My friend Brad writes on his microblog:

I think the strangest thing by far, reading tech optimists and boosters, is that even at their most dystopian, they lack the imagination to consider the profoundly alienating, boring, or otherwise inefficient and frustrating possibilities of prospective technologies.

It’s as if they look at the internet today and just see efficiency, frictionless transactions, and a thousand apps of convenience — rather than a thousand apps of maddening exhaustion, too many transactions to keep up with, and inefficiencies all the way down. In other words, something like the tyranny of the inbox. I don’t use email because, on balance, I consider it preferable to snail mail. I use it because I must. And I’ve never met a soul who loves email.

A few comments seem in order to me:

First, you can invert nearly every sentence and read it as a tech optimist confused by tech pessimists. Don’t believe me? Watch:

I think the strangest thing by far, reading tech critics and skeptics, is that even at their most utopian, they lack the imagination to consider the profoundly affecting, exciting, or otherwise enabling and illuminating possibilities of prospective technologies.

It’s as if they look at the internet today and just see a thousand apps of maddening exhaustion, too many transactions to keep up with, and inefficiencies all the way down — rather than efficiency, frictionless transactions, and a thousand apps of convenience.

That you can so easily flip this set of claims around and have it work equally well is important. Both of these things are true! There is a great deal of tech that is maladroit at best, that causes its users no end of frustration while making a quick buck. But there is also great software out there in the world. I’m using one such software application to write this very post. I used a couple other such applications this morning for deeply creative work that will, I hope, be appreciated for its beauty when it appears in the world in a few weeks. I suspect Brad himself could, if pressed, name a number of apps that he does, in fact, deeply enjoy using!

I wouldn’t choose the positive adjectives Brad lists as the key “winning” qualities of digital technologies, either, of course. I think it’s telling that those are the bits Brad picks up on, rather than the potential for creativity, collaboration, and communication. Because these are the things promised by Big Tech? Perhaps: but why let them set the terms of the story? Perhaps by “tech optimists” Brad merely means to name “boosters and shills”. The problem, of course, is that many of us are optimists about computing without in the least being boosters and shills for Big Tech. The story we have been telling — some of us for a long while now! — is a rather different one, focused less on expediency and more on excellence.

Second, on email — well, Brad is simply wrong. A lot of people do in fact love email. Not that we love every email we receive, but then I rather suspect Brad does not love every piece of snail mail he receives either. Cal Newport’s particular hatred of email does not a case for “everyone hating email” make: it makes the case that he hates email, for whatever reasons. But my own experience of email is decidedly polar. Some of it is annoying tedium, much of it mere spam (in which regards it is more or less identical to snail mail!), but on the other hand there are newsletters, and correspondences born of newsletters, that are among the real joys of my life.

What is the proportion of us that love (some) email vs. those who hate it? I haven’t the foggiest idea. But Brad’s unqualified assertion here is, again, simply wrong. And I think it is wrong in a way that is illustrative. Email, in this telling, is not merely something some people dislike; it is bad to its core and a perfect illustration of everything wrong with tech. Except: that isn’t true! Newsletters blew up for a reason: because there are things about email which are great, and which are different in kind from similar pieces of snail mail.

Third, and finally, Brad seems (both here and in his writing on tech in general) to take it as a given that everyone ought to share his vivid dislike of digital technologies. I have yet to see him ask why someone like me — or, perhaps better, the sorts of thoughtful folks I know we both read and profit from reading: the Alan Jacobs and Robin Sloans of the world, capable of being both critical of tech’s woes but also significant appreciators of what it offers at its best — might find such joy in these technologies, might despite all the frustrations and ups and downs nonetheless not end up in either the crushing despair that seems to characterize much of what I read from L.M. Sacasas or Audrey Watters these days, or the simple dislike that I read from Brad and folks like him.

The challenge with digital technologies is their sheer generality.¹ Those thousand inconveniences, frictions, boredoms, and alienations that Brad hates? I hate them too. But those are simply not the whole story of digital technologies. The capaciousness of these devices is their strength no less than their vulnerability. A smartphone with its front-facing camera can be a devastation and a plague on the lives of young people addicted to social media. It can also be a way of staying close to those most beloved of us, separated by half a world for reasons we may or may not have chosen.

We get to choose how, and whether, and when, to use these devices. We get to make laws and set policies that protect the vulnerable and punish the abusive. We get to choose whether to indulge in their invitation to isolation, or to lean into their capacities for creativity and connection.

Let me be clear: I am glad that there are folks who push back against the follies that dominate much of Silicon Valley — against the thinking that more, and more digital, is always better. It is not. We do a great deal of work in my own family to help our daughters spend their lives primarily in the “real world” rather than video game worlds and to grow up free from the pressures of social media addiction and comparison. The world of Big Tech and its aim to monetize every bit of young people’s lives is perverse and deserves a rebuke.

But that is not the whole story. We also teach our daughters to see these tools as tools, over which they have control and agency. We are showing them that computers can be wonderful means of creation: of music, of writing, of visual art. We have taught them that “creative time” beats “game time” by giving them freer reign if they are writing or composing or drawing than they have if they are playing video games, even as we also encourage them to do that work by hand on paper and at the piano. Both-and, not either-or.

In the end, I just wish folks like Brad were a bit more careful in their critiques and a bit more open to understanding why folks like me have found computers such a source of joy: because at their best, they are gloriously capacious tools for good work.

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Notes

1. A framing I first used in an essay that ended up sailing into the void last year; hopefully it will make an appearance somewhere at some point. Some readers may note that Andy Crouch makes much the same point The Life We’re Looking For and The Tech-Wise Family. Great minds, it would seem! ↩︎