Everybody is. I'm strongly of the opinion that all this 'needy tech' is a net negative and I try hard to keep it out of my life. But some of it, mostly associated with my kids schooling, is very hard to avoid. 10 emails per week about some school portal with 'an important message' (which you need to separately logged into, of course the message is so important that it can't be entrusted to mere email, even though the account recovery does use that same email) that ends up being nonsense but you're not able to block it because one day an actually important message might show up.
Tech should serve us, but meanwhile instead of having terminals to the internet we are now the terminals to the internet. Push notifications and all manner of intrusive interaction have become the norm, not the exception that they should be.
It should, but it's becoming more and more obvious that it won't and can't. Literally every economic incentive it pushing towards 1) making it crappier until it's just good enough to buy, 2) maximally exploiting its users.
The market won't save us, because a competitor who tries to gain market-share by not doing that crap will eventually turn around and join in the fun, once it's in their interest.
Mobile internet may end up as being a giant mistake. It opens up an entire superhighway of enshittification, makes us more dependent on centralized control, and doesn't provide a much better communication experience that the telephone network.
No need for such pessimism - what can, and will change how things work is the consumer, being smart enough to demand better. See the other comments here, there is a market for responsible sustainable and boundary-respecting products. It is just a matter of time IMHO, until the majority of people have enough.
Imagine the food industry 20 years back. It looked like the end of the world - literal poison everywhere you look. Your arguments back then would never foresee today's organic food hype and vegetables craze.
> No need for such pessimism - what can, and will change how things work is the consumer, being smart enough to demand better. See the other comments here, there is a market for responsible sustainable and boundary-respecting products. It is just a matter of time IMHO, until the majority of people have enough.
I'll believe it when I see it. But it's not looking good. Subscription streaming was supposed to be like that: you pay to get a "responsible sustainable and boundary-respecting products." But it turns out showing people ads makes more money, so those products are pushing users in that direction.
> Imagine the food industry 20 years back. It looked like the end of the world - literal poison everywhere you look. Your arguments back then would never foresee today's organic food hype and vegetables craze.
Isn't that mainly an affluent consumer thing? And often subject to lies and nonsense?
I expect the digital equivalent to be something like Google's doing: changing their products to ostensibly "protect" user privacy, but in reality giving all the data to Google and locking out its competitors.
>The market won't save us, because a competitor who tries to gain market-share by not doing that crap will eventually turn around and join in the fun, once it's in their interest.
Doesn't this imply, though, that there is some kind of market force which would allow such a competitor who isn't doing that to grab market share in the first place? What happens to that market share when the competitor eventually decides to change their trajectory - does it just disappear?
> But some of it, mostly associated with my kids schooling, is very hard to avoid. 10 emails per week about some school portal with 'an important message' that ends up being nonsense but you're not able to block it because one day an actually important message might show up.
> Tech should serve us
This problem isn't really the tech, it's the people behind these messages. Complain to them. You shouldn't be getting "OMFG IMPORTANT MESSAGE" alerts that, when you click on them say "LOL PTA meeting is this Thursday, and we need someone to bring coffee." That decision is being made by a person who you should be able to find and share your concern with.
> That decision is being made by a person who you should be able to find and share your concern with.
Good point, and it generalizes to pretty much all the social problems "created by" tech. The technology is fine. Behind each misuse is a person or a group that commissioned said tech, and/or is applying it in malicious ways. Focusing on ills of technology, while ignoring the people wielding it for wrong, is just a distraction.
> Behind each misuse is a person or a group that commissioned said tech
How many cases of misuse implicates a structural flaw in a larger system? It's absurd to point the finger, over and over, at this or that "malicious" person. It's exhausting! They somehow keep getting incentivized to appear.
Yes, but! People, not systems, are the moral actors. And yes, while a lot of problems are more or less systemic, in many cases those systems have control levers that happen to be in the reach of a small number of people. Finally, pointing the fingers and creating ethical, social and legal pressure for people closest to control levers, is a form of systemic response too - it's adding a back flow to form a feedback loop.
Rejecting "technology" is, IMHO, a perfectly rational response to the typical layers of consultants, sales teams, and general lack of knowledge of the fundamentals of tech that result in the isses described above. You can't win.
I would like to get journalists to see things my way, so we'd get a little less "oh look at the bad tech" and a little more of "look at the C-suite of companies X, Y and Z employing tech for bad" kind of articles, but I get the feeling that I won't get through to them either. Something about things your salary depends on not understanding, etc.
“I don’t use email anymore. I need you to communicate any important information about my child’s education to me through other means. Would you rather send notices home with my child or call my home phone?”
Or some variant thereof. “I reviewed the privacy policy and have serious concerns, no longer agree with the terms of use and cannot use this platform.” (I’m sure if you go read it it won’t even be a lie; all the ones I’ve seen have been awful.) Or “My phone broke and I can’t afford a new one so I can’t check my email.” Or “I’ve had a religious revelation and will no longer be making use of any technology created after 1970.”
Once someone has to make an active decision to contact you instead of just mass-spamming the entire school with a button press I guarantee nobody goes “Yeah, I really should call jacquesm and ask if he can bring coffee to the PTA meeting.”
You might be the first person to ask for an accommodation but it doesn’t mean that it can’t be done, just that it hasn’t.
My daughter is a bit younger, but I’ve never used the various platforms, Facebook pages, etc that all the daycares are trying to use. They figure it out. Hasn’t caused any problems yet.
> Once someone has to make an active decision to contact you instead of just mass-spamming the entire school with a button press I guarantee nobody goes “Yeah, I really should call jacquesm and ask if he can bring coffee to the PTA meeting.
Instead, they make the decision to call you at 3:30pm to inform you that your child needs picking up asap today when they realise your kid hasn't been picked up yet, whilst every other parent found out about the need to arrange an earlier pickup in advance via the after school club's mailing list.
This may be more inconvenient than receiving a few irrelevant emails. Other stuff like being the only kid not in fancy dress or sports kit because nobody would ring you about that even if they were competent at handling the essential stuff may only be inconvenient for your child, of course.
I agree it is a people problem but: the people are ignoring you and the tech is just asking for abuse and that tech too was implemented by a bunch of people who are ignoring you. So absent an outright block on all such messages with the significant risk that one day you'll miss something important there isn't all that much that you can do. Complaining certainly doesn't seem to work (at least: it hasn't worked for me) and the only thing that happened in terms of change is that there now are two portals (and two apps...) to be used because half the teachers refuses to switch to the new one. It is frankly incredible how little attention is given to usability and respect for the user when the user is part of a captive audience. Short of changing schools there is not much that you can do and that isn't an option for a variety of reasons.
Have you ever tried making this complaint? In the context of OP's comment about schools and technology, you will only ever get told "well, everyone else wants this". Sadly, this is true.
I just checked and there are 16 messages from one school in the last 7 days. The other school have managed 11. Those are emails, containing PDFs, containing important dates, if you can find them.
At least they are e-mails. Schools and kindergartens in Poland all switched over to some garbage SaaS that incorporates a half-assed, barely functioning faux-e-mail service, so I have to actually log in to their confusing and ad-infested website every other day and check if the facility sent something new. I would love it if we were using e-mails instead.
I dream that one day organizations will learn that you can in fact just put your message in plain text in the message body, rather than a 1MB PDF or docx
Oh god, schools are the worst. So many messages, very few of them that need to be read. Result: parents don’t read them, then teachers wonder why parents never know any of the stuff they’re sending home.
Let’s go back to physical letters and notes in backpacks.
Unfortunately they have to if they want to make sure parents get it. Every week my school's sends out a weekly email of everything happening in the quarter with emphasis increasing as time get closer. Then there's emails for when parents actually have to do something like sign up. There's physical flyers. There's the private Facebook like app that reiterates when parents have to do something. And the public Google calendar. Parents STILL miss it. And it's not even a few. At this point I just assume I have to tell people in person with my own mouth if I want to make sure they'll do the thing for their kid (and thus make my kid's day better)
"We should have an app for our school, it's only $x00"
Me: What does it do?
Calendar and notifications about new posts
Me: The website already does that, there's a button to click to subscribe to the calendar, another to subscribe to notifications, and you can "install" the website if you want, all with open standards
Surprising, I actually won the argument and they didn't waste their money.
I mean, the school districts I've had kids in all had Microsoft 365 or gmail for the kids, I assume the staff is in the same system. Its really not that hard to send out invites and searchable emails.
I've had an intuition that much recent ouroboric "technology for technology's" sake is actually more pernicious that it appears to be (at first glance).
Reading that essay helped crystallize the "why" behind that feeling.
Tech should serve us, but meanwhile instead of having terminals to the internet we are now the terminals to the internet. Push notifications and all manner of intrusive interaction have become the norm, not the exception that they should be.