Does it feel like everything is more annoying?

There is a good amount of interesting commentary about this, ranging from the Enshittification Discourse to the cognitive burden of living through a golden age of scams, grift, and fraud.

It is increasingly difficult to pay for a cup of coffee without being asked for your email address, mobile number, and mother’s maiden name. What, you didn’t want to be opted-in to the additional fee for spurious ‘package protection’ automatically? That’s on you for trying to buy something online!

The rapid integration of generative AI into software and digital platforms has had meaningful consequences on user interfaces, user experience, privacy, and costs.

I am not particularly surprised that more people are going analog. (I did say you should consider buying a CD player.)

Engage in digital decluttering. Ruthlessly unsubscribe from the retailers from whom who bought something once and who have emailed you once a day since then. Pay for small offline transactions in cash while you still can (which is also a budgeting technique).

Tip in cash. Go for a walk and keep your phone in your bag or your pocket the whole time. Borrow a physical book from the library. Volunteer. Remember what it is like to engage as a person in community with other people and not merely as consumer who is being surveilled for maximum rent extraction.

Attribution

I want to say
that the night we swam towards
the moon hanging over the horizon
of the Caspian Sea, we found ourselves
kneeling on a sandbar we couldn’t see
like a last gift. I want to say
I’m the wrong person to ask.

— from The Wrong Person to Ask by Marjorie Lotfi Gill (videos)