downsides of tech convenience
I look at my mysterious little reliable phone. There’s just what Apple wants me to see and do. I can’t really look under the hood. It’s neat, it’s user-friendly - for the laypeople who don’t want to tinker or adjust anything. It just works.
I understand the convenience of having a machine that just works, hides everything in the background and locks everything down; no visible code, no Linux startup screen scaring people that there’s a virus, no command line or terminal, not manually having to update, no responsibility or mistakes made by the user via decisions or typos. Cannot have lost or corrupt files if everything is in the background, hidden, admin access only - and the user never gains admin rights to some things. The device becomes an ad in the user’s hands, looking and acting just like the company intended.
But we underestimate how much valuable experience and problem solving skills we lose with this approach. Sure, grandma and grandpa need something reliable - but you? You learn and grow by the mistakes, by searching for solutions, applying fixes, trying things out, cracking something, disassembling and reassembling it, modding it, snooping around in files, deleting things on purpose to see what happens. Many people in tech-y jobs even got interested in tech by doing all this, learned by breaking and fixing childhood computers and consoles, modding Doom and other games, writing cheats for Ultima or Warcraft, deleting system files, or writing scripts to do funny or useful stuff for them. Imperfect and transparent software had its good sides!
This experience is taken away from young people when all they have is a locked down smartphone or tablet that quietly works, where they don’t even have folders and algorithms run it all. Now they have to start later in life or spend money on bootcamps or university or some Udemy classes, potentially struggling harder than the ones before them. Who is supposed to be our tech future?
When we uncritically continue down this path, we become very dependent on tech solutions and decisions made for us by big companies to a mass appeal or newest trends. What if you get left behind due to hardware, age, disability, taste? Decisions like that affect your ability to work, the workflow itself, your usage of the device, what you can run and how, what you can process and share and play. Locked into compliance, you’ll never learn how to solve problems on the device, how to fix something, how to customize to your needs specifically. You get fully used to how a specific brand does it and get more stuck in their walled garden.
You may get less curious, or never even become curious, about how things work behind the curtain when trying to access anything is so hard. The device you use and rely on so much remains a complete black box, a mystery. Instead of saving money in attempting to fix it, you’re more likely to send it in, pay a lot of money or just get a new model.
Ads for more powerful phones or tablets don’t even entice me with all these restrictions. The advertised new hardware of an iPad is useless to me if it has meager apps and no ability to run an IDE. Locking things down stifles innovation by users. I deserve to run my own apps on my device without having to get App Store approval when I pay that much.
That’s why I’m always for having more devices I can fully own, which means I am free to do as I please with it. Devices that I can crack, modify, deface, break, visually change and do what I want on. Different OS, sideloading, emulators, ricing, my own repairs, you name it. I used to jailbreak past iPhones I had. I love my Steam Deck, I love my Linux laptops, I love IFixit and I love the legislation forcing Apple to open up the devices.
Not everyone is good at tech, and doesn’t have to be. People deserve ease of use and accessibility. But in a world that becomes more tech reliant by the minute, I don’t just want to look on helplessly and accept what I’m dealt by companies - I want to shape my own tech reality as far as possible or needed.
Published 12 Dec, 2024