when reading personal blogs, it's best to assume any statement as a reflection of their experiences and world-bubble rather than as verified facts. This is a blog, not a technical doc. while your frustration may be well founded, it's also self inflicted to a degree, you're expecting the wrong thing from the wrong place.
While we're on the subject of gripes with the modern internet, the fact that most social media sites that publish to a single feed flatten reality into a single format. People then apply uniform judgement to content with wildly different purposes (and subconsciously people ascribe more purpose to posts that happen to rise up the frontpage, even when the blog in question was just some thought somebody threw out in ten minutes)
Like all addictions it's about habits and you compete with multiple trillion-dollar companies to shape your habits for you. Luckily, you are closer to where decisions are actually being made.
So the measures, in no particular order, but vaguely resemblign an escalation ladder:
1. Get a shittier phone. Something worth 100 eurobucks from aliexpress working on a slow mtk soc, outdated android and all that
2. Disable all notification forever, also incoming call ringtone with a voice mail saying you will return the call tomorrow
3. Get a landline or equivalent land-line like voip phone on a table in a hallway. With a voice mail of course.
4. Start leaving the phone at home when you go for a short walk or somewhere in a shop.
5. When you do take it with you outside, put it in a banana bag under the jacket instead of your pocket and then leave it in the bag when you get back home.
6. obviously remove all of the dopamine junkie apps.
7. don't look at the mail, chats, news, whatever is there before lunch, specifically don't let it be the first thing getting your attention in the morning.
8. doing a prayer 5 times a day and going to mosque or whatever you have to counter balance the influence of shaitain sitting your pocket for the last 10 years.
9. allowing yourself to use junkie apps for a dopamine hit when you actually need it but deciding the time and trigger yourself (separate phone with instagrahm turned off most of the time, only scrolling it while you are outside in the park in a nice setting after having a juicy piece of junk food, icecream or whatever, etc).
Tried almost all of these, stuck on no. 7. If I have a browser I’ll browse, I have no social media apps at all, I’ll open HN and browse it happily, I even use Reddit on a browser with that atrocious webpage nagging you to install the app. I’ll use it in a PC if my phone breaks.
If I lock myself out of the browser, cut all communications, miss a phone call, I’ll not be able to do “something” that is not socially acceptable not to do. Life will create a situation, and make me feel like I’m doing something wrong, maybe I am.
Then there is all the good things, that article that got you hooked on a new idea, that contact that got you a better job, that friend you miss in another continent. My kid would not exist were not for the internet. When you are in a bad day you will convincingly argue it’s for the greater good, maybe you are even right that it was.
There is porn when you are horny, delivery services when you are tired and hungry, a map when you are lost, hobby items you can’t find locally, podcasts when you are lonely, all the music.
I think I’m not wired in a way that can healthily separate the good and the bad in a society that also can’t. I know something is wrong, but I don’t think I can fix it with tech.
My phone is in my pocket all the time basically, along with my keys and my wallet. I use it to respond to text messages from friends and family, read books on the Kindle app, check the weather report, and occasionally check Teams to see why my watch has been vibrating constantly with notifications for the last twenty minutes. Oh, and to talk on the phone once in a blue moon.
I get that I'm an outlier, but I'd worry more about the people that launch it across the room the minute they get home. Of course, if you're always picking it up and checking social media, that's also a problem.
> the offline option exists the way the wheelchair ramp exists at certain train stations: installed after the fact, satisfying a regulation, pitched at an angle no wheelchair on earth can climb. We are all expected to pretend grandma can make it up, and to act only mildly surprised when we find her at the bottom again.
It's hyperbole like this that breaks the illusion for the post. I'm not an editor, but if you're trying to make a valid point you need one man. Stinkeroo.
I have lived in a tech-rich life since I bought my first single board home system in around 1975.
I think it is as easy as setting boundaries: practice meditation. Learn to enjoy sitting and doing nothing, both in the living room and sitting outside.
Then when the time is right, work hard for several hours to get important stuff done.
Food tastes best when we are very hungry, so we must go long periods of time doing mini-fasting a few times a day in order to enjoy food. Similarly, earning a living or experimenting with tech should be something that you sit down and do for a while, then do something else.
if fasting (and spiking your blood glucose with ostensibly bigger meals) is required to enjoy food, then something has gone quite wrong. I assume you're referring to more whole and less processed/sugar-infested food. in that case, maintain a consistent diet of whole foods, eat small meals throughout the day, and your palate will adjust.
nah, periodic calorie-restriction without feeling you 'have to' feels alright when you next eat, and, you can consciously choose a healthier snack in the moment to continue the nicer feeling.
Knowing you skipped a pizza and it's still available in the freezer (plus you still don't need to buy another one to replace it, yet) after growing up feeling overweight, eventually being overweight, and feeling the same during both periods - the price is an electricity bill for the freezer, not priceless.
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
It goes from complaining about endless pitches of tech to pitching a gaming console. The tech pitching is a problem, but the need to be constantly entertained and fed some content or game is the real problem. Those are pacifiers. You stuff them in an adults mouth to keep them from actually thinking about what would improve their own life. Take the pacifier out and use your brain for your needs - what you should want to do, to make of the world, to make exist. See what happens next…
While I appreciate the viewpoint, I do not think the idea resonates personally. If I'm following, your idea is to take a brain submerged in this feedback loop from childhood and task it with the question: "what should you want to do?" Are you expecting new results? Is there some noble, obvious result you held back that you think this brain can come up with? Pick ourselves up by our bootstraps to go where?
I think the population starting to age is an interesting one -- the first one playing more-complex 2D + 3D games from an early age. I'm in this age group. In a world with nothing left to explore, and humans globally connected by commercialism, I think you don't need to be bothered with what capitalism is making of the world. Our brains are hooked on solving imaginary, complex problems. We're all on some weird ship at sea, migrating toward some unknown old-age destination. Probably an MMO.
What? Almost everyone talks about phone addiction, it's an extremely mainstream view. And Meta just got record fines for the addictiveness of their product.
If my phone demanded my attention as much as it seems the author's does with notifications, I'd probably not keep it with me either. I also feel tired of it, but it's difficult to remove access to the number of beneficial things I get from it. I try to limit non-FOSS apps and modify most of those to suit my purposes better, though that often feels like a lot of work done with the intent of saving work...
I recently switched to a used Minimal Phone (no longer being made sadly) and its been great for this. The best thing for me is to just make the phone completely unappealing to use, but still capable of essentials. A slow refresh rate eink screen helps a lot with that.
For the authors complaints about ads, I recommend paying for ad free versions of things you truly enjoy. Budgeting will mean you consume less and have fewer choices, but enjoy it more. And if something doesn't offer an ad free experience you can pay for, that's a great reason not to use it.
I’ve read so many posts like these on hn, but I just don’t relate to them. I have loved internet access since my first dial in to a BBS in the 90s. I’ve been cruising the information superhighway at top speed every day since. There is always something new to discover.
I'm with you. There's so much cool stuff going on and new things to learn! Stuff to try and new tech to play with.
It sounds like the author got locked in some sort of, "I follow" loop where he got used to trusting certain companies to keep him interested and entertained, then they sold out to ads and the lowest common denominator of entertainment audiences.
The Internet is the same as it's always been! There's infinite ways to use it, full of all sorts of fun communities, new hobbies to spend too much money on (hehe), and endless amounts of people to engage with.
If your iPhone is bothering you that much, maybe it's time to try Android or go totally off the grid (so to speak) and install something like GrapheneOS on a used phone (the horror!).
How about designing your own damned phone? It's not impossible. Make a thick ass brick with a huge battery and dual screens that barely fits in your pocket but can do amazing things a normal phone can't: Give it an IR emitter so you can turn off TVs from a distance. A CO2 sensor so you can tell when any room you're in is getting stuffy. A friggin laser projector. Whatever!
Instead of being a passive intake of all things corporate Internet, make something. Contribute!
I'm old. I was in college when the first personal computers made their debut. I was a married adult when I got my first computer (a Timex 1000). I was a father by the time the Internet appeared in public. The first cell phone I used (not owned) was the size and weight of a brick.
I keep thinking that, though it's been abused and in many ways turned against us, this is the world many of us dreamed of. Baby Boomers grew up wanting Star Trek communicators. When we got Commodore 64s and Apple IIs, we wanted them to be portable. When they became portable, we wanted them to be connected everywhere.
Just because greed and scrabbling for power corrupted the people who made all these dreams come true, it doesn't mean the dreams didn't come true. We asked for the tech, and we got it. Now I guess we have to take responsibility for how we use it.
My solution to this is carrying two devices. One turned off iphone and a TCL flip 2. The flip phone runs android 11 so I can use signal to stay connected with international family, but for anything else it is useless other than calling, texting, and basic email
> I long for the days of driving through the night with AM radio, where at least the ads were interesting.
This right here is exactly how you can be sure that the author has absolutely no idea what they are talking about. Nobody liked radio station ads and if they do, they can, quite literally, just tune into AM/FM radio and see for themselves how much they actually suck.
A million ways to complain about the state of technology, but this ain't it.
The author loved technology when it worked for him, now he toils in its service. Previously, it was additive, only giving and not taking; now it narrows options to only one: the app.
Obviously, we shouldn't let this happen. Keep paper tickets, physical menus, cash, etc. These things are human, made by and for humans. They make sense across the intelligence spectrum as they connect to us in the physicality of the real (which everyone understands).
Of course, the individual doesn't get to decide if all his government and city services app-ify themselves. What to do in that case? I guess this guy's chosen the path of minimal leashing: wearing the digital yoke as little as possible. That's just harm minimization though.
Perhaps it'll help someone to say this: It is possible to live without a smartphone. I do it. There's times when you can't use a service. QR codes are meaningless. You might occasionally be bored. I've always found an alternative or workaround to these issues. Yes, that's inconvenient sometimes (usually not though, surprisingly), but is that worse than being a slave to glass slab?
> Previously, it was additive, only giving and not taking; now it narrows options to only one: the app
This seems a bit dramatic. The issue is who is making the decisions. People have stopped being intentional about their decision-making, in a variety of ways, and tend to simply go with whatever the company providing the software recommends. This is the thing that we need to change. Using these services and using a smartphone are fine. We need to find a way to do it on our own terms, though.
People don't want to admit this because it is uncomfortable to blamed by the problems you yourself create, but if you are addicted to your phone to the point that you feel compelled to complain about the network (on the network, mind you), then it is entirely because you let yourself get addicted and you still let yourself keep being addicted.
The most insane part of this is the subtle-as-a-hammer-to-the-face MiSTER ad shoved in the middle of the article as if it made any sense whatsoever. And people are taking this guy seriously?
Addiction has a demand and supply component. I think we can all recognize that fact. Personal responsibility matters of course. However, ignoring the fact that companies spend trillions to make their products addictive is a very silly thing to do.
IMO the closest corollary we have is gambling. Most countries place strict limits on gambling, because it's so incredibly addictive to some people. We can see this very obviously in the rise of online gambling platforms like Polymarket it recent years. Without regulation, a lot of people will get sucked in and their lives will be destroyed.
I encourage you to read up on how addiction works. Your comment implies a severe lack of understanding about the subject. Alternatively, you could take a course on addiction at your local college. Always good to get educated!
Not letting yourself be addicted does not mean it is easy, it means that you have the power to stop it, and fuelling that addicting (as in: posting ON THE FUCKING NETWORK that you don’t like the network) is exactly that.
You can get pretty far replacing your launcher with something that makes you type the name of the app you want to launch, and avoiding most apps, like FB, X, Amazon, Insta, etc.
The trillions are effective at forcing network effects, but anything outside that it pretty trivial to swap out and get a better experience.
I'm a bit surprised by the fatalism on display in this discussion. I get that it sounds like I'm victim-blaming, but you can only alter your own behavior, so assuming responsibility has merit.
For an example from my own life (technically less relevant because if it comes down to it I'm fortunate and stubborn enough to win the lawsuit if that's what it comes down to, but swap me for any of their other million customers and the story still applies), my HSA has unilaterally made owning a sufficiently modern smartphone (<3yrs practically speaking, though it depends a bit on the manufacturer) with all the secure enclave bells and whistles mandatory to access my money I voluntarily placed into their system under a completely set of rules. Customer service has gone nowhere. If I couldn't afford the lawsuit, what options would I have? The employer offering the HSA a decade ago was just trying (and succeeding) to provide a nice benefit. I would've been insane to turn down a bunch of free money from my employer when the only stipulation was that it went through a third party taking a <<1% cut. The fuck-the-customer mentality happened later, and suddenly enough I couldn't do anything about it. If some family caves to their demands to access their own money, I'm not going to be the one to blame them for not being intentional about their decision making.
Total tangent, but I really like the way this article is written; you can effectively read the first sentence of each paragraph, and it still conveys the same story in a coherent, summarized way.
If only the content didn’t read like a third grader trying to sound important. Just put down your goddamned phone. Just stop using Ali Express. Just don’t buy game consoles. Jesus.
Absolutely audacious to complain about being "forced" to install apps and in the next sentence complain about the Aliexpress app. Nobody forced you to install the aliexpress app. Nobody needs the aliexpress app.
Also people need to hate ads more. A single unwarranted notification will get me to disable all notifications or uninstall your app. If you don't hate ads enough, you'll find yourself being shown ads.
I think the author has good points but maybe we need to separate out a few things.
AliExpress is very much a user choice issue. It’s not a necessary service and it has a wide variety of competitors.
But the Apple OS nags for free trials and services should be something that is illegal under antitrust law. iOS and Android are the only two viable operating systems on the market for cellular phones. They are a duopoly. We shouldn’t be forced through promotions and ads in the basic operating system functionality just to have a basic communication device.
And we can say all we want about feature phones and flip phones and other similar alternatives but that’s bologna. 99.9% of customers are buying iOS or Android. From a numbers perspective there are no other options.
I'm an Apple OS owner and I'm trying to imagine what these nags for free trials and services are. I have most notifications off, so perhaps I'm missing them? Some apps do this, I guess, but I just can't think of the last time my Mac or iPhone or iPad or Apple Watch nagged me to join a free trial or service.
Yet services do whatever they can to convince the user to install their apps.
While I agree that the user shouldn't install unnecessary apps and probably remove most of what's installed, this is playing a rigged game.
On the one side a person who want to do something, on the other end countless very well founded teams trying to exploit our monkey brains.
> Yet services do whatever they can to convince the user to install their apps.
You don't need the Ali Express app to track your orders, yet the author seems to think so. If you think this is a rigged game then just don't play it.
Use your phone for what you need and let it be the end of it. The author is complaining about things as if someone were putting a gun to their head and forcing them to use the Ali Express to track their orders.
The emotions are relatable, but the examples are strange and don't back up his argument. It is true that there are many situations in modern life where a smartphone has become effectively mandatory.
But Ali Express is not one of those. It's very feasible to delete the app, or at least turn off the notifications. The quality of TV writing may have taken a nosedive but nobody is forcing you to watch TikTok Empire. If you long for the golden age of television, you can find disc versions of The Wire, Mad Men, The Sopranos etc. Often they're free to borrow at your local library. The App Store is indeed garbage, but I open it a handful of times per year and probably spend less than a minute to search for the app I want and install it.
The argument about losing control to devices would be much more effective if the examples weren't mainly cases where the user clearly has control.
> When we first got computers, this is simply what they were. By default they did nothing. They sat there and waited for you to have an idea.
It's ironic that we've come full circle here. This is generally what AI does - nothing that isn't prompted, and yet still part of the end and nothing like the beginning of the internet
I think part of the problem is the frictionless and feeling like I can’t control the nature of the device.
I think my killer feature would be a phone that is only configurable at a laptop. You can install whatever you want, but it has to be at the laptop. Website allow lists on the laptop. You can uninstall and block things on the phone but you can’t reinstall or unblock them until you’re back at your computer.
You can have that. Here is a guide showing how to do it on an iOS device https://stopa.io/post/297
I think something similar exists for Android but you'll need to do some research.
I've noticed a similar phenomenon: getting tired of networks and algorithms. I wrote a short essay with my thoughts on "Well Being in Times of Algorithms" [1].
Look, I understand the issues the author has with our current world, though I'd argue there are methods to avoid many of the things they mention (like ads). But it was hard to follow between the silly examples (Steam Deck games needs updates? And?) and the legit issues. Also I'm not sure what kind of rose-colored glasses they are wearing but I will never agree that the "ads were interesting" on AM or FM radio. Thankfully I was not subjected to radio, and the ads which I abhor, for long before I gained control over what I wanted to listen to and when. To pine for such times is anathema to me.
This is such an incredibly pessimistic look at our present. I'll be the first to tell you about what I see as wrong in our society and the author make a number of salient points, but we live in an age of wonder. Yes, there is bad, plenty of it, avoid it is hard but not impossible. Or maybe I'm just an earlier version of the author who still believes in a Star Trek future (TNG/Voy/DS9, not the crap they are putting now, though Lower Decks was a joy).
My phone is a freaking tricorder, I control robots in my house, I turn on/off the lights with my voice, and I can build new software by talking to my computer. I don't deny the bad, nay, evil in the world, but what a bleak outlook this author paints.
Shut up man. Bar Starfleet Academy and the atrocious Section 31, recent Trek output has been great—don’t you fucking dare complain about Discovery.
But I agree with you that the author is just whining for the sake of whining. It’s a bunch of nonsensical unrelated complains on entertainment options that they could very well just stop using and nothing would change in their life.
I mean, dude is literally complaining about the network ON THE NETWORK. Fuck’s sake, man, just put down the goddamned phone and be done with it.
People like the author have likely spent so much time soaking themselves in cynical/pessimistic online discourse that they don't realize how much it has poisoned their worldview. You have so much more agency in this world than picking which device you are at the mercy of. You can choose to use social media less or not at all. You can choose to read the comments sections rarely, and mostly ignore what they say. You can choose for your iOS/Android device to be a source of joy and delight instead of doomscrolling, or you can indeed choose to use something else entirely for some or all purposes. Those are perhaps not the easy choices, but sometimes the harder choice is where the rewards are hidden. I hope the author's experience with their MisTer is only the start of a journey to more control of their life and less being "very online".
Interesting. I don't know if my experience is helpful, or there are many (or most?) people like me, but I consider myself a total 100% Internet-loving Geeky Nerd.
And yet I never had (oh well, I did register and post 1-2 posts N years ago) Twitter, Twitcher, Threads, MySpace, Instagram, TikTok, Red Book, Facebook, any other -book for that matter, no Youtube channel, and I very rarely watch it. I also never "get information" from these. I don't understand how people do it. So every time I get a "rabbit hole itch", I went straight to Google, lost in some niche blogs or forums.
Nowadays, of course, the Internet is gone - you can't Google a non-LLM blog, or there are just no non-LLM blogs anymore? So I go straight to Deep Research. I don't enjoy it, but I would never think to find my information on Twitter or something. Sometimes I will read a book.
Maybe all of this is just because I'm a loner without any friends. That's one possible reason.
I also don't have any streaming services. Everything you need can be... found elsewhere wink-wink, in good quality. We watch some older stuff, Breaking Bad, Person of Interest, some non-English stuff. Same with music.
98 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 75.3 ms ] threadI'm tired of convincingly presented falsehoods. I hate being on my phone. I also can't stop being on my phone.
So the measures, in no particular order, but vaguely resemblign an escalation ladder:
1. Get a shittier phone. Something worth 100 eurobucks from aliexpress working on a slow mtk soc, outdated android and all that
2. Disable all notification forever, also incoming call ringtone with a voice mail saying you will return the call tomorrow
3. Get a landline or equivalent land-line like voip phone on a table in a hallway. With a voice mail of course.
4. Start leaving the phone at home when you go for a short walk or somewhere in a shop.
5. When you do take it with you outside, put it in a banana bag under the jacket instead of your pocket and then leave it in the bag when you get back home.
6. obviously remove all of the dopamine junkie apps.
7. don't look at the mail, chats, news, whatever is there before lunch, specifically don't let it be the first thing getting your attention in the morning.
8. doing a prayer 5 times a day and going to mosque or whatever you have to counter balance the influence of shaitain sitting your pocket for the last 10 years.
9. allowing yourself to use junkie apps for a dopamine hit when you actually need it but deciding the time and trigger yourself (separate phone with instagrahm turned off most of the time, only scrolling it while you are outside in the park in a nice setting after having a juicy piece of junk food, icecream or whatever, etc).
But then don't do anything money related with it or use any important account details.
If I lock myself out of the browser, cut all communications, miss a phone call, I’ll not be able to do “something” that is not socially acceptable not to do. Life will create a situation, and make me feel like I’m doing something wrong, maybe I am.
Then there is all the good things, that article that got you hooked on a new idea, that contact that got you a better job, that friend you miss in another continent. My kid would not exist were not for the internet. When you are in a bad day you will convincingly argue it’s for the greater good, maybe you are even right that it was.
There is porn when you are horny, delivery services when you are tired and hungry, a map when you are lost, hobby items you can’t find locally, podcasts when you are lonely, all the music.
I think I’m not wired in a way that can healthily separate the good and the bad in a society that also can’t. I know something is wrong, but I don’t think I can fix it with tech.
I get that I'm an outlier, but I'd worry more about the people that launch it across the room the minute they get home. Of course, if you're always picking it up and checking social media, that's also a problem.
But also, dispose of it properly, we don't need polluted rivers full of garbage smart phones.
> people who love being connected (implies =>) never leave it
You don't love being connected, so the author isn't claiming anything about you.
It's hyperbole like this that breaks the illusion for the post. I'm not an editor, but if you're trying to make a valid point you need one man. Stinkeroo.
I think it is as easy as setting boundaries: practice meditation. Learn to enjoy sitting and doing nothing, both in the living room and sitting outside.
Then when the time is right, work hard for several hours to get important stuff done.
Food tastes best when we are very hungry, so we must go long periods of time doing mini-fasting a few times a day in order to enjoy food. Similarly, earning a living or experimenting with tech should be something that you sit down and do for a while, then do something else.
Knowing you skipped a pizza and it's still available in the freezer (plus you still don't need to buy another one to replace it, yet) after growing up feeling overweight, eventually being overweight, and feeling the same during both periods - the price is an electricity bill for the freezer, not priceless.
I think the population starting to age is an interesting one -- the first one playing more-complex 2D + 3D games from an early age. I'm in this age group. In a world with nothing left to explore, and humans globally connected by commercialism, I think you don't need to be bothered with what capitalism is making of the world. Our brains are hooked on solving imaginary, complex problems. We're all on some weird ship at sea, migrating toward some unknown old-age destination. Probably an MMO.
For the authors complaints about ads, I recommend paying for ad free versions of things you truly enjoy. Budgeting will mean you consume less and have fewer choices, but enjoy it more. And if something doesn't offer an ad free experience you can pay for, that's a great reason not to use it.
It sounds like the author got locked in some sort of, "I follow" loop where he got used to trusting certain companies to keep him interested and entertained, then they sold out to ads and the lowest common denominator of entertainment audiences.
The Internet is the same as it's always been! There's infinite ways to use it, full of all sorts of fun communities, new hobbies to spend too much money on (hehe), and endless amounts of people to engage with.
If your iPhone is bothering you that much, maybe it's time to try Android or go totally off the grid (so to speak) and install something like GrapheneOS on a used phone (the horror!).
How about designing your own damned phone? It's not impossible. Make a thick ass brick with a huge battery and dual screens that barely fits in your pocket but can do amazing things a normal phone can't: Give it an IR emitter so you can turn off TVs from a distance. A CO2 sensor so you can tell when any room you're in is getting stuffy. A friggin laser projector. Whatever!
Instead of being a passive intake of all things corporate Internet, make something. Contribute!
I'm old. I was in college when the first personal computers made their debut. I was a married adult when I got my first computer (a Timex 1000). I was a father by the time the Internet appeared in public. The first cell phone I used (not owned) was the size and weight of a brick.
I keep thinking that, though it's been abused and in many ways turned against us, this is the world many of us dreamed of. Baby Boomers grew up wanting Star Trek communicators. When we got Commodore 64s and Apple IIs, we wanted them to be portable. When they became portable, we wanted them to be connected everywhere.
Just because greed and scrabbling for power corrupted the people who made all these dreams come true, it doesn't mean the dreams didn't come true. We asked for the tech, and we got it. Now I guess we have to take responsibility for how we use it.
> I long for the days of driving through the night with AM radio, where at least the ads were interesting.
AM radio sucked.
Right? Also it still exists and can be listened to. The ads were interesting? What?
I don't even know what the ads are on the podcasts I listen to because I can skip them instantly
A million ways to complain about the state of technology, but this ain't it.
Obviously, we shouldn't let this happen. Keep paper tickets, physical menus, cash, etc. These things are human, made by and for humans. They make sense across the intelligence spectrum as they connect to us in the physicality of the real (which everyone understands).
Of course, the individual doesn't get to decide if all his government and city services app-ify themselves. What to do in that case? I guess this guy's chosen the path of minimal leashing: wearing the digital yoke as little as possible. That's just harm minimization though.
Perhaps it'll help someone to say this: It is possible to live without a smartphone. I do it. There's times when you can't use a service. QR codes are meaningless. You might occasionally be bored. I've always found an alternative or workaround to these issues. Yes, that's inconvenient sometimes (usually not though, surprisingly), but is that worse than being a slave to glass slab?
This seems a bit dramatic. The issue is who is making the decisions. People have stopped being intentional about their decision-making, in a variety of ways, and tend to simply go with whatever the company providing the software recommends. This is the thing that we need to change. Using these services and using a smartphone are fine. We need to find a way to do it on our own terms, though.
The tech industry has spent the last 20 years (and really in earnest the last 15, accelerating over time) making their tech as addictive as possible.
Current tech is egregiously addictive. It’s worse than most drugs.
The big tech companies are now the most successful drug dealers in history.
People don't want to admit this because it is uncomfortable to blamed by the problems you yourself create, but if you are addicted to your phone to the point that you feel compelled to complain about the network (on the network, mind you), then it is entirely because you let yourself get addicted and you still let yourself keep being addicted.
The most insane part of this is the subtle-as-a-hammer-to-the-face MiSTER ad shoved in the middle of the article as if it made any sense whatsoever. And people are taking this guy seriously?
Come on now.
IMO the closest corollary we have is gambling. Most countries place strict limits on gambling, because it's so incredibly addictive to some people. We can see this very obviously in the rise of online gambling platforms like Polymarket it recent years. Without regulation, a lot of people will get sucked in and their lives will be destroyed.
I encourage you to read up on how addiction works. Your comment implies a severe lack of understanding about the subject. Alternatively, you could take a course on addiction at your local college. Always good to get educated!
Come on now.
The trillions are effective at forcing network effects, but anything outside that it pretty trivial to swap out and get a better experience.
I'm a bit surprised by the fatalism on display in this discussion. I get that it sounds like I'm victim-blaming, but you can only alter your own behavior, so assuming responsibility has merit.
But I'll post about it on the network
Also people need to hate ads more. A single unwarranted notification will get me to disable all notifications or uninstall your app. If you don't hate ads enough, you'll find yourself being shown ads.
AliExpress is very much a user choice issue. It’s not a necessary service and it has a wide variety of competitors.
But the Apple OS nags for free trials and services should be something that is illegal under antitrust law. iOS and Android are the only two viable operating systems on the market for cellular phones. They are a duopoly. We shouldn’t be forced through promotions and ads in the basic operating system functionality just to have a basic communication device.
And we can say all we want about feature phones and flip phones and other similar alternatives but that’s bologna. 99.9% of customers are buying iOS or Android. From a numbers perspective there are no other options.
While I agree that the user shouldn't install unnecessary apps and probably remove most of what's installed, this is playing a rigged game. On the one side a person who want to do something, on the other end countless very well founded teams trying to exploit our monkey brains.
You don't need the Ali Express app to track your orders, yet the author seems to think so. If you think this is a rigged game then just don't play it.
Use your phone for what you need and let it be the end of it. The author is complaining about things as if someone were putting a gun to their head and forcing them to use the Ali Express to track their orders.
But Ali Express is not one of those. It's very feasible to delete the app, or at least turn off the notifications. The quality of TV writing may have taken a nosedive but nobody is forcing you to watch TikTok Empire. If you long for the golden age of television, you can find disc versions of The Wire, Mad Men, The Sopranos etc. Often they're free to borrow at your local library. The App Store is indeed garbage, but I open it a handful of times per year and probably spend less than a minute to search for the app I want and install it.
The argument about losing control to devices would be much more effective if the examples weren't mainly cases where the user clearly has control.
It's ironic that we've come full circle here. This is generally what AI does - nothing that isn't prompted, and yet still part of the end and nothing like the beginning of the internet
I think my killer feature would be a phone that is only configurable at a laptop. You can install whatever you want, but it has to be at the laptop. Website allow lists on the laptop. You can uninstall and block things on the phone but you can’t reinstall or unblock them until you’re back at your computer.
iOS also has another way to dumb down the phone by limiting which apps are available: https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/apple-buried-a-perfect-dumb...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352747
Look, I understand the issues the author has with our current world, though I'd argue there are methods to avoid many of the things they mention (like ads). But it was hard to follow between the silly examples (Steam Deck games needs updates? And?) and the legit issues. Also I'm not sure what kind of rose-colored glasses they are wearing but I will never agree that the "ads were interesting" on AM or FM radio. Thankfully I was not subjected to radio, and the ads which I abhor, for long before I gained control over what I wanted to listen to and when. To pine for such times is anathema to me.
This is such an incredibly pessimistic look at our present. I'll be the first to tell you about what I see as wrong in our society and the author make a number of salient points, but we live in an age of wonder. Yes, there is bad, plenty of it, avoid it is hard but not impossible. Or maybe I'm just an earlier version of the author who still believes in a Star Trek future (TNG/Voy/DS9, not the crap they are putting now, though Lower Decks was a joy).
My phone is a freaking tricorder, I control robots in my house, I turn on/off the lights with my voice, and I can build new software by talking to my computer. I don't deny the bad, nay, evil in the world, but what a bleak outlook this author paints.
Shut up man. Bar Starfleet Academy and the atrocious Section 31, recent Trek output has been great—don’t you fucking dare complain about Discovery.
But I agree with you that the author is just whining for the sake of whining. It’s a bunch of nonsensical unrelated complains on entertainment options that they could very well just stop using and nothing would change in their life.
I mean, dude is literally complaining about the network ON THE NETWORK. Fuck’s sake, man, just put down the goddamned phone and be done with it.
And yet I never had (oh well, I did register and post 1-2 posts N years ago) Twitter, Twitcher, Threads, MySpace, Instagram, TikTok, Red Book, Facebook, any other -book for that matter, no Youtube channel, and I very rarely watch it. I also never "get information" from these. I don't understand how people do it. So every time I get a "rabbit hole itch", I went straight to Google, lost in some niche blogs or forums.
Nowadays, of course, the Internet is gone - you can't Google a non-LLM blog, or there are just no non-LLM blogs anymore? So I go straight to Deep Research. I don't enjoy it, but I would never think to find my information on Twitter or something. Sometimes I will read a book.
Maybe all of this is just because I'm a loner without any friends. That's one possible reason.
I also don't have any streaming services. Everything you need can be... found elsewhere wink-wink, in good quality. We watch some older stuff, Breaking Bad, Person of Interest, some non-English stuff. Same with music.
YMMV I guess.