Taking back control of our digital life

How to get the most out of tech while freeing ourselves from the lunatics in Silicon Valley.

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

The greatest bit of tech in my life is the photo gallery on my Google Home. Every day, it cycles randomly through my photos. There are a couple of these devices around the flat, so wherever I go I encounter a memory - usually of my dog, often of some night I'd forgotten, occasionally of people I haven't seen for a while. Sometimes it's an image of someone who has died and you experience this strange sad delight, to see them again, as if still present, nestled in the minutiae of your day.

I could buy a physical frame and put a photo in it or get a dedicated digital photo frame. But I would soon ignore the former and would never have thought to buy the latter. The photo galleries on Google Home devices were an afterthought. No-one bought the product for this reason. No-one designed it for that reason. It was just something they chucked in for when it wasn't doing anything. And yet it gives me more pleasure than any other bit of tech I have in this flat.

We barely have the language to speak about what's good about tech anymore. We're so used to it being this monstrous oppressive force that it feels almost unnatural to observe the ways in which it has improved life.

I am growing to truly despise AI. Every time I start a new paragraph on the word processor I’m using to type this, Google puts a little icon by my cursor saying: 'Help me write'. It is a daily insult, to have this tawdry thieving little machine, this patronising empty-minded cunt, suggest it can tell me goddamn thing about writing. That insult is only aggravated by the fact that it learned to mimic writing by stealing my book.

But much as I hate to admit it, AI is also improving my life in all sorts of small but meaningful ways. I use an app to track what I'm eating (I know, don't start). If I use a recipe online, it allows me to just chuck the url into the app and it will build the list of ingredients. It is simply very handy. In other instances, it has been life changing. Before Google Maps, I would get lost going to the local shops. Since it was invented, I am capable of fooling people into thinking I possess elementary spatial competence. That's AI. I am grateful for it and have no plans to do without it.

The negative impact of tech is well rehearsed. Our tech overlords enjoy an extraordinary degree of power with hardly any accountability. They control, to a very large extent, the information ecosystem. In Musk's case, they actively spread far-right messaging and support far-right movements. But even seemingly more benign sites, like Facebook or Instagram, serve to shatter our relationship with the world.

The candy-crack engine whirrs into life, with one intention and one intention only: to grab your fucking eyes and embed them in the screen. One post, then another, then another, scroll down, escalating sense of crisis, constant presentation of opposing views in their most lurid and outrageous terms, with an algorithm behind it which is specifically selecting this kind of content to show you instead of something more moderate, bringing with a kind of baffled hatred rather than structured disagreement, and now there’s a video of a beautiful person with a perfect six pack and you wonder why you don't look like that, and then an ad for this, and an ad for that, creating problems in you that don't exist to sell you products you do not need, might get it anyway, and then perhaps just quickly answer this email, it's a work thing, and then reply to your friend on WhatsApp because that notification icon is sitting there and needs clearing away, but then a breaking BBC news report about something terrible Netenyahu did, so let’s see what people are saying about that, and then the whole dreadful cycle will begin anew.

Then, most frightening of all, there are the moments when you pick up the phone even though you had only just put it down a couple minutes earlier. You go through a regime of empty motions. Check one app. Check another. Nothing there. Stare at it. Recognise that you are behaving like a rat in a cage, distractedly pulling levers that once triggered a dopamine response.

It's not just that the tech overlords have become fascistic, or that they have joined forces with a specifically fascist administration in the US. It is that they are inflicting terrible psychological damage upon us. They're wrecking our political system and wrecking our minds.

There must be a balance between these two positions. There must be a form of moderate tech disinvestment, which allows us the things we benefit from while removing the things which harm us.

I have no answers for this but have basically been trying to find them for the last five months or so. One of the first changes I made was to cancel Amazon. This provided me with Amazon Prime TV, free fast Amazon deliveries and Audible audiobooks. They're all gone now. You don't realise quite how big a change this will be until you do it. I now use the Boots, Argos and HMV website a lot, like I'm journeying back into my childhood. It's actually quite reassuring, as if you were walking around town with your mother on a Saturday morning in the early 1990s.

Needless to say, everything costs more and takes longer to arrive. There's nothing desirable about this, although honestly there is something strangely satisfying about it - that life moves a little less quickly, requires a little more planning. It feels more wholesome somehow.

Instead of streaming, I'm switching to Blu-Rays. There's still a rental service out there - Cinema Paradiso. Like the glory days of Love Film - before Amazon purposefully destroyed it - you put together a list of films and they send you whichever one happens to be available at that moment.

It is beautiful to have your choice of what to watch tonight taken away from you. No more endlessly scrolling, your soul slowly seeping out onto the sofa, dribbling down the sides onto the floorboards, a sense of growing powerlessness and listlessness, the tyranny of excess options. Now you will watch one thing specifically - something you thought about and selected ahead of time - and be happier for it. Also you will make better choices, because you did not make them when knackered on a Tuesday evening.

I'm also buying films and placing them on shelves, along with the books and the comics and the records - all the other things which are available much more cheaply and with less clutter online. But I have decided that I like clutter. I like the artifact as well as the experience. I like splaying myself out on the floor and reading the sleeve notes of an album as it plays on the record player, finding these little images that you would pore over as a teenager, when a new favourite band was an identity-forming revelation.

The clutter of our lives is a reflection of who we are. One day, I will leave behind some impossible trove of books and records which no-one will ever want and will consider an exhausting logistical exercise to have to deal with. One of my last acts will be to inconvenience someone I love, which I rather like. Then, slowly, bits of my collection will find their way into charity shops, and perhaps be picked up by someone who is open to them, and parts of me, very faded and minimal, will seep into the lives of others after me. All of this is possible because objects exist in the real physical world, with textures and weight, and they can be passed on. They do not blip out of existence once we cease to use our username and password. They give us purchase.

There are times - loads of times really - when records are inconvenient. You don't want to turn it over every 15 minutes when you're doing the washing up or reading a book. So music streaming is still necessary. But when I research streaming audio players like Sonos, I'm aghast that they still require an app on your phone to select the music. In fact, this is so deeply assumed that it is barely mentioned in reviews of the equipment.

This is a deal breaker. I will not buy any product for the home - be it lighting or music or anything else - which relies on the phone for its interface. I'm unlikely to be alone in that. We're now seeing the emergence of products which specifically aim to disconnect these services from the phone, like this and this.

The phone is the centre of our problems. Once we pick it up, there is a danger that we will get lost in the candy-crack engagement world - you select the song, reply to one quick email, notice that your friend liked your post and - pop - twenty minutes are gone. They stole another twenty minutes of your life, mate. That device is a goddamn threat. We are in the business of minimising the number of times we pick it up, controlling the moments we're by it and reducing the instances in which we have to reach for it.

In some cases, tech can itself reduce tech exposure. The best device for this is the tablet. No-one really cares about tablets anymore - probably because they prioritise user experience over engagement. In fact, they are remarkable. They provide a tool for a particular kind of journalism: one removed from the empty frenzy of endless information overload. One which can be controlled.

The best subscription, by a country mile, is Readly. For a monthly fee (I promise I'm not getting paid for this shit) it gives you access to countless magazines and newspapers. The i paper and the Guardian are there, as are a bunch of magazines with whatever your interests are. I use it for film, music and video games mags. Thrillingly, these are presented in their physical form. You do not click on the articles you want to read. You have a curated experience, with features, letters, reviews - the specific pleasure of a journalistic product that has been put together for you.

You can also take out a separate subscription for other newspapers and magazines, like the FT or the Economist. The tablet is the best object to read them on - obviously far superior to the phone, but also much better than a laptop. On the tablet, you can remove all notifications so that there is nothing to distract you. On the tablet, they can become part of your routine - a point during the day when you actively choose to engage with journalism.

This is about the establishment of boundaries. We do not need news and content streaming in at us all day, every day. It is driving us mad: hyper-alert, frazzled, exhausted, oppressed, prone to vicious outbursts, with a sense of escalating crisis. Instead, journalism should be put in its rightful place. It should be treated with the importance it deserves, but given a set time and place. This allows us to engage with it thoughtfully, in a rested, considered manner, instead of being battered by it.

These are the opening stages of a broader cultural moment. You can see it everywhere. I've lost count of how many friends now have dumb phones, with purposefully reduced functionality. On the street, I see young people embracing analogue technology, particularly with cameras. In polling, they're now highly likely to display serious scepticism about the internet.

We're all changing. But we will not be going back to the days before the internet or smart phones. What's required is something more nuanced and complicated.

Winston Churchill once said: "I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me."

This is precisely the relationship we now search for with tech. We all know, on a deep intuitive level, how the power dynamic works at a given moment. We know, when we've lost an afternoon to the phone with no knowledge or enjoyment to show for it, who's really in control.

There's a chance now that we might be able to wrestle some of that control back, to address its deleterious effects while still benefiting from its advantages. To have a thoughtful, conscious approach to how we manage its role in our lives. To benefit from what it offers, but remember the joy of silence and tactility as well. To make it serve us rather than the other way round.