For the better part of my life I’ve been an early adopter. The first time I ever used a computer was 1981. I was in grade 6 and my friend would hang out with his older brother and his friends in the computer room where they had a few TRS-80 Model 1 computers as well as a DEC Rainbow computer and even an old teletype machine. We would mostly make really simple programs, try new software and operating systems and damned if it didn’t feel like the future.
Not long after I started bringing computers home for the weekend, sometimes making my own programs (my first ‘real’ program? Route music from the cassette player through the TRS-80 Color Computer into our TV and at the same time make the screen cycle through random colours every 0.5 seconds). But I also played hours of video games like Galaxy Invasion
This may look primitive but it felt amazing – and it was made just by a group of friends who made it big. In the future we were headed for you could make money from having fun! It was true! (Timex Sinclair did not buy the option on my really simple video game I made at age 12 – one alien crossing the screen while the player in one spaceship shot at them. They never sent back the cassette I sent them).
In university, only engineering (or rich) students had computers. Everyone else still typed their papers. So during that first year I rarely used a computer except for the occasional game of Nethack.
1989: My statistics class in my last semester required mainframe access to process data. One night, while looking through the various folders on the mainframe I found info about Relay, a chat program that pre-dated IRC. After trying for quite some time to figure out the commands to connect, I succeeded. And then the world opened. There were people on multiple channels from all over the world just talking about whatever came to mind. There went my grades. After leaving university at the end of that semester I still kept a friend’s account info so I could continue to chat and sometimes even met people living nearby. And it was one such meeting in 1991 where I met Sage. That’s a whole story in and of itself.
When I got to the working world things were really starting to heat up. Computers were just arriving in biotech offices and I learned Lotus 123 and Wordperfect 5.1 and then came MSWord and Excel with WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get. No more white text on blue screens you had to guess the layout and appearance of.
In 1995 I joined a small startup of about 5 people. While we had laptops to do our tech writing at client sites, I wanted to see more. Though the management didn’t understand my idea, they supported my getting modems for one of the desktops in the office and the 2-3 of us in the field got email. Now we could send documents from wherever we were – to collaborate, to review or to share something similar you’d used before. Before long the company had grown to over 70 people – and we all had email. A few years later when our son was born and I quit my to live in a yurt in the woods with no electricity and focus on being parents, I kept a blog, published from a computer we kept in a friend’s house and written on an alphasmart pro – basically a keyboard with a buffer in it. I could type several entries and then later connect it to the computer – press “send” and it would “type” the whole thing in at something like 200 wpm. We even got a program that we could use to go the other way – to load email messages from the computer into the alphasmart to reply to later – all by oil lamp light.
The 2000s were a rapid-fire series of early adoptions: Facebook, Google Reader, Podcasts (listening and creating), Twitter, WordPress, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, a robot vacuum, and most recently some dabbling with AI.
Most of that time was spent mindlessly adopting as quickly as I possibly could. It’s new and it must be good because of it. But recently we’re finding that often it’s not as good as advertised. Then there are other things that we found actually were as good as advertised. Here’s a sample:
Robot Vacuum: This one’s the most recent change. For over five years we’ve had a robot vacuum. It sounds like a really great time saver. Push the button and it drives around your house sucking up dirt and cat hair. The reality was that it had to be rescued from tangling itself in cords, sucking up socks or a piece of paper that fell on the floor. Most surprisingly, despite going literally back and forth across the whole floor, it didn’t do a great job. Sometimes it would bat one clump of cat hair around the room never sucking it up. Last week we swapped it for a simple rechargeable stick vacuum. It cleans better and takes about the same time to clean a room as it used to to make sure cords were stowed, chairs moved and otherwise preparing for the robot vacuum.
Facebook: This one was a hard one to leave, and to be fair, I’ve lost contact with many people, particularly from my teens and 20s. On the other hand, by the time I left it became a toxic minefield of terrible news, internet arguments and ads. The more I tried to filter it with plugins the worse it seemed to get. And there was nothing like having a friend of a friend (or worse still, a former high school friend) just stop by to drop a racist, sexist or transphobic comment on a post. After the initial time missing it, I am really happy to have left.
Instagram: Surprisingly I missed this one enough that I signed back up after a year or so. I have friends there but there isn’t the political, doom laden or controversial content in my feed. Mostly it’s just fun stuff though I do get lots of really excellent feminist content including this one woman who has the perfect response to all of the toxic sexist and fatphobic garbage out there:
Google Reader: My routine back in 2008 or so was to go to Google Reader and check all of my subscriptions, catching up on blogs and any site that had an RSS feed (basically most of them). It would automatically update as the site updated and generally had little or no advertising content. The formatting was minimal – mostly text and necessary images but no backgrounds or other formatting. And then, one day, Google cancelled the entire thing – likely because it was hard for it to make money. I went without it for years, trying a few online alternatives that tossed in algorithmic recommendations, ads and other nonsense. So now I have a self-hosted version of FreshRSS. I review the sites I follow to see who updated recently. Sometimes I read there and click through, other times I will send it to my Obsidian database. This I can then sync with my phone and iPad and read anywhere with or without an internet connection – and again without most ads or busy formatting.
Most algorithms: At first algorithms seemed really useful – they gave me the perfect browsing experience. But what they also managed to do on sites like YouTube is send more extreme content my way – in my case more upsetting doom news. Spotify gave me an ouroboros of music it thought I wanted to listen to mostly because last time I was on I listened to one of their algorithmic stations. So mostly now I follow human recommendations. Qobuz has human-curated playlists by their staff and subscribers. Stingray, a cool Canadian company, has playlists that make me think of the old site Songza – except these are also human-curated. When I do go to places like TikTok that use algorithms I have to be very aware of what I’m doing. A “like” or comment is a vote for “show me more like this”. This means if I see something upsetting and political but that I support (e.g. a No Kings protest video), liking it means I get more. If I were to comment on something I disagreed with (I don’t) then I’d get more of that too. So every once in a while I do have to look closely at who I follow (you get some of their likes also) and do some searches and like some content that is actually what I want to see. So far so good.
Ebooks: This is something that I find to be an actual improvement. With a huge bedbug issue in Toronto, I’m more reluctant than ever to bring library books into the house. However, Libby lets me borrow ebooks and magazines and so I’m reading as much as ever. What isn’t available at the library I’m able to source online. NOT from Amazon.
Google Photos: I was really into this app, uploading every photo I had and then setting up my phone to sync with it to send every photo I ever took up there. On the plus side, the AI was really useful for searching for photos on a given theme, from a place or of a particular person. On the creepy side, looking back they now have lots of photos of us over the years identified by name. Yikes! That was a dumb idea.
More practically, what I found when I downloaded the archive is this: Much of what I archived there was worthless. A photo of a shopping list from 2009? Got it, a photo I accidentally took of my foot in 2017? I have that too. And all of that syncs up to the cloud, taking up space that is costing me money and impacting the environment. As I started thinking of this, I realized something: There are whole data centres worth of photos that nobody cares about. Thousands of photos of funny photos taken for one text, a picture of a concert poster to remember ticket info, the location of a car in a parking garage. This digital hoarding is impacting the environment and making it harder for us to find the things we care about.
So for this aspect I’ve done something really simple. I unsubscribed from cloud storage. Every week or two I back up the photos in my phone I want to an external drive. And here’s the cool thing. That storage is off 99% of the time and is only turned on when needed to back up or find an old file.
AI: This one has been a mix for me. A year ago I was all in, making ridiculous songs on Suno, asking practical questions about diet and exercise, even making some programs for work to turn PDF tables into Excel sheets. Where I’m at now, though, is that like the photo storage, there is so much use that is completely unnecessary. Is it fun to make a song about that funny thing that happened on your last vacation? Sure. Is it worth the energy expended and impact? Not at all. Work-wise I’m finding it less useful for most things. It actually seems to do a worse job at doing things like reviewing documents than it did a year ago. I still have to spend the time reviewing looking for its mistakes. For example last week a colleague tried to get our company’s AI to put some powerpoint slides in the corporate format. It tried, and did a terrible job, adding tables and otherwise ruining the content. It would take longer to fix its mistakes than it would to just fix the format.
So for the most part, I use it for a few things: if all other computer troubleshooting has failed I’ll try AI. I also find that the Merlin Bird ID app is amazing at identifying bird calls and helps me learn to identify them – thus making me need it the more I use it. The same is true for Plantnet. Over time I think I’ll likely find ways to use those less also.
Looking back now what I see is that in the 90s and early 2000s, there was less of a push behind various platforms and technologies. If it was good you used it – even if it took a bit of work to get or keep running. If it was not, you didn’t use it no matter how easy it was. Now there’s so much advertising so many people end up on platforms they don’t like but are there because everyone else is and it’s so easy the idea of doing something else is so hard it’s unthinkable.
But things are slowly changing. Teens are starting to push back on tech, moving toward real-world experiences and turning away from smartphones at a rate faster than older generations. All it took was the ability (or simply the realization) that you can do interesting things and have fun with friends without using your phone – almost always more than with the phone.
And some people are even going back to the state of mind many of us in the 80s and early 90s had around computers – bringing it back to the DIY side of things. People are now building their own computers from scratch that look and behave exactly as they want them to.
So yes, there are many who are glued to their phones still (and many of the worst of them are old enough to remember lots of time before the phones were around.) However, I do see the tide turning. And just as I was an early adopter of tech in the 80s, I’m here for this early adoption of “right sized” tech – bring in new things that work, questioning what’s being used and tossing out the things that no longer serve us.
What’s your relationship with tech like?
Technology helped Aravind to be independent in his studies. Accessibility features in mobiles help him. And of course I cannot imagine life without the washing machine or induction stoves or smart pots.