I'm Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better

I'm tired of pretending tech makes things better. 

I'm tired of kidding myself that all these apps, these chatbots, these "tools" are doing anything but dragging us into the mud and the shit and calling it progress. 

I sat down at a cafe a few days ago, hungry and ready to order. But there were no menus at the tables - just a QR code on a hockey puck. My phone struggled to load the site to order a single cold brew, pop-ups to install the custom App kept obscuring the options, and I had to register with my phone number, email address, and first and last name to buy a $5 cup of coffee.

By the time I placed my order - paying a 1% fee to the app makers in the process - I would have happily paid double for the experience of simply flipping through a menu and talking to another human being. 

You can call my complaints out of touch, but I'm no stranger to the other side. I've worked in hospitality intermittently for the past decade, and I still pick up shifts here and there. I can tell you right now that anyone working in a decent venue would rather have a line of people ordering at the counter than be juggling iPads and QR codes while barely interacting with human beings.

We keep adding layers of technology meant to reduce friction, but it just winds up abstracting us from other people, from our neighbors and communities, while forcing clunky, barely functional, and always extractive apps into every facet of our daily lives.

In some parts of the city, you can't even park your car anymore without downloading an app. 

I used to say that I wasn't against technology. I believed in it and was hopeful, and I could still get excited about the New New Thing.

But that's not the case anymore.

Faced with the relentless, myopic, growth-at-all-costs optimism that seems to surround our tech overlords and their toys, all I can think is that I'd rather give up 99% of the consumer-tech "improvements" to go back to a world where things felt a little bit harder, and a lot more human.

There's a cultural pressure to be excited about new gadgets, apps, and AI breakthroughs.

It's almost an act of heresy to express distaste about the world's digitization as if any rejection of technology is a selfish, privileged whine.

Skepticism is dismissed as "Luddism" rather than critical thinking.

Tech's rhetoric frames every new product release as revolutionary - when most are just minor, incremental, or even unnecessary - casting anyone who questions their worth as out of touch, anti-progress, anti-everything.

We're stuck in a cycle of tech creating barely functional solutions to problems it caused in the first damn place.

Nobody asked for social media, but now that it's eroding our mental health, we're being flooded with apps and tools to "help" us digitally detox, all for a monthly fee.

We're drowning in a cesspool of AI-generated content while being punished by AI-content detectors that can't tell a human from a bot when we try to write an essay or even apply for a job.

We have so many bloated SaaS tools that we've started swiping our credit cards for SaaS tools to manage them. 

And in all of this shit, there are hidden costs: complexity, attention fragmentation, dehumanization, manipulation, and the abdication of free will. 

For the past 20 years, tech has promised to make things more efficient while making almost everything more complicated and less meaningful. Innovation, for innovation's sake, has eroded our craftsmanship, relationships, and ability to think critically.

Even the phrase "deep thinking" has been co-opted by AI companies. We have the paradox of choice - more tools, options, streaming platforms, shows, everything except clarity or satisfaction. 

We have a responsibility - to ourselves and each other - to reject technology that does not improve our quality of life - measurably and tangibly - rather than following trends.

To recognize that new does not always mean better.

To be OK with stepping back from the hype cycles and embracing simplicity.

To ask that the tech we are given, the tech we buy, the tech our taxes fund in the first place, does less harm and more good. 

It's easy to convince ourselves that tech has made the world better. And in the sciences and the medical fields, it has.

But for consumers who have been consumed by Meta's mass-surveillance-as-entertainment business model and TikTok's mental and emotional decay as a service, and a thousand other bullshit pieces of unasked-for tech, the world has not been made measurably better than it was two decades ago. 

When people accuse me of being anti-tech, they try to paint me as wanting to drag the world kicking and screaming back to the 1800s. But that's a distortion of what most critically thinking tech skeptics want.

Truthfully, we'd happily take the world back to any time before Facebook. 

2003 would about do it. 

I won't keep pretending I believe in tech as a force for good. 

That ship has sailed, that horse has bolted, and that gutless CEO has already embraced fascism. 

Instead, I'll call it like I see it, and I see a world in forced decay. 

If I sound like a luddite, that's a mantle I'm happy to take on. I see no shame in it. 

We'd all be better off if we learned to question tech as a gift and see it for its grift.