This is my post for day 27 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.

I grew up just about at pace with the rise of the internet, laptops, and smart phones. It was fast enough that I could tell it was revolutionary, but slow enough for me to stay up to date. Along the way, I saw lots of adults and older people totally fail to keep up. Or, I shouldn’t say “fail”, because they weren’t always trying. And for many of these people, that was totally the right call. But for many others it wasn’t, and their lives started to get worse. Sometimes it just got worse relative to if they had adopted the changes, but other times it got worse in the absolute. Eventually your bank or your pharmacy starts requiring you have an email address, or the ability to receive texts, etc. If you don’t understand things like good passwords, or that some email addresses are “noreply@”, then you’re going to eventually have problems. If you don’t keep up with what’s normal, then the scammers can get you pretty quickly.

So at some point in my youth I realized that this was a natural progression people went through as they aged, and that if I didn’t want this to happen to me, I would need to instill certain habits and tendencies in myself. I realized that if I started thinking that what “the kids these days” were doing was weird or useless, that might be what it feels like to be missing the train to the future.

Of course, there are plenty of things that the kids do that are weird or useless, or sometimes even harmful. And sometimes there are things that all of society does that are harmful. So my policy was not just to “try everything once”. Here are two similar examples for contrast.

At some point a lot of my friends started using a chat platform called Discord. It looked like it was basically Slack, but for gaming? Or at least developed for and adopted by the gaming community. At first there was no benefit to me switching, since I could still talk to all my friends by other means. Over time more and more people dropped off facebook. Some content creators I follow started hosting Discord servers for supporters. Eventually, I started going to events that coordinated over Discord, and then I really needed to learn how to use it. At this point, I run two servers, a personal one and one for my research fellows. I still feel like I’m not totally on-boarded, and I struggle to understand how to casually participate in bigger servers with infinite messages. But at least I’m here.

In contrast, I have never downloaded TikTok. This type of content consumption just feels insane to me. Like, I get it, I have enough exposure to pop culture that I’ve seen several of the emergent sub-communities that TikTok made possible. The amount of creativity in the format is really beautiful to watch. But like… it is just straight-forwardly the heroin of social media apps? There’s no way I’m touching that. It’s also wild to me that people are fully content if not thrilled to have their experience fully controlled by the app. I want to watch the videos that I decide to watch. And when a video is done I want to be the one who decides whether I watch another one. I also want to know how long it is, and the date it was uploaded, and who the creator is, et cetera. The fact that all shortform platforms seem to aggressively hide this information is so bewildering to me.

Okay, rant over — the point is that I think I can assess from an outside view that my disinterest in Discord needed to be overcome but that my disinterest in TikTok was the correct call.

A more general trend that makes these calls harder is what Cory Doctorow termed “enshittification“. This is the trend of software updates slowly adding “features” or other changes that eventually turn the service into, well, shit. This starts to happen after everybody is dependent on the infrastructure, and it’s not necessarily the result of individuals being evil. It can be viewed through the lens of incentive gradients and evolution dynamics. I’ve been on facebook almost since it began. And for the first several years, I kinda hated every update they pushed, but then eventually loved the change. The initial hatred was the old-man dynamic. There was a golden age where the software was mature, richly featured, and the platform teeming with life. But these days, I don’t think I have you tell you that facebook has objectively enshittified.

Sometimes it’s harder to tell. My first couple of laptops had replaceable batteries. That is, there was a compartment that you could unscrew or unclip to access the battery. Once the battery’s lifespan got too short, you could buy a replacement on Amazon and swap it out yourself. This was amazing and I loved it. I would keep a spare battery to take when I traveled. Eventually, fewer and fewer models had this feature. There was probably some kind of enshittification factor at play, where companies figured out that few enough buyers cared enough about this feature, and that they would make more money by not letting you replace the battery. But also, batteries got better. They started lasting longer. External power banks got better, and everything started using the same USB-C standard, which was faster and more convenient. I haven’t replaced a battery in many years, and also I haven’t wanted to.

I’m currently struggling real hard to keep away from being an old man about AI. I mean, I do think its an existential risk and we should shut it all down. But separately, as an everyday tech product, I should obviously be making use of it and keeping up with the developments. I’m finding it mysteriously hard to figure out what it’s good for, but I keep trying, at the endorsed rate.