Welcome to our TechTalk
The guys are terrified of tech, and it shows.
We’ve instituted a new process to determine ROTW. The votes have been whipped and the white smoke is pouring out of my townhome’s electric fireplace.
Congrats to Scott Olberding on being named this week’s ROTW.
Stephen: Hello, Ryan. I believe you had a prompt for this week.
Ryan: That's right, Steve:
If you could halt the progress of technology at any decade, which decade would it be?
SK: Halting Progress sounding like a damn Nietzsche essay.
But you’re saying that you believe we’ve gone too far in technology? That’s the implication.
RS: That's right. We've crossed a line in the sand.
SK: I think we could have stopped in 2012 and been just fine. We had email, we had iPhones, we had the earliest iteration of Instagram where we just took photos of food and slapped the X-PRO filter on it. It was everything we needed.
Do you think I’m WRONG?
RS: Hard to say, Stephen. Though I do enjoy some of my iPhone's capabilities like maps and Spotify and, I guess because you brought it up, Instagram. It's done more harm than good. I'm probably a worse person because of my iPhone. Do you know how many times in a given day I look up from my iPhone only to make eye contact with my wife and realize she had just finished asking me a question I completely ignored? And what am I doing on the iPhone? Social media. Just scrolling through miles and miles of the worst shit you could imagine.
So I guess I am saying that yes, you are wrong. We need to go back to, like, 2004. You can have a MySpace that you’re only able to access from a desktop computer, you can have a Nikon Coolpix camera and you can have a Motorola Razr. But what about my maps? Buddy, here's a 500 page Thomas Guide that lives in the backseat of your car.
I'm getting sidetracked.
SK: The fact that I have to spend money on an app that then locks me out of my other apps is a giant red flag. And we just go along with it, acting like it’s normal behavior. We need Digital Tools to keep us from spending all of our time staring at Reels. It’s twisted.
My perfect tech, and I know this isn’t the prompt, would be early two thousands BUT I have iMessage on my Razr. It’s my favorite app. I love group messages and I truly believe those add value to my life. Otherwise, everything else is just bad and is quickly hollowing out our society while creating a giant, vapid monoculture.
RS: A Razr with iMessage technology does sound like the perfect piece of tech.
I think the attention span stuff and your monoculture argument are valid. But I think the worst thing about technology is that I am more or less available to anyone, via ten different apps, 24 hours a day.
Our Slack notifications were down yesterday and we nearly lost it. And that fucking sucks! The fact that I need to be around all the time and respond in a timely manner is nuts. Can't a man leave the office one day and never return anymore?
SK: We’ve eliminated boundaries and the worst part is that lack of boundaries is celebrated. You should be able to go run for 3-4 hours in the middle of the day every day of the week and no one should bat an eye. You know? That’s the world I want to live in.
Do you think the pendulum will swing back? Will we be able to remain a bit more out of touch or is it only going to get more intense? What do you see in your Meta Ray Bans?
RS: You know how our parent's generation (people roughly 60-70 years old) don't know how to use the remote on the television? Well, it took them a while to get there. They used to know how to use all the latest technology (microwaves, thigh masters, seat belts). But somewhere in the last 10-15 years they could no longer hang onto the rope. That's going to be us, but probably in the next 5 years.
Technology is accelerating at a breakneck pace and I'm planning on being totally aged out of it by the time I'm 40.
So I guess the answer is no. We've opened the box. Good luck putting whatever came out back in.
SK: A bunch of bad stuff came out. Our elder relatives got indoctrinated online and our nieces and nephews think their iPad is their best friend. And we’re somewhere in the middle — lost at sea, trying to get back the bliss of 2004 while attempting to remain relevant. It’s all just embarrassing.
Can we lighten this thing up?
RS: Sure man, how about a slightly related but mostly unrelated question?
Do you yearn for a pre-tech era in athletics the same way we yearn for less technology in our daily lives?
SK: Tech and sports have always gone pretty hand-in-hand, albeit in the last 10 or so years the tech has become a lot more impressive and clearly performance enhancing. At least in the world of athletics. I’m pretty conflicted on this because it’s fun to run in supershoes and the difference in performance is so incredibly clear — I look forward to running in those shoes in a way that I never really felt when I was lacing up my adios 4s. The pre-supershoes were light and that was kind of it in terms of cool tech.
There’s definitely something sexy about that, though. The simplicity of it all is obviously way cooler than dumb neon green shoes that lift you up about 4 inches. There is nothing cool about that.
RS: Right. Tech is not cool. If I got to the start line of a race and the person on my left was wearing an Ironman watch and a pair of adios 4s, that would be exponentially cooler than the person standing on my right wearing a breathe-rite strip, a Garmin with a heart rate monitor, and shoes that aren't technically legal because of stack height.
SK: Exactly. And now we’re in a weird space where people are trying to take jogging back to its roots by rocking up in cotton t-shirts or a sweatshirt but then they have on $350 supershoes. The high-low contrast isn’t working here. Either complete the look with your Chuck Taylors or pair the AlphaFlys with a VoltTech singlet. Choose one.
RS: If you want to take jogging back to its roots you go out and buy a pair of Asics Keyano and basketball shorts, walk out to the end of your driveway, start your stop watch and put it in the mailbox before you start your run.
Are we done beating this horse? What else can we say about how tech has ruined every facet of our lives?
SK: I think, at the end of the day, we are enormous hypocrites who rely on tech to make a living, get to the grocery store, and everything in between. But I’d like to strive to transcend it a bit more on the day to day. That’s all, I guess.
RS: This newsletter was written by ChatGPT.
Fun reminiscences! Clinton had a good sweat going, not sure about those shorts though.