In August of this year, I deleted Twitter off of my phone, after what I found to be the final straw after months of garbage policy changes enforced by the rich egg who now owns the site. While I have been using a minimal smartphone for years - that is to say, a smartphone with as few apps as I “felt possible” (more on that later) - what I found after deleting my main digital narcotic was that instead of spending less time on my phone as I expected, I was instead spending just blankly staring at my phone before either reading the news or finding some other way to waste time.…

I’d like to take you on a journey through the world of scams, laundry, and search engines. In 2016, Foldimate, a California based startup, showed the world a laundry folding robot - it was the size of a washing machine, with a slot in the top for garments that would be mechanically folded and then passed down into a tidy stack at the bottom. I watched Foldimate with great interest, for you see, of all the daily chores of life that one must accomplish, folding laundry is the one I hate the most, put off the longest, and have tried to - mostly failing - hack my way out of for decades.…

In the early days of Google and Yahoo the best hack for getting your website to the top of rankings was Keyword Stuffing. You’d make the font blend in with the background and jam in as many relevant (or in many cases completely irrelevant, depending on your intent) keywords as you possibly could. Your users couldn’t see them, but search engines could, and they’d push you up the rankings, since with so many keywords the website in question must be super relevant to what you’re looking for.…