Thoughts on Computer (1)

1

At some point in 2024, I realized that if my primary hobby was going to continue to be video games—that is to say, an activity exclusively conducted on screens and dubiously intertwined with the attention economy—I was going to need more control over the way I interact with screens that aren't game-related.


2

I think the touchscreen is profoundly overrated as an interface technology. If I am going to have to press a button to do something, I want the button (a) do what I think it will do and (b) to be where I think it will be. I want to perceive on a level as nearly intuitive as possible the relationship between a given input and what that input did. Touchscreens, especially smartphone touchscreens, are not great at performing these functions.

Obviously, no interaction I have with anything running on a CPU will be as immediate as pedaling a bicycle or pulling a lever. And the little vibration that phones do when, for example, you touch a button on the keyboard gets impressively close. But as anyone who has attempted to change the temperature in a car built in the last decade will tell you, there is a difference between turning a physical A/C knob and pawing at a capacitive touchscreen until a representation of an A/C knob pops up.

The object impermanence intrinsic to the touchscreen serves a purpose in terms of how many useful and semiuseful functions can be crammed in there. But the feeling of going to press a button that has vanished—or, perhaps more to later points I will make, the feeling of pressing a button that has suddenly popped up under your thumb—is not something we would tolerate under other circumstances. Compare the way we accept this disruption to the way we speak about the proprioceptive disorientation which follows from wrongly assuming a step is underfoot. Accidentally triggering the AI chatbot on a random retail website is like expecting a step that isn’t there, except we’re reaching for doorknobs that are turning into ATMs.

I’m overstating my case a bit for effect. But I do believe that the touchscreen is a useful stand-in here for the smartphone in general: neither has earned their hegemony on their merits, let alone democratically. And if, like me, you are someone prone to feeling disoriented basically all of the time, these mildly destabilizing interactions really add up, though I’m sure they’re annoying if you’re normal, too.


3

Here is a partial list of things I've regularly used my smartphone for: textual, verbal, and video-based communication; watching videos; reading books and news; listening to music, audiobooks, and lectures; engaging with academic material; recording music and voice notes; writing; checking the time; consulting and editing daily, weekly, monthly, and annual calendars; navigating physical space while driving and walking; consulting traffic reports; figuring out bus and train schedules; riding with car services; storing and using transportation and event tickets; registering for parking; finding urgent information; finding trivial information; remembering things; dealing with work and school logistics; ordering consumer goods; communicating with doctors and pharmacists; paying for things; ordering delivery; reading a restaurant menu inside of the restaurant; interfacing with my bank account.

Saying “I use my phone for a lot of stuff” is obvious to the point of uselessness, maybe. But it’s remarkable just how many things you can squeeze into a list like this, especially when you think about how you would perform these tasks without a smartphone.

To be clear, I do believe making one tool that can accomplish all of these tasks is an astonishing engineering achievement. It’s “convenient.” But catheterizing myself for a long drive would be “convenient,” too. When I pick up my phone to put on some music, then read a couple emails, remember an app I installed a while ago and meant to uninstall, uninstall it, read a text, then put the phone down, it’s like: killing two birds with one stone is “convenient,” but it’s disappointing when you went out just to birdwatch. When each of the tasks I need to perform on my phone requires passing through a fog-wall of distracting notifications, the frustration adds up.


4

At times, I struggle to feel a sense of agency over my own life. Some of this is philosophical or whatever, sure. But “the problem of free will” is not quite coterminous with the feeling that your life is, in some meaningful sense, out of your control. For me, this feeling was in large part circumstantial; an extended period of access to both prescription amphetamines and GLP-1 inhibitors has fully confirmed my intuition that “willpower” is an incoherent concept and that the people most likely to deploy it against you are literally cheating at being alive. In any case, I have begun, over the last couple of years, to feel a modicum of control over the circumstances and activities of my life. I’m still scared and confused most of the time, and I still don’t do a quarter of what I’d like to, but it’s pretty nice.

Because “control” can also mean some pretty nasty things, I have thought a lot about what I mean by it, or what it is I want that I call “control.” I think by “control” I mean roughly “the capacity to align my circumstances and actions with my values and desires.” I feel “out of control” whenever I am sideswiped by obligations I’d forgotten about, whenever I can’t direct my attention more-or-less where I’d like it to go, whenever I can’t sleep or eat well because I don’t like my living situation.

What this means is that the feeling of control can emerge from small, practical interventions. Here’s an example: I realized one day that I never worked at my desk. I told myself to work at my desk more, but that didn’t work, so I tried to figure out why I didn’t like working at my desk. Well, my chair sucks; let me put a little pillow under my back or whatever. Okay, that’s better, but I still don’t use it; why not? I don’t like how many cables are everywhere. I don’t like how Windows is laid out. My keyboard hurts my hand. The desk needs a lamp. No one of these fixes solved the problem on its own, but a few weeks of chipping away at them and suddenly I found myself working at my desk a lot more. I am sitting at it right now! This all was, in its way, a small, practical intervention in the direction of control. While tricky to get right, the only real constraint on this process when it comes to something like my desk are my resources.

Unfortunately, we are legally and practically forbidden from performing these kinds of interventions on our smartphones. This is not a technical limitation: we could be allowed to do this sort of thing. As Cory Doctorow emphasizes in Enshittification, every computer that exists can technically do everything that any other computer can do. Some might not have the hardware to do it at a reasonable speed, but they can, on principle, do it. What this means is that, if you can't do something with one piece of hardware that you can on a comparable piece of hardware, it is the result of human decisions.

For years, I have wanted to delete all web browsers and app stores from my phone. While I’d probably have to “sideload” (or install from a source outside of the app store) an app here or there, and I might have to borrow someone’s phone at some point to look something up, I wanted the temptations gone. But iOS and Android are configured to make this impossible.

The reasons for this are nefarious and obvious—they don’t want you to stop looking at your phone. (Android, at least, refers to apps such as these as “system apps” to give the vague impression that your phone will break without them, but of course it wouldn’t.) But it’s strange. Don’t I own this thing? Isn’t it mine to do what I want with? People might get sad if they accidentally delete the app store, sure, but if you turn on the developer tools you can fuck your shit up in a hundred different ways already; just lock the option back there.

As a “concession,” many phones now come with a widget that monitors how much you use different applications. The two functions of this seem to me to be (a) tricking you into thinking that the answer to an intrusive and inhumane economy built on constant surveillance is more surveillance and (b) making you feel guilty about how much time you’re spending on addictive software—including software they refuse to let you remove. On my Samsung Galaxy Whatever they call this surveillance app something like “Digital Wellbeing.” This makes me angry and upset, because it’s our lives they’re fucking with.


4

Consumption, as a rule, is not a means of exerting political agency. There are exceptions—yachts, Nazi black metal albums—but using Proton instead of Gmail isn't going to “do” anything, really.

Still, I think it is a useful personal exercise to exert agency where you feel agency is possible. I also think that the line between organized boycott and an individualist politics of consumption is, in a very few cases, thinner than you might believe. Veganism is a good example; ad blockers are another.

I am pessimistic about the prospects of boycotts like these given the scale. For example, the fares withheld by Black bus riders in Montgomery probably constituted a slightly larger percentage of the bus operators’ income than the money Microsoft lost from the BDS boycott of Xbox. But it’s good to participate in things like this, I think, because it makes participating in things down the line easier. And it's not like Xbox is doing particularly well right now, so hey. I’m not some fucking politics expert!


5

Likewise, extricating yourself from the clutches of Big Data is basically impossible. It's nice and good to toggle your Google settings in order to opt out of algorithmic recommendations, but those options strike me as akin to security theater. These companies lie to us, and the governmental bodies charged with forcing them to tell the truth not only fail to execute this function, but also lie to us. Tracking technology is sophisticated to the point of absurdity: even if you block every tracker and click no on every cookies pop-up, data brokers can figure out what you're up to online through your “browser fingerprint,” which is extremely hard to obscure, especially if you're doing things like installing ad-blocking extensions. If you are a cool elite freak like me running the a fork of Firefox called “Zen Browser” on Ubuntu with a bunch of weird extensions, well.

That said, I do think it's worth remembering that it's not just you versus some abstractly deific panopticon-wielding megacorp. Individual decisions about individual technologies can wind up important. “Tea,” a popular app that cynically captures and commodifies women's “whisper networks,” has experienced not one but two breaches revealing extremely sensitive information to potentially hostile actors. Perhaps even more dystopianly, personal materials (mostly publically available photos of real women) used to prompt an "erotic AI chatbot" were being hosted in an unprotected cloud bucket.

While the chatbot victims couldn't have done anything to avoid that (and the victims of the Tea leaks certainly aren't to blame, either), I think these underscore the specificity of individual privacy concerns. I don't think it's particularly likely that the NSA has much use for my SMS metadata right now—they're drowning in data anyway^[1]; and while I don't at all like the idea of Gemini training on the content of my Google Docs, in the context of the entire corpus of human writing they're probably not wringing a lot of profit out of my short stories.^[2]


6

It's good that using the computer is easier than it was back in the day. I need it to be relatively easy to use, because I'm not smart enough to figure out all of how a computer works. I doubt I will ever have the discipline, interest, or time to Learn to Code.

Since high school I’ve done shit like “put Linux on my laptop and then never use it.” But during the heady stimulus-check days of the pandemic, I had, suddenly and randomly, both the capital and interest to do shit like buy a Nintendo 3DS and jailbreak it. I didn’t really learn anything from doing this; I just followed tutorials. But after a few years of just following tutorials, I realized, embarrassingly recently, that I could absolutely learn something about how the computer works. I am still in the very early stages of doing this, but it was a very cool realization to have.

Like society writ large, computers are so complicated that nobody can master everything they are and do. In the same way that I’d love to be a true-blue expert on stuff like trees, sewage treatment, klezmer music, what the fuck a “comptroller” does, etc., I’d love to be able to program in COBOL, troubleshoot enterprise network problems, DDOS government websites with a botnet constructed out of unprotected smart thermostats (jokes!), etc. This is not going to happen.

However, I can still learn a little bit about how stuff works. I can get better at troubleshooting and take on slightly more ambitious projects. I can learn Markdown and a little HTML and some basic best practices for security and some command-line stuff. I’m not going to contribute to the body of technical knowledge in the world, but I can gain some marginally practical skills in a way that will make my life, if not better, a little more interesting. For someone who’s long conceived of myself as basically untechnical, this is a nice idea!

And, in the same way that participating in a consumer boycott and attempting to reduce the amount of information marketers have about me and realizing that I don’t have to like the design of smartphones can perhaps best be conceived as a type of “practice” for more serious and important things, I think that learning a bit here and there about the stuff I like and use is good practice. I realized long ago that I would never be a political organizer, but I only recently realized that openness to being organized is its own (admittedly lesser) skill, and I want to be available to help out how and where I can. I don’t know if this adds up or makes sense but at least it’s kind of fun or whatever.