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Digital consumption keeps me from getting better at my job
(sibervepunk.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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Programming
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I have been thinking about this a lot. Wrestling with how much consumption I can allow myself to sustain, and how much I can allow myself to abstain from.
As more and more of the world around me is interfaced with through machines and/or the internet, I can't just "take a break from computers" for a few days to give my brain a break from that environment anymore. From knowledge to culture, so much is being shared and transferred digitally today. I agree with the author that we can't just ignore what's going on in the digital spaces that we frequent, but many of these spaces are built to get you to consume. Just as one must go into the hotbox to meet the heaviest weed smokers, one shouldn't stay in the hotbox taking notes for too long at once because of the dense ambient smoke. Besides, how do you find the stuff worth paying attention to without wading through the slop and bait? The web has become an adversarial ecosystem, so we must adapt our behavior and expectations to continue benefiting from its best while staying as safe as possible from its worst.
Some are talking about "dark forest", and while I agree I think a more apt metaphor is that of small rural villages vs urban megalopolises. The internet started out so small that everyone knew where everyone else lived, and everyone depended on everyone else too much to ever think of aggressively exploiting anyone. Nowadays the safe gated communities speak in hushed tones of the less savory neighborhoods where you can lose your wallet in a moment of inattention, while they spend their days in the supermarkets and hyper-malls owned by their landlords.
The setup for Wall-E might take place decades or centuries from now, but it feels like it's already happened to the web. And that movie doesn't even know how the humans manage to rebuild earth and their society, it just implies that they succeed through the ending credits murals.
I highly recommend reading Digital Minimalism, which deals with exactly what you are talking about. It's a great and inspiring read, even if you don't actually go through with it.
From what I remember, it mostly talks about how to approach any kind of technology as a tool, though a pretty simple process - honestly think about what your goal is (networking, getting information about new topics, keeping up to date on events...), and properly decide whether the technology is actually The Best way how to do it, while minimalizing any drawbacks.
Some examples I remember are:
Most of the arguments in the book were thought-provoking, and from what I've tried implementing, it has made my life a lot better. For example, switching my phone to a dumb phone (and carrying a powered off smarthphone that I can make a hotpost for, if I really need an app for something) made my away-from-computer life a lot better and peacful, and it was really easy to get used to that. Once you start considering anything you do on a computer from the pragmatic point of view, and ask yourself what your goal is, and if there isn't a better way - the answer usually is yes, there is.
I've seen a few people recommend that book, I should check it out.
A way of thinking about tech that I've found interesting is what philosopher Bernard Stiegler refers to as "φάρμακον", or "pharmakon" (the greek root from where we get "pharmacy"). He uses the greek not just to be a pretentious arse, but because whilst it most directly translates to "medicine", pharmakon also can mean a poison or toxin. Stiegler argues that technology can be both helpful and harmful, often at once. It depends on how we use it. ^[1]
(I'm reminded here also of Cory Doctorow's discussion of reverse centaurs, because turning people into reverse centaurs is definitely the vibe of "pharmakon as poison". At the core of it, most people aren't being empowered by tech in our lives, and I really feel like we need a collective, radical recalibration around this. Books like "Digital Minimalism" certainly seem to be pushing towards that.
[1]: n.b. I am not a philosopher, nor have I actually directly read Stiegler, just a few people who draw on his work. One such person is Greta Goetz, an academic whose blog is great for people who like dense and wordy philosophy about tech and teaching.