Digital Acedia

Scuto circumdabit te veritas ejus: non timebis a timore nocturno; a sagitta volante in die, a negotio perambulante in tenebris, ab incursu, et daemonio meridiano.

-- Psalm 91 : Gorczycki's setting is one of the best out there

There's a malaise in the air, in the tech industry and on LinkedIn (well, there's always a malaise on LinkedIn, but this is a new variety). People of all stripes are constantly restless, constantly busy but unable to dedicate themselves to any real, substantive work. We watch the hours on the clock pass by, thinking that they're going too slowly, scrolling social media or news and waiting for the terrible software that we're using to, inch-by-inch, do the job that it's meant to be doing. When we go home and try and tackle all of the chores that life imposes on us (of which there are an increasing number), we have to fight the same distractions and challenges. We're constantly interrupted by buzzes from our phones or pings from email or instant messages. We find it increasingly hard to care about whatever the work is that we're actually doing, and before too long it starts feeling like we're all losing our minds. Though it's impossible to pin down, there's some pervasive feeling that all of the bright, shiny little technological artifacts that we carry with us might have something to do with it.

This is particularly painful for those of us whose work it is to create these technological artifacts. In general, we love the work we do and enjoy it, and we believe that it should be used to make the lives of people better: a strong hedge against this misery if ever there was one. Unfortunately for all of us in the industry, the bulk of all the software that we write has the goal, before anything else, of making life for anyone who isn't rich enough to avoid it intolerable, and try as we might, knowing that we contribute to that allows the misery to seep back in through the gaps.

This is, of course, in large part the process of Enshittification as described by Cory Doctorow: Ed Zitron would later try and essay the economic processes that produced it in his article on the Rot Economy. These are both excellent pieces and describe the dynamic and its consequences well. They do not, however, discuss the effect that this has on the average person's mind in much detail: at a guess, both Doctorow and Zitron are the kind of people who think that it's pretty obvious to a first order of approximation. They're not wrong, exactly, but I think digging into the actual experience of enshittification and the consequent effects is quite worthwhile.

The end effect of living in this enshittified, rotted economy and society of ours is a kind of digital acedia. Acedia, or the noonday demon mentioned in Psalm 91 and quoted above, is a mental condition with a long and storied history. It's best described as a kind of listless, restless lack of care for oneself and the world: the Desert Father John Cassian describes it as follows:

He looks about anxiously this way and that, and sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness.

It must be said that this is not a description alien to the modern world. Go out onto the street and you'll see it: people anxiously and restlessly pulling their phones out and putting them back, scrolling through their social media and looking for notifications as though they're hoping for good news but expecting only evil, constantly distracting themselves as though time passes too slowly. In our workplaces we switch constantly between our distractions of social media, news sites and suchlike and our emails and slack channels on the other hand, constantly busy but unable either to focus in and work on something important or to rest. Even when we're relaxing or spending time with friends and family, we too often stay in a state of restless expectation, watching our phones for the next little tidbit of good or bad news. Thus unable to ever stop, relax or reflect, an unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of us, just like one of Cassian's monks, and we begin by increments to behave in some very strange and unhealthy ways.

While Acedia has been a thing, as mentioned, for a very long time, our current variety is interesting inasmuch as it's primarily induced by technological means and in particular by digital technology and computers. For the longest time acedia was seen as primarily a condition affecting knowledge workers and (because these were largely the same people) people who lived and worked in a religious capacity. What then is it about our modern technology that triggers acedic responses in so many people?

How your average person experiences tech

Whatever OpenAI and the other LLM boosters might claim, the way in which the average person experiences the tech industry is as a user or consumer of tech that they haven't deliberately chosen. Importantly, the technology being interacted with is, for the most part, tech that people have no choice in and that they can't opt out of using. It's important to stress this because the mental model that we tend to have of tech (encouraged by the industry) is that people feel a need or are made aware of one that they didn't know about. Knowing this, they then look for tech products that they're aware of that might help them solve this: social media to help them keep in touch with friends and family, word processors or spreadsheets to write things or calculate them, various website builders to build websites... you see the point. The issue here is that this simply isn't an accurate depiction of how tech is for most people. While the figures for time spent might be different, the vast bulk of individual pieces of software that a person interacts with are chosen, not by them, but by a different party who often has an interest in disadvantaging you.

The most innocuous version of this is probably the enterprise software that people use at work. Nobody really wants to be using Microsoft Teams, Copilot or whatever other dreck the industry's putting out. Nobody, given the choice, would choose to use your average HR software or time tracking tools. If a fair comparison were made, it's not even clear that people would elect to use Windows, and they certainly wouldn't go for Windows 11. A lot of these tools are not written with the ease or efficiency of the end-user in mind, but they look very appealing to the people making hiring decisions, and consequently they're designed much more to be sold than to be used. The experience of actually using the tools that we're given to do work is this, for an average worker, deeply frustrating: things break all the time, the tools are deeply unintuitive, licensing is so restrictive as to make the tools almost unusable (my friends tell me that civil engineering is particularly bad in this way) and the software is so bloated and slow that we often spend minutes at a stretch waiting for basic operations like opening a file to happen. Work, then, is often an experience of trying to actually do your job in the face of technical and corporate systems that seem to want to actively stop you from getting anything done.

It gets even worse, though, when it comes to all of the stuff you do in your life that isn't work. Applying to rent a place? Get ready to spill some of your most private details into an unbelievably intrusive third-party platform, where the platform, the landlord and the property managers will do God-knows-what to it. Want to stay in the place? Get ready for the interior of your house to be intensively photographed every few months, with the photos stored on some horrifically insecure system held by said property management firm. Want to challenge the property managers when you leave and they inevitably try and take as much of your bond as possible? Well, guess what? The tenancy tribunal that's responsible for this shit insists on the application being filled in online, via yet another system, another set of verifications and another organisation having an online version of your documents and susceptible to data breaches.

And what if you do get data breached? Are you going to see any meaningful accountability from the organisations who just leaked your personal information to literally every fraudster, spammer and thief of identity on the global internet? Of course not. Taking them to task and getting compensated for the damage that they inevitably do to you will cost more than just dealing with the consequences, and that's if you succeed at all. And who's to say where a breach even happened or whether it'd be detected at all, given the massive chains of third-party applications that almost everyone seems to use these days. Fact is, if you want to be able to minimally function in our society these days, you have to leave yourself wide open to having your information stolen and used for evil, and the response of the organisations, public and private, that brought us to this pass is more or less "ha ha, fuck you".

None of this would be remotely possible without the assiduous work of millions of software developers carefully (or not so carefully) writing the applications that replace manageable interactions mediated by humans and paper with an endless stream off web forms that can be described not so much as Kafkaesque (we can do that just fine with paper) as something straight out of Borges: an endless stream of incomprehensible information where you can find anything except for what you really need to know. While doable, it would be a lot more difficult without millions of other software developers assiduously writing and releasing the free and open source software that makes up the backbone of all of these apps. One way or another, then, it seems that most of the time, effort and care that we've put into our industry has gone into making life unbearable for everyone who isn't extremely rich.

Everything is adversarial now

For your average citizen, this means that we now spend ever-increasing parts of our lives fighting institutions that are meant to be helping us, recasting relationships with organisations that are meant to be providing you with services as adversarial. From your doctors, to your phone company, to your internet and power providers and even your grocery shopping now that online delivery is increasingly becoming a thing, a steadily increasing proportion of the things you need to do to function in society also require you to fight a web application whose primary goal is to get you to go away and stop bothering the organisation so that they can keep taking your money without actually delivering the service. If someone fucks up and your service fails or they decide to penalise you wrongly, their first instinct is to pass you off to a chatbot or some kind of voice recognition system so that an actual human doesn't have to touch your complaint: in fact, they'll usually do their best to make sure that you can't find out how to contact a human in the first instinct. If you need to make a change to the services you rely on, you can enjoy clicking through page upon page of forms that may as well have been designed to be as confusing as possible.

If you need to apply for a job, the same thing happens: in so many cases these days, rather than being able to apply through SEEK you'll find yourself wading through the process of creating a login in some custom BambooHR or Workday deployment that's been tweaked just enough that it requires you to fill in page upon page of forms from scratch all over again. God help you if you've applied for a role with the company before and forgot the login you set. Of course, this isn't to say that SEEK is all that much better: making sure that your profile appears active is a process in itself, and the company is itself getting awfully pushy about demanding credentials of you.

And when you get tired of dealing with all this shit and choose to relax with a movie or a TV show? Well, suffice to say that the relationship of the likes of Netflix to the end-user is just as adversarial as anything else. It's nigh on impossible to actually search for a given show and have some confidence of actually find it, the shows that you might actually want to watch are spread across multiple different platforms, each with exclusive licensing, the platforms themselves actively aim to extract as much money from you as possible and the platforms make an active effort to get you to watch, not what you want to watch, but whatever would make them the most money if you watched it. Give up on watching something and decide to doomscroll, or maybe read an article or watch a video essay on Youtube? You'll quickly find yourself snowed under with the most noxious advertising you could possibly imagine, and of course all of these companies are actively doing their best to make sure that blocking these ads is impossible.

Engaging with the world in any way that's mediated by technology (and that's an increasing amount of the world at the moment) basically requires you to either give up and let yourself be exploited, or to actively fight people. There's no longer any presumption of good faith and by and large our society is a large pile of people simply trying to screw each other out of whatever they can get. This is a massive drag on our mental health and the mental energy we have available to get anything done: we are, after all, constantly squaring up for a fight when we have to interact with the wider community, which doesn't leave much energy for things like planning, thinking clearly or not constantly feeling like shit.

There is no escape

This might have been tolerable (if still unacceptable) were it restricted to our desktop computers and our email inboxes. Unfortunately, Apple created the iPhone and now we are unable to navigate daily life outside of our homes without carrying around a brick that tracks our location at all times and allows anyone to interrupt us and demand our attention whenever they feel like it. The fact that people feel at liberty to send us an email, a text or a push notification basically whenever means that , when carrying our phones, we're constantly on tenterhooks waiting for the next bit of bad news more or less wherever we are. We hear a little buzz in our pockets, and at best it's some advertisement or a push notification from an app trying to get you to upgrade. At worst, it's yet another organisation trying to panic you into taking action on something very important right now, denying you the right to even schedule your own day and worry about life admin or whatever at a time that's workable for you: you have to constantly be available to be bothered.

You could of course try and not use your phone, but that's increasingly just not an option. More and more organisations are using phones for everything: event tickets are on your phone. You have to check into places using your phone. People increasingly share links through a QR code only. And even when you lobotomise the machine or otherwise install as little as possible on it, people somehow (through leaked or stolen phone number lists, usually) still manage to bother you. And all this is ignoring the shit that the operating system itself pushes on you: it is basically impossible these days to not give your credit card number to the Google Play store, for instance, without Android bombarding you with notifications and pop-ups that do their absolute best to make out that you can't use the machine at all without giving them all of your details.

The sheer volume of information that reaches us in this way is only increasing, and between LLMs and the kind of poor regulation that allows scammers and grifters to operate unimpeded, the quality and truth of the information degrades in lockstep with this increase. We can't ignore it, because if we miss important information we get into trouble. We can't really disengage, because the affordances that society makes increasingly assume that you have your phone on you and are using and paying attention to it at all times. And we can't simply drop our vigilance, because if we do even for a moment, we're liable to get scammed, defrauded or otherwise taken advantage of because, as discussed earlier, people are interested in dumping any risk involved in doing business onto us, the end-users.

So this, then, is the situation for your average user of tech (which even includes us tech people when we aren't directly acting in our capacity as makers of software). An increasing number of our interactions with the world are mediated through software and tech that we do not choose, but are mandated to use: without doing that you can't get paid, can't get a driver's license, can't do any banking, can't get a home... cannot, in fact, do any of the things that living in society involves. Engaging with these things, however, means submitting to a constant barrage of harassment: given that your data is misused by the people you've given it to and then also ends up being sold or leaking, your phone, your email inbox and your desktop apps quickly become a relentless flow of mixed advertisements, false threats, real but unenforcable threats, important information that you need, scams and miscellaneous push notifications from social media designed to get you addicted to your device. All of these things are indistinguishable without close examination, so you have to function in a state of constant hypervigilance because they could all be important and all be attempts to defraud you. And while, with a lot of careful and deliberate effort, you might be able to reduce the amount of this shit that comes across your bows, eliminating it entirely is basically impossible.

Minds worn so thin as to tear at the slightest scratch

Unfortunately, the average person's capacity for dealing with this has some pretty sharp limits. It is not healthy for a human to be functioning in a constant state of hypervigilance, and it's also impossible to maintain indefinitely. However, if that hypervigilance is dropped, one quickly finds that one gets punished or hit with negative stimulus in an increasingly creative set of ways. For an average user of tech, the experience is rather like being randomly subjected to electric shocks with no control over when they happen or wherewithal to make them stop, or at least happen less.

In animal studies, the response to this is learned helplessness: in humans, it translates pretty well to our description of acedia. We're constantly restless because we know that negative stimuli are coming: we can't relax or drop our guards in any way that would allow actual rest. Genuine focus is impossible because we're being constantly interrupted, and nor can we focus on anything enjoyable because even things that should be pleasant seem to have buried razor blades in them. There's no quiet: even our most peaceable moments can be suddenly disrupted by the buzzing of the nightmare brick. And worst of all, thanks to the way that the world is organised, there's very little that we can personally do to reduce the impact of all this shit on us, even if we have the knowledge and some of the energy to do it. In the end, we end up simply being very, very tired: so tired that we can't care about the situation, can't care about not caring, can't rest... can't do anything, in the end, but gaze into the nightmare brick waiting for the next little bit of stimulus from it and hoping that it'll be good. This is an unreasonable confusion of the mind if ever there was one.

Given that the vast majority of us are, through no fault of our own, functioning in the acedic mode, it's no surprise that a whole variety of morbid symptoms have occurred. LLMs, for example, are a picture-perfect example of an acedic technology. It's easy to interact with a chatbot when in the grip of acedia: you don't have to care, you don't have to think, all you need to do is prod the thing occasionally to get it to do what you want it to do and wait for the hours to pass. What it produces is immaterial: all that matters is that it gives momentary relief from the deep-rooted restless exhaustion. Social media and our politics are similar: while organising in person, writing long-form content or making art requires diligence, you can post through acedia quite easily. In fact, one can't help but suspect that most of us on social media are engaged, first and foremost, with precisely this kind of posting through acedia. It's way easier to get angry, lash out and feel righteous than to actually engage carefully with an argument, after all.

This is a pretty miserable situation for us to be in. The vast majority of us are working at the very outer limits of our capacity, where further pressure (and the pressure shows no signs of decreasing) is liable to actually make us break. The constant restlessness makes it very difficult, even when we want to, to do the kind of long-running, persistent work that we need to be able to do if we're to improve our current situation. We think irrationally, we're angry and we're constantly exhausted. When we look to the future, we feel so overwhelmed that we can't do what we need to to change the situation in the present. And we can't even properly enjoy the pleasures that we do have. This is, let's be fair, somewhat bleak.

And what of us here in the industry?

For those of us trying to earn our living doing things with computers, the situation feels desperately, cruelly impossible. We got into this industry (those of us likely to read a blog like this, at least) because we love working with these fascinating, baffling, often frustrating machines and we're good at them. It's fortunate for us that, in a world where opportunities are otherwise thin on the ground, there is great demand for people who can make these machines do economically useful things. Even in our brand new LLM-oriented age the need for people who know how to bend computers to their will remains present, which means that even in our current state, we tend to have better access to well-paid, engaging jobs than most people do. Moreover, given the FOSS movement, we often get the chance to feel like we're both contributing to and benefiting from the tech industry as a whole without it having to be mediated by our jobs. It's easy enough for tech to start feeling like a community: a group of people that care for us and allow us to live wealthy, comfortable lives even when our individual employers are troublesome.

This makes it easy for us to split our lives between "us-as-engineers" and "us-as-citizens". When we work as engineers, we don't worry too much about what the things we build will be used for unless it's really bad: we just get enthused about whatever it is we're building and working with. While developing machine learning applications for autonomous weapons might not be something we're willing to countenance, we're more than happy to work on developing a new authentication scheme, to try out a new form validation library in our current work project or to put considerable effort into optimising database queries: while little of this will be everyone's cup of tea, in most of these cases there will be someone who finds it truly engaging. Even if developing these new technologies isn't what we're getting paid for, we still get the chance to try the technologies out doing the work we get paid for, and we still, in a very real sense, get to benefit from doing the fun stuff in our off hours during work hours.

Professionally, this is quite a good deal. We get to do things that we find compelling and engaging, we get to develop our skills day-to-day and even at the most intolerable, we still tend to get a more varied and interesting workload than a lot of people have the chance to engage in. We have a community of people around us who value the things that we value, and being well-paid, it's quite easy for us to keep our interactions outside that group to a minimum. We can live as engineers, and one way or another, stave off acedia that way.

Almost everything that matters to us, however, involves us as citizens. And the moment we step out of the doors of our offices or submit our final commit for the day, everything we've been working on through the workday turns against us. If we lose our jobs we suddenly have to deal with the convoluted state assistance system that our compatriots have spent the last few years writing and working on and that seems deliberately designed to prevent as many people as possible from applying for the support their taxes fund. When we look for new work, we have to wade through pages upon pages of job sites once again designed to offload any friction from the company running it onto the poor, unsuspecting job applicants. Even when we're working, any state services that we have to interact with add yet more paperwork burden to our lives, pushing us to something near breaking point. In a sense, the moment we step outside of our role as tech people, we get hit with the full force of the acedia that we were putting off.

And so we go to work and push ceaselessly at things that make actually living life less and less tolerable for everyone, including ourselves. We cannibalise the time, space and mental capacity of everyone on the planet, betraying our fellow citizens in ways small or big in exchange for enough money to make things a bit more tolerable for us. Or we leave, though even then, if we don't consign ourselves to fear, pain and insecurity we tend to rely on the money we earned from making things worse for ourselves and everyone else in the past. It's nigh on impossible these days to contribute to tech without contributing to making functioning in our society intolerably cruel, and most of the people I know who do manage that are either doing something very strange or exist on the margins of the world: we make our money through donations, through writing or something else that isn't the traditional kind of tech work that makes money. Either way, the marginal nature of it means that by definition only a small number of us can do it, and even then most of us are in a tenuous kind of situation: the vast bulk of the tech community will, one way or another, have to find work, which right now means making it harder and harder to get anything in this world actually done.

For those of us who can retreat into our identification as tech people, avoiding the acedia was possible to an extent, or at least we could avoid facing it. For the more thoughtful kind of tech professional, though, the acedia always had a way of leaking in. We looked at the work, registered that we were making life just that little bit more unbearable and acedic, and started feeling acedic at work. Why run that analysis, after all? Why care? It's just going to make lives worse. Let's just spend another two hours scrolling through HackerNews. And of course, with technology progressing and the pressure increasing, this has been getting worse for everyone: every new outrage is the straw that breaks someone's back, after all.

More and more people in more and more places are breaking down more and more as the pressure steadily increases. What happens when enough breaks badly enough that the motions of our society break in a way that's irretrievable? While I don't want to find out, I suspect that we're going to before too long. Unless, of course, we do something to arrest this slide into uncaring, unresting technological acedia.