I Kinda Hate Everything About Tech

The only thing it's disrupting is the user experience

Image: Badly edited by author

I’m in a foul mood today.

It could be because my phone alarm decided not to go off, and I slept in. It may be because my computer chose violence, taking an age to load anything before crashing on me completely. It might have been that when trying to jump into my first video call meeting of the day, my headphones wouldn’t connect to my laptop. It might have been that when I was at the gym, my Spotify algorithm apparently took drugs and forgot who am I because the recommendations were terrible. It was just one of those days when technology did everything but work as it should.

The day had me feeling like Ron Swanson — and it was still only 11 am. 

I’ve since spent too long contemplating how everything tech-related around us has turned to shit, and my mood has only worsened. 

Just think of the current state of play in tech at the moment.

The big development of the past two years, Generative AI, offers almost nothing of real significance so far except to help so-called creators throw more sludge into the already overwhelmed content well. It’s resulted in more content, but all of it is of less quality than what we had before. Great. We also now have a market hedged on big bets on AI ventures that are looking unlikely to pay off anytime soon — and the reckoning is sure to be painful for everyone except the AI grifters who will happily move onto the Next Big Thing™. 

Google search, a core pillar of the internet, is completely broken. It fails to deliver results that are a) useful and b) earned in a fair manner. Instead, it favors sponsored posts and paid ads, exerts its power and influence to control the pecking order, and, of course, the worst update of all—generated AI overviews that pull from sources like Reddit as a source of truth. Google is quickly becoming the spam it spent the last 20 years trying to fight. 

Viewing almost any webpage online is shit — and even worse on smartphones. The internet is so polluted with inescapable ads, banners, autoplaying videos and more that trying to navigate most sites is unbearably awful. Many sites and apps are borderline unusable. When clicking close on an advert opens another in a popup window, again and again, it takes all my self control not to destroy my device. Any decent media that’s left is now stuck behind paywalls in a desperate bid for these sites and creators to make a buck and survive. It’s a reasonable ask, sure, but it still erodes the general user experience — and it’s impossible for most people to subscribe to more than a few. 

Hyperlinks are dying, and everything has turned into a walled garden out of fear of sending traffic to anyone but themselves. It’s left creators unable to utilize audiences across platforms, you know, the way it used to work; hell, the way it should be made to work. The platforms — and creators/users — have a lesser experience as a result.

As

Adam Singer

wrote, 

“At its core, the war on hyperlinks represents a betrayal of the promise of the internet – a promise of unfettered access to information, the democratization of knowledge and not letting centralized entities have full control. Some control by some cool products was fine, perhaps desired in places to create a good experience. But large social media brands have crossed the line, and not enough people care. By relegating external content to the shadows, platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn altered the deal with users, prioritizing corporate interests over the principles of openness and transparency.”

Algorithms suck across the board and have long stopped recommending anything remotely close to matching my “interests” — now we have algos designed to do nothing but churn out content that keeps people scrolling while simultaneously making us more depressed, hateful, dumb and detached from society. Remember when they used to show us content from friends? I miss messenger groups that aren’t swarmed with sponsored posts, scammers, or promotions for the latest shitcoin. Remember when they actually fulfilled the promise to connect us and help us build communities? The push towards engagement metrics — all done to fatten the wallets of shareholders — has eroded the entire experience. 

Social media is an absolute shitshow these days—everything is done for clicks and clout. Nothing is genuine. Everyone is shilling a product, a course or a podcast. Bots have overrun them, and thanks to AI, are getting more and more sophisticated. Twitter X, Facebook and LinkedIn are now just homes for bots and bot engagement, with bots now responding to their own shitty content in some bot death loop. Most engagement is fake. So many accounts are fake. When we soon have AI imagery, video, and voice that are impossible to tell apart from the real thing, we’re going to be in a whole heap of trouble. Can’t wait for Elon Musk to shout about how engagement has never been higher in the public town square, only to find out 90% of it doesn’t exist IRL. 

Another thing that pisses me off is subscriptions — hailed as possibly the only way to break the hold advertising has on most industries — that have now been replaced by subscriptions that still come with ads. These are honestly an insult to the consumer. Any time an ad appears on screen, on a service I pay for, I want to scream. How did we let this happen? It’s a tale as old as time: disrupt an industry, monopolize, and then destroy the user experience to make more money. Worse is the fact many of these subscriptions offer “premium features” as a way to lure us in, features that used to be standard. Not cool. 

I hate the current wave of hardware products that are all pointless, shitty ChatGPT wrappers that are completely broken on release, or unnecessary, expense trend chasers, like the Vision Pro, or just pure CreepTech. I hate that everything is controlled with some baked-in voice control, which leads to awkward silences, misinterpreted commands and incorrect responses. I hate “smart” gadgets that have only made our appliances and devices more dumb — oh, look, you can see into your fridge without opening the door. Revolutionary. 

I could keep going on, but this is likely as exhausting to read as it was to write. And it’s probably pointless anyway — I’m pining over times that have long passed us, that are merely specks in tech history. It isn’t going back to the way it was. In the growth-at-all-costs tech landscape, we’ve destroyed everything that made the internet, devices and social media fun. What we’ve got left is a hollow, vapid shell of its former glory. I hate it here.

It’s dawning on me that, as someone who lived with and without tech, this new world is not compatible with me.