Let me take you back to 2014 Nerd Ben, to show you what using technology was like in its heyday. (Yes, I called 2014 technology’s heyday. Get over it.)
2014 Ben was knuckling down with a few key apps to get his world really tuned up and humming. Emails were getting filed and filtered in the right way. Notes were being stored in Evernote with tags and notebook organisation, anything and everything captured into the system to keep reference files handy at all times. My life was going paperless; scanning and saving PDFs was the order of the day. I was using Todoist to keep track of all my to-dos, scheduling, organising, again filtering them, etc. I had my Mac, and a cool iPhone, maybe an iPad for a bit of consumption. Life was good.
And thus things might have carried on, indefinitely. It’s 2024, and technically all those tools still exist; I could go on using them in much the same way I was in 2014. But something happened. Well, several things.
It would be easy to blame the pandemic, for one thing, because it’s everyone’s favourite scapegoat. It certainly made a lot of us fed up with our screens and crave face-to-face interaction again. By keeping us even more hunched over our laptop keyboards, it taught us that work isn’t all about what you do hunched over a laptop keyboard.
But more than that happened. 2010-2019 might be called the golden age of app development; the App Store (pioneered by Apple and copied of course by Google etc.) matured and grew a whole industry, spawning thousands and thousands of jobs; whole new companies and sectors emerged, and software development became something everyday people talked about.
It’s not quite a tale of boom and bust, but the cycles of change have proved extremely rapid, with many companies having to move to subscription models in order to be sustained as businesses, and many that haven’t been able to keep up have gone bust, with the result that some lesser-apps that we came to rely on early on the lifecycle of the App Store disappeared from the eco-system altogether, in some of the worse cases leaving our data dead, outdated or disappeared.
With a move to services that might prove sustainable, users then had to choose between cloud-based or local storage, sync services, end-to-end encryption, and filter through lists of dozens of features across many similar apps to choose the one that was just right for them. And ultimately the right choice wasn’t always the perfect choice but just the best of the options. And then they had to face trying to migrate everything from their defunct services, as I have with Evernote – and I’m still facing the pain as nothing has so far quite brought the tags across as I would have wanted.
And you still couldn’t guarantee an app’s longevity or serviceability. Evernote still exists, but like many, I was long since put off by the pricing, not to mention many of the performance problems I experienced especially on mobile platforms for quite a long time.
People started going ‘all in’ on Google, or ‘all in’ on Apple, or ‘all in’ with some third-party service provider; some folks are now ‘running their entire lives in’ Notion or Obsidian or any one of a number of other ‘PKM’ apps that promise the capability of storing and linking your notes in impossibly complex ways. There is no unified solution across all platforms. Some people’s workplaces are locked into Microsoft 365, but outside work they want to use Google. The ceaseless proliferation of options across the spectrum of software breeds confusion, despair and probably a lot of time-wasting for individuals and corporations who, twenty years ago would, for example, have only had Microsoft Word at their disposal for writing. Now there’s Word, Pages, Docs, Ulysses, Scrivener, iA Writer… etc. etc. All with their own hooks into other services and collaboration tools.
At some point over the last decade, another revolution started to emerge, epitomised and perhaps captained by Ryder Carroll’s ‘Bullet Journal method’, which proudly and deliberately took a paper notebook and made it into a whole system for life. This was the first sign of the rebellion a culture already tired of the cognitive dissonance bred by so much mellifluous content on our screens. A notebook was unapologetically simple, self-explanatory, while still entirely user-customisable. It didn’t have the ambiguity of potentially being many things; it was only one thing. It didn’t need syncing or charging. It didn’t even hurt your eyes late at night time. It started what became nearly a cult, caused people to discover ‘mindfulness’ and approach life in a more Zen-like way. What people were discovering was simply the connection our brain makes with text that is written by hand rather than typed – an experience we all lost in the rush to adopt the smartphone into our lives.
It might not be the first time that I’ve suggested that smartphones have actually made us dumber.
So it’s 2024, and here we are, with apps continuing to develop and change, forcing us to have to continue to keep up or fall off the wagon, when our ancestors simply bought a diary and a typewriter and got on with it. I could reminisce or become a Luddite, but it is difficult to deny that technology has changed irreversibly, and that we have to live with it. I wouldn’t be able to work with my colleagues without it. But I am fed up with the constantly changing landscape, and how none of it really tunes in with how my brain wants to think, most of the time.
The best approach I can work out is two-fold: a) to treat technology as if it were analogue, meaning I restrict the number of apps I use for different purposes to the absolute essentials, and resist any of the more abstract features of an app that might move away from how my brain would think with pen and paper; and b) to choose apps and services that store my data locally, as much as possible. It can be synced with the cloud, but I want to remain in possession of my data as much as possible, knowing how and where it is stored, were I to need to access it at any point in any other way than through the app.
It’s not a very fun solution, and I really would like it all to be fun, still, because enjoying something helps you want to use it more; but more often than not I find myself getting bogged down in an app, lost in the proliferation of features or data that I’ve entered into it, struggling to make head or tail of it or to make useful decisions. 2014 tech was fun, though we didn’t see what was coming, with dopamine addiction becoming a thing, and social media companies especially becoming increasingly adept at stealing and harnessing our attention to beef up their bottom line.
I look at tech in 2024 with a lot more realism, suspicion and skepticism, hoping that somehow I won’t always feel alienated from something that is supposed to be there to help make life happen. Notebooks are all well and good (and seriously, they are), but of course they will never sync to my work calendar or my various email accounts and attachments, and that missing layer of convenience is sadly just a bummer sometimes. I ought to be able to have this cake and eat it too without completely busting my gut; it should all work together much more naturally. But I still can’t help feeling some of that cognitive dissonance.
Ben David Trigg 