The Computer was Once Special

Now it's everywhere

The computer was once a special object that had a designated spot in the house. It was a portal, a gateway to another world. For a long time it was the only pipeline to the internet. You went to your PC with hopes of doing a task or entertaining yourself for a while, and when you were done, you left it alone.

For most of my childhood I didn’t have one at home. I could only use a computer at a cyber cafe, where my time was rate-limited. I grew up exclusively on TV which is maybe why I love it so much as an artform to this day.

My family bought our first real PC with Windows XP when I was thirteen. This PC was a gift for me and was kept in my bedroom, and so I naturally spent a lot of time on it even though we didn’t have an internet connection just then. For the first few years I used it almost exclusively for listening to music and gaming.

The only surviving photo of my first PC. I miss you bro

Even pre-internet, calling the computer “fun” would’ve been an understatement. The more I learned about the different things it could do, the more riveting it got. I learned how to burn CDs, how to port and edit photos you took from a DSLR, how to install and play cracked games, and what tools (like VLC Media Player) were a must-have. I learned about a store in my city called Gadget which sold PC games to you on the cheap. I learned about tech magazines like Chip and Digit that gave you a DVD full of cool tools with each issue that you could try out.

As I got older there was soon an extensive file sharing network among all my friends as more and more of us got PCs and wanted the good stuff. We would share music, movies, games, and softwares that someone or the other had Limewired or Torrented among each other. Through certain friends (shoutout Arjun) I was introduced to media that resonated with me like nothing else had till then, and is still among my favourites to this day.

My PC soon became home to a huge collection of music, starting with Linkin Park and Green Day, sitcoms, Dragon Ball Z video compilations, and games like FIFA 08, NFS: Most Wanted and GTA: Vice City. It was a treasure trove of all the media I loved, and I was spoiled for choice as to whether to use it as a gaming console or a music player or a movie theater at any given time.

A couple of years later my dad bought home another PC and hooked up a broadband internet connection to it. Of course I wanted to use the internet but we didn’t have WiFi then, and so could access it only through this new “family PC”, which was kept in my parents’ bedroom, which meant that I had limited time to be online every day.

Till then, my touch with the online had exclusively been through hangouts at other friends’ places or through cyber cafes. I’d mostly used the internet either to do last-minute Wikipedia research for a school project, play Counter Strike 2.0 with friends on LAN, or to play online games on websites like Miniclip and Club Penguin. After this arcane magic entered our home it was over for me. Once I began using YouTube and then Facebook regularly it became even more over, and after I discovered Torrenting I knew I’d succumb to a spiral of endless media consumption and never amount to anything useful in this lifetime.

2010’s era Facebook really was, to quote Kanye, the best of all time at the time though. In a way it was like 2010’s era Manchester United. Those red notification badges on that navy blue UI hit like crack. We were hooked. I would write status updates like “Height of sarcasm: I love exams!!” and get five likes from my friends and feel like the king of the world. I would spend an evening meticulously growing crops on Farmville after school and then switch back to my personal PC to play some Price of Persia at night, all to avoid that day’s piling homework. Life was good.

While my early childhood was dominated by TV, the PC quickly took over as the go-to choice of entertainment before smartphones arrived on the scene in college. (Boy am I glad that I didn’t have them in school.) But before the smartphone era there had always been a very clear demarcation between my digital life and my “real” life, back when my real life mattered more than my virtual one. When I wasn’t using a computer, I wasn’t using one. That constant lack of access, that sheer anticipation of going home and finally getting to play with all my digital goods made all the time I was on my PC that much more precious.

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“Could I interest you in everything?
All of the time?
A little bit of everything
All of the time
Apathy's a tragedy
And boredom is a crime
Anything and everything
All of the time”

- Bo Burnham, Welcome to the Internet

Cut to fifteen years and multiple generations of PCs, laptops, mobile phones, smartphones, and tablets later, the computer is my life. In some form or another it’s there when I wake up and need to check my email, it’s there when I’m taking a dump, it’s there when I go for walks or when I do laundry or when I meet up with a friend, it’s there when I’m working, and it’s there when I’m relaxing after work. It’s everything everywhere all at once.

And it’s so goddamn exhausting sometimes.

Gone are the days of the PC being in its assigned place in my home. Gone are the days of my time online being limited. Gone are the days of anticipation, of waiting in any sense to use a computer of any kind, of going to the internet rather than having it be literally all around you, always. Top comment on a blog post about the 90’s: “I miss when the internet was a place we visited, not a place we inhabited.”

I personally own more electronic devices today than my entire family collectively did at one point. My life is like Times Square: anywhere I look, I see a screen. The longest stretch of time when I’m not looking at one is when I’m asleep at night.

Now, I’ve never been the proverbial tech-bro-slash-hacker-slash-cracked-10x-engineer-with-an-anime-pfp-slash-brogrammer kind of guy, but I do fundamentally like technology. I’ve always enjoyed programming and I’m more optimistic about AI than most. But there’s just something about staring at a screen all day for years on end that creates this sense of malaise about tech that starts to creep in over time, a certain need to touch grass, a need to do something else with both my hands and my life other than type words into a machine, a need to actually live, whatever that means. It’s a feeling that says, there’s more to it out there. It’s a voice that goes, I cannot spend every day of the next forty years hunched over a laptop like this.

Me in 2065

To be fair, this isn’t a Big Problem of any kind and is something I directly chose. I love tech, I’m never gonna stop using it, and I’m amazed at how fast the industry has progressed in the last decade. I just think that this feeling of malaise I’m talking about is the inevitable endpoint of years of overexposure to the same sMaRt dEvIcEs, streaming services, apps, operating systems, and interfaces, day by day, over and over and over again, and I think it could somehow have been avoided without avoiding using these devices entirely.

Even the internet starts to feel homogenous over time: if you don’t proactively curate your feeds, every social media platform devolves into a stale soup of memes, ads, influencer-posts, short-form videos, thirst traps, discourse, humblebrags, announcements, and/or hot takes. This infinite stream of consumption accrues day by day until at some point all this “content” merges into one sloppified digital entity in your head and drives you to a point of insanity where you feel like chucking your phone out the window.

Over the years, the thrill of buying a new machine has slowly faded away too - no matter what phone or laptop I get, I know I’m going to install the same apps, bookmark the same websites, and login to my same accounts on it anyway. Wherever you go, there you are.

This “techaustion” is also a function of age, I think. I’m not “old” (wait, am I?! OH FUC-) but I’ve now used computers for long enough that any semblance of newness is completely gone. The reason using a PC felt so good as a kid was because it was a completely unexplored paradigm. It was the first time you could actually interact with a machine and make it do things instead of passively consuming what it showed you. And I’m sure I’m being overly nostalgic here and that PC-time wasn’t always all jolly, but I’m fairly certain that at its zenith it gave me more joy than it does now. I know for a fact that everything feels good as a kid because I remember really liking Windows Vista.

It’s pretty ironic that I feel this way at a time when a computer has never been more powerful. It’s Archimedes’ proverbial lever. You have what’s equivalent to the modern library of Alexandria in your pocket, you have instant access to all the art humanity has ever made, and you have tools that have democratized the process of creation like never before in human history. (And this is before we even get to the latest AI stuff that has the potential to make anyone 10x more agentic.) There are artists, entrepreneurs, and programmers who have changed the world using just their crappy laptop. I’m very aware of these facts, and yet they make no difference to this feeling of anti-tech angst that I feel now and again. It seems to stem more from my body than my mind.

More than anything else, there’s a certain inescapability to this tech-industrial-complex that really gets to me. I’m a software engineer by profession and don’t know how to do much of anything else, so it seems pretty unlikely that I’m going to be able to reduce my use of these devices at least professionally anytime soon.

My personal life isn’t any better. Everything is scheduled on Google Calendar, my entire life’s gallery is on Google Photos, I get all official correspondence on my Gmail, and I talk to friends only through WhatsApp, if at all. Even if I qUiT sOcIaL mEdIa I can’t realistically stop using any of these tools for too long without needing to drastically alter my entire lifestyle.

And so I feel trapped in these digital systems which, to be fair, have made my life infinitely easier and feel good to use most of the time… until they don’t, and my body channels its inner Chuck McGill and starts screaming at me to throw away every device I own into a river and run away from it all.

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“Hey, put the cellphone down for a while
In the night there is something wild
Can you hear it breathing?
Hey, put the laptop down for a while
In the night there is something wild
I feel it, it's leaving me”

- Arcade Fire, Deep Blue

This “problem” is probably a failure of my imagination more than anything else. It’s not even a real problem as much as a feeling that comes up sometimes that I don’t really know what to do with. (To be fair, that’s all feelings.) All I want is to make tech a joyful part of my life instead of having it be my life.

Maybe the solution is to constantly do new things with it. Maybe there’s some obvious cool tool or game I’m missing, some project I should be pursuing but am not, that’ll make everything exciting again. Maybe if I just learn Rust or try out Crusader Kings III or make something in Blender or get a PS5 and speedrun Horizon Zero Dawn on it, I’ll feel completely techjuvinated (sorry).

Or maybe a new form factor is the answer - switching to beautifully designed devices of the kind I’ve never used before. That’s why I get excited by companies like Rabbit, Daylight Computer, and Teenage Engineering, and often browse their websites even though I might not buy (read: afford) their products. At least their devices look exotic. They’re exciting in a way the next iPhone just isn’t. But I know for a fact that even if I did own any of these gadgets I’d get tired of them eventually and then write another blogpost complaining about that instead. “Newness” is just a bandaid solution.

Maybe the most obvious solution really is the best one: simply reduce my screentime. Duh! But what’s the point of actually doing something about a problem if you can just write an essay complaining about it? Jokes aside though, my issue is that most of my hobbies outside of work (like this blog) are also quite laptop-dependent, and I don’t know of a good way to get around that hurdle. That said, I still could read more and watch less Netflix (such a LinkedIn-esque phrase I almost threw up), use Twitter only for three hours a day instead of five, go for walks without my phone, start listening to music solely on vinyl, and so on… There’s definitely steps I could take if I bothered to start walking.

Anyways. I don’t really know which of these solutions will help me get rid of this tech-weariness. Maybe doing a bit of each will help. Or maybe none of these are worth it and that feeling is here to stay forever. Deep down inside I don’t believe that’s true though, I do think a perfect balance of mechanization vs humanity is possible, even if I have no clue how to get there just yet.

I do sometimes fantasize about a future in which for some reason I take a break from all electronic devices for months. Maybe I’m living in a remote cabin somewhere or backpacking on another continent or whatever. During this break I imagine only talking to people IRL, only reading words printed on real paper, only paying with cash everywhere. No smartphone, no laptop, no Spotify. I then imagine returning to my digital life once this so-called quest is done, back home to my comfy devices and to the sweet, sweet release of getting to waste time on the internet again. I imagine booting up my dusty laptop, the Windows logo turning blue, and feeling that rush of euphoria I used to feel as a kid whenever I was about to spend the next few hours gaming, till eventually the new becomes the old once again and this rush inevitably fades away, because apparently that’s what being an adult is about, or so I’m starting to learn.