I spend a lot of time thinking about how the culture of the 21st Century United States has tethered itself to an incredibly fragile ecosystem of technologies that could all disappear with one belch from the sun.

Right now, CVS is trying to figure out a way to build an app that will let shoppers walk up to a plexiglass showcase which is hiding shampoo and allow them to click a button and unlock it so that they don’t have to have an employee come over and unlock it for them. Deep down, there’s a hope here that it will bring back impulse buying.

It will not.

What it will do, is push more and more people to online shopping. More people than already do. In fact, most will turn into me and say that it’s going to be a hostile experience either way, so why am I going to leave the house for that? I can bike over to CVS but I can also bike into the local national park and enjoy the trees instead of waiting for someone to unlock a case with some toothpaste behind it.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m leaving my phone behind more and more. I don’t miss it. The Apple Watch is a perfect replacement. It’s even better than the phone because I have a mode called “Shut Up” that I use when I cycle so that no alerts go off while I’m riding unless they are from a particular subset of humanity. 5 people in total. THEY get to text me while I’m riding. No one else.

Curating the watch was easy. Don’t install apps. See? Simple! I can have any kind of communication I’d like. I can pay for things with it. I can do everything the phone does but it’s quieter.

CVS thinks that they can get me to install an app on my watch so I can buy shampoo. No. I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to add to the clutter on my devices and I’m not going to give away more of my personal data than I already have.

The thing is, I’m widing down. I’m stepping away. At the same time, I’m more engaged with some of the computing around me than ever before. I’m playing with things like Gemini and even Gopher. I’m writing apps for my desktop computer in Python that use a TUI. I see web browsers less and less and the terminal more and more. The web has pushed me away. It’s unsearchable. Results to questions about how to do something are met with page after page of slop. Remember when leaving the first page of a search engine’s results was a waste of time? No longer! We’re back to a place where there’s not even a point in SEO anymore.

I’m complaining. I do that a lot too.

But saying that I’m winding down is the right way to think about it. I’m consciously removing the nonsense from my life so that I can get back to the things that bring me joy and improve the world around me.