Posting this as it deeply resonates with me
Thanks for posting, OP. I have replied to a few people’s comments in this thread, and I’m really appreciating you sharing this post which has led to such thought-provoking discussion.
It just takes a little effort to filter to see and reach the right people’s content. Otherwise, I don’t think completely withdrawing would be very beneficial in my industry and the era I live in.
I have been thinking about this a lot. Wrestling with how much consumption I can allow myself to sustain, and how much I can allow myself to abstain from.
As more and more of the world around me is interfaced with through machines and/or the internet, I can’t just “take a break from computers” for a few days to give my brain a break from that environment anymore. From knowledge to culture, so much is being shared and transferred digitally today. I agree with the author that we can’t just ignore what’s going on in the digital spaces that we frequent, but many of these spaces are built to get you to consume. Just as one must go into the hotbox to meet the heaviest weed smokers, one shouldn’t stay in the hotbox taking notes for too long at once because of the dense ambient smoke. Besides, how do you find the stuff worth paying attention to without wading through the slop and bait? The web has become an adversarial ecosystem, so we must adapt our behavior and expectations to continue benefiting from its best while staying as safe as possible from its worst.
Some are talking about “dark forest”, and while I agree I think a more apt metaphor is that of small rural villages vs urban megalopolises. The internet started out so small that everyone knew where everyone else lived, and everyone depended on everyone else too much to ever think of aggressively exploiting anyone. Nowadays the safe gated communities speak in hushed tones of the less savory neighborhoods where you can lose your wallet in a moment of inattention, while they spend their days in the supermarkets and hyper-malls owned by their landlords.
The setup for Wall-E might take place decades or centuries from now, but it feels like it’s already happened to the web. And that movie doesn’t even know how the humans manage to rebuild earth and their society, it just implies that they succeed through the ending credits murals.
I highly recommend reading Digital Minimalism, which deals with exactly what you are talking about. It’s a great and inspiring read, even if you don’t actually go through with it.
From what I remember, it mostly talks about how to approach any kind of technology as a tool, though a pretty simple process - honestly think about what your goal is (networking, getting information about new topics, keeping up to date on events…), and properly decide whether the technology is actually The Best way how to do it, while minimalizing any drawbacks.
Some examples I remember are:
- I have to use social networks to stay in touch with my friends and family. - Is that really the best way? Isn’t it better to make sure to visit or call them regularly, so they can tell you what they have been up to, instead of you passively seeing it from soulless posts? If your goal is to have a meaningful connection with them, is chatting in a group-chat the best way and better than talking less often, but in person?
- I have to stay up-to-date on news. - Is endlessly scrolling through clickbait articles for hours the best use of your time? Wouldn’t just subscribing to a physical newspaper/journal, that you get to read every day/week/month, accomplish the same thing while also saving you an immense amount of time?
- I need to have a smartphone so I can be reached at any time. - Do you need to have a smartphone for that? Isn’t dumb phone way better, since you don’t get distracted with other stuff? And are you sure that you have to reply immediately, and it won’t wait until the evening? Will setting up regular 30 minutes per day, to check and answer your personal mails/IMs be sufficient, and if someone needs to reach you immediately, they can always call you.
Most of the arguments in the book were thought-provoking, and from what I’ve tried implementing, it has made my life a lot better. For example, switching my phone to a dumb phone (and carrying a powered off smarthphone that I can make a hotpost for, if I really need an app for something) made my away-from-computer life a lot better and peacful, and it was really easy to get used to that. Once you start considering anything you do on a computer from the pragmatic point of view, and ask yourself what your goal is, and if there isn’t a better way - the answer usually is yes, there is.
I’ve seen a few people recommend that book, I should check it out.
A way of thinking about tech that I’ve found interesting is what philosopher Bernard Stiegler refers to as “φάρμακον”, or “pharmakon” (the greek root from where we get “pharmacy”). He uses the greek not just to be a pretentious arse, but because whilst it most directly translates to “medicine”, pharmakon also can mean a poison or toxin. Stiegler argues that technology can be both helpful and harmful, often at once. It depends on how we use it. [1]
(I’m reminded here also of Cory Doctorow’s discussion of reverse centaurs, because turning people into reverse centaurs is definitely the vibe of “pharmakon as poison”. At the core of it, most people aren’t being empowered by tech in our lives, and I really feel like we need a collective, radical recalibration around this. Books like “Digital Minimalism” certainly seem to be pushing towards that.
[1]: n.b. I am not a philosopher, nor have I actually directly read Stiegler, just a few people who draw on his work. One such person is Greta Goetz, an academic whose blog is great for people who like dense and wordy philosophy about tech and teaching.
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Yeah. It was pretty awful early in my career. The good news is that “The person with an opinion has no power over the person with an experience.”
As I’ve built up years of my own work experiences, I don’t spend as much energy on each new idea I encounter.
Now I’m just proud that I still, once in awhile, significantly change the way I work, thanks to new information.
But, since what my team is doing works well already, I have to encounter the same advice from several trusted sources. And then we put it through a test sprint with a thoughtful team retrospective, after.
It’s possible to find a happy balance, but it takes experience to get there.
Edit: So to answer the obvious question - what advice stuck with me?
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Host team retrospectives. The rest of Agile is optional. Effective retrospectives are mandatory, because they’re what tunes everything else correctly for my team and my organization.
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Cherish plain text under version control. I’ve slept soundly many nights when others were up and working late, thanks to the simplicity and clarity of the process of reviewing what changed in plain text files. Any time a tool supports being setup with plain text files under version control, I advocate for that option.
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Pick one thing that matters for today. It helps me focus, and forces me to really decide what matters, today. It helps me say “no” to requests that need to wait. And it helps me choose to give myself a break after I get that one thing done. One important thing per day adds up to awestriking levels of annual productivity, given reasonable opportunities.
When I was learning to program in the 1990s, at university, it was easy to get good advice and learning from the printed word: both in books and on websites. I think if I had to start learning all over again, and not be in a good school, it would be very hard for me to do as well.
Today there is too much advice, too many influencers who recently learned whatever they are peddling, too much AI, too many fields of tech.
I think the best way to learn now is how many of us learned decades earlier; use a list of books that are vetted by many ( can find lists here and there, saw one in GitHub last year). And while reading the books read the documentation even if they are gaps in one’s knowledge and the docs are badly written.
I don’t think one needs recent books for many concepts and basics. The wheel has been reinvented many times in the hundreds of tech stacks in use today. And the same concepts will be easy enough to learn in newer docs once a technology and programming set of tools is invested into by the learner.
As for new software engineering ideas and architecture concepts: usually these are reiterated from earlier ideas and often marketed for profit. So older architecture books, refined by several editions, are still best.
I find that the .NET/C# documentation has great guidance for old and new concepts. There’s reference docs with remarks, there’s guidance and best practice recommendations, and there’s examples and guided work-alongs.
Personally I’ve never done the examples or video or text follow-alongs. But I greatly value the concept guidance that goes beyond mere reference docs with remarks.
While it’s somewhat specific to the .NET/C# ecosystem, I imagine it’s valuable beyond it, and maybe a good example of how a big and significant enough project can provide more relevant and condensed information than “random tech blogs and websites” or similar.
I spent a lot of time using msdn Microsoft docs for windows and activex c++ back in the day. Faintly envious there are videos in the c# docs.
I changed tech stacks, but comments and examples are awesome to use inside docs. Usually in the php, it’s the comments in the docs that are the best help, and example code and work around can be found there.
But most php depends on the tens of thousands of projects and libraries made others: so the docs one needs is scattered in the dependencies. Some who have good docs (laravel) and some that have no docs , in which case a debugger is best way to learn.
So older architecture books, refined by several editions, are still best.
Yeah. It’s hard to do better than the classicsl books. The language structures have changed, but the core principles endure.
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This puts to words something I was recently thinking about pretty well, especially the part about being an “advice seeker” and not really being able to solve stuff on your own, which is something I’ve always attributed to just being a field where you are driven to, especially in school, to have The Correct Solution, and that one always exists.
I mostly struggled with this when I tried getting into art, especially music or drawing. Suddenly, there’s no algorothm or The Solution, and you have to figure out something based only on your creativity and judgement, and there’s no-one who will tell you “this is the correct answer”, which for someone being used to there mostly being one, was something I never managed to get over to this day, because it simply stresses me to the point of creative paralysis.
Thankfully, due to enshitiffication of most of the services I was following, which basically forced me to drop them due to invasive privacy rules, AI integration, or not working in privacy focused browsers or over a VPN, it’s getting better. I’m kind of looking forward to OpenAI, Google and Meta finally killing most of the internet, so I can let go when 90% of content is AI generated, 60% of websites wont work without chrome, and the rest is just porn.
Oh man, you’re so right in highlighting how this problem manifests even in art. In a way, hobby related stuff is even harder because there’s a weird pressure arising from a sense that you’re not allowed to enjoy things that you’re not good at. And like, how are you meant to get better at a thing if it doesn’t feel permissible to be mediocre at it for a while? What if you don’t want to get better at a thing, what if someone is happy to just have fun with a hobby and doesn’t care if they are consistently mediocre at it, because they’re doing it for themselves.
And it doesn’t get better if you are good at the thing. Suddenly you’ve got people saying “wow, you’re so good at that, you should sell them”, and that’s then even more pressure because it reinforces the constant feeling that not only must one strive for the “correct answer” in all things, but that progress towards this answer involves selling the products of one’s labour because that’s how we try to translate intangibles into measurable numbers. But the logic falls apart because excellent leather craftsmanship, for example, isn’t at all related to one’s ability to be running a business, and every time I have monetised a hobby, it kills the joy of the craft. Similarly, I have a friend who is an artist who used to be earning money from art, but they got sick of doing pet portraiture and got an office job so they could regain art as a hobby. Things that sell well != Things that are good (and that’s even before we consider the Intrinsic value in dabbling in hobbies and creativity for fun’s sake)
there’s no-one who will tell you “this is the correct answer”,
That’s a great point. The metric that really matters is “good enough for today”, which can be very subjective.
