Rick's b.log - entry 2025/08/18

The internet is ruining my brain...and I'm letting it. 😳

So, look, here's the thing about the modern internet that is responsible for an awful lot of this "sod all got done" situation: it is basically a giant sprawling distraction machine. That's not even my inherent sense of cynicism, it is the business model. Every site, app, advert, and stupid little notification is carefully designed to grab your attention by the balls (it's a metaphor, don't picture it) and grip it hard and not let go (metaphor, remember!).
Imagine, if you will, being surrounded by several hundred toddlers all on a sugar high, each one grabbing at you and shouting "WITNESS ME!!!". The only difference is that toddlers will eventually run out of energy and fall asleep for a while. The internet does neither.

Now, if you're autistic, this is a particularly cruel state of affairs. Autistic brains tend to hyper-focus on those things that we take an interest in, or tumble down rabbit holes with great enthusiasm because knowing a pile of utterly useless facts is somehow critically important. Just in case some smart-arse asks you "What is the capital of Outer Mongolia?". You can reply Ulaanbaatar and point out that Outer (and Inner) stopped being a thing in 1911 at the end of the Qing Dynasty, it is now just called Mongolia following independence in 1924. Info-dump much? Well, yeah... ask me how I know this. ☺

How is Trump going to do right by Ukraine when he
likely couldn't even point to the Donbas on a map?
(or understand why it should remain a part of Ukraine)

The internet? It is a global rabbit hole filled with endless amounts of information, some of which is even sort-of correct. Maybe.
One search for "flights to Rennes" in order to see what it was that just flew over at low altitude, and somehow I am watching a video about grizzlies learning to open bins and how there is a distinct overlap between smart bears and dumb humans, which leads to an advert for a cute bear nightie with ears, for girls, but it reminds me that I ought to sort out pyjamas for the coming colder months so I look those up because browsing Districenter is much less effort than walking, quite literally, four and a half paces to my right, and suddenly I'm engrossed in cotton production in Greece which is the EU's main cotton producer (about 80%). And that plane? Landed, emptied, refuelled, boarded, taken off, flown over the other way, and probably landed in Marseilles or Toulouse or wherever.

It doesn't help that smartphones have become little dopamine dosing machines that we keep in our pockets. Once upon a long time ago, a phone was something you used to call people. Radical concept, I know. You would shout into it, be shouted at by it, and then slam down the handset with great aplomb and a massive sense of satisfaction that today's stupid little buttons just cannot match. Maybe you even wrote a few numbers in an address book if you were feeling especially organised, or scrawled onto a Post-It taped to the wall if you weren't.
Today, my phone is just as much a portal to the electronic world as a desktop computer so I am no longer constricted by the need to plug it in, to the mains, to a network, to a phone socket. My phone, that I do not use to talk to people, exists purely to interrupt me as many times as possible, particularly when I've just made a nice cup of tea and want to enjoy it in tranquillity. It does this simply to inform me that "Somebody you have never met has liked a comment you made six days ago on a thread you don't even remember"...and of course I go check it, because what if it was something important? It never is. But that dumb delusional dopamine addict in my head still claps like a trained seal every single bloody time.

And no, I can't "just turn off notifications". If I were to do that, I'd leave the notification page open in the browser and keep on unlocking the phone just to check, in case anything vaguely interesting happened and nobody told me. My compromise is to mute the annoying noises, so the notifications appear without fanfare, just a little blue blinking LED that says "some machine somewhere thinks you are worth a moment of consideration".

Do not disturb, I'm disturbed enough as it is.

It is, essentially, Schrödinger's notification: both nothing and everything until it is observed, at which point the wave function collapses and the notification is seen to be yet another pointless waste of time, but I keep living in hope that some day some how I'll get a notification that'll make me run out front, throw my arms in the air, and yell "OH F**K YEAH!".
I'm fifty. I'm still waiting. The only strong reaction I've had to a notification has those first two words, but "NO!!!" at the end. Like, let's say...<gestures broadly at everything>

Compare this to the '80s, the time of my childhood. Yes, I was a child when Madonna sang bubblegum hits with an oddly squeaky voice. I was...let's just skip over the nostalgia, I'm a dinosaur. Anyway, back then "distraction" was of an entirely different sort. For one thing, you just couldn't get distracted that easily because the only thing your computer did was...exactly what you told it to do, and only that.
What you usually told it to do was "load this off cassette", which in itself took long enough that you could brew tea, feed the cat, and possibly repaint the hallway. Assuming, of course, the tape actually loaded. If it didn't, if your "Block? Rewind tape" prompt didn't work, you would be spending the rest of the evening carefully cleaning the plugs and tape head, and then fiddling with a screwdriver to adjust the azimuth of the tape head while the machine screamed like a possessed bean sí that made the cat bolt out of the house in alarm. Yes, "azimuth". We eighties kids had to just know stuff like this, and it was important because data recorded to cassette was very simplistic, often just dumping square waves that alternated between two specific frequencies. Only... square waves don't exist in nature, you'll actually see a signal level here after a signal level there with all sorts of muck in between as the level changes. Couple this with consumer grade relatively inexpensive components, a complete lack of RF shielding inside the plastic box of the computer (with all sorts of freaky frequencies like 1/2/4/8/16 MHz and 17.73 MHz plus all of the switching of 5V logic circuits), and of course the mechanical properties of trying to put that square wave onto a slow-moving piece of tape with magnetic gunk on it being dragged across a magnetic coil to transfer a copy of the warbles...it was a mixture of technology and hope that, astonishingly enough, managed to work most of the time.

Printers? Oh, printers. Oh my god, printers. They were a distraction all by themselves. And not in the "Oh no, it's a bit streaky, is the ink low or does it just need cleaning?" way. No, I'm talking about the pure unfiltered joy of trying to get your dot matrix printer to actually print a pound sign (£) instead of a hash (#). Whole afternoons were lost to changing DIP switches and hacking random bytes in memory. Sometimes you would get the right character but discover the printer now thought that linefeeds were optional, happily grinding its way through the paper and ploughing across the platen in a continual line of noisy agony. After that kind of struggle, when it finally worked, you concentrated. You had to. You weren't about to waste that perfect moment when the computer and the printer actually agreed about what the data meant.

And, of course, your distractions were simpler. Did you like the song on the radio? No? Fine, turn it off or grimly bear it until the song ends. That was it. No algorithmic stream of bollocks designed to keep you hooked. No clickbait promising "You won't believe what happened next" (spoiler: you will, because it is never that exciting).

Sure, you could fall down rabbit holes back then too. But they were manual. If you wanted to know something obscure, you had to hunt down a book, or trawl through a magazine, or - another radical thought - actually go ask a human being. And there were limits. Libraries closed at five. You couldn't wake up at three in the morning with a deep desire to know everything about the eukaryotic evolution because there simply wasn't a way to access that information without waiting several weeks for an inter-library loan, assuming that the pretty librarian with the big glasses didn't look at you and say "what the hell does that mean?" before directing you to 576.8 for the word she did understand.
These days, the internet will say "Okay, here is a lecture, a kurzgesagt-induced existential crisis, a dozen PDFs (half behind Elsevier's paywall), and a forum full of biologists arguing about mitochondria". And of course you stay up until the sun has risen learning all you can, and maybe even remembering some of it, because who needs sleep when you can have facts.

Don't even get me started on social media. There is a reason why I largely avoid it. It pretends to be social but really it is just weaponised small talk. Endless conversations that just don't matter, people posting memes at speeds that make caffeine junkie squirrels look sluggish, and the vague sense that if you don't join in and post constantly, you simply cease to exist. Meanwhile, when you try to say something vaguely useful, the algorithm buries it beneath seventeen memes, half of which are that guy checking out the other girl only with a different caption each time.

Back in the day, socialising on a computer meant writing a letter. Messages had weight, actual physical weight. You didn't dash off a snarky reply every five seconds; you thought about it, typed it, printed it, folded it, stuck it in an envelope, licked a stamp, and walked to a big red letterbox. Which took so much effort you weren't going to bother doing that unless you actually had something to say.

Some people socialised on-line, on bulletin boards or maybe the ghost that was Prestel. These people were rich. If only you knew how much phone calls cost in the eighties. Or modems. Or floppy drives to make the whole shebang bearable.

Now, don't get me wrong, the internet is incredible. I can order a pasta scoop and it'll appear in my letterbox n days later, watch a physics lecture, learn to count in Japanese, and argue with strangers about whether or not Doctor Who should be crying, all without leaving my bed.
In the '80s if you wanted something, you went to a shop and hoped they had it - you could pass a day looking in Tesco, M&S, Wilko, Waitrose...only to find one in a little garden centre because of course that makes sense. If you wanted Japanese anything, you prayed your local library had a single dusty book that wasn't about the war or Geishas. If you wanted physics lectures, you had to sign up for college or university. And if you wanted to argue about Doctor Who, you had to find another fan in the actual, physical world. Good luck with that last one, because the '80s started with Tom Baker and Romana. An absolutely iconic Doctor, and Lalla Ward could easily compete with Felicity Kendall for "sexiest woman alive" status. The decade ended, as did the series, with Sylvester McCoy. Okay, he was marginally better dressed than his predecessor, but again he was let down by weak scripts and naff story lines. So in the end the BBC cancelled it.

The thing is, the price of all that convenience is a world that's just too good at distracting. The endless buffet is open 24/365¼ and every dish screams for your attention. You don't just nibble tasty looking entrées, you load up your plate until it is collapsing under the weight of everything you never meant to pick up in the first place.

So yes. The modern internet is amazing. It is also a relentless distraction engine that sucks away up your time, shatters your focus, and leaves you wondering if maybe, just maybe, you'd be better off with a dumbphone and a stack of books.

Except of course I won't, because I just got a notification that I have to check...

Written a month ago, upvoted yesterday. 🤷

Your comments:

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Zerosquare, 18th August 2025, 22:58

I'd post a comment, but that would be one more pointless distraction for you... ;)

jgh, 19th August 2025, 01:02

I get like this with the town council. Some members have been playing les buggres ridicule, which results in me going all pedantic, and I've ended up spending the afternoon trawling through standing orders to hopefully basically tell them: shut up and get on with your job.

C Ferris, 19th August 2025, 14:49

Someone on the Rool site is trying to run one of your progs in a Emulator with problems:-(    Ref the new UK safety Internet rules - it's just winding people up :-(

Richard Walker’s Poorly Foot, 19th August 2025, 21:40

Actually this overexposure to tech *is* ruining our brains. Those on the LLM bandwagon have it even worse. It’s not just the distractions; people are not thinking much anymore and that’s been demonstrated with brain scans.     I got rid of my smartphone for a few weeks. I recently had cause to get another one but find I’m not as bad with the addiction after the break. I intend to get even stricter with it.    If WhatsApp ran on desktops without the need for a smartphone, I wouldn’t have one.     We need to remember tech is a tool and keep it firmly in its place. Real enjoyment comes from lunch with friends and family, a walk in the hills or that cup of tea in the garden. Tech is mostly a source of stress and a waste of time.

jgh, 21st August 2025, 18:08

I only got a smart phone because:  a) my job required me to have one - so why don't *they* provide me with one, as "work equipement"? Because they've run out of budget. When that job ended I gave the borrowed smartphone back to its owner  b) more recently, my phone company were turning off the service my phone used, so forcing me to replace the phone. The choice was a cheap smartphone or an expensive slightly-dumber-phone. Then LINE updated their software to refuse to work on pre-Version-BigNumber phones, so that forced me onto the smartphone.    It's annoying. My Nokia easily fitted in my pocket, the smarty keeps trying to fall out of my shirt pocket and won't fit in my jacket pocket. I keep worrying about smashing the screen, it eats power, and the slightest motion bumps against my chest and starts "pressing" touchscreen buttons. One day I'm going to find I've accidently entered too many wrong PINs and it will have locked me out.

jgh, 21st August 2025, 18:11

"If WhatsApp ran on desktops without the need for a smartphone, I wouldn’t have one."    Ditto. I get so many people who apparently find the concept of SMS messages or email too confusing and demand that I be able to receive WhatsApp messages. You send it via my mobile number, just send a ***** text message. To. The. Same. Number!    And now I seem to have enabled Outlook on my smartphone so it now bings at me every time a work email arrives. **** off! I'll deal with my computer mail when I'm sat in front of a computer!

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