Operating Under Constraints
Today I've given myself two constraints to see what surfaces.
The first is time. I've allowed 33 minutes for the first draft. I might tack another 30 on the end for editing, but that's that. Not so long, but it's enough.
The second is program-related. Rather than Google Docs or Microsoft Word, I'm reverting back to good, old-fashioned Notepad, and am pleasantly surprised. It’s simple and it's improved significantly in the intervening years. You can do bullet points, you can create H1/H2/H3, it's got bold/italics functionality, and you can input hyperlinks.
In short, Notepad is what Microsoft Word once was when it was a WORD PROCESSING program.
And I'm typing this with no internet connection, because Google and Microsoft both need one of those pesky things.
Google and Microsoft have been forcing AI onto their users for years, but I could not give less of a shit about drafting anything with assistance. That's the part of the work that is human.
The first time Microsoft threw a 'start drafting with AI' on my previously blank page I went postal and cancelled my subscription in that moment, and if you don’t know it yet that’s a lost customer for life. I can be very stubborn.
Google pulled the same trick later. They were sneakier about it, but the outcome was the same. ‘We've bundled AI into your product, and we've increased the price, and you're going to enjoy it’. Due to web hosting I've kept Google, but it's on my 'soon to be addressed' list.
The upgrades keep making things worse.
How Did We Get Here?
I spent my morning deep in conversation with a guy who is bringing awareness to our technological systems. He is showing that they are, by design, destroying our way of life, and controlling us against our will.
I'm inclined to agree with 85% of his positions, though that final 15% of disagreement always comes down to Who Are They? and What About Human Behaviour?. That said, I don't need you to show me who is pulling the strings to believe that if there are strings, someone is pulling them.
But my own experience of technological improvements echoes his sentiments, and Ted Gioia has been going on about it for a long time too. Somewhere along the line technology stopped delivering benefits with its updates, and started building an inescapable structure that no longer improves over time.
For as long as I can remember, a software update was always a harbinger of doom. 'What's going to go wrong this time?' Planned obsolescence, coming soon to an Apple/Microsoft/Tech product near you.
We are adding complexity on complexity, solving ever more complicated, nuanced problems, but the infrastructure these solutions are being built into creates its own problems. I don't know that mixing anti-venom with venom is effective.
If you build the solutions to our problems into the internet in an attempt to save the internet and the real world, you merely interface the solutions of the world into the internet.Which means, if you want to solve the world's problems, you have to use the internet.
But what if the internet isn't there?
Where Are We Going?
(20 minutes left)
The guy believes that the infrastructure and technology underpinning the internet is collapsing. He has his reasons. I couldn't keep up with them because I don't understand tech like him, but I can see it with my own eyes. There's countless benefits from the huge developments in technology, but the problems of social isolation and community breakdown don't seem to be seeing benefits.
And the bill is coming due.
Jack Dorsey, the guy who made Twitter, is building a messaging system that works through Bluetooth connectivity rather than the internet. Fucked if I know how that works, but he's a smart cat and he's already built it.
The post-internet infrastructure is already under construction. We are looking to tech for connection, and are locked into this narrative that the only way to find it is through technology.
I can't help but feel like these ultra-intelligent people can also be colossally stupid.
Most societies where people live long lives tend to have a social fabric, a connected network of humans sharing time, effort, and energy together, with a shared goal: survival, and as much enjoyment of the days we have.
And then you have your Bryan Johnson's; people who are determined to not die, and think that the best way is to synthesise the human experience into lab-grown meals of plasma and other stranger-than-science-fiction things.
Are we determined to learn nothing from history?
Sometimes The Simplest Solution Is The Best Solution
(13 minutes left)
Time is the great judge. Time has proven to us that living in a community improves our chances of survival. It has proven that shelter goes a long way too, along with food, sanitation, and trade.
When things get complicated, messy, or convoluted, they tend to break down. Anyone who has mastery in any field or discipline, knows the basics so deeply that they can ignore them entirely and produce excellence. But a system designed to expand and grow as rapidly as possible has never had the chance to consolidate. It hasn't mastered the basics yet.
If my discovery of Notepad is any indication, we're seeing a reversion to what works, though I’m sure it’ll surprise Microsoft and Google. I will be writing all future posts in Notepad. There are no colours, distractions, or bullshit. I am processing words with my word processing software. Exactly what I wanted to do with it all along.
And I can do it offline.
A Prayer For Pre-2000s Gaming
(7 minutes left)
The online/offline problem is relatively recent, and video games are the best (worst?) example.
Once upon a time you could put a disc or a cartridge in a console, turn on the console and TV, and play a game with your friend immediately. No updates, no connectivity problems, no need for an account where all your data was stored, just pure fun and entertainment shared with your friends.
This is what people want. And I am willing to bet it's coming back.
As the age of connectedness implodes and crashes around us, people are looking to their actual social networks, communities, and friendship circles for support and entertainment.
Constantly ‘downloading information’, from the internet or otherwise, is frying our capacity to be human. If our mind generates too much heat (or electricity) and our body isn’t strong and healthy enough for the charge, we burn out. Hence the expression burnout.
The beauty of nature is that you can look at a tree and your mind doesn't need to tell a story about it.
If we spend a little bit more time with trees in reality and less time planting digital trees in online fields, we might be able to spend more time walking around with an expression of awe and wonder at the beauty of how it all comes together.
It might be the answer to the collapse of the internet.
If you're looking for me, I'll be watering pages of my notebooks with ink from my pen, and occasionally planting seeds in my newly discovered Notepad forest, propagating them into Substack when they're ready.
Much love, and catch you all soon <3
"...solving ever more complicated, nuanced problems, but the infrastructure these solutions are being built into creates its own problems." My take on this is: tech people gotta produce something to keep their jobs. Mostly, it is solutions in search of a problem.
"The beauty of nature is that you can look at a tree and your mind doesn't need to tell a story about it." Not entirely true. I know trees that dance, sometimes ballet, sometimes it's jazz, depending on the whims of the wind. Sometimes the trees dance far, far away, and you can hear the dancers coming closer and closer until they blast you overhead in their ecstatic frenzy. I've seen them bend to harsh Arctic winds, literally bent in half as they resist the wind's need to break them. Then, as soon as the wind isn't looking, they stand up straight, tall and laughing at the wind, reaching their branches out to release the birds who sheltered within.