Is your phone turning you into a mindless slave? Don't worry! Help is here!

Earlier this week, I watched a really interesting podcast. The host was interviewing a man named Anjan Katta who is producing a new kind of computer that looks very interesting.

The conversation goes into quite a few interesting places and I recommend it highly. One of the main theses is that Anja thinks (and who could disagree?) that, broadly speaking, we aren’t using computers and the Internet and “screens” in the healthiest of ways.

The blue light is bad for us. So are the “flickering” screens. So is staying up all night scrolling and not sleeping. There is an addictive quality to the way many of us use our devices that recalls the poor fools plugged into The Matrix.

Are we turning ourselves into “batteries” for the social media companies and their advertisers as we mindlessly scroll and scroll watching inane video after inane video? Or arguing endlessly with idiots and bots, getting really really angry and accomplishing nothing?

Is that really the best way for tech to help us live our best lives?

Of course not.

When I hear conversations like this, or the warnings from smart people like Jonathan Haidt about how awful smart phones and social media is for kids (girls especially), I remind people not to despair.

This tech is very very new. The Internet has only been around as a commercial thing since the mid 90's. Smart phones came along in the late 2000s, but weren’t ubiquitous until the mid 2010s. Then it took big tech companies a few years to “weaponize” those pesky algorithms so as to hypnotize us with them.

All that to say, of course we aren’t using this technology optimally. How could we? It’s almost brand new. We never evolved to know how to use these tools at all, let alone wisely.

But we will figure it out. It’s what our species does. We figure stuff out and we adapt. Anja Katta clearly wants to help us in the way we use our shiny new tools. I wish him well.

But whether it’s his product that moves us in a better direction, or some other product or movement or shift in culture, I will bet heavily that humans figure this out. We aren’t slaves to technology. We aren’t slaves to our “addictions”. When we notice problems, we find solutions.

It’s our superpower.

Speaking of which, one of the solutions I found long long ago to “fix” a substandard college education was to devour every course produced in Tom Woods’s Liberty Classroom. If you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend it. Enjoy!

Naturally,

Adam