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Imagine that you, as a philanthropist or activist who wants to help spread democracy across the world, read about a country described as a “flawed democracy.” The report describes the problems that country is facing in this way: 

low levels of trust in political institutions and the media; institutional gridlock; excessive influence of lobbyists, interest groups and the mega-rich; sharp economic and social inequalities; and an absence of social consensus on core national values.

What might you do to help address these problems? 

The country in question, in case you haven’t guessed, is the United States of America, and the quote is from The Economist Democracy Index, an in-depth study of the health of democracies worldwide. The United States hasn’t met the threshold for a “full democracy” on this list since 2015. 

Americans like to think they invented democracy and freedom, and that their country is the most democratic and free one on earth by definition. That idea doesn’t stand up to basic scrutiny, though, and statistical analyses help point to why. The Democracy Index is based on ratings of the electoral process, the functioning of government, political participation, the political culture, and civil liberties. The United States has been declining on several of those fronts for decades now, and scores especially low on both functioning government and political culture. 

People talk about democracy as something we need to fight in order to keep, and I agree. But I also think it’s not enough to defend democracy—you have to build it back after it declines, and the job of building it is never fully done. We must do more than fight not to lose (more). We need to keep bringing democracy to America. 

Because democracy isn’t just a particular system of government. It’s an agreement you build as a society, a way of life together. It’s an ideal to strive toward, not one that anyone has yet achieved. I don’t think ancient Athens, a city-state where only certain male citizens could vote, was particularly democratic, despite making significant contributions to our idea of what democracy is. I don’t think America was democratic before 1920, when women were given the right to vote, or before 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was passed. America, too, has made significant contributions to our idea of what democracy is, but democracy here is and has always been a work in progress, and not without setbacks. 

America made democratic process after the civil war, when formerly enslaved people were given the right to vote. It backslid during Jim Crow, when that right was taken away through various schemes. None of this was inevitable. 

America is not a good or perfect democracy right now, but it could be. Getting there requires a new way of thinking. It’s not enough to fight—we need to build. 

None of us can take on all of this, and what the specifics look like will depend on you – your community, your work, your sphere of influence. The important thing is to look for real ways you can help bring democracy to this county – what can we do to push those declining metrics of democracy back in the right direction? If you’re a journalist, like I am, your job is to do what you can to build back trust, to earn back the respect lost by decades of metric-based clickbait journalism. Another way to help build democracy, as a citizen, is to intentionally seek out and support quality information sources instead of passively believing whatever comes through your social feeds. You could support institutions that make democracy possible but are under attack, like your local library or public radio station. You can start a group in your town that gets together at a brewery and talks about ways you could improve your community, or join a group that’s already doing that.

It’s less about the specifics and more about the story we’re telling. It’s easy, when you think of this as a fight, to feel like it can only be won or lost. That’s certainly how the fascists frame things—as a battle to return to some lost golden age. That’s not the project of democracy. We know that we don’t have a full democracy now, and that we didn’t have one before. We’re not longing for the past—we’re trying to build a future. 

We are trying to bring democracy to America, every day. It’s on all of us, together, to figure out how. 

​​I write a lot. I’ve finished just shy of 150 articles so far this year between Lifehacker, PopSci, WIRED, and PCMag, an average of 25 articles a month. I love it. 

The best part of being a freelancer, to me, is that I don’t have to do anything but write. Yes, there is a little bit of admin—I need to send and track invoices, and the taxes aren’t fun. But there’s no managers, no meetings, and no company vision boards. I pitch articles, I write the ones that are approved, and after a few edits I get paid. It works for me. 

So what’s the hard part? Ideas. To write around six articles a week, I need six article ideas every week, and that’s not easy. So I thought I’d talk a bit about my process, for two reasons. First: I personally find learning about other people’s workflows fascinating and think others might be interested in mine. Also, though, I think most people could benefit from curating their own internet instead of doomscrolling, and maybe my workflow could inspire you to build something similar. 

I write a few different kinds of articles. For PCMag I tend to write reviews, which are assigned to me. I like this because I don’t have to think up an idea. For PopSci, lately I tend to write science explainers. I mostly come up with those ideas because I’m curious about something, end up reading a few scientific papers, and eventually end up with a document called coffee myths debunked by science on my computer. 

But the most common articles I write, which I publish on both Lifehacker and WIRED, are tech tutorials or profiles of specific applications. These aren’t news articles, really. I’m trying to find tools that solve specific problems so that I can highlight them. Finding these sorts of article ideas take up a lot of my time in any given week. I’m constantly looking for applications worth profiling or problems that need a documented solution. 

I have a morning routine for this, in which I read as broad a selection of technology news and recommendations as possible. I have an RSS reader in which I subscribe to a wide selection of tech blogs and other interesting publications. Many are well-known publications but I get some of my best ideas from lesser-known blogs like the excellent AppAddict. I supplement this by visiting a few websites directly every morning—Techmeme, Github’s Trending Repositories page, and a collection of Reddit pages that I’ve built over time. Between all of these I generally find a few applications or tools worth profiling every day, which I save in a Mac application called Gladys. 

I should re-iterate that I’m not looking for breaking news, or things I have a take about. I’m looking for tools that I think seem useful, and that readers might potentially find useful. I clip the ones that intrigue me. Then, once a week, I review everything I’ve saved there and turn the ones I still think are good into one-paragraph pitches, complete with a potential headline, that I send to the various editors I work with. If one editor doesn’t want a piece, I’ll pitch it to another one. 

I’ve done some version of this workflow for the past decade and a half. I start every week thinking I won’t be able to find six more things worth writing about and generally end the week having written six things. It works for me.

I’m curious about other people’s workflows, though. What’s something you do every day, or every week, that makes your job possible? I’d love to hear from you. 

Featured image source

“Technology makes everything more complicated,” an elderly relative said to me. It’s hard to argue with. 

In this specific situation she had paid to reserve a parking spot that, it turned out, she didn’t need. She tried to get a refund only to find out that’s not possible—all you can do is try to sell your parking spot to another customer on the parking complex’s “innovative” re-seller platform. Since situations like this did not happen in the recent past (when the company would have simply had one more spot to sell again), she blamed the technology. 

That’s not an irrational feeling, but is technology to blame? Or is tech making life easier for companies while making it harder for their customers? 

The tech investment class has complained, loudly, that mainstream society has a negative view of technology, allegedly due primarily to what they see and read in the media. I think people’s negative views of the tech sector has more to do with that parking spot, and situations like it, than anything else. Every day people experience companies using technology to make their lives worse. Those paper cuts, more than media narratives, are the reason people have increasingly negative views of technology. 

The economics here are not complex. Customer service is an expense; companies are also always attempting to lower expenses, and now technology makes it easier than ever to shift more of the cost of customer service onto the customer themselves.

The parking spot is an example of this. Not that long ago a customer could reasonably expect to get at least a partial refund for an unused parking reservation, likely by talking to a person on the phone. It was easy for the customer, but it wasn’t optimal for the company, which had to pay a human to talk on the phone and then actually give money back to their customers. Now, technology could have made that faster for the customer by automating the return, but the parking barons saw an opportunity for more. Thanks to the internet, they can instead keep their customers’ money until someone else buys the parking spot (the parking lot takes a cut of the sale, of course). The customer does not benefit from this change—only the company does. 

That’s not technology making things more complicated. It’s a business making things more complicated and using technology to obscure that. Pay attention and you’ll see this all over society. There’s stores replacing their clerks with self-checkout, forcing customers to do what was a paid job. There’s ‘home screens’ on our televisions full of service offerings we don’t have, obscuring what we are trying to find when we turn on the screen.

Anyone who has waited on hold for customer service is experiencing this same phenomenon. The company could, in theory, employ enough customer service agents so that you wouldn’t have to wait so long. They don’t, though, because that would cost more money. They could use technology to let you hang up and call you back when an agent is ready to help you (and to be fair, some organizations do), but even better to keep you in a holding pattern until an overworked agent is available or (ideally) you give up. 

And there’s a brave new world of cost cutting coming up: AI customer agents. Instead of waiting for a person to solve your problem you can talk to a bot! This, if implemented, will allow companies to lay off thousands of workers, so they’re going to try. There’s only one downside: AI bots have a habit of making up policies, which can sometimes cost companies money. Ideally this would discourage companies from using the technology until it’s ready (even if that day never comes). More likely, though, the company lawyers will be sure to draft language that puts the burden of working out whether what the bot says is true or not on the customer.

Am I being pessimistic? Possibly. But the pattern is a clear one—too many companies, when given the chance, will happily use technology to increase their revenue by making their customers do more work. Technologists who want people to have a positive view of technology should start thinking of ways to reverse that trend. 

Image source.

The internet used to be exciting—its potential to make the world better seemed endless. In the early 2010s it felt inevitable that innovation would make us happier, more productive, more connected, and all-around improve our lives. 

It doesn’t feel that way anymore. 

Some technologists blame the media for this. I’ve worked in the media too long to think we have anything close to that amount of influence. No, people feel pessimistic about technology because they recognize ways in which it’s made their lives worse. Instead of creating technology that helps humans thrive—encouraging human connections, increasing productivity, saving time so people can focus on what matters most—modern tech oligarchs are working to capture as much of humanity’s collective attention as possible so they can sell it to the highest bidder. 

Which brings me to Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire digital narcotics dealer, who recently made headlines by expressing a bad idea (again). In a recent podcast interview Zuckerberg mentioned off-hand that the average American has “fewer than three friends” and “has demand for meaningfully more”. His proposed solution for this problem: people can chat with AI bots created and managed by his Meta corporation instead. 

To be clear, he’s wrong about the specifics—the study he’s referencing was referring to close friends, not friends in general. But more interesting is what his “solution” to the problem reveals.

Because if he cared about friendship, he’s got tools. If there’s anyone on planet earth who has some technology to help solve the problem of “people don’t have enough friends”, it should be Mark Zuckerberg. He launched the platform whose whole initial purpose was to keep up with friends through technology. Now, after years of adjusting that platform to gain and exploit more and more time and attention, he runs the infrastructure where the majority of humanity scrolls content instead of talking to the people around them. He could, right now, change that interface in ways that encourage people to interact with friends directly—on his applications or even in real life.

Mark Zuckerberg could create a golden era of human friendship if he wanted to. He doesn’t.
If anything he’s done the opposite. It’s actively challenging these days to find posts and photos from people you know on Facebook and Instagram. How do you square that with Zuckerberg’s supposed concern about how many friends we all have? 

To Zuckerberg, if people are feeling like they don’t have enough friends, there isn’t a problem to solve, there is an opportunity to exploit. He’s identified a deep human need—connection—and realized a new way he can wring out a little more profit from us. Meta made its billions by exploiting people’s real life relationships, only to abandon those connections after they had a user base. Now to continue their infinite growth, they need more. The company can’t monetize the time you spend in the real world with your friends; they can monetize the time you chat with AI “friends” they control. 

Let’s be generous and assume that Meta’s AI bots will, over time, feel like real friends to people. The problem is that real friendship is based on shared interests, mutual respect, and ideally, admiration—intangible and mutual benefits. Meta, on the contrary, exists to make money, which means these “friendships” must ultimately be transactional. It’s not even hard to predict what this will look like. Maybe in time, your AI buddies will start casually mentioning brands in your conversations. Maybe, if you mention that you’re feeling depressed, you’ll see more ads for antidepressants in your timeline. You get the idea. 

Meta is named after the Metaverse, a term they stole from a dystopian cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash,  where large corporations control every aspect of human existence. Which is to say that the people who run the big technology companies right now are the kinds of people who read science fiction novels and entirely miss (or ignore) the cultural commentary. It’s hard to believe such people can help humanity flourish. 

Even so, I still think we can flourish in spite of them. I have to believe that. Yes, these assholes want to mimic human friendship in order to make a profit, which is undeniably bleak. But it’s also not inevitable that they win. 

Technology isn’t the solution to our problems—it’s a tool we can use. The Zuckerbergs of the world will always see our problems as a market opportunity, and they’ll try to use their tools to exploit them. If humanity is going to thrive, we need to do better than that. But to get there we all need to get better at spotting this kind of exploitation masked as problem solving. 

Hope for a better future, right now, is an act of rebellion. Fascism, throughout history, has pointed to the past as a model for the future. It is an ideology that sells people a myth about past glory and false promises to restore it. It promises, in as many words, to make a nation great again. 

That is hope in an imagined past. What we need is hope in the future. For that to happen we need technology that’s designed to serve humanity, not exploit our needs to stripmine our collective attentional capacity. We deserve better than what these assholes want to give us—it’s time we started demanding it. 

Related reading

• Facebook allegedly detected when teen girls deleted selfies so it could serve them beauty ads Joe Wilkins/Futurism Seems like exactly the sort of company we should trust to build bots that we share our insecurities with. 
• People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasties Miles Klee/Rolling Stone Things are weird but they’re going to keep getting weirder. 
• Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is because you misread the ones you meet Henrik Karlsson A few reflections on the work of building actual human friendships. 

The more you learn about a subject the less capable you are of understanding what the average person knows about it. In journalism this can result in articles that are incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t have the proper background. It can also result in information not being published because it seems too obvious. 

For example: it’s really easy to use modern laptops with desktop screens, keyboards, and mice. This means that, if you have a laptop, you (probably) don’t need a desktop computer. 

I’ve pitched this to several publications in the past month and none of them have picked it up, calling it too obvious for an article. And I’m sure the computer people reading this article agree. But not everyone is a computer person, and not everyone knows things like this. 

I know multiple people who purchased a desktop computer, in addition to their laptop computer, simply because they like having a full-sized keyboard, monitor, and mouse. And I agree: those things are nice to have! But you don’t have to get a whole other computer in order to use them—you can plug them all into your laptop. 

I’m writing this article on a MacBook Air that is plugged into a 4k monitor, speakers, a big old mechanical keyboard, and a full-sized mouse. But I can, at any moment, unplug the laptop and keep writing somewhere else. It’s amazing, and it’s how everyone should live.

You might be thinking that you don’t want to bother plugging and unplugging all of those things. And I’ve got good news there: docks. Anker makes a good one for $20. Plug your monitor, mouse, keyboard, and charger into the dock and you only have one cable to manage. Even better: many modern monitors have a dock built in, and even charge your laptop for you. 

Now, there are exceptions. If you’re really into PC gaming there’s a good argument for a dedicated desktop computer. The same goes for anyone who needs a high-powered GPU. That’s not most people, though. Most people are better served by a laptop and a dock. 

Because using your laptop as a desktop isn’t just cheaper—it’s easier. You don’t have to worry about syncing files between two devices, because you just have the one. And you can take all of your work with you anywhere. 

A lot of this is obvious to a lot of the people reading this, and this is one of the hardest things about being a journalist. Every time I write about anything I need to do two things: explain a topic in a way that’s useful for people who don’t know anything about it but also not completely boring for those who are knowledgeable. 

I’m a freelance technology journalist, pitching stories and tutorials to editors who are also technology journalists. This means that I, and the editors I’m trying to sell articles to, know a lot about technology. And I like that! It is fun writing about weird stuff that you’re interested in for a living, and getting to do that work with other people who are interested in it. But it can sometimes be easy to overlook the obvious tips that a lot of people can benefit from. 

In review: go ahead and plug your desktop computer tools into your laptop. It’s great. Thank you for reading this.