Looking At 2025 Themes Through 2024 Posts
A digest of posts that resonated with you and me. And some thinking on what matters and I'm exploring in this year's posts.
The Teardown
Wednesday :: January 22nd, 2024 :: Approx. 6 min read
👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how we interact with technology that powers our day-to-day lives.
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A look back at last year generates ideas for this (2025) year. This post also acts like a digest to lots of newer subscribers. Everyone sees Substack’s view of my “top” posts on The Teardown homepage (see below), but what about my view of the best posts?
Not the most engaged, or viewed, or #1 by any single metric. Instead, my gut feeling on what I liked thinking about, writing about, and how those explorations resonated with all of you.
I published 44 posts last year. More than any other year during the 8(ish)-year existence of this newsletter. I’m on track to publish many more than 44 this year. And the goal is to write high-quality stuff that resonates with me and sparks your interests.
So, here are various posts to gather up for your week or weekend of reading. I added current thinking too.
[1] My Complicated Relationship With Tech [12/12/2024]
This post sparked action. Numerous folks wanted to know what was wrong.
The language of the post was, in retrospect, strong. But I wanted to illustrate a contradiction that’s still present in my thinking: I like using and exploring new technology. To do so, I sometimes use technology that’s otherwise considered unhealthy. Social media is, of course, the target of that last comment.
But I’ve created and built friendships through social sites and other adjacent platforms. And still do today, little by little, one by one. Not unlike real life, frankly.
What’s tricky is balancing what we assume is superficial vs. valuable when thinking about use. Suppose you’re involved in a vibrant offline (in-person) friend group that discusses all of the TikTok videos stemming from the Secret Lives of Mormon Lives women.
Is there a contradiction in that paragraph or not? It’s hard to conclude - in pure objective terms - that a group of people engaging in that conversation are wasting time. They’re talking with each other. They’re practicing in-person social communication.
[2] App Age Ban: Wait and See Mode [12/03/2024]
Australia’s age-based social media ban is a work in progress. I remain convinced that age-bans are good in concept but very hard in practice. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., we briefly tiptoed over the line of ban (a very big line) and wiped TikTok from U.S. internet existence.
That action floated on top of national security concerns. China controls ByteDance - TikTok’s owner - after all. So, the thinking was (and still is) that China imparts its view on what U.S. users see in the app.
I won’t dive into the details, but think this story is largely about age too. We (many in the U.S.) don’t want our young bright minds to cede electrical control of their brains to China’s brand of influence. And we don’t want the Great Firewall of China, either.
But we’re doing a great job filling those same minds with, well, what? Influencer videos. Dances. Memes. Insulting text. Misinformation. Deep fakes. The list goes on and on.
The TikTok ban was complete at least. We didn’t decide to ban some videos. We banned TikTok as a whole, with a law, something that seems unfathomable looking back. Intra-platform moderation, on the other hand, seems doomed to never do enough and piss off at least one group of people.
[3] Not Just Kids: We’re All Stuck In The Phone Hole [7/24/2024]
[4] Remembering My Used Car Show [5/11/2024]
I published both posts before I wrote about age bans. There is a clear theme across the three: kids don’t need phones until later in life, possibly as late as age 16. And at that age, do they need them? No.
Of course, we live in a digital world in so many ways. It’s hard to imagine graduating an 18-year-old from high school that doesn’t use a mobile phone. It should be possible to do so.
But phones are ubiquitous in everyday life, helping us stay in touch, do homework, respond to messages, and waste time and intoxicate brain cells via social media.
My first device experiment begins next year. No, I’m not letting my older daughter use a phone. She enters 2nd grade in Fall 2025 and receives a Chromebook on day 1 (or close to it). I plan to morph into some sort of cyber sherlock to understand its inner workings.
The goal of the experiment? Observe how she evolves and learns as that Chromebook parallel parks somewhere in her brain. I suspect she will learn to type during the day. Possibly use the machine as a paper weight and for homework, too.
Will something resembling social features, collaboration, etc. creep into her daily device usage?
[5] Can We Agree On Rules (pt 1a) [4/24/2024]
I closed the post with this line:
Exactly what rules and definitions are we allowed to care about?
Does that question - absent context - resonate relative to anything else in the news recently?
I’ll rephrase it to align with the present moment in time: who decides what we say to each other?
Should it be the government? Should it be private companies? The U.S. protects freedom of speech through established law. But I don’t think we understand modern free speech well.
There’s a difference between freedom to say what you want to say and an untethered unfiltered distribution pathway for your words. But these two concepts suffer from constant conflation. Two notable (you know who) U.S. businesses recently decided that they don’t want to restrict distribution. They both repeated the conflation mistake.
So, I’m reminded that we (in the U.S.) have something quite powerful at our fingertips: end-to-end (E2E) encryption. Look for my specific dive into this topic tomorrow (Thursday, 1/23/2024).
[6] Software Eats My Therapist [9/11/2024]
I wrote this post on September 11th last year. It feels like it happened 2 years ago based on how much I read and hear about AI products and funding.
This post was the first introduction to the power of Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots for some of you. I replicated a therapist of sorts to help me resolve imposter syndrome.
And I thought Dr. Michael (the therapist I created) was pretty good. Real enough. I thought then and still today that the technology sorely missed one key advantage: ingesting peripheral information and making connections in real-time.
wow, you have been writing for 8 years? how great is that?!!