Wed 2025-09-25 08:12 EST

ROOPHLOCH 2025: Some Thoughts On Technology

As I write this, I'm sitting on a bench at my local park. I come here to walk in the mornings. The park is nice. I wonder what all of the other people walking by think I'm doing here.

As I'd been planning to do this challenge, it made me reflect on a lot of things I've been thinking about in the past year about technology.

1. I feel like electronics are so pervasive in my life that I need a break from them entirely. I've been thinking for a little while about taking an entire week off from any electronics, at least any newer ones: computers, video games, internet, smart phones, tablets. I'd just read books and write with pen and paper and play board games and listen to terrestrial radio. I would have to take the week off of work. I'm not sure when I'd be able to do it. But a technology cleanse sounds like something that could be helpful to me.

2. I think a lot about the impermanence and volatility of digitally stored information. Obviously everything is impermanent. A digital file is no more impermanent than a physical book in the grand scheme. But digital information just feels more etherial, like it could just disappear at a moment's notice, without warning. A file on your hard drive could just all of a sudden become corrupted. A website you like to visit could just shut down and become inaccessible. But a book, or a notebook, or even a piece of paper, feels so much more solid, easier to preserve. It's why I've been buying and reading more physical books recently, and buying more physical media. It feels so much more real, to me at least. I wonder how many others share this view.

3. With the advent of generative AI and Large Language Models, and their pervasiveness these days, I've been thinking a lot about technological progress. It seems like a lot of newer technologies try to improve upon what's been done before, but either don't do it as well as the technology they're meant to be improving, or they do it just as well, but differently. In the case of LLMs being integrated into search engines, it seems they perform that function much worse than the previous technology did. Is technological progress real? Is it actually always forward momentum? Or is a lot of "progress" just horizontal, coming up with new ways of doing what we could already do? And is it worth it? I'm not sure it is. Which is why I use the Gemini and Gopher protocols, I guess.

ROOPHLOCH 2025: Some Thoughts On Technology was published on 2025-09-25