Under pressure
I’ve spent weeks disgusted with myself for allowing my iPhone 13 Mini to force an upgrade from iOS 18.6 to iOS 26. I can’t even look at you anymore, phone! Last July the e-ink Mudita Kompakt phone started officially supporting sideloaded APKs, so when my iPhone gets too slow to function I will start to look in that direction.
“The whole point is that the new U.I. has pointless animations,” I’d explained to my best friend, of iOS 26. That’s the idea, to eat battery and memory and other resources. I hate to abandon my iPhone Mini so soon after I’d finally had its lemon of a battery replaced, but this is technological coercion: an abusive relationship, with diminishing returns for the consumer.
Speaking as a person with diagnosed ME/CFS (“chronic fatigue”), I’m extra offended by iOS’s new “Liquid Glass” veneer. At a certain point you’re just like, “Listen, this is the amount of battery I have to work with. I am performant when I’m not trying to do it all with extra flourishes. This additional cognitive load is silly.” I’m irked because iMessage is animated now, with text bubbles blooping into existence. Cool. It looks great. You can't turn it off. What the fuck? This doesn’t justify a bigger, hotter lithium battery.
Digital Rights Management
I was recently explaining to a Gen Z’er that it has become, by design, more and more difficult to strip D.R.M. from a Kindle purchase. In the era of digital media, it had really started with Apple successfully locking music purchases to iPods and iTunes. I explained the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, and I’d gone into detail: Bill Gates was one of the first people to have a smarthome himself. He’d envisioned, for the rest of us, a type of always-on, always-connected computer—really, a home server—and there wouldn’t be any meaningful difference between locally-stored files and remotely-stored files.
“That’s kind of what we have now?” the Gen Z’er asked me. “The cloud.”
“Exactly,” I said. So that had been Gates’s big idea, hence the blurring of the distinction between the G.U.I. ‘Windows Explorer’ and the web browser ‘Internet Explorer’. But a court of law had determined this was a violation of consumers’ free will, and that the end-user ought to be able to use Netscape Navigator if so desired.
“When you eliminate true choice,” I warned the twentysomething, “you end up with billionaires.”
Some billionaires are apparently hellbent on making the Apple iPhone the last luxury good. I mean, it was already a luxury good, but at the same time people do need phones. I’m already over it.
I don’t have the spending money for an overpriced e-ink Android, though, so I’ve been trying to make it work with my iPhone 13 Mini. I used Nugget to mostly reflatten/unslick my U.I.; then I fussed with Blank Spaces until I’d achieved a look I can live with. (There’s a constant, perceptible border on widgets now, and you can no longer ‘hide’ the dock using wallpaper tricks, so my launcher is still messier-looking than I’d like.)
My best friend thinks my launcher screen is unexpectedly pretty, with its dual competing background wallpapers—I couldn’t get the one wallpaper perfectly lined up, so the widgets are now backed by an entirely different wallpaper—and I agree with her assessment.
The Gen Z’er, conversely, stared at my home screen in confusion, remarked that it is “depressing” (“Desolate?” I suggested, and she nodded fervently), and then said something about worrying about my mental health. I laughed and promised her that I do like color, just not on my phone.
I guess winter can be tough on everyone. Right now, outside, the fields are blanched with hoarfrost, so that they match the opaque white sky. It looks like a big blank slate, which seems to really get under people’s skin sometimes.
User Friction
I have been struggling to recover the feeling of 2005 for myself; blessedly, I’ve enlisted allies in my battle against my smartphone. For Christmas I received an inexpensive digital audio player, the FiiO Snowsky Echo Mini, which replaces my much older FiiO. I also received a Garmin for the car, plus a Kodak PixPro C1 (I happily gave away my CampSnap to a nearby child). As always, I’m still running around with my old Game Boy Micro in my purse, but for the past couple of years I’ve used an EverDrive cartridge with it. Last year I replaced the Micro’s battery, so it is good to go for maybe another decade or so. Rounding out everything are a few e-readers (I have a problem): I am so close to escaping iOS and never looking back.
Another thing I was gifted was a gen 2 Original Tamagotchi. Eventually I returned to the store and picked up a contemporary Tamagotchi Paradise. This thing is great. It’s the ultimate fidget; you could really get away from your smartphone using something like this. It’s crammed with mini-games, but a lot of them are time/progress-gated, “like Animal Crossing,” I explained to my best friend, “preventing you from playing everything all in one day.” This is the kind of friction we need.
The whole concept of “positive” technological friction is so interesting to me. U.X. designers have mostly eliminated it in favor of slick glossy surfaces because people hate to feel like their precious time is being wasted. But time is a slippery thing! If you don’t have gates and dams and a lot of texture and grit—if you don’t intentionally create friction—then time slips off, and you glance up from Candy Crush (or whatever infinitely-scrolling dopamine drip you prefer) and you stare at the clock like “huh?”
With that, it’s almost time for me to post an EDC selfie to the r/dumbphones subreddit. Admittedly, posting a picture of an iPhone there is just begging for a dogpile (“this place is getting to be as bad as r/veganism,” someone recently commented, of the subreddit’s purity tests), but I’m very proud of how small all my devices are, including my vape.
“But Jenn, that’s still so unwieldy. That’s so much stuff to carry in a bag. All those tools are already available on your full-featured smartphone.” Sure.
But I remember lugging all this stuff around in 2005: the stuff that mattered to me. It mattered, so it occupied space in a physical way. (This thought relates to Julio Torres’s idea that more ‘important’ apps should have icons that grow larger and larger with continued use, or his subsequent suggestion that, once a smartphone is laden with apps, it could become physically heavier—that each app might have corresponding weight and heft. This is whimsical, but this is also U.X. design.)
“You can’t do the job if you don’t have the right tools,” my landlord said to me in 2005, in a charming Croatian accent. He was proud of me for bringing him a toolbox—but no need, because he’d already brought his own tools. (He also once told me, very benevolently, “My compliments for having the correct-size television.” Not too big, not too small, appropriate for the room. He was impressed with the way I’d nested in his beloved building and, more specifically, with the fact that all the furnishings in my apartment were scaled appropriately. I loved him.)
When every tool or instrument is frictionlessly available on a phone, your priorities, the things you value, get flattened: everything ends up mattering the same amount, which is to say, nothing matters.
This very sense of ‘flattening’ was pretty directly evoked by the 2024 iPad “Crush!” commercial, which sent people through the roof because it’d so clearly illustrated the feeling of turning everything into a stupid app. At the time, some marketing dude named Michael Miraflor tweeted that the Apple commercial “[a]chieves the opposite of their legendary 1984 spot. It’s not even that it’s boring or banal. It makes me feel… bad? Bummed out?”
Here Miraflor was attempting to articulate an ineffable sense of desolation, a blanched cultural doomscape, an icy Tartarus. Feels bad, man.
Link Roundup
Last year I wrote about how much I liked the browser Arc; I ended up ragequitting over some poorly-implemented A.I. features, however, and shortly thereafter Arc’s own developers bailed on the project themselves. I ended up going back to Vivaldi, and eventually back to Brave. (I talked about using the Chrome extension The RSS Aggregator with Brave here.)
Much more recently, my friend Jason was screensharing his web browser over FaceTime. “Is that Arc? Are you using Arc as your browser?” I asked them. Nope, it was Zen! I was astonished and delighted. Now I am using Zen full-time on my Mac. I imported my feeds to the Firefox extension Sage-Like, a nimble feedreader that works well with Zen (unlike Feedbro).
Here are some links, most of which I collected before Christmas. Hopefully you can still enjoy them in 2026:
- Wikipedia – Corrupted Blood incident: Something I did not know about until today (thanks, TikTok) was an accidental, simulated pandemic in World of Warcraft in 2005, when—after a boss battle—players’ animal companions could remain ‘infected’ by a debuff. Introducing these still-infected pets in densely-populated cities could spread the debuff, even to nearby NPCs; ‘catching’ the contagion would kill a maxxed player-character within 30 seconds. “Epidemiologists [...] took interest in how MMORPGs, unlike mathematical models, could capture individual human responses to disease outbreaks rather than generating assumptions about behavior.”
- Pajiba – The Cruelty Is the Best Part of ‘Beast Games,’ Actually: Let’s talk about game theory!!
- The Guardian – The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months: Here’s some happier news about human behavior. The Lord of the Flies is a book that messed me up as a teen; I have remained actively messed up by it, and I recently said so aloud. I lamented that, in times of crisis, if you try to impose any order, someone will sneak up and bonk you over the head. My best friend told me she had an article for me to read. Apparently, Rutger Bregman, the author of this book excerpt, was also disturbed by The Lord of the Flies. But instead of stalling out, as I had, he began to question William Golding’s nihilistic outlook. Bregman sought out and found the amazing true story of six Catholic school students who’d survived on a desert island for 15 months—and how they successfully, cooperatively accomplished it. “It’s time we told a different kind of story,” Bregman writes.
- Neal.fun – Size of Life via waxy.org links: A slideshow of living things, from smallest to biggest. “Each illustration was painted by hand and took five months to complete.” A handy “Compare to...” button lets you see scale illustrations side-by-side.
- WBUR Cognoscenti – Is the humble pigeon a mascot for our time?: I was thinking about this, too, just two nights ago as I drove under an overpass. It’s probably common knowledge by now that we domesticated pigeons for their utility and then abandoned them. “We became convinced they didn't belong,” writes Tove Danovich. But people everywhere are reevaluating the humble pigeon. File under “pizza rat.”
- Open Culture – “The Matilda Effect”: How Pioneering Women Scientists Have Been Written Out of Science History: Nice to know that the systematic discrediting and erasure of female scientists has a proper name, I guess? The fact that women’s contributions to humankind have to regularly be ‘excavated’ and ‘unearthed’ really drives home how and why a person can feel like a long-dead ghost of an ancient Babylonian well before they actually croak.
- Bloomberg – Meta Is Killing Off Its Only Good Virtual Reality App: I used to joke that the collective idea of V.R. was this dystopian nightmare vision of everyone braindead and drooling, either corpulent or withering away, jacked into the hypnomachine—and then it turned out that actually people enjoy dancing and punching and lunging their way to cardiovascular health. Even with a big clunky neck-breaking weight strapped to their heads!! Every platform dreams of having a killer app like Supernatural. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Leanne Pedante, I’d follow you to the ends of the Earth.
- BBC – Why do Gen Z have a growing appetite for retro tech?: The majority of people on the r/dumbphones subreddit are college students in their late teens or early twenties: that is, young people for whom it is imperative to recover focus. But also, young adults recognize things weren’t always like this, and their outright rejection of ‘the way things are’ is refreshing. It’s Liquid Glass all over again: we’ve lost control of our own devices, paralleling our very real lack of bodily and financial autonomy. Offline devices aren’t just about privacy or ‘opting out’; they’re about authoring your own destiny.
- The Baffler – The World’s Memory of the World: I’m embarrassed to admit I've never played the video game Disco Elysium, but that is slated to change. “It also eases your way into Elysium using a hoary old video game trick: amnesia. Gaming is full of amnesiac player characters,” writes Gabriel Winslow-Yost, “because they offer a tidy solution to the problem of controlling a person who knows things the player doesn’t. If by some plot device the character has forgotten all those things, they have a reason to ask for information about the setting or even about themselves, and the player has more narrative leeway to define their personality.” Elsewhere, on my own personal blog, I recently wrote about the social deduction game Spyfall. When you’re cast as the ‘spy,’ you’ve effectively been thrust into a story with no clearly defined role or setting—you're lacking a script that everyone else has been equipped with—which might function as a serviceable analogy for being neurodivergent. There in that blog entry, I’d compared this feeling to that of being “an amnesiac protagonist”: disoriented, disenfranchised. What if that isn’t a weakness at all, but a strength?
- Current Affairs – Why Fascists Always Come for the Socialists First: “This anti-egalitarianism can assume a conservative form where those on the right seek to uphold existing hierarchical authorities they regard as, by and large, legitimate. But it can also assume revolutionary and even utopian forms, where the radical right will fantasize about restoring or creating utopian kinds of society where the true ‘organic’ hierarchy will express itself.”
- McSweeney’s Internet Tendency – An Open Letter to the Soft Millennial Man Facing Extinction: Stay tender, tender boy. We need you now more than ever.
A Word
This newsletter/blog entry has gone on longer than most of my other updates—because I spent over a month writing it—so I’d like to leave you, dear reader, with a word of unsolicited advice. Maybe think of it as Drew Carey, echoing his predecessor Bob Barker, concluding each episode of Price Is Right by begging his viewers to spay and neuter their pets.
Here is my word of advice: Please fully dry your laundry.
To make a long story short, I wasn’t able to put away an enormous load of clean laundry, so I left it festering at the foot of my bed. Over the next few days I noticed a number of skin eruptions on my face and neck, which I eventually identified as hives. Then I uncovered the pile of clothing and realized it smelled rank. It had never fully dried! According to the Internet, that foul mildew odor is a product of the VOCs from mold spores. I learned this after frantically gulping down Benadryl because my eyes and lips had swelled up. Now my bags of laundry and bedding (six! six trash bags!) are in the garage, and I am doing them one at a time, and the window is open in the dead of winter, and I have to fully disinfect my bedroom. Please fully dry your laundry.
Blessings, Jenn