Shut it down

So much of our interaction with computers in 2026 is having to come to terms with everything getting more intrusive, more annoying, more time-wasting, and generally breaking the contract between companies and their customers. As loath as I am to use a Cory Doctorow-coined buzzword, I have to admit that he nailed it with “enshittification.”

But yesterday the internet made me throw a “why can’t we have nice things?!” tantrum — I finally deleted Instagram from my phone, after a couple of weeks of feeling like it was giving me psychic damage every time I opened the app. There’s been such a long, slow degradation of that platform that it took me a while to put my finger on exactly why it was bothering me so much. Eventually I realized that they’ve finally abandoned any pretense of being anything other than an advertising platform that occasionally and randomly shows you a photo from someone you might know.

I actually counted, for science, and saw that the stories1 were actually 8:1 ads vs entries from accounts I was following. And as for the real posts, the ratio was 6:1 ads or “suggested” posts vs followed accounts.

I’m still amazed that a company that’s put as many billions of dollars into social engineering as Facebook has could be so lackadaisical about blatantly destroying the user experience. Like they got impatient waiting for us frogs to boil and just took a flame thrower to the whole thing.

So I could use a win, and I’m trying to procrastinate instead of being productive anyway, so why not look for something to be optimistic about? And I found it when I sat down at my computer and realized I’d left it on all night, with several apps and browser tabs all open in the middle of doing stuff.

Actually, I realized I’ve been leaving it on all the time for the past week, if not longer. And yet everything was still running fine, with nothing slowing it all down or generating any zombie processes (as far as I could tell).

Which probably seems completely unremarkable for most people, but I can’t stress enough how alien this is to me. Even this many years into the iOS era, I still close apps when I’m done with them. No matter how many times I hear people insist that I don’t need to, I worked in app development just long enough that I don’t trust leaving anything suspended. And I’ve always shut my computer down when I’m done with it for the day, even if I frequently forget to turn off the monitor.

My brain is now so corrupted from decades of programming, in fact, that I get low-level anxiety when I’m in a conversation and someone suddenly changes the topic without finishing the last one. It’s like pushing items onto my mental stack, and if we don’t pop everything off, my mind will end up leaking.

My desktop computer, for the record, is an M3 MacBook Pro that’s now 3 years old, so it’s not as if it’s struggling. But there, too, I’m often having to balance my frustration with many of Apple’s business decisions against straight-up marveling at how good the computers are. I almost never use it as an actual laptop, but I’ve never once had the feeling that I’m sacrificing utility or performance for (theoretical) portability. It’s still way overpowered for anything I try to throw at it.

Back when Apple introduced the M1 MacBooks, I made the switch as soon as I could. It was genuinely amazing on its own merits, but even more impressive in comparison to the last several iterations of the Intel-powered versions. I’d just started to take it for granted that laptops simply run uncomfortably hot, and there was no way around it. Of course you don’t actually try to put it in your lap, what a silly, fanciful idea. And don’t touch the area above the function keys unless you want to get burned, but why would you want to do that, anyway?

Apple’s marketing is so hyperbolic in general that I didn’t realize until later that they’d been underselling the switch to their own chips. It genuinely feels like a huge company saying, “it doesn’t have to be like this, you know,” and “computers can actually be good.”

Again, this is all stuff that might seem inconsequential for anyone who’s not as terribly, terribly old as I am. But I’m typing this on a super-responsive bluetooth keyboard that I rarely have to charge, using a wireless ergonomic mouse that requires charging even less often. And I’m sitting next to my handheld PC (the Steam Deck) docked and connected to the monitor, which doesn’t run Windows but can still run 99.99% of the games I’m interested in playing, using the same keyboard and mouse.2 Every bit of this would seem weird if not outright impossible to me from 2016.

So occasionally it’s a good thing to realize that the boiling-frog syndrome happens both ways. Obviously, there’s a ton of stuff that’s deliberately weighing us down, making everything more annoying, more wasteful, more expensive, or just plain more unpleasant. But we’re also surrounded by things that are getting better without our really taking notice of it.

1
Which are all but useless and should be ignored, yes, but satisfy the “I need something new to tap on” urge exactly as they were intended to ↩︎

2
While I wait for the Steam Controller to come out. ↩︎

1 Which are all but useless and should be ignored, yes, but satisfy the “I need something new to tap on” urge exactly as they were intended to

2 While I wait for the Steam Controller to come out.