What tech has taken from us, and how to get it back

We're all "screenagers" now

A quick announcement: I had so much fun offering Permission to Play over these past two weekends that I’m planning to offer more workshops like it. I’m open to suggestions for topics, so if there’s anything creativity-related that you’d like to learn more about in a fun group setting, please hit “reply” right now, or leave a comment, and let me know. Thanks!

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One thing I’ve noticed since joining Substack is that my inbox is constantly on overload. There’s just so much to read here, by so many fabulous people. It’s impossible to keep up with all of it, no matter how grand your intentions.

I was weeding out that inbox a few days ago and came upon a post by

Ted Gioia

, who writes about music and culture. He recently published an email he received from an 11th grader in response to a post of his own, “The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn’t Happening in College.” That original post starts off with a note about the state of tech:

Nobody trusts the technocracy anymore. People suffer from it.

Almost everybody I hear from has some horror story to share. Like me, they loved new tech until recently, and many worked in high positions at tech companies. But then they saw things go bad. They saw upgrades turn into downgrades. They watched as user interfaces morphed into brutal, manipulative command-and-control centers.

Things got worse—and not because something went wrong. The degradation was intentional. It happened because disempowerment and centralized control are profitable, and now drive the business plans.

Gioia is basically describing what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification.” And it is indeed difficult to look at the state of Big Tech anymore and remember its glory days, when we all thought it was going to be sunshine and flowers and instantaneous, accurate Google searches all day long. And it’s only been, what—a decade? That’s a pretty quick shift.

I used to work in IT, way back in the long ago, in the late 90s/early 2000s, so I remember some of this better than others might—the absolute awe of the first WiFi routers, for instance, when I literally carried a laptop down a hallway while surfing to test one, stunned that such a thing was possible. What other wonders were we in for?

But now? I encourage you to set aside some time to read Gioia’s whole post. It is deeply thought-provoking. He looks at how tech has eroded our humanity through the rise of algorithms and AI-driven systems, all in the relentless pursuit of profit over people, and how we need the humanities more than ever to combat tech- and finance-focused thinking.

As just one example of that kind of thinking, he includes a quote from Sam Bankman-Fried, the famed literary expert who didn’t at all perpetrate a massive financial fraud that he’s now sitting in prison for—no, no—about the “failings” of William Shakespeare.

Silly us, thinking of Shakespeare in terms of art rather than “Bayesian priors.” It reminds me of that VH1 “Save the Music” promo from 15-20 years ago where a kid insults street musicians, to his mother’s horror, because he can’t see the value in music at all thanks to schools cutting arts education. SBF is that kid come to life and all grown up.

As worthwhile as Gioia’s original essay is, I’m really interested in the response from a high school student, who went into a lot of detail about what’s happening among his generation. Again, the whole thing is worth reading, but this particular section stood out (emphasis mine):

Kids are stuck in an age of simplicity and ease, attention spans are decreasing, the yearning to actually learn something has plummeted, and yet, I feel sympathy because students like those are simply a product of their environment.

[…]

I am witnessing my peers and younger kids begin to resent technology simply because of everything it has taken from them. It has robbed them of a life that is fulfilling and actually worth living. Technology has altered people's perception of reality and it has created an absolute echo chamber of villainizing and dehumanization.

Now, students are realizing the importance of human connection and actually crave it, but see technology as a barrier to achieving human connection.

Eeeeeeeeeyyyyyiiikes.

I’m not gonna lie: this hits, and not just because my first thought was for my nephews, who are still young enough to think Minecraft on the iPad is second only to soccer as height of human existence, but also because my second thought was for me.

Me, my friends, my entire generation, and frankly, all of us.

I see myself in this quote. I see my peers in this quote. I’m old enough to remember when we were promised the “paperless office” and that the computers were going to do all the work and we’d just push a button occasionally, like George Jetson, and it would be a fabulous utopian life.

The older I get, the more I think that vision was a lie. At the very least, it was overly idealistic. Not that it matters which it was: the effect is the same. (And now that I’m writing about this, was it an accident that Jetson worked for “Cogswell Cogs”?)

Back in 1989, a new friend in my freshman dorm, whose dad was a civilian in the Air Force, introduced me to these two wild, newfangled things called “email” and “the internet.” Who knew it was possible to send a message halfway around the world in a matter of minutes? Or to tap into online resources like Usenet, the predecessor to online message boards and then Facebook groups/Reddit?

I literally had to fill out an application for an email address back then, justifying why I needed it, in order to get one from my university. The only catch was that it wasn’t much use if you didn’t have anyone to receive the email on the other end, and in 1989, who did? I tried to convince my parents to get a modem and an email address, but you’d have thought I’d asked them to roller-skate to the moon for as much sense as that request made to them.

When that same friend set me up with the “talk” command on the VT-100 terminal in the dorm so I could chat in real time with a friend in another state—for free!—it was like living in a Star Trek episode.

At the same time, I got to where I used that service enough that I was spending a lot of time sitting in front of a screen, typing out a conversations with a friend who appeared only as words on that screen. (Sound familiar?) And even then, as young and naive as I was at 18, a sort of unease crept in. I began to see the future of humanity as, very possibly, one where we all just sat in our own little rooms staring at screens all day, without a lick of genuine human contact—only the illusion of it.

Who could have imagined that those screens would live in our pockets? That we’d never want for the answer to a question because it would be handed to us the second we typed it into that magic screen? That some of us would come to say, “All my friends live in my phone” because we mostly send text messages on a device that was originally designed to enable long-distance voice communication, which is much more human, but which an awful lot of people essentially refuse to do anymore?

We never anticipated that technology giveth, and technology taketh away. Or, more specifically, the tech bros/corporate boards/shareholders taketh away.

As just one example, this past week, the CEO of the Bumble dating app announced that they’ll be adding AI into the app so that your profile’s AI and your potential date’s AI can talk to each other to decide if you’re worth an actual screen-based conversation. Why would they think you’d want even less human connection in what should be the ultimate connective experience? Did anyone actually ask for this?

What could possibly go wrong?

I frequently find myself trying to think back 25-30 years, before I even had a computer in my house, to remember what I did to pass the time that didn’t involve one kind of screen or another. There were so many hours—what did I do with them before it was all internet and text messages and TV streaming? Do I even remember?

If I think hard enough, I do. I talked to friends regularly, whether in person or on the phone (and the latter often cost a ridiculous amount—remember the long-distance rate wars? 1-800-COLLECT?). I read a whole lot more, because my attention span hadn’t yet been shredded to something that would appall even a goldfish. I got out of the house and took classes at the local adult school, hung out at a coffee shop, went to see plays or was in them, sang in a local choir, got together with friends for dinner, and probably more that I haven’t dredged up yet.

Some of these things, in fairness, were victims more of the pandemic than of technology, but the technology that got us through the pandemic hasn’t left. It wasn’t temporary.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the one thing I’ve heard over and over again as I’ve been putting my new course together is that people want community. Even in a one-on-one course, there’s a longing for connection with others, especially others who are doing the same kind of thing.

We get upset at our kids for wanting to stare at screens all the time, but are we any better? I think we’re worse, not only because most of us stare at a computer screen all day at work before we come home and stare at our phones, but also because we don’t have parents looking over our shoulder to tell us our time’s up. Part of the reason we react to our kids’s screen use is almost certainly a kind of worried projection based on our own behavior.

Our kids know we’re hypocrites. They’re not stupid.

I’d bet, if you ask the average “screenager” (what a great term) what technology has taken from them, they’ll put relationships with their family on the list. Maybe at the top. And, of course, their friends, but you don’t live with your friends. You live with your family. Like everyone else, their families are all addicts scrolling for their next dopamine hit, too. Even if parents and siblings don’t spend all their time looking at their phones, they probably spend enough to make any kid feel disconnected—and more lonely.

What must it be like right now to be 17, trying to figure life out? I imagine feeling that technology has taken away my entire generation’s social skills, my mental health (how many kids have anxiety and depression now?), an attention span I might not even have had the chance to develop, my ability to be bored and to live with not knowing an answer to a question immediately (and possibly my intellectual curiosity along with it), my privacy (if I ever really knew what that was), the full depth of human relationships, and my sense of myself as a human first rather than a biological appendage to a device that wants to be the center of my world because that’s how someone else with more money than any one person should ever have makes even more money?

It’s bad enough for me as a 50-something. But for a kid? That’s a horror show. It’s something out of a Black Mirror episode, but for these kids, it’s reality.

And it’s done all this under the pretense of being some sort of great societal good.

Obviously, tech has its upsides. But we need to start thinking about the downsides, too.

I do this experiment sometimes when I have to wait in a doctor’s exam room: I leave my phone across the room and see what happens. It doesn’t take much more than a minute or two before I’m like a junkie jonesing for my fix, to my horror and disappointment (though I know I’m not even remotely alone in this, and I’m not surprised by it at all).

When’s the last time you were bored? How long did you last?

I keep trying because I think boredom is important, and being able to tolerate boredom also means being able to entertain ourselves with our own thoughts—an important source of creativity. The brain doesn’t like a vacuum, so it wants to fill that space somehow. It’ll reach for its electronic drug of choice if we let it—it took two full weeks for me to go through Facebook withdrawal when I deactivated my account in 2017—but that’s not really what it needs—and not really what it wants, either.

What does the brain want? At the core, I believe it wants what the soul wants. As our student friend says, it wants connection. Real connection, not just the illusion of it that we get from text messages or Facebook. Once I detoxed from Facebook, I had zero desire to go back.

It wants meaning, too. Real meaning. It wants to do something that feels purposeful, that makes us feel like we made a difference by being here. That we matter to someone else—and they matter to us, too.

And, of course, it wants to create. It wants to experience the magic of flow and imagination meeting up and something new coming out of that process. It wants to be curious about what’s happening and how it can be better. It wants, as counterintuitive as this might sound, to experience the frustrations of creating, and of being fully alive, along with the joy of those things, because that’s what it means to have a full, true, human experience.

I may be biased, but I think one of the most powerful antidotes to our digital dystopia, to the algorithms deciding what you see on Instagram (or insert your favorite platform here) and trying to hook you into its little world forever, is to carve out space to live in the analog world of 3D creation.

Pick up a piece of clay and make something out of it, even if it doesn’t look like what you saw in your head. Sit down at a piano and play something, even if it’s been years and it sounds terrible. Grab your camera—preferably one that’s not part of your phone, if you have one—and take it outside so it can show you a different view of the world. Dance for the sheer joy of remembering that you are in a body and that it feels so good to move. Find the art in that hunk of raw wood and spend an afternoon bringing it out. Put your words down on paper. (Yes, if you’re a writer, that may still involve looking at a screen, but it’s still an active pursuit, rather than passive scrolling, and what you’ll really be seeing is the adventure inside your head.)

The dopamine hit you’ll get from any of these activities beats doomscrolling any day of the week. Not only do we get to do something in the real world that you love, but we also can point to the thing you made, even if you don’t think it’s any good. Scrolling through Twitter or Instagram can never do that for us.

It’s so easy, and maybe even glib, to say that creativity is the solution to everything that ails us, but a lot of the time, it’s at least a part of that solution. Giving time to something that captivates us helps to restore our attention span. It activates our curiosity and slows us down—something a lot of us have forgotten how to do—which helps to regulate our nervous system. It connects us with our deepest selves and our spirit. It gives our imagination a chance to stretch and grow, all while reminding us that we have one in the first place. If we’re doing it right—without burying ourselves under mountains of pressure and perfectionism—it can remind us how to have a good laugh at ourselves, freeing up a lot of tension we didn’t even realize we’d been holding inside us.

Creativity isn’t therapy, but boy, oh boy, is it therapeutic. And it’s the fastest way I know of to remind ourselves that we really are human beings after all—with all our potential and all our flaws.

What a glorious thing that is.