Jason Walsh is mostly enjoying the experience of going without the distractions of social media and AI
Blogs
Image: Jessica Ticozzelli via Pexels
Writing about ‘digital detoxes’ is an easy win for journalists, yours truly included. Doubly so at this time of year, and why not? All of us today are bombarded, heads set spinning by bit slaps from work, friends, non-friends, and from apps that we didn’t want but were forced to download simply in order to access basic services.
Neurological studies suggesting beeps and boops are turning our brains to jelly strike me as alarmist and, basically, asking the wrong question. Nevertheless, the fact that tech is having a negative effect on us, both individually and collectively, is self-evident: we are distracted, depleted and perpetually on edge.
Neurologists are welcome to keep looking at this, but what I object to is not the idea that we are suffering (we are), but that we are nothing more than moist robots dumbly responding to stimuli.
The truth is simpler and more structural: the main impact of IT on the workplace, and on life, has been the absolute destruction of administrative capacity by forcing it all onto unaided individuals.
I am not going to sit on the mountain dispensing advice as though I am somehow better than you. What I will do, however, is note some small steps that I took in 2025. The first thing is that notifications are off. And I do mean off. If someone cannot explain themselves in a paragraph then they are free to call me.
There are downsides: two days ago, driving around trying to find a long term parking space (hindered rather than helped by poorly-designed apps), I missed an opportunity to co-host Tech Radio with Niall Kitson. I have also missed messages from family and friends. As yet, I have been unable to square this circle. The ‘simple’ act of creating groups and assigning contacts and apps to them, along with various rules, is labour that I do not want to perform.
And labour is the point. Every notification setting, every privacy toggle, every app permission is administrative work that once did not exist, now quietly demanded of us all. Nor did the existing administrative work go away: we just all have to do it ourselves now.
Then there’s social media: Facebook, which was given the heave-ho some time ago, has left a hole in my life. Two, in fact: one the shape of some friends whom I have no easy means to stay in touch with. The other hole is less of a worry, shaped, as it is, exactly like insanity.
Twitter, now X, is also gone. The entire website had been declining in utility for years, but owner Elon Musk’s antics are just too much to bear. Account closed. Do I miss anything? Yes, I miss being connected to people who listen to – and talk about – music. Unfortunately for me, my rather quixotic tastes – free jazz and contemporary music – leave little scope for discussion in my daily life, but I’m used to that.
From time to time friends send me videos on Instagram and TikTok. I routinely reply saying: sorry, I can’t look at these without opening an account.
Artificial intelligence (AI) I have come to terms with, in part by paying for it.
However, any serious engagement with LLMs reveals problems. Everyone knows about so-called ‘hallucinations’ (which would be better called spoofing), but even when AIs get things right they get them wrong. AI answers derive from the ability to search and compare material. As a result its answers are inherently biased: American, for a start, often simple conventional wisdom, easily manipulated into saying more or less anything (and, thus, useless) and with so-called ‘guardrails’ that protect the machine and its owner, not the user (something users really need to be aware of).
Sloppy analysis
One recent ‘chat’ with an AI about literature resulted in an extraordinarily aggressive and reductive analysis, of the kind now churned out by subliterate scholars who think their discovery of subtext means not needing to read the text. Just the kind of slop, then, that is privileged in academia, but done without even trying to read a word.
I am satisfied that AI is not good enough (actually, as Pauli put it, not even wrong) to do serious work in any field I am interested in. However, I remain worried that, by lowering the bar, fewer and fewer will notice this. Indeed, my main complaint about AI is that it actively harms discernment by giving soothing, and false, shortcuts to expertise.
I remain concerned about its economic impact, both on the wider economy and on, frankly, me, but I’m an adaptable fellow, and hope to be more thoughtful than ever having cleared acres of nonsense out of my head.
What will I do with all of this reclaimed time? A lot of things. Yesterday, I discovered a Kandinsky lithograph in a shop window, an image that detained me for minutes, despite the cold. In December I visited two exhibitions, one absolutely at random, and managed to drag myself to the cinema. Twice.
Reading is back on the agenda, too, with several novels read over the Christmas break. This weekend I will have dinner with a friend. Somewhere nice. Mid-priced food, so-called ‘fast casual’, which is itself an epiphenomenon of tech, can also go in the bin alongside the rest of the ‘content’. Next month I will visit my mother. I will drink cups of coffee and walk the streets. I will think.