This website is about keeping personal computing simple.

I use to be hooked to a plethora of mobile apps, clouds, and a smartphone.

This was consuming too much of my time and attention.

This was in 2017.

Since then, I got rid of my smartphone and have been trying to figure how to do personal computing sanely.

I have been documenting this transition on a log.

My motivation for starting this weblog is to steer the conversation away from the idea that “there is no alternative”, “it’s too late” et cetera, which is also what my full time work is about.

I do research, mostly drawing from philosophical works, to try to figure out concepts and frameworks to critique digital technologies; ‘to critique’ meaning to sieve through to improve (not to blame or reject).

I’d like to give you an idea of what this is about: one of the axioms of my work is the idea that usage of technologies is both, progress and regression, “good” and “bad”, et cetera, and that both effects are intertwined, like the poison and the remedy of a drug. Meaning that it is not possible to take a drug as a remedy without taking some of the poison. Both are intertwined. So we’ve learned to use drugs as remedy (progress) knowing that intakes can also be poisonous (regression). We’ve learned to do a pharmacology to learn to distinguish between curing practices and toxic practices.
I think of technologies as drugs. For example, we can rely on the predictive dictionary or the spellchecker. It is convenient. Yet, overtime, we might forget how to spell words; we can no longer write without the digital assistant. In other words, we loose agency over our ability to think of what we want to write, and the digital assistant takes over the unfolding of how we express ourselves. That is the idea my work tries to convey: that digital tools can help us, that is foster our condition, but also undermine it. Like drugs. Therefore, instead of thinking of technologies as “progress only” and adopting technologies unquestionably, we might want to think of technologies as a medium which brings progress as well as regression. If we can see this dual effect, we can start thinking about how we want to use technologies. Because how we think about doing things affects how we do things. And how we do things affects how we live.

If you have questions, thoughts, or want to discuss the above feel free to email me at: yctct at yctct dot com

If you want to receive an email when the book is out, send an email to book at yctct dot com (I’ll reply to your email when the book is available).

Also, I put together: A guide to simple and stupid usage of computers for writers (anyone who writes really) under a BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.