death to screens!
In the past, I was enamored with the tech/hacker aesthetic. Visual glitches, code, lots of screens, esoteric desktop environments and ricing, neon colors, cyberpunk, techwear, and more. I still love some of these, but my enthusiasm has been waning. The time of tech feeling exciting, positive, liberating and beautiful is over for me.
Owning tech feels burdensome, dystopian, involuntary, restrictive to me. Everything feels too clean, too processed, too brand-protective and monetized, but also fake, stolen, bastardized. Everything is about ads, engagement, sponsors. Iām not disputing that tech can be used for good and that you can carve out good spaces and create better habits around it, Iām just saying the rose tinted glasses about it all that were put on my face during 2007-2016 especially have fallen off for good. AI slop, privacy transgressions and lack of choices are a big reason.
It affects how much I still want tech in my life, design choices I make, the standards I set for the tech I have and what I wanna do with it. The pictures my iPhone 13 takes look like shit. Itās ironic that I have to consider getting an app that makes it look less processed and that I would rather take pictures with a 2012 digicam.
It also affects how I furnish my home. For a while now, I wanted to get rid of my smart TV - that thing is insufferable, bloated and unsafe. It works, but at what cost? I want to replace it with a beamer. More privacy conscious, saves space and is portable, colors and FPS are good enough for my needs, has enough ports. Something is just thrown on the wall when itās needed and thereās no ugly black rectangle taking up space when nothing is being viewed.
I am tired of the oversized everything - all screens getting bigger and seemingly never having enough screens. The big screen as a status symbol. The big screen as the center of everything that all chairs and sofas are turned towards, facing the content and not each other. The big screen as a misleading meter for productivity, quality of work, efficiency, tech literacy.
The big phone, the big TV, the multiple screens on the deskā¦ tās not about what we need, but what we could have, about the supposed advantage, the edge. What we allegedly need as a treat, or to be more productive, multitask more. Bigger space to serve more ads, more websites at the same time, bigger images, more posts, more to see, more to get stuck on, more to watch, even on the go. I associate it with ābrain rotā now, with overstimulation and overconsumption.
We kinda make fun of the short form videos with Subway Surfer and ASMR slime included in it, but arenāt many of us the same? Discord on one screen, Spotify playing stuff there, a game open on the side, scrolling a feed on the other screen, while a long form video essay runs on YouTube.
This is why Iām going to return to a one screen setup for private use. Itās currently three, and briefly I had even considered if a curved ultrawide would be better. But no. I crave a time when I had one small screen and nothing else and I wasnāt able to have everything blasted at me visually at all times with either multiple screens or one screen large enough to tile everything comfortably.
Traveling somewhere else and doing everything on my old laptop cemented it. I like not seeing everything all at once all the time, and I feel no disadvantage for my studies, note-taking, Zoom calls, art, gaming etc. either. I tried, and it was fine. Iām ready to put a stop to my mind being hijacked by having a ton of things visible all at once and jumping from window to window often and using any short loading screen to glance at other screens. Is it useful for work? Sure, yes, in my case. But thatās why the double screen setup will be available in the office, not at home.
You know what aesthetic appeals to me now? Humanness, softness, fabrics, comfort, usefulness, boldness. Tech disemboweled. Displaying its parts on the wall. Wearing parts of it as jewelry or hanging off of your belt like a hunting trophy. You survived and you made it your own.
Published 06 Nov, 2024, edited 7Ā months, 2Ā weeks ago