The one word that can help you use technology — without letting it use you

Technology. I’m not a “technology writer” by any stretch of the imagination, but I find myself writing about it a lot.

I don’t opine about the next breakthroughs in AI or the newest generation of iPads that are set to be released at the end of Q3. Are there new iPads coming out in Q3? I don’t know. I’m not a technology writer.

But it is the most viable and scalable path forward in a world oversaturated with digital technology.

But I do think a lot about the role of technology in our lives. About the way we live differently alongside it and how we are shaped in strange ways by it.

Same but different

In some ways, it’s a very 21st-century concern. Technology — digital technology in particular — has been advancing at an unparalleled rate in our century, and it doesn’t seem to show any signs of slowing.

But, of course, technology didn’t begin with the digital. Cars are technology. The washing machine was once cutting-edge technology. Same for the printing press, the mechanical clock, and the wheel. Technology has been around, advancing, and disrupting for a long time.

We live in a post-assembly-line world. That term — the assembly line — isn’t even particularly interesting to us. Same with the Industrial Revolution. That’s just something boring we learned about (and then promptly forgot) in middle school.

But the Industrial Revolution and the assembly line were quite radical at one point. They changed the way people work, and they disrupted society. A fair share of the carnage of the 20th century is due, in part, to the disruptions of the Industrial Revolution.

The train changed the way we move, the printing press changed how we learn, the telephone made us closer even when we were farther, the radio made mass society possible, the television made books less relevant, and the invention of the washing machine — yes, the mundane washing machine — played some role in the social revolutions of the 1960s.

All-consuming

In this sense, the age of AI is no different from the steam age. In another sense, however, it is unlike any technological revolution we have ever experienced: far more immersive and all-consuming than anything that came before.

Because it is more possible than ever to always be connected to everyone on earth in a perpetual state of latent distraction and worry, our time presents unique challenges for all thinking people who want to live a decent life that might be be hard to recognize to those who came before us.

For a few, the answer is blowing it all up. For many more, the answer is embracing every single aspect of every new form of digital technology imaginable like a dog lapping up fresh water. Both are wrong. The extreme answers are often the most alluring because they only require addressing one decision point. This way or that way? Once you settle on which, you just scale it out the whole way and set the cruise control.

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Split the difference

Yes, as with most things, the middle path is the way forward. I know, it’s not sexy, and it’s not at all alluring. Moderation never is. But it is the most viable and scalable path forward in a world oversaturated with digital technology.

Intentional technology use — that’s what it is, and that’s what we will call it. That first word is the key word: intentional. Most of the drift into toxic technology consumption and brain rot is due to being less than intentional in terms of how one uses technology.

Defaulting to “just using the phone” or “just asking Grok” or “just scrolling” because you have some time to waste. Concluding that watching more, streaming more, scrolling more, and outsourcing more of your decision-making to technology because there isn’t anything inherently wrong or immoral about it.

That kind of unintentional approach to technology can quickly lead to surrendering all of your agency to the bots. As the gamers would put it, you go from being a player to one of those automatons the player meets along the way: a non-player character.

Best intentions

To use technology intentionally is to ask if we can do it ourselves before enlisting digital help. Intentional technology use is asking ourselves if we like ourselves when we use some product, app, or digital service — and, if the answer is no, changing course.

Intentional technology use is setting aside time apart from technology so we can remember what it means to be purely human. Intentional technology use is about balancing convenience and thoughtfulness. It’s about managing the speed of the modern world without losing the pace of organic human society.

Intentional technology use isn’t about making everyone’s choices regarding technology the exact same. People will decide differently. Everyone’s lives won’t be alike. That’s a feature, not a bug.

The key is that first word — intention. Without that, we’re just floating down the stream, pushed wherever the currents of technological progress take us. The 21s century is unlikely to become less complicated. To thrive as humans in this most disruptive of times, we must keep asking ourselves the fundamental question: Who are we, and who do we want to be?