Technology is never the point
Ten years ago, I wrote that identification was the real value of burgeoning technology. Along with the launch of more powerful wearables like the Apple Watch, we were also seeing a growing movement toward edge computing — processors increasingly placed in everything from our light bulbs to our cars — and the combination of these promised a world that would adapt to us as we came and went.
In such a situation, computing power isn’t king; what matters is the ability to identify ourselves and share our preferences with the network of computers embedded around us: we arrive and the temperatures changes, the car seat moves, art on the wall adapts. Not a new idea, even ten years ago, but one that helped me think about the role of technology in our lives.
Which is to say: a tool, a helpmate. Technology in that vision sat adjacent to our lives, augmenting our capabilities. A decade on, though, I think we got something fundamentally different: technology that sits between us and everything else.
Several things have changed in the past decade.
Toward the center
Edge networks could process small bits across millions of devices, but with the demands of AI and LLMS — whose models won’t fit on edge devices — we are now reverting back to central processing. In 2010, data centers were primarily for storage; in 2025, they’re for compute. (And despite sharing a name, today’s version of a “data center” is like nothing we’ve seen before; Meta just announced they’re building one the size of Manhattan!)
That move from the edge back to the center didn’t just reshape infrastructure — it reset the balance of control, pulling decisions away from us and toward the cloud.
Whither social
It’s not just processing power. Our entire online existence is being more centralized.
Social media was well named at the beginning: it was social, often a mirror of our real-world relationships. Even through 2015, we were commenting and posting and liking — and we did so with people that we knew, accounts that we had decided to follow and engage. We were active participants not only in pressing buttons but in choosing what we saw and heard.
That’s changed in the past decade. Social has moved from an active exercise to a passive entertainment; they more closely resemble a television network than a human network. We turn it on, sit back, and hours disappear.
The numbers tell a story: only 7% of time on Instagram involves friends’ posts; only 17% of time on Facebook. Talking about “the algorithm” with derision is common sport, but we often seem to talk past the fact that our primary digital tools are no longer designed to connect — r.i.p. GeoCities — but rather to captivate.
Our digital spaces have never been perfect, of course. We lost time to Candy Crush, our bosses messaged us long past business hours, Twitter was a hellscape long before it should have been. And the timeline is messy here, as with most human endeavors: there wasn’t one moment when things changed from clear to dirty, not one company or one decision that broke us. But a decade ago it felt as though we still had myriad ways to engage the world — dozens of apps, millions of websites — and we had far more control.
From springboard to straitjacket
That’s really what we’re describing here: centralization and control. We used to decide whom we see on Instagram; now Instagram decides. Google began as a springboard to the wider internet; even before the recent rise of AI, Google was controlling more and more of the experience, whether we liked it or not. And now AI agents are usurping web traffic. They are, in practice, deciding what we see.
That seems to be the fundamental promise of this current approach to technology: to be a one-stop shop, a genie with all the answers, our sole intermediary to the digital world (and maybe the physical one, too). Sure, there are sources and citations, and we can, ostensibly, still click through to real and diverse information and people. But these AI tools feel designed to be a straitjacket, closing us off from the world, rather than, as Steve Jobs once called computers, a “bicycle for the mind.” The latter is what we actually need: something that might amplify our own capabilities, something that might connect us more with the world, not less.
And that’s the ultimate cost: losing each other during a time, I would suggest, when we’re feeling more disconnected than ever before.
Next steps
We can’t uninvent AI or dissolve the cloud, and I’m not sure we need to. There is value there. But the digital tools being shopped around right now are not the only ones we have in our future. As Sherry Turkle reminds us:
“We are the empathy app. People, not machines, talking to each other. Technology can make us forget what we know about life. It is not too late to remember, to look up, look at each other, and start the conversation.”
If the past decade has been about technology stepping between us, the next one should be about building tools that stand beside us.
So I am thinking these days about using technology that facilitates connection on my terms, not theirs; technology that is tool more than translator. This might mean choosing products that are open and decentralized — it might mean designing products that are more open and permissive of user choice.
It might mean things we haven’t yet seen or dreams. That’s the exciting part of new technology, isn’t it? Whatever it is, I will be in search of something that will work alongside me; that will catapult me into the world rather than saving me from it; that will be the beginning of my exploration and not the end.