The Reluctant Technologist

Back in the early, early days of the web, Slate ran a column called “The Reluctant Capitalist.” The columnist, Heather Chaplin, grew up in a leftist, deeply anti-capitalist household; she absorbed those values, but was nonetheless fascinated by the machinations of capitalism. The column resonated with me—while I grew up in a more conventionally liberal family and didn’t think, at the time, I was particularly anti-capitalist, I found myself agreeing with both her criticisms and her fascinations.

This has been on my mind while I’ve been thinking of “soft rebooting” my blog lately, by which I mean getting back to writing for it regularly. That inevitably raises the question: why haven’t I been writing for it regularly? While it’s not obvious if you look at the archive page on Coyote Tracks Dot Org here, I wrote several things a week for several years on the original Tumblr-hosted version of the blog, and at one point was a featured technology blog on Tumblr, had a hundred thousand followers, got cited occasionally on Techmeme, the whole shebang. There is another universe in which I figured out how to actually make Coyote Tracks into a living.

What happened in this universe, though, is that Coyote Tracks led to my career shift from web development to technical writing, right at a moment that coincided with me re-focusing on fiction writing by attending a two-week residential workshop at the University of Kansas’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction. (Due to university politics, the CSSF is a shell of its former self, but the Ad Astra Institute, led by the Center’s original directors, carries on the tradition.)

So, it would be easy to say that I stopped blogging regularly because I was writing so much else, in no small part thanks to the blog. Easy to say, but not entirely accurate.

In recent years, I’ve come to realize that what I saw as the “good bits” of capitalism are real, but they’re being drowned out by the bad bits. They’re properties of well-regulated, properly functioning markets, and market socialism is a thing. Capitalism doesn’t, at the end of the day, want properly functioning markets, because corporations don’t want prospective customers to be able to make informed choices or, ideally, to have choices at all. So the bad bits of capitalism are (checks notes) capitalism.

In parallel, I’ve been finding that a lot of what I saw as the good bits of technology are real, but they’re being drowned out by the bad bits. The bad bits of technology are (checks notes again) also capitalism.

In July 2024, I wrote about feeling burnout on my job hunt. Part of that comes from how bad job hunting has become in the tech market the last few years, but it’s also tech itself. It’s the sense of desperation in pushing whatever the next big thing is—currently, LLMs—as the most revolutionary invention since the steam engine. As Ed Zitron memorably puts it, it’s the Rot Economy. If the sole meaningful measure we apply to companies is growth, all companies, no matter now interesting or artsy or humane or quirky they may start out as, are inevitably driven to enshittify their products. Maintaining your existing market is not enough, because that means you’ve stopped growing. You must, must, extract more revenue from your existing customers and find new customers, and if you can’t find new customers, you have to get into new markets.

And, you know, I love Apple TV+ as a service, even if the naming conventions lead to Who’s-on-first comedy routines. (“How do I watch Severance?” “It’s an Apple TV+ show, so open the Apple TV app on your Apple TV. Now, you can watch other shows in the Apple TV app on your Apple TV, but those aren’t Apple TV+ shows, so don’t get confused. Also, make sure your Apple TV is set on the correct Apple ID Account or you won’t see the correct Apple TV+ shows in the Apple TV app.” “Maybe I’ll just see what’s on Netflix.”) New products and services in unexpected areas aren’t intrinsically bad. Hell, nobody expected Apple to make a great phone, and it’s no exaggeration to say their designs changed the entire smartphone field. We can debate whether Apple also makes the best tablet computers and the best smartwatches, but we can’t debate they’re sure as hell in the running for both.

But we don’t need “Apple Intelligence” everywhere, especially in its current, degraded form. (The flaws people assume will get fixed later are very likely intrinsic to large language models, but that’s a different post.) We especially don’t need the System Settings panel to show us an advertisement for Image Playground that we literally cannot dismiss without opening Image Playground. That is not a dark pattern, it is a Vantablack pattern, and it neatly encapsulates everything that I hate about what technology has become. That it’s coming from Apple, a company whose products I’ve mostly loved for four decades, is fart icing on a shit sundae.

Sorry, I’m getting off track. The point here is, technology in its current state pisses me off. A lot. Web development—software development in general—has become absurdly complicated. Selling software is more difficult, with more gatekeepers, more corporations to placate. Our hardware and operating systems are ever more difficult to customize. Websites are harder to read, with eye-searingly intrusive ads and whiny requests to sign up for mailing lists. Half the time they’re full of reposted, AI-filtered slop when you can read them, because you can no longer rely on search engines. Everything from your phone to your television wants to track you. It’s enough to make you want to sell everything electronic and move to a cabin in the mountains (assuming you can find a place that won’t be routinely subject to floods and/or wildfires).

And yet, in spite of it all, I still kind of love technology.

I still love finding new—or merely new-to-me—apps. (I’m trying to use Obsidian instead of Ulysses for the blog, starting with this post!) I love it when a program or feature I didn’t see the use for suddenly “clicks.” (I could never make task management apps work for me, until I used Things 3 with macOS’s desktop widgets.) And the Mac, for all the steadily increasing number of things there are to complain about, remains a joy to use in a way that no other system I’ve routinely used—and I’ve used a lot—ever matched. (The year I used BeOS full-time came close, but again, that’s a different post.)

So, I’m a reluctant technologist. I don’t like the industry much at all, and the things I dislike about it are the things that make its products worse. Yet I’m still fascinated by gadgets, by software, by big swings and big misses, by hidden gems. And, yes, by the so often self-destructive business practices.

I know I’m not alone in that love/hate feeling, and I’d like to explore the why of that more, dig into it. While there’s too many pundits on both the pro- and anti-AI beats, as someone who worked in the “intelligent assistant” industry for a while, I have love/hate feelings on that front, too.

And, of course, one of the big weights lately on the “hate” side of the equation is the politics—the way Silicon Valley’s ill-considered technolibertarianism has curdled into an altogether darker technofascism. While I never moved in those circles, I got close enough to peek in on occasion. As much as I don’t want to dwell on topics that make me want to walk into the Gulf of Still Fucking Mexico, they’re important to face.

What I don’t think I’m going to try to do is keep up with current tech news the way I did fifteen years ago. That doesn’t mean I won’t talk about it, but I think I’d rather embrace Last Week Tonight energy rather than Daily Show energy. It’s more my speed these days.