> The “digital echo” is more than just the awareness of this; it is the cognitive burden of knowing that our actions generate data elsewhere.

I don't really feel any burden of this myself, I don't feel weighed down by the data generated by my actions. If someone else wants to clutter up their database with some useless info, that's on them. I mainly feel the "direct" burden of distraction.

Just came from a thread where people are discussing Foucault’s literal panopticon (Bentham really but Foucault popularized it) and it seems relevant here. Just knowing that someone is watching changes how you behave.

Byung-Chul Han in burnout society introduces the concept of hyperattention, which is the kind of attention that seems efficient at first, because it gives the impression of enabling you to multitask, but in reality it robs you from any deep and meaningful connection to anything around you.

That's is pretty much what happens with anything tech nowadays. Because we see technology as a pure feat of rationality where in fact what we consume are nothing more than cultural artifacts, which will invariably reflect the fundamental problems of the society in which these artifacts are forged. In our case, in the Burnout Society, it's potentializing hyperattention.

I wonder if this is why BlackBerry phones (best ones ever made) went extinct. Because the media used to grab attention more aggressively, images and short videos essentially, are better experienced on a bigger screen. That's why there are no more iPhone minis. It's either convenient for Big Tech to keep us engaged to that type of media, or just simply user preference. Guess I'll never know, but I do miss smaller phones, and especially a physical keyboard.

I think there is a more interesting point made by the essay than "digital echoes," which are pretty abstract in comparison to day-to-day distractions that tangibly reduces time.

It's that there's a notion of a device that has so many features that it becomes "too useful." There is only so much time you can devote to so many features. Yet it's clear, for example observing the uptick in sci-fi computer interfaces in movies and such at the time, that crossing a threshold of "enough features" at once was useful at a certain point - having a pocket-sized Internet-capable device with a small-format camera that didn't suck for one thing.

There was also the essay posted recently that argued for a macOS release focused on bugfixes and stability over the disruption of new features with accompanying issues.

I've been wondering for a long time now, at what point will so much innovation have already happened since the 90s-00s that there won't be enough actually useful features to tack on to the next release of X thing except ones that solve problems we didn't have? Has that point already passed? I remember some iDevice releases weren't as notable upgrades as their predecessors for example.

In my opinion, if the AI revolution hadn't happened exactly when it did a couple years ago, this problem of diminishing tech returns would have been much more obvious than it is already. In fact, I think the current LLM rampage of sorts acted as a flood to fill the drought of incremental innovation that would have otherwise occurred.