• 23 Jan, 2026 *

I’m hesitant to paint broad strokes about technology. It being inherently good or bad aren’t useful contemplations for me. I see technology as part of the human experience. Like hermit crabs and their homes, we utilize technology and that is a very human trait. At the same time, technology and its use is deeply indebted to a culture and their cosmologies surrounding technology. It seems to be both something deeply human as well as something as variable as cultures themselves.

AI is a deeply boring technology. Culturally, it is a technology born from a deep boredom brewed under circumstances of hyper consumption. Only a culture so bored and bankrupt of creativity could ever be enticed by a glorified Mechanical Turk technology that creates crappy art for us. That’s not on us. Blame the capitalists for overworking us into uncreative order-takers.

AI is also boring because it represents the acceleration and thrust toward a politics that we’ve seen time and time again. It’s a colonial politics of transcendence where technology enables us to relax while another class of people or beings do all the work for us. Philosophically, the promise of AI is another iteration of the promise of slavery. And they’re never gonna achieve this promise, at least not in some way that doesn’t require Chinese factories to install suicide nets at their factories, require South African children to mine lithium, or require the ongoing colonial practice of capturing and controlling water resources for what is said to be a project that will save us all.

The saviorism is so fucking boring. Again, guys? Really?

Some Cool Technologies, Reviewed

There are a few metrics by which I like to gage a technology. Thinking that it is kinda like this:

1. Efficiencies: How efficient does the technology itself operate? Does it also produce efficiencies for the user and their surroundings?
2. Creativity: Does the object enhance the user’s ability to be creative or does it confine the user into a relationship of consumption?
3. Ergonomics: How does the design compliment those efficiencies and creative production?
4. Use/Application: Does the technology get used to enhance freedom or restrict it? How has use drifted from initial purpose or intent?

Let’s review some cool technologies that aren’t as fucking boring as AI and rank them up next to AI. Oh YOU KNOW AI is gonna get eaten alive. You can skip this post if you were expecting something else.

The guitar

1. Efficiencies: The guitar and its various iterations and relatives follow a basic unchanged design principle of strings over a physical board with either a resonant chamber or an electromagnetic pickup system to amplify the vibrations of the strings. It can be constructed with fairly basic, accessible materials. It can be played acoustically with no electricity, or through an amplifier for a stadium-sized crowd. A guitar can both be cheap and last a lifetime or more. That’s efficient.
2. Creativity: For me, it is one of the ultimate creative devices. You can consume it as a listener, but a guitar is both accessible as an object to acquire and as an instrument to learn. Because a guitar is so affordable, the odds of us having a creative encounter are greater and that’s a good thing for us!
3. Ergonomics: Guitars are made in all shapes, sizes. Some are custom made for the player. Some of the most famous guitarists aren’t even right handed, but a guitar can be flipped over, strung upside down, modified heavily for the user, or even played with teeth. Some of the most famous guitarists didn’t even have all of their fingers. The guitar is ergonomic!
4. Use: On one end we have Metallica’s Sandman used as a sonic torture technique at Guantanamo Bay. On another, we have Hendrix obliterating the Star Spangled banner for the better and the countless bands of resistance formed through a shared love of the guitar.

The guitar: 9/10 technology. Incredible potential for community building, creativity. A super cool technology that lets humans easily access their hidden super power which is accessing that universe that is music. Sometimes it is used to bend that which is normative, and that’s a form of resistance. Super not boring.

The bicycle

1. Efficiencies: maybe one of the most efficient human transportation technologies ever created. Wildly more efficient than a car in terms of energy use. Way better for the body and environment. A well kept bike can last more than a lifetime. Inefficiencies: lubrication required for moving parts, tires made from rubber are usually the most frequently replaced part. Unfortunately, bicycles also seem to be easily stolen, discarded, or abandoned as a practical mode of commuting and so bicycles do contribute to a lot of waste.
2. Creativity: I can see how the act of pedaling doesn’t seem creative, but bicycling is entirely creative when one has to navigate an automobile-dominated field. One has to be creative in order to be safe: riding in the center of a lane seems counterintuitive, but its safer than riding off to the side where the rider risks the driver attempting to overtake them. The bicycle also encourages creative commutes, rather than the same routine one might take in a car. It encourages seeing different places in your community, meeting others also on bikes and having a chat (because there are no windows that act as borders to socialization!). Commutes have become so uncreative that we’re basically checked out mentally and hoping that a podcast gives us knowledge osmosis as we sit in traffic with the broken promises of fast moving cars.
3. Ergonomics: Most bicycles are constructed to be efficient for speed and aerodynamics, and that is bad for ergonomics. Probably the most ergonomic bicycles are recumbent bicycles, which are also probably the most efficient at transferring energy from the legs to the pedals. It isn’t the most accessible technology. While there are all kinds of modifications for the disabled to make use of bicycles, safety remains an issue for all potential riders. The bicycle can be modified to be ergonomic for almost all users for riding, but in this world shared with automobiles, it is said to be up to 78 times more likely you’ll suffer a serious injury while riding a bicycle than driving in a car.
4. Use: Waste is at the top of my mind. Bicycles are often a phase for people, whether that’s because of the physicality required of it, or living/commuting circumstances–a lot of bicycles become trash. The upside is that bicycles are largely modular with interchangeable parts. And so the bicycle is easily recyclable. I worry that the fad of e-bikes will suffer the same fate and we’ll be left with a lot of leftover dead lithium ion batteries. I also worry for the safety of those who may have previously been couriers but now work within the food app-delivery economy. These delivery riders are exploited by the app companies and are left with little co-workers to develop community or form unions with because the primary mode of interfacing with the company is through a phone interface.

The bicycle: 7/10 technology. Despite all of its flaws, it is still an incredible way to move your body from one place to another. There should be way more organizations that search for and take in used bicycle parts to recycle for the kids or anyone in need of bicycles. One of the most non-boring things!

The quartz watch

1. Efficiencies: Compared to their mechanical predecessors, quartz watches tell time way more accurately. They’re also much easier to manufacture for much cheaper, which sent the entire Swiss watch industry into an existential crisis. Quartz watches are lighter, more durable, more accurate, and although sometimes wasteful of CR2032 batteries, newer quartz models often come fitted with solar panels that extend their lifespans. A Casio F91-W tells time better than a Rolex Submariner, and for under $20.
2. Creativity: Low on the creativity powers, the watch is an object that tells you the time. I’m going to be blunt here for those watchuseek watch snobs that will proclaim watch making as creativity: watches are objects of consumption. They’re mostly generative when timekeeping is used as a managerial tool over employees. We can pretend that watchmaking is creative, but it is also mostly a job for most in the industry. Most watchmakers are churning out hundreds of Casio’s a day. A small minority are completing mentorships at Tudor and moving on to working at Rolex. Let’s not fall for the romanticism of the factory that watchmaking marketers have sold us for so long.
3. Ergonomics: It’s an object made with ergonomics as its primary design objective. Folks just had pocket watches dangling from all over the damned place before they figured out that the wrist is a good spot to strap it onto. Watches are so ergonomic, some expect to strap one on and never take it off unless it needs maintenance.
4. Use: It isn’t as commonly found today because smartphones are everywhere, but the quartz watch is still incredibly useful. We use time telling devices for everything from getting to work on time to meeting up with a friend on time. Sadly, in this pick yourself up by the bootstraps and toxic hustle/grind culture time telling becomes confining. You live by the clock. It might be said that the most freedom-enhancing wristwatch is none at all.

The quartz watch: 6/10 technology. Great because watch snobbery is mostly about how much money you’ve wasted. Not great because being on time all the time is such a drag. Only boring if you don’t buy a colorful watch to add life to your outfit!

AI

1. Uses a lot of water so that we can have SmarterChild, but on every computing interface possible. Super inefficient. Doesn’t even give the right answers all the time, and so it is a lot of times a waste of time. Fake Mechanical Turk presentations of robots doing chores still do nothing for me, but have required an immense amount of resources to produce. Don’t even ask about the maintenance. It will be both costly and prohibitive for the user as well as wasteful.
2. Creativity? AI eats your creativity and regurgitates something that is just so mid that you’re never really impressed, but also never really bored. Using AI can feel like having creative super powers when it writes the song for you, but you will have to sit and listen through all of its takes and choose the best stuff. If using generative creative AI is basically 1) choosing inputs and then 2) curating outputs then I hate to say it, but you’re going to spend more time on curating outputs. When I said creativity I meant that you do the creating!
3. Ergonomics: Oh I haven’t forgotten how "The Internet of ‘Things’" or ‘IOT’ was plastered on the headline of every single tech blog throughout the 2010’s. That’s still the energy. AI will be ergonomic as hell, and it’s an understated development that voice interfaces will make hardware touch screen interfaces seem uncomfortable and archaic. Terrifyingly, AI will slip into all of those same IOT objects and we’ll have to live the whole future tech nostalgia of "it was built better when they made everything with touch screens!"
4. Use: Is it freedom enhancing when governments utilize AI to monitor and kidnap their own citizens? Is it freedom enhancing when AI is used to target people for bombings, or to produce disorder online via social media bot accounts? Is it enhancing the freedom of humans who need to drink water when AI data centers make water more difficult to access? It feels like AI is increasingly used for the transmission of anti-democratic propaganda, for the surveillance of marginalized peoples, and for the purposes of online sexual abuse in the form of AI generated pornography.

The latest ChatGPT ad that I saw is a guy preparing a dish for what looks like a first date that is going very well. Then overlaid on the screen you see his chat history and how he asked ChatGPT for the pasta recipe because this guy is so fucking boring. I presume the ad makers thought this dystopian and incel-adjacent-themed commercial would be wholesome and not something like a total Black Mirror episode squeezed into 15 seconds.

AI: 1/10 technology. It is said that AI will one day become human, "aware", or cross some plane into humanity. Sorry, folks, but the Philosophy Department is still rigorously working through the problem of what the human is. They still haven’t figured out the boundaries and limits of the human/non-human or of life/death. But when they do, I’m sure they’ll let the AI folks know what deliverables they’ll need to execute on.