use technology to do things
It feels a little ridiculous to say my writing has a core theme. I'm just a guy who writes technology tutorials—step-by-step guides to doing specific things. I'm not delusional and I don't think this work is particularly important—it's just what I like doing. I want to write things that are useful, entertaining, or both—ideally while also managing to make a living. I was lucky to work with great editors in 2023 and I hope I'll be able to do the same in 2024.
My writing is guided by a basic idea: that technology should be a tool. We should be able to use technology to do things. It sounds simple but at some point this got all messed up at some point. Technology companies obsessed with growth at all costs stopped seeing the people who use their products as people and, over time, imagined them only as numbers.
Everyone who spends time online can feel this. It's the clearly AI-generated articles in search results that don't answer your questions. It's the social media feeds that no longer include any posts from friends or family—just random videos. It's the unwanted marketing emails you get from every company you've ever interacted with. It's the contorted faces in the thumbnail of every YouTube video. All human endeavors became a game, a series of numbers that can be made to go up with the right trick, until the entire world felt vaguely inhuman.
It doesn't have to be this way. We can still find ways to use technology to connect with each other and make the world better—it's just a matter of having a little discipline. And that's the core theme of my work: tweaking technology so you can use it to connect with others, regardless of what the company who made the technology intended it for. That's what my work is about.
The best things I wrote this year
- We're in the Era of Dirt-Cheap TVs The Atlantic In capitalist America TV watches you.
- Google's AI death spiral The Atlantic Replacing links to articles with an AI summary of said articles destroys the incentives for anyone to publish online ever.
- Can a Flip Phone Make You Feel More Human? PCMag It turns out smartphones are pretty useful and switching to something else is kinda annoying. I still learned a few things, though.
- How to Fix a Broken Sleep Schedule WIRED I forgot I even wrote this one! Hopefully it's helpful.
- How I Use Obsidian for Writing and Productivity WIRED I was surprised how many people liked this one! I hope I can write more like it next year.
- Stop binge-watching YouTube videos Popsci These tweaks have saved me so much time.
- Turn your laptop into a karaoke machine Popsci It's easier than you'd think!
- Stop Bing from showing up in the Windows start menu Popsci A lot of what I do for a living is notice an annoying change Microsoft makes and figure out how to change it back.
- I wrote a lot of reviews for PCMag and I'm proud of most of them. If I can tell you one thing, though, it's this: Spark is a better email client than Superhuman. Don't spend money on Superhuman.
- Oh! I also wrote about how to get more out of common office applications for the Wall Street Journal. It was a section cover with pretty great art.
I had a great year, even if I didn't write many newsletters. I'm going to try to do a better job at publishing here next year, even if it's just a round up of article links every few weeks. Feel free to bug me if I don't live up to that, and happy new year!