Slow down: Come find the humans

It’s a digital lost and found. How much have we learned since the nodes joined?

Unfathomable amounts of knowledge crawl onto our shores from fathoms deep cables. A digital Dagon oversees undersea…

What did we lose to get here? What can we grab back?

Well, it’s about time we dive into it and

brandon reed

goes deep — without drowning us. A wonderful read for everyone in this digital realm. Accessible theory and good writing, that’s what we want.

Bring it back, sing it back (apologies, Moloko)

There’s no nostalgia in trading in for some old tech: No one has time for the dial-up to warm up.

Yet the accidental scratches on vinyl, paper cuts and bad parking are our pagination in the book of human. Us clumsy, distracted, fallible and rambling humans.

It’s worth remembering, as we outsource our admin and experiences:

Everyone and their self-help guru companion, be it from the towering canon of regurgitated aphoristic mulch or from their data leach of a custom health gpt, says we should be ‘present’.

Well, if you are present here online, then at least be as human as possible.

Humans make digital.

Brandon Reed Explainer

We're now living in a world where convenience reigns and everything you could ever want is just a click away... but at what cost? From the coffee we barely make to the relationships we barely maintain, we’ve traded real, messy, authentic experiences for the comfort of speed and efficiency. This essay isn't just a lament for what we've lost, it’s a challenge to rethink what we've ‘gained.’

Digital Minds Collide 09

The Convenient Price we Pay

Every morning, I stumble to my coffee machine, press a button or two, and like magic, coffee appears. I love my coffee machine. I don't think I could live without it, and I hate that. I know it dulls me with convenience, wraps me in its comfort, and pulls me just slightly away from something more real. I could take my time grinding the beans, measuring the water, and waiting for the temperature to be just right. I could make coffee like a monk, with care and intention, but I never do. The ease of instant coffee is too seductive, and these days, efficiency tends to win. That, to me, feels like a small tragedy.

Then I think of the other moments, the ones that feel somehow more alive. When I drop the needle on a vinyl record and land it right in that sweet spot between two tracks, it feels different. There's that soft crackle, and such a fragile precision only a record player could have. The imperfections I know are coming, the ones that make the record uniquely mine, make me feel loved. When I open a real book, I can feel its weight in my hands, the worn edges, the resistance of turning a page. These things remind me that I'm still here. A human being, on planet Earth, doing human things. They're not fast or optimized, but they matter in a way that I cannot quite explain.

This discrepancy between convenience and authenticity makes me wonder what we have sacrificed in the pursuit of this easier, faster, more efficient world we've built for ourselves. What have we lost by trading presence and imperfection for speed and convenience?

“We had to drop the baggage to catch the high-speed train.” (Credit to Tate Ellis)

This isn't just a metaphor, it’s our collective reality, whether we realize it or not. We have made ourselves ‘lighter’ by shedding everything that once grounded us: community, privacy, friction, contemplation. We have optimized away the very substance of human experience in pursuit of an easy, convenient existence.

What we have constructed is a prison of digital systems and algorithms that promise freedom while quietly reshaping us in their image. What makes this prison so abnormal is that it traps us through comfort. We do not want to leave. It disarms resistance through benevolent indulgence. No one has forced us into this new mode of being. We're seduced into it, one convenience at a time, until existence outside its parameters becomes unthinkable.

The full cost of this progress is not in what these tools do, but in what they undo: the human capacities that deteriorate through inactivity. Each digital convenience we choose carries a shadow price: GPS navigation diminishes our sense of direction without it, autocorrect erodes our attention to language, social media eliminates the necessity for real community. These aren't mere skills or traditions being lost but entire aspects of consciousness that have been forged through millennia of interaction with a world that offered resistance. Our pursuit of comfort doesn't just make life easier; it fundamentally alters our relationship with reality itself. We no longer inhabit the world, we navigate representations of it that are curated and optimized for our consumption. This comfort now becomes its own form of alienation. The more seamlessly our digital tools operate, the more distant we become from the messy, imperfect reality they're designed to manage. We exist increasingly in a constructed reality. One built expressly to eliminate friction, difficulty, and discomfort. It only cost us our capacity for direct engagement.

We've made ourselves a world where efficiency reigns supreme, where the instrumental value of making things easier has eclipsed all other considerations. This is a sort of self-perpetuating problem: a world built entirely of instrumental values ultimately leads nowhere. It's an infinite regression of means without ends. We optimize our tools to save time, but what exactly are we saving it for? More efficiency? More optimization? This relentless pursuit raises profound questions about what we're becoming. If, as Heidegger suggests, technology isn't merely a tool but a ‘mode of revealing the world,’ what exactly is being revealed by our digital conveniences? They aren't just changing what we do. They're changing who we are, reshaping our sensibilities, our capacities for attention, patience, and our tolerance for difficulty.

The most insidious aspect of this transformation is how it trains us to value certain qualities. Speed, efficiency, and convenience rule above others that might be equally or more essential to a fulfilling human life. We've collectively decided that faster is better, easier is better, more is better, without questioning whether these values serve what makes us most fully human. I'm not advocating for rejection of technology or a nostalgic retreat to some idealized past. There's no virtue in needless difficulty or choosing excessive hardship for its own sake. The challenge instead is to cultivate what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls "the art of lingering." A deliberate resistance to the annihilating acceleration that digital convenience enables. This means choosing, at times, the longer path not despite but because of its demands. It means recognizing that value often emerges not from optimization but from engagement with resistance itself.

The influencers on the internet who fetishize suffering get it mostly wrong, but they've stumbled onto something important: comfort alone does not create fulfillment. There's merit in embracing certain discomforts, not for their own sake, but for how they ground us in the physical reality of being human. A society that recognizes only instrumental values will inevitably prioritize efficiency above all else. What then happens to intrinsic value? Doing things not because they get us somewhere else but because they are valuable in themselves, is that still possible? Perhaps this is what we've sacrificed most: the capacity to engage in activities simply for the love of doing them, without regard for outcome or optimization.

The coffee tastes different when made by hand, the music sounds different coming from a vinyl, the words feel different on paper than on screens. Not necessarily better in all contexts, but different in ways that matter. In preserving these differences, these particular frictions, we preserve something essential about what it means to be human.

So, I return to my coffee machine, its quiet hum a daily reminder of what has been gained and what has been lost. I do not plan to discard it, but sometimes, on weekend mornings when time feels less tight, I will choose to make coffee by hand. Not out of nostalgia but because I recognize that something meaningful happens in that process that no automated system can replicate. True freedom isn't the elimination of all friction but the ability to choose which frictions are worth preserving. In a world increasingly defined by digital convenience, the most radical act is simply to pause, to feel, to just be.

Create spaces where efficiency isn't the highest value, where you can rediscover what it really means and how it really feels to be fully human.

The Convenient Price we Pay by Brandon Reed

More Voices Across the Stack: Coming soon…

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TE