In the episode, Editor Eric Limer, who covers technology, talks candidly about how tech-saturated our lives have become. Electronics and connected devices surround us, and their pervasiveness can feel overwhelming at times, particularly if you’re concerned with security and privacy. Eric offers advice to anyone feeling some of that anxiety. He offers tips for taking inventory of what tech you use and how you use it, and also the implications of cutting back.
Tips for taking inventory of what tech you use and how you use it, and also the implications of cutting back.
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Nick Caruso:
This is the Gear Patrol podcast. In this episode, editor Eric Limer, who covers technology, talks candidly about how tech-saturated our lives have become. Electronics and connected devices surround us and their pervasiveness can feel overwhelming at times, particularly if you're concerned with security and privacy. Eric offers advice to anyone feeling some of that anxiety. He offers tips for taking inventory of what tech you use and how you use it. And also the implications of cutting back.
Nick Caruso:
Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoy the podcast, make sure to subscribe and we'd appreciate a five-star review because they help us get in front of more listeners. I'm Nick Caruso and I'm glad you're here. Let's get started.
Nick Caruso:
So the anxiety is real and there's still that urge to be whatever people are conceiving of as low tech. So is there anything we can do or can recommend if someone is anxious about the over-saturation of tech in their lives?
Eric Limer:
Yeah, I mean, sort of like we were saying before, I think it's always important to highlight the boundaries of individual action when it comes to this are very sort of small. But there are things that you can do to sort of mediate your relationship to technology in certain ways. Like you said, other than going off to live on a desert island, there's only so much you can do, but yeah. The thing that I found the most useful is just sort of be thoughtful about what you're getting into when you sort of getting into something new and it's exciting to digitize something or to have a new way to interact with stuff.
Eric Limer:
But it's also, I think, the way a lot of this stuff is portrayed and marketed is designed in such a way to make entry extremely easy and exit extremely hard. And so before you pick up something, a smart home device or whatnot, and sort of try to design, this is how I'm going to live my life from now on, think about what the implications of that might be. And the other thing that I think about is, also if you're trying to take a piece of tech out of your life, you should think about what the implications of that are. I don't use Facebook. I hibernated my Facebook account seven years ago, but I never went and deleted it. And for a while, I was just like, oh, look at me. I'm the guy he's not on Facebook or whatever.
Nick Caruso:
Self-righteous.
Eric Limer:
Yeah, legitimately. And then I did begin to realize eventually that a lot of the burden that I was avoiding being on Facebook, just fell to my wife who ran in the same circles and suddenly was the only point of contact for the two of us, between other people. And so my decision, my theoretically individual decision, to back out of this, changed her relationship to technology in a different way. And so I think that's a thing to keep in mind. Because when you make a decision to sort of go low tech or whatever, you are sort of necessarily cutting yourself off from certain people and that's a calculus that you have to do for yourself. It's different for everybody.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. It was an equal and opposite reaction sort of thing. So you're talking about auditing your tech. This is a phrase that's come up with us before in the last podcast episode you were part of, we were talking about saving energy or energy bill savings and such and taking an audit, a real good inventory of what devices, gadgets, tech you're using and how you use them and deciding what's essential and what isn't. You talk about that complicated sort of social calculus that's one, but there are ways to kind of cut down behaviors. And there are even ... interesting, I'm using one right now. There are sort of these ironic devices that are designed to be lower tech. I'm using an e-notebook. There's the light phone, those kinds of devices. What do you think about those? Do those work, are they bullshit? What's the deal?
Eric Limer:
Devices like that are complicated. I have some of them in my life, too. An e-reader is sort of one of them but those are complicated because they often present themselves as a solution to a problem that you're having of being over-teched and there's obviously a contradiction there of the solution to being overteched is an additional piece of tech. And they sort of get past that seeming contradiction by being like, oh, well this will replace the other thing that you're using and that's how it'll sort of bring you down a level. So for light phone, for example, I think, I'm not actually sure how it's necessarily positioned in the marketing material, but I can see a lot of people being like, all right, I'm going to buy a light phone and I'm going to use this instead of my smartphone.
Eric Limer:
And the sort of sticky thing about these gadgets is that it typically doesn't work well if you try to do that, because suddenly you've moved a bunch of functionality from your life that you weren't necessarily prepared for because you didn't necessarily do the sort of straight up audit and you are going to be downgraded and you're just going to be angry about it. I do think that those gadgets can be useful if you have a plan for using them. If you buy something that and you're like, well, I'm going to take pains to arrange my life such that I will use only this on this day, or this after this hour to sort of use it as, I was going to say methadone, but you do use methadone to replace heroin.
Eric Limer:
So, but to use it as as the sort of lesser version, but not to remove the other thing entirely. Basically to use it as a device that helps you do the kind of auditing that we're talking about. But those things are definitely not a easy solution to a impossible to solve problem. They will often raise problems that you weren't expecting when you try to use one. But that in and of itself is productive so long as you're expecting to have to deal with that.
Nick Caruso:
I want to make sure people understand what devices we're talking about. So the light phone, maybe between us, I'm sure we can get this. You probably know way more than I do about details, but it's essentially an e-ink little tablet, phone size tablet, smaller than a phone, that has no connection to social media. It has no GPS. It has no way to store music, whatever. It's just a phone and it can just text. And the idea was, your iPhone is driving you crazy. You're too connected, use this instead, but you kind of need another phone to use it. Isn't that, is that the hook?
Eric Limer:
So there've been a couple of different iterations of the light phone. I think the most recent one is a little bit more sophisticated in that. It wasn't there at launch, but they've brought maps to it. I think it can play music. The main thing, though, is that there is no social media and because it has an e-ink screen, that really limits the way that you can look at it [crosstalk 00:09:11] Yes, the graphics, that's the word I was looking for. And it's also limited by the fact that it is its own little ecosystem. And so it has a very limited set of apps because it's not just using Android or iOS apps, so it's limited in that sense as well.
Eric Limer:
But yeah, that's essentially the idea is that it's trying to strip the phone down to the basics, to the essentials. But, also, it raises the question of well, what are the essentials of the phone? Is mapping an essential in your phone? Maybe. And then there are definitely ways that you can ... it's a spectrum. You can have this conversation about what are the essentials for a phone. You can either end up at the flip phone or a wall phone, honestly, or you can end up being like, well, I need to have an iPhone that's no more than three years old because I need to have this app on it. So it's tough. I think the main takeaway there is that, these are interesting tools. They can help you maybe work through a process, but they're not going to solve the problem because nothing ever solved the problem easily. But also the problem is kind of unsolvable.
Nick Caruso:
It's our colleague JD has a light phone. He and I were talking about this not long ago. And it's he's like, I kind of had to give up using it consistently because it's such a pain in the ass to actually coordinate which device I'm going to use. Music for a run versus whatever. And you bring up a good point about updating tech. That's another really big element of this is the planned obsolescence. You can be a hold out with an old iPhone, but after a while, that iPhone is not going to work, unless you jail break it and leave some sort of low-tech, unsupported OS or get a wall phone instead.
Eric Limer:
Yeah. I mean, this is something that I had on my mind because of Apple's WWDC conference. WWDC for folks who aren't familiar, happens in the early summer. It's mainly for app developers and it coincides with the launch of the early beta stuff of the new iOS. But for us and for people who are interested in tech or whatever, it's your first glimpse at the new iOS that'll be coming in the fall. And with every new iOS, a new-old generation of phone dies because it's not supported by the new iOS. One of the ones I was looking at this year is that, if you remember the sort of interesting related to the light phone thing. But if you remember the first-generation iPhone SE, which came out in 2016, and so that's the one that is the shape of the old ... I think it's literally the body of the iPhone 5S.
Eric Limer:
So it's the last of the iPhones that is that smaller size, which is a whole other sort of tech thing. If you've been paying attention to phone sizes, if you've used a phone over the past 10 years, you know what I'm talking about. So iOS 15, the good news is, does support the iPhone SE first gen. So people who are still hanging on to that, because they're in love with that size, they get a stay of execution. There's another year before inevitably that that phone gets left behind. And so that's the other complication is because we talked about the way that individual choices are limited and you have a limited slate of options and also as time moves forward, some of those options will be torn out of your cold, dead hands.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. That's a fine way to put it. At some point I'm going to pull you aside, or you and Tucker maybe, and ask you to talk me out of getting the new iPhone mini, but that's a different conversation entirely. But ... this element of this conversation is very much in the universe of nostalgia for analog devices and this is the inevitable part of the episode where I mentioned my old analog Jeep that is constantly falling apart. I have to work on it nonstop to keep it on the road. It's kind of fun, but also it's a really big pain in the ass to try to issue a new kind of updated car that I can't just crawl under with a socket wrench and fix. So you can really only resist to a point.
Eric Limer:
Yeah. You can only resist to a point and the sort of further you get along, the more it has to be a really conscious, positive decision in the other direction. A lot of the way that companies that sell gadgets, and just we a culture, I think, think about technologies is we think about it as additive over this sort of baseline of what everyday life is. And so you think about opting out of a piece of technology as choosing to not add that layer on top of your baseline of life or whatever, when in fact it's kind of the opposite. You were saying with the Jeep, I think it's clear from the way that you described it ... it's less about making your decision of oh, I don't want or need a fancy car and it's more of a, I am going to make the decision to make a significant part of my life be about nursing, this piece of analog technology as it falls apart.
Nick Caruso:
That's my personality.
Eric Limer:
But legitimately. I'm a person, obviously I use a bunch of technology, there were a lot of great apps for note-taking and calendars and to do list stuff. I have a physical notebook, I have a bullet journal and it's a decision that I have to remake on a regular basis because I sit down and do it and it's enjoyable to me, but it's just it's extremely inefficient, just wildly. And it has to be something that I legitimately enjoy doing in order to justify that.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. I mean, I don't know how our caveman ancestors put up with it. Between trying to catch up on all the latest shows and chisel their journal into a new piece of granite. That's great point. Let's return to one element of this before we start to wrap it up. And that is the privacy thing. I think not just the saturation of tech, literal number of devices or screen time, whatever. I don't think that's the only strong element here. I think the other main element to this sort of wanting to get rid of tech is privacy. You mentioned the algorithm earlier, it's impossible to avoid. But you also mentioned the WWDC ... I thought I was talking about wrestling for a second. That Apple just released a couple more privacy-focused updates to some of their tech. So I guess what I'm asking is some tech is safer or will guarantee your privacy more than other tech. And that's another decision you have to come out of your tech audit with.
Eric Limer:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, this is another one, because so much of this is sort of beyond your control, whether or not you can use it and whether or not you have any control over it. The one thing I think about, this happened a couple of years ago, the FCC basically made a decision that allowed your internet service provider to look at your internet traffic and give it to advertisers if they wanted. The ISP said, oh no, we're never going to do that. So that's something that's, well, all of that is completely sort of beyond your control, whether that is happening. You can do things to protect yourself from that, by using a VPN, et cetera.
Eric Limer:
But the point I'm trying to make is that a lot of this stuff, especially privacy related, these are these are questions about how we exist as a society. And they require to be solved at bottom, they're going to require political answers. But that being said, there are there are things you can do here and there and yeah, you're right. There are going to be different trade-offs in general between different devices and privacy is one of those things. And this is another, I feel like I sound a broken record and it's a lot. This is tough advice to say, you need to be mindful of everything, you need to be conscious of everything, you need to be well-informed or whatever.
Eric Limer:
Ideally we would live in a society where, I'm going to just going to keep saying society. Ideally we would live in a culture where that level of personal responsibility is not necessary in order to secure basic rights like privacy. But going back to, again, with WWDC, this is actually, I said I used Android for awhile. This is part of the reason that I switched to an iPhone, because I like a lot of the privacy stuff that Apple is doing. And I think an important piece of context there is to understand that Apple isn't doing this altruistically. Because no company ever really is. But that Apple is in a unique position where its business model is primarily based on selling hardware and increasingly selling services like iCloud and that sort of stuff. Which can be annoying in its own sense when your iCloud fills up or whatever.
Eric Limer:
But that business model puts them in a very unique position versus their competitors of, they have the luxury of being able to offer you privacy because their business model doesn't revolve around violating that. And so that', I think, the thing to keep in mind. Like I said, that's why I've become more interested in Apple devices because I trust them more to preserve my privacy because I'm relatively confident that it's not in their best interest to violate that for now.
Nick Caruso:
You've really backed Tim Cook into a corner [crosstalk 00:21:39] You're right, though. Apple has famously resisted unlocking phones for the government on some occasions, in an extreme cases. And also on the algorithm, phones are listening to us privacy concern point. I actually came across a Twitter thread that I'm going to try to find and I'll try to link in the show notes about the paranoia about phones listening to us, you talking about something and you get an ad served to you. And just sort of dismantling that idea. That's not how it works, but that paranoia is justified because we know that there are algorithms searching everything we do in our life.
Eric Limer:
Yeah. The thing with that is, I sympathize with that paranoia. And in some ways I almost ... it's not happening. It's not necessarily harmful for you to live your life as though it is. But the thing with the phone's listening to you or whatever, is that the good part is that they're not eavesdropping on you directly. And the bad news is that the reason it appears as though they're eavesdropping on you directly is because there are other more complex and wide ranging modes of surveillance at play that are so accurate that their results make you think your phone is listening to you. My wife recently got an ad on Instagram for a drink that was packed in as a free bonus in a meal plan kit thing that we get.
Eric Limer:
And it was just like, wait, how did the phone find out about this? We never said this out loud. And it's just, well, maybe the information about who is signed this meal plan kit or whatever, and maybe it's just an ad blitz. But yeah, I sympathize with that fear of don't don't go all the way tinfoil hat or whatever [crosstalk 00:23:56] It's generally good to be helpfully suspicious about what's going on around you.
Nick Caruso:
Sure. Question your environment. And really, the essential pipeline there is, if I'm around my friend who has been looking at cars, Toyotas, and we talk about that a lot and then search while they're around me, our information has been sold to advertising companies and they can tell that we're near each other. So logic implies that we probably talked about it, et cetera, et cetera. And then I get an ad. It is complex and it is weird and unsettling. But to your point, healthy skepticism. Which brings me to my final question. Someone stops you on the street, recognizes you as a famous tech editor and says, Eric, you are a God of tech. You are the encyclopedia to end all encyclopedias, but I want none of it. What is your top level advice? Can you let them down easy? Can you give them sort of a positive spin on what they can do in a succinct way?
Eric Limer:
See, the thing is I'm going to, this is maybe unsatisfying, to answer your question with a question, but it's just like, who is that person? The answer to that question depends on who this person is. Here's the thing, is, the person who wants nothing to do with tech, isn't going to know who I am probably.
Nick Caruso:
Okay. We don't need to break down my logic, Eric, this is not a personal attack here.
Eric Limer:
No, but it's tough. It's tough. I guess here's an actual answer to that question, which is just keep removing pieces of tech from your life until it hurts too much to continue. Don't be afraid to add some stuff back in and remove a different thing instead, but just have a mindset of just constantly thinking about what things you can remove.
Nick Caruso:
Well, that goes along with your advice earlier, too, about that it's easier to not adopt tech than it is to remove it.
Eric Limer:
Yeah. And that's why it's sort of the question is, where is that person on that pipeline? Because the kind of person who doesn't like tech, chances are going to be back further anyway. So you can have a different conversation with them about which steps forward to take or whatever, versus somebody who is all the way in, it's going to be tougher to sort of walk backwards.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, exactly. But, hypothetical person, if you're out there, I don't know why you would be listening to a digital podcast, but if you are, there are steps you can take, reasonable stuff, but your anxiety about oversaturation of tech is also justified, frankly, Eric, we could go on about this for a long time, but I don't want to oversaturate the oversaturation. So thank you for weighing in, on all this stuff. And everybody, thank you for tuning in, taking some time out of your day to listen to the Gear Patrol podcast and I hope you what you'll hear. And if you do, I hope you'll subscribe and keep listening to future episodes. We have a nice little backlog of episodes, many of which feature Mr. Eric Limer, tech extraordinaire, who you'll recognize on the street now.
Nick Caruso:
And if you do the podcast, I hope you'll give us a review. Five stars, really, honestly help. Speaking of algorithms, help us get in front of more people so that we can give them advice about how to get rid of us. And find us on social media, if you haven't deleted your accounts yet. Our handle is GearPatrol, one word, and you can email me at podcast@gearpatrol.com with any questions, comments. I'd love to know if you have a personally issued tech, if you are a self-proclaimed Luddite, if you embrace tech wholeheartedly, or if you have any suggestions along the lines that we've been discussing here. So with that, Eric, thank you again. Very enlightening.
Eric Limer:
Glad to be here.
Nick Caruso:
And everybody, thanks for tuning in. I'm Nick Caruso and until next time, take care.