The Last Quiet Thing
"That guilt was manufactured. It was placed inside you by an industry that profits from your participation and a wellness culture that profits from your shame."
This is a useful reframe of our relationship to technology, presented in an arresting way:
“What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn't a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking?”
I’m less enamored with the author’s reframe of the work to be done to maintain these devices as shifting from an IT department. That’s not the point, and it distracts from a stronger argument about finished products vs continuously-updated devices that want to have a codependent relationship with us. Whether it’s with an end user or an IT department, it’s still dysfunctional.
It reminds me of Amber Case’s Calm Tech Institute, which aims to promote these kinds of values. The quote it features on its homepage — “What matters is not technology itself, but its relationship to us.” from Xerox PARC technician Mark Weiser — is completely on-point. I hope we have more of these sorts of conversations.
[Link]