One Complicated Trick to Curing Convenience Addiction

Are we doomed to addiction to phones, social media, and subscriptions?

I spent the weekend in Fargo with some great folks at a little comic convention. While there’s plenty to say about being back on the road, we’re tabling that for now. At the end of the show, a bunch of us met at Kroll’s Diner, a staple in North Dakota. As we sat down, and ordered drinks, I pulled out my phone and opened Pokémon Go, spun a few stops, took down a Pikachu raid, and looked up, across the table. There were six of us, and we were each on our phones. I sat in that silence until it broke.

I know we’re all aware that we spend too much time on our phones, scrolling through slop. We’re hooked like smokers in a pre-1990’s world. I’m hooked and I have no idea what to do about it. That quiet moment in the diner felt forgivable. We’d just had a long day at a convention. We’d seen each other all weekend. We probably needed a minute. It still cast an uncanny sense of posthumanism over the table.

If you haven’t kept up with tech news, dumpster fires abound. Companies like Discord are entertaining the idea of collecting people’s IDs for age verification despite their frequent security breaches. TikTok is open and shockingly honest about their addictive formatting. And, my nemesis, Spotify, is playing with AI slop in an attempt to coopt our ears that means even fewer dollars getting to real artists. Legislation can’t keep up with ingenuity and I’ve been sold my whole life that it’s a good thing. You have to, “move fast and break things,” if you want new breakthroughs. It doesn’t matter if the thing they’re breaking is our mental health, or attention spans, and our support of one another.

While all of that intensified into an intellectual forest fire, the same companies have turned into landlords. They’re selling us the convenience of communication in exchange for our little free moments. They’re renting us music, movies, and TV shows while slowly stripping each art of the humanity that goes into making us fall in love with the things that become culture.

I have no answers about what to do in the face of the oligarch tech bro takeover. I spent the first thirty-five years of my life thinking it was all for the best. I could get ahold of my friends and colleagues on Facebook, who needs to talk to them in person? Streaming services stopped my buying of DVDs and CDs in exchange for a few bucks a month and the convenience was out of this world. Eventually, I’d gone all in on renting my experiences. R.E.M. drops a re-release or a benefit mix? Why buy it? It’s on Spotify.

It’s so convenient.

That moment of silence at Kroll’s reinforced my solidifying conviction that instant gratification and the convenience of buying it is the leading biological failure of our species. We’re all just so damn easy to hook. That moment of silence was soothed by my internal monologue knowing that I’m finally in the late stages of breaking up with Spotify. I may be irreparably hooked on Facebook, and twisted up with Discord, but I am making progress because Spotify won’t be getting my money much longer.

I talk about leaving Spotify a lot, I know. But I am finally working through the steps to leave it as far behind as I can. It’s been a challenge, though. And, I have to admit that it’s been anything but convenient. I’m a music enthusiast. I pay for a household account so we both have access to anything the service has to provide. However, I have an iTunes account full of music, a modest Bandcamp collection, and a hard drive with 180 gigabytes of music. I needed to find a way to become a master of my own collection.

Thanks to connections through the Brimstone Order and the Brimstone Clubhouse, I was able to get educated on running an independent server. While I had a grasp on what I needed to do, I didn’t have the hardware, or funds, to get it off the ground at the same time that I was promoting the abandonment of our playlists. Over the last few months, community members helped me get my hands on a ZimaBoard, a singleboard server. Once that arrived, I needed to get some cabling, and a hard drive and I was off to the races.

With a little work, I was able to start importing music I own to the hard drive and I established a Plex server in my own closet. The new music server has a wonderful interface that feels a lot like Spotify and all the music is from albums I already own. But that’s the first pickle.

I don’t own all the music I listened to on Spotify. My plan is not to stop spending money on music, but to slowly populate the server with music by buying it as directly from artists as possible. This means Cathryn and I will have to live with the discomfort of having some of our favorite artists just out of reach until we can buy them.

The second pickle is server access and maintenance. Getting to a plex server isn’t as cut and dry and sharing your data and credit card and having most every song on the planet. Ensuring we both have access hasn’t been as simple as I wished. Furthermore, keeping the server online and accessible has had a few hiccups that make it feel like I just don’t know what I’m doing.

I own boatloads of music. I love supporting bands I care about. And, on top of that, I am an artist who spends most weekends asking folks to buy my work. I don’t want to feed into exploitative systems that feed off artists. I am utterly exhausted paying rent on things I could otherwise own. I’ve been guilty of using ubiquitous apps and programs because they’re convenient and everyone else is using them. It feels like it just makes sense.

I understand that establishing an independent media server isn’t accessible for everyone. Getting the hardware, having the catalogue of media, and investing the time to maintain the server, is not going to work for all of us. It’s tough. No one wants to carry a Walkman and CDs anymore. It’s the opposite of convenient. But our conveniences are consistently exploited to separate us from our money and to separate artists from their fans. If I could, I’d get us all independent servers. That dream is doomed to go unrealized.

I don’t know what to do about those moments in which we give up our attention to our phones. I don’t know how to get back the moments of boredom that let our minds wander to new, beautiful and creative ideas. But, I do know that taking any steps toward technological independence is a step toward breaking habits. If you can’t set up your own servers, consider buying tracks from artists and using iTunes. Or, stay on streaming and consider moving to Qobuz, or Tidal. Do your best to stay aware of the policies and practices of the companies you support, and always be willing to walk away. In a world in which the most moral choice is to make money, your wallet is your voice. Quit giving the worst actors the most of your wallet.

I’m so excited to break from Spotify that I feel like I might just be able to change my relationship to everything on my phone. Maybe the day will come where I can be present, in the moment, or even just a little bored.

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Today’s Tune