We may think that machines are serving us, saving us effort and energy, increasing our comfort and expanding our powers. However, close observation has often revealed that it is us serving the machines and not vice versa.

Long before the time of smart digital devices, when film cameras were the gadgets of choice, German philosopher Erich Fromm argued that cameras were changing the nature of traveling, and not in a positive way. He observed:

“[T]here had at first been people who traveled to learn and thus expand their knowledge, then tourists who took cameras with them, now we have only cameras that travel accompanied by tourists to service them.”¹

Fromm’s remark is a rhetorical exaggeration, it exaggerates reality to make it more visible. The remark points our attention to how cameras often manipulate our choices and actions. It is as if travelers no longer freely and independently choose where to go and what to do, the urge to take a good picture chooses for them, drags them from location to location just to “service” their cameras, point them at a good view and capture a snapshot of it. And the outcome of the traveler’s trips is no longer an experience, but “a collection of snapshots, which are the substitute for an experience which he could have had, but did not have.”²

Technology conditions us to spend less of our time experiencing life and more of our time recording it. 

Fromm’s analysis is generalizable well beyond his times and well beyond travelers and cameras, it illustrates how technology conditions us to spend less of our time experiencing life and more of our time recording it. Today, in the age of social media technology, the drive to record life has reached unprecedented power. We think of an idea; we post about it. We engage in an interesting activity; we post about it. We unexpectedly see a beautiful view; we rush to capture it on camera, then post about it. We continuously “service” social media platforms with data that gets used to train the platforms’ artificially intelligent algorithms and bring them profits. And through our data, the platforms’ algorithms get more effective at creating content that keep us glued to our devices, mindlessly scrolling and clicking, constantly manufacturing data for them.

This is not a manifesto against technology, it is not a call to completely remove technology from our lives. Technology empowers us, it enables us to connect with others and to create communities that span distant geographies: the internet, video call technologies, Instant Messaging (IM) applications, social media platforms, they all help us connect. …

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