Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

What do you mean by "covid bubbles"?

Algo-paranoia.

Every time I interact with a remotely "clever" system, I keep thinking how my input will feed some machine. How fast do I scroll, what is in my viewport. What do I listen to and when. Is this an A/B test? Will something I do on a whim affect that machine to predict something incredibly stupid tomorrow?

It only became obvious recently, as I was readying an actual, physical book. The relief to realise that the publisher won't optimise the font based on how fast I turn the pages. And the disgust at that aspect of tech.

And to what end?

I basically don’t encounter any ads in my day-to-day life, digital or physical. I have no TV, and use uBlock Origin (including annoyances lists) on laptop and phone. I live in a tiny rural town so that practically the only advertising posters within a 35km radius are first-party advertising on two or three Telstra public phone booths, and in the decent-sized towns 40km away in either direction there’s barely any more. The nearest billboard ads of any sort would be over a hundred kilometres away, in Horsham, Ballarat or Bendigo, and not much at that.

When I go down to the big smoke (Melbourne) I find the prevalence of billboards, side-of-bus ads, &c. physically distressing—and then they make it worse by using screens for them so they can change their contents, make them glary, &c. and it’s just awful. And it becomes ever more and more intrusive; Melbourne’s trains used to be safe spaces, then they put billboards on the platforms, then scrolling billboards, then ads in the carriages, then animated billboards on the platforms, then billboards with speakers on the platforms, and I wonder just what they’ll come up with next. I really dislike the city. There’s a reason I moved out into the country.

As for television ads, ugh! Maybe once every year or two I happen to be in the same room as a television that’s turned on, and how anyone can stand to watch the stuff when such ads are part of it, I don’t know. Maybe if you grow up with it you don’t realise quite how obnoxious it is?

I have concluded that display advertising is just fundamentally bad and that our society would be better if it were outright banned in all its forms. I would even sympathise with vigilantes that went round demolishing and vandalising billboards on principle.

1. Information hoarding, distraction and FOMO

The Internet has generated in me an habit of information hoarding. At the beginning I would bookmark useful information and then take notes on paper of the useful things; with the passing of time distraction has started to creep in: more and more useless information, more and more FOMO.

2. Omnipresence of tech and privacy concerns

An increasing number of actions require emails to get done, this rises privacy concerns. When I was 14 enrolling in high-school meant filling a form in pen and paper and bring it to the administrative office. 11 years later, my sister needed an email and personal information on the net. I really don't like it.

3. Affliction due to envy

I haven't used social media since I was 19 but HN and reddit are not really better: there are a lot of thing that I just wish I could forget and fill me with envy that I would have never felt if I had never read about that particular thing. It is obviously irrational being envious of something that you didn't event wanted in the first place, but the irrationality of that feeling do not make it less real and painful. Sometimes I do a 30 day diet and I do not visit HN or reddit, but the feelings never really go away.

4. Ephemerality

I still have some books passed by my great-grandmother belonging to my great-grandfather during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. I still have all my books from middle- and high-school. These required passive maintenance: just put them on the shelves far from fire and done. On the other hand I've lost entire years of data (photos, books, notes) during a single incident that rendered my physical back-ups useless.