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We should keep invasive proprietary technologies at bay by limiting our reliance on them. Further more, we should assess in what ways technology, in general, has affected our lives, by compromising our relationships and daily doings. I am not a tech-luddite by any means, technology is one of my hobbies, specifically system administration of Unix-like operating systems, but, as an individual, then as a collective, we can all feel something is off.
First and foremost, I think that a healthy relationship regarding our use of technology is possible, but not in the current circumstances, the corporatised internet respectively. Questions should be posed, which can only happen in solitude, about the ways and the common attitude of our society towards the internet. In what way does texting, for example, affect you? Many use it as an excuse to not have a fully-fledged conversation, or a myriad of other ones, such as anxiety, which ironically enough in many cases is caused by technology. Human contact with technology as its medium has become cold and sterile, missing all the important and beneficial parts of a real-life conversation.
Emojis cannot replicate body language, while a simple reply such as "I am sorry." cannot, and will not, match a direct talk with the other person. Texting has become integral within our communication, although we can only begin to feel the bad parts just now. Friends sitting at a table, not talking to each other, but texting. This is ridiculous for anyone that does not engage in this harmful behavior, yet it has been normalized across generations. This has been useful for those wanting to control what people say, take Amazon's instant-messaging program which censored words such as "union." But for us, the people, it had a dangerous effect across all the strata of society.
I do ask the reader, if you find yourself in such a situation, a negative connection with technology, that you should not despair as many do, but to take small steps towards repairing your relationship with technology, then humans. We are all in this together. Engage in real life activities, do not answer with "just want to chat", feel the anxiety and tensions of a real life relationship, with its goods and bads, it is what makes us people.
Second of all, I ask people to continuously and actively resist the ways of Parasite Technology. Technology that feeds on our well-being and markets us as sellable units, through algorithms, be it open or not. The steering wheel must come back to ourselves, not to external factors, such as corporations that have teams of psychologists making their products more addictive by the day. Instead, we should move, slow or not, towards sustainable computing. No, your gaming setup with the price of a car is off the list. On a serious note, have you seen how much electricity modern graphics card use? Latest Nvidia cards use 700 watts on a minimum basis! An SBC, such as the Raspberry Pi, can run with 5 watts, if not less.
The current technology is not made with the idea that eventually we will run out of material to build microprocessors, and we will have to reuse the actual ones we have. There are billions of devices on Earth, yet consumerism is encouraged, and planned obsolescence applied, when we could work on long-term support for current hardware. This is one of the reasons I use a 2011 laptop, although it is "old" by the standards of consumerism, it performs any task just about as well as any other modern computer would, minus the modern bloated web pages which at this rate will surpass 100 megabytes quite soon. Hardware keeps evolving, yet web page loading speeds stay the same, because they keep getting more and more bloated, which does not fit the idea of a sustainable internet.
Another thing, which is a pet peeve of mine, are people not experiencing the real world, instead living it through their devices by taking photos. Now, an occasional photo here and there is fine, but actually going to a location then taking photos in order to "prove" or brag that they have been there, immediately proceeding to leave is another story. Not paying attention to their environment at all, results in not experiencing the beauty of the location. We cannot see the world through the lens of technology and expect we feel happy and fulfilled.
Our use of technology has both positives and negative results, but we must seek to have a healthy, and especially balanced, interaction with technology and start reclaiming our lives, relationships, conversations and thoughts.