I swoon. The Duesenberg company was only in operation for 17 years and was dissolved in 1937. Yet there is lovable doozy, an invented marketing term that American English has adopted as its own.


Now here I am violating the spirit of the article and Googling things, but it seems like this is, at best, an uncertain etymology:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/where-the-word-dooz...


Interesting! I’ve always googled about Duesenberg and read the old saw several times, and never googled for the etymology. Thank for the correction!


dösig?


I also regret wasting time in the past on junk content online (especially on platforms with algorithms designed to show you the most inflammatory content first), but I have personally found that online discussions and the internet have been a net positive to my life.

I've been studying foreign languages over the past few years. Even though people hundreds of years ago have learned languages without computers, I would have never been able to succeed without technology—in fact, I struggled a lot studying a required language with paper books in high school. Online discussions helped me find the best books and good-enough techniques to start, and streaming services let me easily find foreign television series (along with dubbed series) which made listening comprehension so much easier and fun.

I was also able to learn the fundamentals of software development much easier with the help of technological aids (specifically by creating my own flashcards, which helped me drill practice problems), which has helped me with work. My physical health has also improved thanks to great advice on diet and exercise available online.

Most importantly, technology has been a way for me to work closely with people living far away from me. I really have felt that I can rely on others (as I hope they can rely on me) from conversations and communication online, even if we've never met face-to-face in-person.

My personal belief is that the amount of time spent on screens isn't usually a problem for living a healthy life. What's important is instead how you spend your time using screens: anything deliberately engineered to take your attention and time is generally a leech on life, whereas anything that helps you develop a skill or meaningfully connect with other people enriches it.


I agree - Technology should serve the individual fully and completely and not itself or its creators. Computing used to be like that. It still is, unless one hands their autonomy to large service providers.

Even if I spend time in front of my screen, I try to avoid slipping into nonsense.


The point 5 amounts to "I can not confidently bullshit anymore that easily". Which from my point of view is massive advantage.


That's not how I interpreted it at all. I interpreted him as basically saying meaningless pub banter is now killed entirely. Because someone is going to pull out their phone and check, and that ruins the train of thought and the conversation. It pulls everyone out of it. Not that he can't confidently bullshit.


The thing is, if you are not bullshitting too much, people will stop fact checking you. Because most of their searches will check out and that is boring. However, if people fact check you constantly and find you are saying bs, they are doing it on purpose - because they do not like that you bs so often.


See point 8.




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