I'm not Anti-Technology, I'm Anti-Anti-Technology

After listening to some of my rants you'd be forgiven for assuming I'm a middle-aged grumpy person who hates technology. If you've known me for any length of time, you'll (hopefully) know that this isn't true (well, except for the middle-aged grumpy bit). It's easy to say "technology" as if it's a binary thing, but it's not that simple. Generally, I love technology. I've been into tech since I was a child, and that was in the 80s when it was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now. I studied computer science at university and I've worked in tech roles for my entire working life. Technology has the potential to massively improve human achievement. I certainly don't hate technology. What I hate is anti-technology.

I've always seen tech as an enabler. Computers are very good at doing frustrating, repetitive tasks much quicker, and often more accurately, than people can. Think of the pocket calculator ... does anyone nowadays know how to do trigonometry without one? I sure don't, and even before calculators maths students used to look up sines and cosines in log books rather than try to carry out the mammoth task of working it all out by hand, yet a calculator can do complex trig in microseconds. The pocket calculator is a perfect piece of tech, it does exactly what you tell it to do, and nothing more, and makes a frankly tedious task much less tedious.

Anti-technology, on the other hand, is technology specifically designed and engineered deliberately to restrict. It's a form of technology which, if removed, makes your day better, not worse. And there's a lot of it about these days.

My first experience of anti-technology was in 2000 when I bought my first DVD player. Up until the invention of DVDs, home movies were usually distributed on VHS, a medium that contained an analog video signal on a magnetic tape. Due to the various video standards around the world, it wasn't easy to buy a VHS tape abroad and play it on your equipment at home, which is why I owned a ridiculously expensive VHS player that could do a partial format conversion, and a TV that could display the weird signal being sent to it. This wasn't anti-technology, it was just a physical restriction in the way the existing technology worked, and I used additional technology to overcome this restriction and allow myself to buy videos from whichever country I liked. DVDs, on the other hand, contain digital video in a universally supported format (usually MPEG-2) meaning that by default any player can play the content on any disc. But, at the insistence of Hollywood, region coding was added to DVDs to artificially ensure that the format inherited the restrictions of its predecessor. This is an anti-technology.

Since then, I've experienced anti-technology in many forms. This was mainly through my more nerdy hobbies at first. I recall the cat-and-mouse game with Nintendo back in the early 2010s when every firmware update for the Wii would almost certainly break whatever method I was using to run homebrew code at the time. That was anti-technology; it was trying to stop me from doing something I wanted to do (and they got away with it because I was the weirdo trying to run my own code on a Wii)

In the late 2010s, however, I had to stop using bank apps because none of them would run on my phone. They all used to run just fine, it's just that after a point they started coming packaged with anti-technology that looks for certain things that only nerds do to their phones (eg removing Google's more intrusive features, root access, advanced Android tweaks, etc) and refuses to run if it finds anything out of the ordinary. There's no technical reason the app can't run, it just refuses because an app developer deliberately put in a piece of code to stop it from doing so. This didn't bother me for a very long time because I don't really feel the need to do any bank-related things away from my PC, but increasingly these days it seems like apps are the only way to access a lot of services, and there's going to come a time when I'll need to buy (and maintain) a cheap, locked-down Android phone just to be able to access my own money.

It goes on... when you try to visit a website and have to click a load of pictures to 'prove' that you're not a bot: that's anti-technology, the website could happily work for anyone, bot or human, it deliberately chooses not to. This website has no such checks, and it hasn't caught fire yet. When you take your smartphone or tablet on holiday and Netflix refuses to work because you're not in the country in which your account is registered: anti-technology. When your car's heated seats refuse to work unless you've paid extra for the premium service: blatant anti-technology, and it's just getting silly now.

I don't think there's anything I (or anyone) can do or say to stop the tide of anti-technology. I can make the conscious decision not to use anything with baked-in anti-technology myself, and this is fine, until the societal expectation makes such exclusion difficult or impossible, see the bank example above. But I think what we do need to do is not treat tech as just one thing. Let's get better at recognising anti-technology and calling it out as we see it, and not assuming those who do so are some kind of tech-hating luddite. It's OK to have a problem with some tech, and I personally would love to see a future in which excluding people based on their tech choices (or lack thereof) is just as unacceptable as excluding people for their religious beliefs, or who they voted for.