I’ve been thinking lately about one impact of technology that may have been overlooked.
Nowadays if someone has a free moment, they have their phone to occupy their mind. I lived in a time before phones. What did we used to do with free moments? Sometimes we had reading material available. Sometimes we would day dream. Sometimes we would just think and introspect about ourselves. Sometimes we would carefully observe the world around us looking for anything interesting.
And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.
Serendipity has been lost. If you aren't at least open to talk to randoms, you are stuck in your own network. People you know from school or work, and people they know, that's it.
You won't be approachable when you are paying attention to a phone.
And it's valuable. There's a lot of people you'll find interesting, but they happen to not be within 2 hops of you. If you want to put a number on it, look at what people pay (opportunity cost) for educational or work opportunities. The social network you'll get is often touted as one of the main benefits of private school, for instance.
Despite being a bit of an introvert, I often reach out to randoms. Just to see what's there. It's been a great strategy thus far.
Theoretically, the serendipity part of it could be replicated online (see Omegle etc.) but I feel that the current regulatory regimes in most countries have a preference for building social media that simply serves up anodyne engagement porn, etc.
I live in a vacation area upstairs from a bar frequented by tourists. I’m friends with the bartender. I’ll go down there when it’s not too busy sit at the bar talk to the bartender and whoever else comes around and is interested in talking. Mostly other guys or couples.
I usually avoid talking to women because I’m obviously married wearing my ring and no matter what, it might come across as creepy and women usually have their guard up and are probably there with spouses somewhere around.
> And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
Two days ago I was in Best Buy looking for a DAC for my headphones. They have a section of gaming keyboards and headphones where a kid in his mid to late 20's started to strike up a conversation with me. It went from whether I play video games, to if I live in town, to his story on dropping out of college.
The entire time all I could process was the question of why this kid was talking to me and I kept giving him short bland responses. Not that long ago I would have sat there for an hour talking with this guy and loved every second of it. Then I would have come home and annoyed my wife by telling her all about it.
I know it's cliche to say but something changed in me over the initial COVID lock-downs where I went from socializing being a necessity in my life to just wanting to be home and not dealing with people. A point that bums me out the more I think about it.
> And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.
Turns out that making it too easy to avoid the hell that is other people has some less than great side effects.
I think the “cure” to this is fostering curiosity within ourselves, and learning to balance our curiosity in real world objects, locations, people, activities, etc. in a way that’s balanced with digital information. And understanding that all digital information is really just an approximation of these real-world things.
Put another way… you have to let yourself be curious about, say, the garden in the park, rather than looking at your phone. And when it comes to people - talking to a stranger rather than looking at your phone - you have to not only let yourself be curious, but also be vulnerable enough to make that curiosity known (a secondary skill, that I think can be built on a foundation of curiosity).
This is not necessarily tech driven. People are extroverted or introverted. Pre smartphone, when I was alone on the bus or subway, I always had my nose in a paper or a book. Now it's my phone or a Kobo. I didn't like and wasn't good at making small talk back then, and I don't think that has changed much. I feel like there are a lot of Seinfeld subplots built around avoiding social interaction that I really identified with.
On the other hand, I feel a lot of media is pushing us to ignore, suspect or otherwise be scared of strangers. I don't know that this is uniquely tech driven though.
yes, but only the real introverts carry a book. everyone carries a phone enabling more people to exhibit introverted behavior.
i used to be one of those with a book. now i listen to audio books which incidentally allows me to appear more extroverted because i can make eye contact and i guess people assume i am just listening to music and am therefore approachable.
I often think about this as well. If you have a problem to solve, it’s easiest to use the internet and find threads or videos to solve that problem. But in the “before times” you would need to seek out someone with experience and have a full conversation. While having the information at our fingertips is much more convenient and helps bridge gaps in communities that would lack experienced experts, it does cut the opportunity to socialize but at least 1 conversation per problem.
Not sure about "overlooked"? It's one of the most common refrain of the past ~20y that smartphones have existed: "people don't talk or pay attention to anything anymore now they're all on their smartphone all the time", it's one of the most criticisms of smartphones
> And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
I think this is the core reason for so much video arcade machine related nostalgia. Those that experienced this the first time around will know about stacking coins on the machines, playing against those you didn't know and so on. Now that is back to table football etc. but an entire category came and went in the space of 30 years.
Sounds like a myth to me, I remember life before "devices" and laptops, I had newspapers, books, magazines, board games and card games, walkmans, audiobooks, idk...maybe you're talking like a thousand years ago?
Not to say the phones aren't having an impact of some sort, but yeah, I always knew how to distract myself.
Tech has played a big part in the shift that has caused lonleyness, but its at best a sideffect.
there are four key things that "obliged" people to meet in the local area:
1) organised religion
2) organised fun, ie drinking, sports, location based hobbies
3) organised politics (social clubs dressed up as poltical movements, or vicaversa but crucially meeting regularly to do activities together)
4) work
In the UK at least there has been a strong but steady shift away from 1 & 3, to the point where they just don't really exist at any critical mass for people under 60. work is now more remote, which mean less concentration of people
Combine that with digital means to form your own virtual groups, You have less and less ties to your local area.
sprinkle on top that parents are utterly horrified by the idea that children might be left to wander, means that meeting your best mate (because there they are on the same street and the same age) becomes digital only.
This is something I absolutely loathe about modern technology and its uses. We have grand power and potential to solve so many societal ills, and yet our grandest achievements are repeatedly used not to better humanity, but to enrich a monied minority that views humans as disposably inconvenient, human interaction a luxury to be savored rather than a baseline expectation.
We replaced branch offices with call centers, then outsourced them to people we will never see and cannot relate to in a foreign land. Then we replaced them with chatbots and TTS, anything to reduce support times and save more money for those at the top.
We built out infrastructure that met our needs and revolutionized how we worked. We did this on-site, with glorious rooms of consoles and equipment that, while fragile, were also impressive to behold. Then leadership got on a treadmill of “also needs”, bolting on new kit of questionable value, outsourcing expensive jobs abroad or to contracting firms. As internal knowledge dried up, it became easier to embrace the perpetual bullshit machine demanding you adopt ERP as a medium-sized business, demanding you hoard data, demanding you surrender sovereignty to “the cloud”, to embrace per-second billing over amortization schedules. Fewer humans in the loop, knowing the business, understanding its needs. Just some guy at the top slapping their name over a Gartner or Big Three report before sending it to the board.
And now in this “age of AI”, the attack continues at record pace. Gone are the people who know and understand your code, replaced by chatbots who can only predict what they’ve already seen. Gone are the developers, the engineers, the architects, replaced with armies of temps and contractors who aren’t allowed to engage with the workers or incentivized to solve a problem, but merely meet arbitrary KPIs decided by algorithms they had no say over.
Robots are meting out punishments to gig workers, our devices spy on us to send data to companies hostile to our existence as consumers, with products designed to break but never be repaired, sold by stores online with no human interaction for questions or to identify flaws.
We have allowed a system to be built that does nothing to improve the daily lives of the average human anymore. These “innovations” do not drive meaningful growth in a majority of businesses. New technologies are little more than checkboxes to be met rather than profound improvements in processes or automation to enable leisure.
We let this happen. We can also choose - at any time we want - to stop.
If you want to learn about invisibility, grow old. Servile occupations are also good vehicles for such education. Just remember that the invisible people vote and know what’s going down.
Some do, but 36% of the eligible population did not vote in 2024. I don't think there's any evidence that "invisible" workers disproportionately vote.
I think the article makes a very questionable—and unnecessary—connection to electoral politics: "A sense of feeling invisible clearly animates working-class rage in many countries, and may have powered Donald Trump to victory in the US presidential election last fall." Note the weasel words "may have", as well as the vague, unsupported "clearly animates" claim, which I would dispute. Although Trump did try to appeal to the working class in several ways, I don't recall him ever discussing the issue of depersonalization, the subject of the article. What do immigration and tariffs, for example, have to do with depersonalization?
Steelmanning the argument, it may be that depersonalization amplifies the resentment that people face as they feel (or are) displaced through job replacement that occurs through immigration and globalization.
> *‘Instead, customers just point and say: “OK, yeah, just put it over there,” and then I drop off the stuff, and they just tap it. I think they see it as more of an – I think they see it as automation. They see you as just a system.’*
If I pay someone to perform a task for me, that's all I desire out of them. Do the job, do it right, collect your payment, and leave.
A transactional exchange is not the right place to look for meaningful human connection.
In fact, if I COULD hire robots instead of humans to do things like drive me places or deliver my groceries, I WOULD. Robots are predictable and reliable, a random human may or may not be.
The driverless taxis I've been in have done a pretty good job.
In some places, Amazon has delivery drones.
Ordering at Kiosks at fast-food places is immeasurably better than ordering from a cashier, especially if you make a lot of customizations to your food items.
I'm glad you're telling us it should be socially acceptable to treat you like a robot at your job. I hope every customer coworker and business partner honors your wish by pretending you are a lifeless chunk of metal with no purpose other than satisfying the agreed upon transaction. If insulting you feels good to them, I hope they will berate you endlessless for things that are not your fault (a robot wouldn't care). After all, whether its reliability or the desire for a verbal punching bag, the customer is always right regardless of anything the employee may feel.
When you are old and gray, I hope strangers continue to honor your wish by seeing you as a worthless husk because you no longer capable of offering any services they care about.
Old people I know that treat employees like robots don't have many friends or family they care about them. Maybe, if you coincidentally end up in that position too, you can pay robots to keep you company. I hear they're very reliable and predictable.
Could you explain what stops _you_ from punching different machines (coffee machines, ATMs etc)? After all they are exactly that - robots, and your comment makes it quite clear that it’s OK. And also human workers who for different reasons are unable to socialize with you while doong their jobs?
I feel the severely increased number of things in our lives -- social connections (former workplaces, schools, kids, church, neighbors, etc), work demands, parenting demands, caring for parents, interests (hobbies, tv shows, ...), modern living (commute, finances, adulting, exercise, property maintenance, ...), etc -- has created so much cognitive load that the only way to "scale" the mind and participate is to leverage tech (social media, online, apps, etc)
how to ease this cognitive load ? I imagine that it is very tempting to accidentally dehumanize others in the pursuit of looking after one's own burdens
After spending some time prompting LLMs and then talking to actual people, I've once or twice been tempted to phrase questions along the lines of "Comment on x, with an emphasis on y; do not mention z."
Readit News
Nowadays if someone has a free moment, they have their phone to occupy their mind. I lived in a time before phones. What did we used to do with free moments? Sometimes we had reading material available. Sometimes we would day dream. Sometimes we would just think and introspect about ourselves. Sometimes we would carefully observe the world around us looking for anything interesting.
And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.
You won't be approachable when you are paying attention to a phone.
And it's valuable. There's a lot of people you'll find interesting, but they happen to not be within 2 hops of you. If you want to put a number on it, look at what people pay (opportunity cost) for educational or work opportunities. The social network you'll get is often touted as one of the main benefits of private school, for instance.
Despite being a bit of an introvert, I often reach out to randoms. Just to see what's there. It's been a great strategy thus far.
I usually avoid talking to women because I’m obviously married wearing my ring and no matter what, it might come across as creepy and women usually have their guard up and are probably there with spouses somewhere around.
Two days ago I was in Best Buy looking for a DAC for my headphones. They have a section of gaming keyboards and headphones where a kid in his mid to late 20's started to strike up a conversation with me. It went from whether I play video games, to if I live in town, to his story on dropping out of college.
The entire time all I could process was the question of why this kid was talking to me and I kept giving him short bland responses. Not that long ago I would have sat there for an hour talking with this guy and loved every second of it. Then I would have come home and annoyed my wife by telling her all about it.
I know it's cliche to say but something changed in me over the initial COVID lock-downs where I went from socializing being a necessity in my life to just wanting to be home and not dealing with people. A point that bums me out the more I think about it.
I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.
Turns out that making it too easy to avoid the hell that is other people has some less than great side effects.
Put another way… you have to let yourself be curious about, say, the garden in the park, rather than looking at your phone. And when it comes to people - talking to a stranger rather than looking at your phone - you have to not only let yourself be curious, but also be vulnerable enough to make that curiosity known (a secondary skill, that I think can be built on a foundation of curiosity).
There was an article about that a month or two ago: The Death of Daydreaming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43894305
On the other hand, I feel a lot of media is pushing us to ignore, suspect or otherwise be scared of strangers. I don't know that this is uniquely tech driven though.
i used to be one of those with a book. now i listen to audio books which incidentally allows me to appear more extroverted because i can make eye contact and i guess people assume i am just listening to music and am therefore approachable.
I think this is the core reason for so much video arcade machine related nostalgia. Those that experienced this the first time around will know about stacking coins on the machines, playing against those you didn't know and so on. Now that is back to table football etc. but an entire category came and went in the space of 30 years.
Not to say the phones aren't having an impact of some sort, but yeah, I always knew how to distract myself.
there are four key things that "obliged" people to meet in the local area:
1) organised religion
2) organised fun, ie drinking, sports, location based hobbies
3) organised politics (social clubs dressed up as poltical movements, or vicaversa but crucially meeting regularly to do activities together)
4) work
In the UK at least there has been a strong but steady shift away from 1 & 3, to the point where they just don't really exist at any critical mass for people under 60. work is now more remote, which mean less concentration of people
Combine that with digital means to form your own virtual groups, You have less and less ties to your local area.
sprinkle on top that parents are utterly horrified by the idea that children might be left to wander, means that meeting your best mate (because there they are on the same street and the same age) becomes digital only.
In the UK is has (almost) never been safer to walk about in public https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand... yet we are paralysed by fear that young people are going to be mugged, drunk, mixed up in drugs.
There is also a massive decline in funded social venues, as council budgets have been slashed.
So whilst tech could be blamed for this, I strongly suspect that its only making it more bearable. The UK at least needs systematic cultural change.
We replaced branch offices with call centers, then outsourced them to people we will never see and cannot relate to in a foreign land. Then we replaced them with chatbots and TTS, anything to reduce support times and save more money for those at the top.
We built out infrastructure that met our needs and revolutionized how we worked. We did this on-site, with glorious rooms of consoles and equipment that, while fragile, were also impressive to behold. Then leadership got on a treadmill of “also needs”, bolting on new kit of questionable value, outsourcing expensive jobs abroad or to contracting firms. As internal knowledge dried up, it became easier to embrace the perpetual bullshit machine demanding you adopt ERP as a medium-sized business, demanding you hoard data, demanding you surrender sovereignty to “the cloud”, to embrace per-second billing over amortization schedules. Fewer humans in the loop, knowing the business, understanding its needs. Just some guy at the top slapping their name over a Gartner or Big Three report before sending it to the board.
And now in this “age of AI”, the attack continues at record pace. Gone are the people who know and understand your code, replaced by chatbots who can only predict what they’ve already seen. Gone are the developers, the engineers, the architects, replaced with armies of temps and contractors who aren’t allowed to engage with the workers or incentivized to solve a problem, but merely meet arbitrary KPIs decided by algorithms they had no say over.
Robots are meting out punishments to gig workers, our devices spy on us to send data to companies hostile to our existence as consumers, with products designed to break but never be repaired, sold by stores online with no human interaction for questions or to identify flaws.
We have allowed a system to be built that does nothing to improve the daily lives of the average human anymore. These “innovations” do not drive meaningful growth in a majority of businesses. New technologies are little more than checkboxes to be met rather than profound improvements in processes or automation to enable leisure.
We let this happen. We can also choose - at any time we want - to stop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
Some do, but 36% of the eligible population did not vote in 2024. I don't think there's any evidence that "invisible" workers disproportionately vote.
I think the article makes a very questionable—and unnecessary—connection to electoral politics: "A sense of feeling invisible clearly animates working-class rage in many countries, and may have powered Donald Trump to victory in the US presidential election last fall." Note the weasel words "may have", as well as the vague, unsupported "clearly animates" claim, which I would dispute. Although Trump did try to appeal to the working class in several ways, I don't recall him ever discussing the issue of depersonalization, the subject of the article. What do immigration and tariffs, for example, have to do with depersonalization?
A transactional exchange is not the right place to look for meaningful human connection.
In fact, if I COULD hire robots instead of humans to do things like drive me places or deliver my groceries, I WOULD. Robots are predictable and reliable, a random human may or may not be.
In some places, Amazon has delivery drones.
Ordering at Kiosks at fast-food places is immeasurably better than ordering from a cashier, especially if you make a lot of customizations to your food items.
When you are old and gray, I hope strangers continue to honor your wish by seeing you as a worthless husk because you no longer capable of offering any services they care about.
Old people I know that treat employees like robots don't have many friends or family they care about them. Maybe, if you coincidentally end up in that position too, you can pay robots to keep you company. I hear they're very reliable and predictable.
https://nohello.net/en/
how to ease this cognitive load ? I imagine that it is very tempting to accidentally dehumanize others in the pursuit of looking after one's own burdens
Its like a fog, slow, suffocating, hard to grasp, hard to agree on where it starts or ends. But we agree its there, and agree its a problem.