The solution to technology is not more technology. The solution to loneliness is each other, a wealth that should be available to most of us most of the time. We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust. Technology has stolen us from each other and in many ways from ourselves, and then tried to sell us substitutes.
I spent the weekend attending my town's annual summer festival. It was a ton of fun despite being packed to the gills with people, a natural consequence of our town's decade-long explosion of growth.
That growth has manifested in the shape of mcmansions packed together like sardines, distribution warehouses for mega corporations, and data centers for notorious champions of privacy and democracy.
Our town has courted a couple of new gyms and restaurants, but I'd love to start seeing us recruit businesses that provide opportunities for us to commune. You know, things like new dining options, shopping centers, theaters, arcades, churches, pickleball venues! Hell, why not a Puttshack?
Maybe I need to find a way to buy that open parcel of land that's a couple blocks from my house and build a coffee shop on it.
We are told that machines will become like us, but in many ways they demand we become more like them. To let that happen is to lose something immeasurably valuable. That immeasurability is what makes this struggle difficult, but what cannot be measured can be described or at least evoked and valued. It cannot be boiled down to simple metrics such as efficiency and profitability.
Resisting the annexation of our hearts and minds by Silicon Valley requires us not just to set boundaries on our engagement with what they offer, but to cherish the alternatives. Joy in ordinary things, in each other, in embodied life, and the language with which to value it, is essential to this resistance, which is resistance to dehumanisation.
This is a case where he had direct decision-making authority during the time period when the very worst most dystopian parts of the technology business model were developed, perfected and entrenched.
He is giving this commencement speech to a group of students who have known nothing but that their whole lives. They're not like me. They didn't know a time before all of this. They didn't experience technology in the 80s or something like this. So all they know is the dark pattern version. All they know is the one where they don't own anything and their data is kept by other people and their behavior is tracked and their data is sold and they are targeted for advertising. That's what they know about technology. That's what technology is like for them and only that.
Eric Schmidt, one of the primary architects, is now looking them in the eye with a straight face and saying, "You should be enthusiastic about the next new wave of technology. You should want to be in the room and make decisions about how that new technology will go. And you should bring your humanity with you and your good judgment about how we can do things in a way that will benefit all of us and be good for all of us."
Well, yeah, but why didn't Eric Schmidt do any of that? He just said in the first part of the commencement speech that there were all these really bad things that happened on his watch and he was in the rooms the entire time. He was in one of the most important rooms where these decisions were being made and he either didn't want to or couldn't stop any of that from happening.
So if he wanted to pass on something valuable to these students... well, that would have been the thing. It would have been the introspection of what went wrong. Why did he fail? Why did he say "okay" to building this very bad aspect of technology on top of the useful tool? The parts that we all think are actually good. Why didn't he stop that part? Why doesn't he take some responsibility for it?
If you are gonna take credit (and win capitalism) for building Google, you gotta take credit for all of it. Looking back in 2026, was the invention of Google a net-positive for society? How about Microsoft, or Apple, or Meta?
This is a beautifully-designed thesis on why we should all go back to having personal websites, which is a topic I could go off on for days.
I hadn’t heard of Tools For Conviviality before, but I think I need to add that to my list:
In his book Tools For Conviviality, technology philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich identifies these two critical moments, the optimistic arrival & the deadening industrialization, as watersheds of technological advent. Tools are first created to enhance our capacities to spend our energy more freely and in turn spend our days more freely, but as their industrialization increases, their manipulation & usurpation of society increases in tow5.
Illich also describes the concept of radical monopoly, which is that point where a technological tool is so dominant that people are excluded from society unless they become its users. We saw this with the automobile, we saw it with the internet, and we even see it with social media.
Illich’s thesis allows us to reframe our adoption and use of the technologies in our life. We can map fairly directly most technological developments in the last 100 (or even 200) years to this framework: a net lift, followed by a push to extract value and subsequent insistence upon the technology’s ubiquity.
Because this is how we are conditioned to see value: we are only valuable if we do x,y and z – this is also how we value other people and our selves. It perpetuates an insidious suffering because very few people are truly loved or seen. We are not loved for who we are but the roles we play and the actions we make. Obedience is seen as a great virtue. Wanting to live in a way that we want is seen as selfish. When other people get to live in an unconventional way they want we ostracise them for it. If I didn’t get to do this, you can’t do it too. If I suffered, you should suffer too. Sometimes weird shit happens even if we do societally-valued things. For example, if we start caring about our health by eating better or exercising more, suddenly we start getting comments about how we are too health-conscious and should loosen up more.
If we spend a few moments thinking about this, it is shocking how little space we have to be our selves. Who exactly are our selves anyway? We may not know because we did not have the time, space or permission to unfold. We spend so much time and energy chasing the goals we think we want, without contemplating why we wanted them in the first place.
Another one I got a sore neck from reading because I found myself nodding vehemently the entire time.
Psychologist Paul Bloom's research on pleasure suggests that we derive our deepest satisfactions not from hedonic experiences but from making meaning; not from having but from being; not from displaying but from experiencing; not from accumulating but from connecting.
In response, new status hierarchies have emerged that privilege experiences that money alone cannot buy: deep relationships, creative fulfillment, community belonging, physical vitality, spiritual practice, and environmental stewardship. In some ways, these new status markers are even more rarified than the old ones, if only because they're harder to fake. Anyone with money can buy a Rolex, but you can't purchase the glow of someone who has fulfilled duty, found purpose. You can't buy your way into belonging to a community that values contribution over consumption.
This isn’t to say that material prosperity has been rejected entirely. But it is a more sophisticated, epistemic relationship with wealth – treating financial capital as just one form of abundance alongside social, intellectual, physical, and spiritual capital.
One of the best parts of going through unemployment was being forced to figure out who I wanted to be.
One way to approach this exercise is to identify what you do not want to be. The easiest entries on that list involved chasing status through my job title and material possessions.
Tradeoffs exist; improving one aspect of a system can make other aspects worse. As projects grow, our control over them shrinks. Ugly truths abound, and beauty is a luxury we can rarely afford.
Knowing this, however, does not mean accepting it. Confronted with this dissonance, this ugliness, we inevitably gesture towards a better future. We talk about better design, better practices, better processes. We await better abstractions. We imagine a world in which we cannot help but make something beautiful.
This belief in the future, in an unending ascent towards perfection, is a belief in progress. The flaws in this belief — its internal tensions, the fact that it is closer to a theology than a theory — have been pointed out for centuries. It is, nevertheless, an inescapable part of the software industry. Everything we do, whether design or implementation, is oriented towards an imagined future.
This is a beautiful sentiment about software systems which could easily apply to most any system (like, our political and social systems, for example).
I was listening to a podcast episode the other day while I was driving and in there there was a thought that stuck with me: the idea that the web is moving from a creator economy to a curator economy. With a web flooded with AI generated slop and the platforms themselves encouraging it, the role of curators is gonna become more and more important. Who knows, maybe with a digital world filled with low-quality garbage we’ll find refuge in old-school printed magazines.
I would love that!
I recently watched the Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary, and one point they made clear was that so much of early skateboarding culture was shaped by misfits around the country reading the same skateboarding magazines and being inspired by the same people.
Shared culture is something I find myself missing these days. Unless you and your friends are watching the same stuff, you quickly run out of things to talk about.
It’s great I have a place to talk with people about the indie web or large language models or The Simpsons, but I miss the larger, more generic topics that we can all bond over more easily together.
As a self-declared Poet, I can confidently describe the Police because it is a job requirement that develops strong working relationships with these essential humans. I need them because the Police do the challenging work of keeping the trains on time. This isn’t simply holding conductors to a schedule but also maintaining the trains, taking care of the track, and ensuring we have a qualified staff of humans to do all this work. Oh, and how about a budget? How are we going to afford all of this? Someone needs to build a credible business plan for this train company so we can afford to keep the trains on time.
As a self-declared Poet, we also need to understand the aspirational goals of this train company. I also understand the importance of consistently sharing this vision with everyone. I know we need to listen because we need to understand how the company feels. I’m adept at organizing teams of humans with differing ideas and skills. It’s an endless puzzle that I enjoy attempting to solve. I love celebrating our victories. I feel our failures deeply, but I know that with the Police, we will learn from these failures.
I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking my personality is Police, but I think it’s because I’ve been ashamed to admit I’m actually a Poet.
My kids used to watch Daniel Tiger, and there was a song on there that went, “Everyone’s job is important, we all help in different ways.”
Our society needs Police equally as much as we need Poets.
I left that conversation admiring his conviction, as well as feeling overwhelming self-consciousness that I was—I dunno, too acquiescent? Hearing him speak so confidently—his assuredness ignited envy within me. Embers that smolder to this day. The older I get, the less confident I feel about anything. The less I want to fight. The less I want to debate. I used to burn so hot. I could argue online for hours. Now, the thought of it makes my skin crawl. It's not that I don't feel strongly, but I don't feel so strongly that I want to spend my days mired in anxiety and rage trying to make people see reason.
But Sam, the older he got, the more he seemed to dig in. Why was he so willing to fight? Why wasn't I?
A heart wrenching story about two cousins who slowly drift apart due to our ever-increasing disability to have civilized, polite disagreements with one another.
Getting older brings a certain sadness with realizing the things you once thought were true and unimpeachable were actually broken all along.
And while that may be a truism, it’s how we accept and appreciate the things we have while we have them which makes life beautiful and bearable.
Businesspeople, governments, and politicians aren’t looking to solve problems; they’re looking to win arguments. And the way you win an argument is by pretending that what should be an open-ended question with many possible right answers isn’t one. Make it enjoyable, have free booze on the train, put Wi-Fi on the train, have a ball pit on the train for kids—these are the Disney answers. Those are multiple and involve what you might call human judgment. You can’t win an argument with those.
What you do is pretend this is a high school math problem with a single right answer, you solve for the right answer using high school math, and then nobody can argue with you because apparently you haven’t made a decision. You’ve simply followed the data.
This is a massive problem in decision-making. We try to close down the solution space of any problem in order to arrive at a single right answer that is difficult to argue with.
Shout out to my buddy Chris who shared this with me. This whole article is so great, one that was difficult to pull only a single quote from.
I do like the author’s conclusion as well, which talks about the notion of “slow AI.” Maybe not every problem needs to be solved instantaneously.
