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< Some Brief Examples of the Unthinking Adoption of Technology (and a Solution?)
Thanks for getting this conversation going, ~immy. Well said.
Like some other folks chiming in, I don't own a traditional smartphone, nor do I have any social media accounts. While I don't think I've been around as long as ~ew, perhaps my resistance to these technologies is related to my age.
I received my first cell phone (a feature phone, or dumb phone as they are now called) when I got my first job after graduating from college. I didn't like it, but it was a requirement for work. I remember having a conversation with an older fellow in my office who really, really did not like cell phones, and I remember wondering if he was right or just blowing their potential harms out of proportion.
All of this was, of course, many years before Apple released the first smartphone and Facebook appeared and started to entice everyone I knew into its shiny new gated community. At the time, I was in grad school and remember being quite busy with classes, clubs, relationships, hobbies, and so on. I could honestly care less that someone had posted a picture of what they ate for breakfast that morning on Facebook or any other social media site. It all seemed like narcissistic, navel gazing to me.
Fast forward to the present, and I'm living in an off-grid home that I built in the forested mountains of Vermont. I power my home and its conservatively designed systems with solar electricity and hand-harvested firewood from my land. I connect to the internet via satellite dishes powered by my solar panels. I use a Lightphone II and a VOIP phone for calls and texts, and I still don't have any social media accounts (unless, of course, we want to consider the Midnight Pub to be one).
My career is in environmental software development, so I do still spend an awful lot of time in front of my computer, but I do at least spend the bulk of my days just looking at text due to my environment just being full screen multi-monitor Emacs (EXWM FTW!). I appreciate many capsules and gopherholes on Gemini and Gopher for their simplicity and lack of addictiveness, while still often being interesting and informative. I even authored my own Gemini server several years back, which supports server-side scripting. I use this at work to host my software team's internal wiki, to try and have one less thing that requires a web browser during my workday.
And lastly, when it comes to the current surge in interest around AI, I am certainly impressed with how quickly the chatbots have improved the quality and diversity of their outputs. However, I don't really use this tech in any meaningful way. For now, I'm keeping an eye on it in the background to see what wild ideas people will try to apply it to next, but I haven't yet elevated it in my mind to a risk worthy of more concern. That may, of course, change in the future, but for now, I'm going to just keep on working as I always have.
Vive la résistance!