I've got a confession to make: for the past two years, I've been trying to learn French. Having been born into a family where 70% of the people around me spoke French, the guilt of a lifetime of disinterest in the language finally caught up to me when I started dating a British girl who, despite my years of not trying, somehow spoke one of the languages I grew up hearing at family gatherings better than I did.

So I tried to replicate the method I used to learn English: Consuming Content™. In my early teens, using the basics I'd learnt in school, I essentially practiced my English by playing video games and watching hours upon hours of YouTube. That plan worked out quite well for me — I think the fact I’m writing this in English is enough proof of that — particularly because it never felt like studying. I simply wanted to play/watch/read a thing, that thing was in English, so I tried my best to understand the language it was using. Seems easy enough to replicate, I just needed to find some French things that interested me, and, little by little, I'd learn the language beyond the basic A2 level I was already at.

Movies? No problem, I already love classic French cinema, and now I get to be even more pretentious about it. Books? Plenty of great and accessible stuff to be found. Music? Easy as well, there are a trillion resources to be found, just pick your genre — plus, their music sometimes crosses over into Portuguese culture, so I already had a head start. Daily news? Pick your poison, it won't have the best politics but it’ll be good practice regardless. But YouTube videos? Social Media Content™? Well… It exists, I can find it, but the algorithmic flows and the interfaces that had helped me learn a language 10 years ago now seemed hellbent on making sure I never even had to think about language at all.

Let's start with the main culprit behind my English language skills: YouTube. My memory isn't good enough to recall exactly how I first started watching videos in English, but I do remember that subscribing to a channel I wanted to watch resulted in pretty much every subsequent video they made being shown to me on the homepage, and that's very obviously no longer the case, regardless of the video's language, so my method was broken from the get-go. Secondly, YouTube's algorithm is so strictly monolingual that even I, a Portuguese person residing in Portugal whose native language is Portuguese, don't remember ever having been recommended a video in Portuguese that wasn't from their “news” tab, despite following and watching a few Portuguese-speaking channels. It's a lost cause, and it baffles me because no other large scale recommendation algorithm I use functions this way, not even Google's own News app. Twitter, Instagram, BlueSky, TikTok, Tumblr, etc. all regularly recommend me posts in the other languages I speak (even some I don't speak, like Japanese, simply because I keep interacting with posts about anime), and had no difficulty latching on to my desire to seek out more posts in French ever since I started engaging with it.

Nevertheless, I perservered. I saved the videos I wanted to see, checked a few channels directly, and made do without the algorithm. What really got me though, was what happened when I clicked on these videos: they were automatically dubbed to English using a terrible, extremely unnatural AI voice.

This feature has been a thing since around late 2024, from what I can gather, and, despite objection from everyone, it has only gotten more pervasive. YouTube now plays the dub automatically for any language it believes you don't speak, and every single uploader has to individually opt-out of it willingly, meaning you're forced to put up with the robotic dubs unless every single channel you watch disables it.

Let me be clear: this is no “this video is in a foreign language, would you like to dub it?” pop-up (which is what Gmail does). You have to individually select the original audio track for every video you press play on. I've had professors, teaching courses in English, suddenly be jumpscared by a robotic version of Jonathan Berger speaking Portuguese, and one of my partners, who is currently teaching English in France, says she's encountered it several times during her classes. What guarantee does she have, as a teacher, that her students won’t go home and just not bother to disable the automatic dubbing of English videos, despite her whole job being to help her students understand English?

It's debatable whether the motivation behind this change is ideological or purely profit-oriented, especially in an AI-happy stock market environment, but the effect is clear: YouTube, the website that had taught me how to speak English, is now designed so that no one would ever want to go through the same thing again. This decision is especially baffling because, despite having had a perfectly competent automatic captioning and translation feature for years, the platform had made it so the choice to enable captions and machine-translate them was always a conscious one, toggled video-by-video.

Before this change, the pact between the user and the platform was apparent: by enabling automatic translation features, you understand you are undergoing a process which has inherent signal loss and no human oversight. You consented to it with every button press: first to enable the automatic captions in the original language of the audio, then to translate them into whichever language you wanted. The user interface used friction purposefully. Through rejecting the path of least resistance towards intelligibility, it achieved what other mediums, like the book publishing industry and the entertainment industry, had not: translation was not the default, it was a willing choice. You had to first recognize that the video was in a foreign language before you could opt to translate it into any other.

This design decision can obviously be attributed in large part to machine translation being, at the time, a clearly flawed and experimental technology, but it was made nonetheless. Now, with AI dubbing (also a clearly flawed and nascent technology), YouTube made the opposite choice. And every social media platform¹ is following suit.

noEscape

Booting up Twitter now leads me to a timeline covered in “Translated with Grok” notices, which I have to individually click on and disable for every single language in the world, one by one. TikTok is much the same, automatically translating every video caption in a foreign language, but it at least allows you to disable the feature as whole. However, the worst offender by far is Instagram. No one at Meta seems to understand what multilingualism is, and so it asks you to choose a “Display Language”, the language every single caption is displayed in. If I want to practice my French — which, ironically, is the language a good 1/4th of the IG Reels I'm shown are in —, I have to opt to either ignore the captions completely or embrace the absurdity of browsing a feed where every English and Portuguese word I hear is transcribed to French.

Examples of the options menu for Automatic Translation for Twitter and Instagram, respectively.

These are deranged systems designed by people who seemingly have never thought about language beyond the concept of a “language barrier”, and who seem to be completely unaware of the realities of fluency and language-learning. These platforms’ misplaced blind faith in their translation algorithms is fundamentally altering the content of the things we produce and consume, and their menus and notices are hidden in ways that can often make both the producer and the consumer unaware of these alterations.

Sometimes this can result in frankly hilarious outcomes, like this post from a hardcore punk snob on Twitter correcting a Polish tweet on the correct English terms to use to describe a show:

But this Japanese post supposedly translated into “British English” showcases exactly why we previously delegated machine-translation to sub-menus: put plainly, it's not good enough, and it can never be good enough. The way these models are built inherently leads them to weird assumptions, and, as they balloon in size and scope, and absorb more information, they become prone to overreach in translation and hallucinating details that weren't there, like these stereotypically English terms:

I don't speak Japanese, but I’m pretty sure Grok is editorializing a bit.

Last issue, I talked about the overreach of the “It Just Works” mentality and how it affects AI development and AI usage. This new design overreach of social media platforms is, to me, yet another facet of this problem. I’ll freely admit the issue of computing in multiple languages is particularly dear to me, but I had been fine with machine translation implementations up until this recent flood of changes. The flaws of these systems were, up until now, (mostly) fine because they were presented in a way that made their existence obvious.

Translation was one of the few remaining processes in computing where the impact and limitations of its usage was made as clear and understandable as possible, partly because anyone who speaks a second language can understand how messy and imperfect even fully human-made translation can be. In a tech industry where the teachings of Media Studies and Critical Theory are often either discarded or co-opted, translation remained a field where the design of our tools followed the caution the social sciences preach. As our technology encroaches further into our language, letting changes like these take hold will mean relinquishing the small amount of control we still have over the words we read or hear inside the posts that are recommended to us.

Thank you for reading noReturn, a biweekly newsletter releasing roughly every other Friday. Follow for more musings on everything Media™ related. Be it tech, film, games, music… whatever really.

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It's safe to say OpenAI is in crisis right now. Between abruptly cancelling their TikTok clone for AI generated videos and consequently losing out on $1B from Disney and shelving plans for an “erotic” version of ChatGPT, it seems our promised future of hyper-personalized AI generated content consumption is dead — or, at least, on life support.

Days after this tragic passing, I gather you here not to eulogize this app I never used and never wanted to use, but to reflect on what to me is the central question of the idea that brought it to life in the first place: Who the fuck would want that?

To answer this, let's think of something (relatively) smaller: the app that started the bubble, the chatbot. Who would want a chatbot? The first answer that comes to mind seems pretty obvious to me: managerial, C-suite types. It's the perfect tool for people whose job is ordering other people around! From sending e-mails to performing simple computing tasks like filling out basic documents, AI seems almost as if it were designed to perfectly suit their needs. Even the method of interaction, the chat box, mirrors the manager's main method of interaction with their employees: a Slack or Microsoft Teams message. It's easy to prove this thesis: one cursory look at LinkedIn — the one place where AI’s sycophantic, bullet-point heavy, buzzword-ridden, overly verbose prose has flourished — shows how much the acronym-obsessed class has felt seen by this technology.

It simply makes sense that these people would think everyone in the world would want unchallenging cut-to-measure entertainment at all times, created through a probabilistic system you operate one or two sentences at a time. It fits perfectly with how I see the corporate class. But there's another group of people whose embrace of AI chatbots, specifically “vibecoding”¹ , has baffled me, and I think their behavior serves as the key to understanding the idea of an AI media future: Productivity nerds.

Browse any subreddit for currently buzzy productivity software (Obsidian and Raycast come to mind, but even an e-book organization app had some drama around AI usage recently) and you’ll find a dozen posts every day about clearly “vibecoded” programs or extensions. As a productivity nerd myself, the premise of using chatbots to achieve these goals seems baffling. Anyone who has ever had the displeasure of either working customer service or texting an ex-lover is familiar with how easily the humble chat message lends itself to misinterpretation and signal loss. Typo’d words and short sentences arranged haphazardly into a small text box that covers at most 20% of your screen are about as lossy a communication medium as possible in the modern world, except for maybe faulty phone lines or 1-bar Wi-Fi. Yet people with the exact same strain of neuroticism as me seem to love using it² .

So I've been trying it. I can't go too into the specifics but here's the basics of my job at the moment: I have a lot of hours-long audio recordings that I need to transcribe; text and notes and spreadsheets with lots of information I need to properly format, categorize and visualize; and, on top of that, one or two thousand images and videos that I also need to categorize. It is maddening, often brainless work involving repeating the same tasks over and over again — but, hey, it's a junior job in my field, that's a straight-up luxury in today's market, I’m not complaining.

My first issue in this job was transcribing audio. None of the tools I was using³ were either good enough at handling audio in a few different dialects of Portuguese and complex terms like brand names, and the one that I had found was pretty okay at it — Google's Gemini — was constantly throwing fits, rejecting uploads for exceeding file-size limits, not transcribing the whole thing, or, worst of all, summarizing the recording instead of transcribing it word by word. And this was using the “Google AI Pro” subscription I got for free with my university's email address!

In a last ditch effort, I went to Google's “AI Studio”, described my use-case and my needs to it, and told it to make me a website that'd do it for me. Surprisingly enough, it worked perfectly. Speaker attribution, complex dialects and technical terms, everything. I wanted to know how it worked, so I looked inside what it had coded for me, and what I saw drove me insane. It was just prompting Gemini through its API. The prompts were essentially the same as what I had spent literal hours doing on Gemini's website, except, when using the API, the tool had no limits that'd stop the response half-way. I was using the exact same Google account, there were no extra charges on my card, my subscription covered it.

Gemini's command line interface.

So I started trying to find other workarounds. I downloaded Gemini's command line client. It is ugly as sin, harder to read and it glitches and eats up my computer's RAM for some godforsaken reason, but it does the things the web version of the exact same AI model, connected to the exact same account, refuses to do. What followed was a honeymoon period where I fell down the rabbit hole of AI programs and briefly embodied the lifestyle of a guy who calls Twitter “X” and loves going off about ‘agentic governance’ or whatever. I futzed around with it, it organized some folders, cleaned up a few spreadsheets, I learned to use “Skills” to do things like add events from a DM to my calendar… it was nice. Hell, I’ll even admit that doing these things, especially through a terminal, made me feel kind of cool.⁴

But as that excitement gave way to boredom (because, fundamentally, there just isn't much in my day-to-day life I want or need automated), I realized that the way I was using these tools was simply to do away with things that had annoyed me about using my computer, much like I had used Gemini to code a website to do away with the things that annoyed me about Gemini. This is, to me, the essence of “vibecoding” in nerd/tech enthusiast circles: remaking the computer in your image.

Browse the Twitter account for Raycast's newly announced “Glaze” app (a marketplace for vibecoded apps) and you’ll see people celebrating making apps for things like browsing a long list of emails or visualizing a large folder. I was listening to the Verge's David Pierce interviewing an extremely monotone Anthropic employee and the one part where he smiled was him getting giddy with excitement about not having to navigate a horribly designed government website and just telling an AI to do it (he also follows it up with an anecdote about using it to file taxes. Don't do that, please, no matter how boring it is).

Glaze's website is drenched in try-hard vibes. It wants so badly to be cool, I love it.

These are all simple, often annoying tasks, and sure, you could just keep doing the boring thing, or, even better, learn how to actually code and spend time coding it, but why'd you do that when all you want to do is make a fancy spreadsheet that's easier to filter. That is the ideology of the productivity nerd. Spend a little extra time hitting your head against the wall (talk to a kind of stupid robot) and get closer to your goal: the One Tool to Rule them All, which perfectly visualizes, organizes, and automates all the things you want done and lets you get on with doing your work as efficiently as possible.

This singular focus on a goal with disregard for the inner mechanics of a process is the fundamental belief of Artificial Intelligence as a Product. It is the consequence of decades of user interface design in service of the slogan “It Just Works”, meant to alienate the consumer from the very tool they're using. Productivity nerds, in our endless hunger for chasing away software pet peeves, found in AI a tool that achieves the goal of “Just Working” (or, at least, working enough), like a student would find in it a tool that achieves the goal of handing in an assignment, like an investor would find in it the goal of having produced ‘content’ to be consumed on their ‘platform’. But computers run on code, schools (supposedly) run on knowledge, and culture runs on culture.

I can be very happy with my little terminal window that obeys my every command, much like how I’m very happy with a search engine seemingly effortlessly fetching the search results I asked for, but, no matter how cool I feel, I simply don't get how it operates, and it doesn't want me to. An app like Sora abstracted away the process of cultural production to merely having an idea and having it be executed, and that is an ideal only an extremely alienated consumer or investor could have. It failed (partly⁵ ) because people, in general, are conscious enough to think critically about the processes that lead to the creation of cultural objects — even if that understanding starts and ends at recognizing the appearance of “someone made this”, it undoubtedly exists. This is no longer the case with how we see technology and much of the rest of the infrastructure that rules our lives. Vibecoding feels great because we love to catch a vibe, but it fails because a vibe is simply not enough to go on. You can't easily maintain or expand vibecoded software, because you don't fully understand its machinations. Though the appeal of cool vibes is still undeniable, maintaining a perpetual culture machine failed long-term because the broader public understands the machinations of the culture industries enough to have some attachment to them. I hope it’ll stay that way.

Thank you for reading noReturn! It is now a biweekly newsletter (turns out writing is hard), releasing roughly every other Friday. Follow for more musings on everything Media™ related. Be it tech, film, games, music… whatever really.

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Today I woke up to a message from a friend: "Have you heard of this new game? It's like a gacha for Wikipedia articles."

My answer was, obviously, "Yes." Wikigacha is a delightful little game, a wonderful parody of games like Pokémon TCG Pocket in that it both satirizes the idea of making a game out of opening digital card packs, by applying the concept to something as mundane as a Wikipedia article, but also perfectly replicates the ridiculous joy of playing Pokémon TCG Pocket and unlocking completely worthless digital items, made in the image of actual trading cards that somehow sell for a stupid amount of money — all without nagging you to spend a single cent. My friend put it best when she described her experience playing it this way: “Last night I got hooked on it. I really felt like I was gambling.”

She was being facetious when she said this, of course. Wikigacha is a completely free game with no paid items, so the comparison to gambling immediately reads as ridiculous; and, regardless, finding yourself being kept awake at night by the ecstasy of pulling an ultra rare “Presidency of Barack Obama” trading card is just inherently immensely stupid — even writing about it feels a bit insane, like trying to explain a simple joke —, but this style of tongue-in-cheek, slightly shameful indulgence in pulling the arm of an abstract slot machine is exactly what the game is being praised for, and probably why it became famous in the first place.

The practice of taking a mobile game with questionable monetization mechanics and stripping it of its in-app purchases, while keeping every single aspect of its design meant to pressure you into paying for hitting the big glowing “BUY NOW” button is taking over contemporary independent gaming to the extent it’s almost a fad. From Balatro’s pinging points tally and psychedelic video poker inspired UI, to Megabonk’s purposefully barren landscapes interrupted by screen-filling hit point counters, indie game players have found themselves enraptured by post-ironic digital casinos where there’s no monetary incentive to chase a jackpot.

And it’s easy to understand why. It’s been a bit more than a decade since virtual currencies, loot boxes, battle passes and the like completely took over video games, and, though they were the object of much resistance from video game nerds when they came out, they’ve essentially become facts of life¹ . At the same time, gambling as a whole has taken over wider culture to the extent that every street corner and webpage I wander into is littered with ads for casinos or betting apps. Even the places free from high scores and big prizes are increasingly being 'gamified' — my personal favorite is my smartwatch's little animation with confetti and bright colors every time I hit 10k steps in a day, a number some Japanese guy completely made up.

These games provide a way to indulge in the overstimulating euphoria we’re being advertised without accumulating disastrous debt, while also still allowing us to mock the wider culture. I myself have spent dozens of hours in the past year or two sinking time into these games, and I don’t regret a thing. They are so fun to play. I would compare them to watching films like Scary Movie, Last Action Hero or, my personal favorite sitcom, Community. Mobile “time-waster” games have now been popular for so long they’ve solidified as a genre and become mired in cliché, much like slasher horror and sitcoms had in the past. We now have a whole generation of players and developers who grew up playing them and making them, and we can’t help making fun of them — both out of love, and out of hate.²

Last week I talked about the "Techno-Pastoral”: the desire to return to the technology of the past, the cycles of nostalgia that create ever-shifting conceptions of a tech 'Golden Age' and the tech 'detoxes' we chase to free us from what we deem 'addictive'.

Going back to old technology, returning to “the pastoral”, is one of the many ways we attempt to rework our relationship with technology. These games are doing the exact opposite. They’re embracing the new, the addictive design and the overwhelming aesthetics of our time in order to trick the more critical into indulging in them and, intentionally or not, providing space for more insightful critique.

Some may find this trickery pervasive, perhaps normalizing the very thing they’re supposedly critiquing, and there’s a chance they’re right. But as someone who avoids games I perceive as having predatory monetization, this genre has forced me to come face to face with the reality of video games in a highly transformative way. I love going off about the joys of entering a flow state, where your brain becomes so focused on achieving a high score or beating a level that the controller melts into your hand and reality fades away to give way to a kind of hyper-focus where you’re not even thinking about the buttons you’re pressing, while wholly unaware of that term’s history in the discipline of psychology that drives the design of casinos and other gamified products.

Companies seeking infinite profits have twisted the flow state, the established mechanisms of arcade-style video games to further their own goals. By reversing this appropriation, and swapping out the cartoony kid-friendly aesthetics of most mobile games for those of sleazy 80s casinos and 30 year old video games, these games make us realize how tenuous the line between the games console and the slot machine really is.

This isn’t to say video games are slot machines, or that the pleasure they incite is inherently evil or manipulative, but they’re doing something, right? I find the honesty of games like these to be a wonderful way to force critical thought on the power entertainment and technology have on us, in a similar vein to how the jingoistic honesty of a Tom Cruise action movies makes them perfect vehicles for critique. It’s discomforting to think of my hobbies this way. I’ve come to love that discomfort.

Further Reading

• Luck be a Landlord is, in my opinion, the best expression of this genre of video game. It’s available pretty much everywhere, and not that expensive. I heartily recommend you play it;

• My friend Sage, someone who knows a lot more about critical game theory than I do, speaks of bleed often, a concept about how games (be they video games, or table-top or live action role playing) affect our perception of reality and ourselves. They told me this article is required reading, and so I’m extending the recommendation to you all: Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character | Nordic Larp

Thank you for reading noReturn! This’ll be a (hopefully) weekly newsletter, out every Friday (subject to change), consisting mostly of my musing on everything Media™ related. Tech, film, games, music, whatever I please.

If you want to come along for the ride, consider subscribing to be emailed every time I post. If you enjoyed what you read, consider donating on Ko-fi.

Two months ago, shortly after Australia's social media ban for teenagers went live, New York magazine published a piece I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Published under the nauseatingly named section "Reasons to Love New York", "How the Phone Ban Saved High School" comes in guns blazing with its title alone, but the subtitle that follows it was what drew my attention. It takes a weirder turn, seeming to posit that the problem with high school was that kids weren't gambling enough: "Since the bell-to-bell device lockup, teens have rediscovered the simple pleasures of conversation and poker." Ah... The land of the free!

Jokes aside, were it not for the bizarre mention of poker as a "simple pleasure" on par with the basic human act of conversation, I wouldn't have even thought twice about this headline, let alone allowed it to live rent free in my mind for an extended stay. There's an unceasing wave of similarly presented pieces appearing on every magazine, newspaper, TV program, short and long-form video platform or social media feed available, showering us in age-old adages about the value of human connection with some buzzwords of the moment peppered on for flavor. We've heard it all before, and I am, admittedly, quite tired of it, but, alas, the promise of high-stakes tales of underage betting in between math classes was simply too good to ignore, so I had to click the article and read through.

After jumping the publication's paywall through means I unfortunately cannot disclose but wholeheartedly encourage you to use, I found myself awestruck by the presentation. It contained the expected platitudes about childhoods saved from certain doom by forced abstinence from the unholy glow of an LCD, of course, but what stood out to me was how this voyeuristic stroll through school playgrounds painted its otherwise milquetoast scenery in the unmistakable color palette of millennial nostalgia.

Though its headline and picture highlighted card games and comradery, the actual text was of such a particular cultural context that you could carbon date the author's birth year. These children were "talking to one another as if they were in a Brat Pack movie" and there was "an alphabet of new analog hobbies popping up just about everywhere". We even hear of one child who swapped Spotify for his dad's old CDs on portable CD player:

The tales of teenage Texas Hold'em I so wanted to laugh at were delegated to barely more than a single anecdote, and instead I was faced with Discmans, mp3 players and Game Boys being given the same symbolic weight as board games and sports. Items that, in my own childhood, were often vilified in much the same way as smartphones.

The way this author's childhood nostalgia overlapped with my own lived experiences of education had to me laid bare the artifice of yearning for a "pre-tech" existence. If a Game Boy is now a delightful little gadget for teenagers to play with between classes, won't smartphones eventually also become a gleefully simple retro computing device once something better comes along? If high school's "salvation" can be recognized by way of a return to 80s kid comedy antics and Weezer CDs, are we really chasing solutions to the ills of technology, or just blind nostalgia?

Techno-Pastoral

Examining this feeling has led me down an endless spiral full of wistful screeds pining for the bygone halcyon days of dial-up internet, cathode ray tubes and iPods, all wrapped in the assertive yet distinctly unchallenging tone of therapized searches for 'wellness'.

Since reading this article, I've found its specific strain of longing well beyond coverage of the current hot button issue of teenage phone & social media bans. Every "tech detox" testimonial and guide to quitting social media I've found seems to, much like this NY Mag article does, revel in satiating the reader/viewer's presumed desire to return to the way things were 'in the before times'. However exactly when those times were is a notion that seems to fluctuate from person to person, generation to generation. Millennials sing odes to Discmans and early internet forums, while Gen Z, the people around my age, seem to take the iPod and MySpace as their respective muses.

Regardless, this desire to wind time back, embodied through brief vicarious escapades to the familiar interfaces of the telephone keypad or the click wheel, reads to me as a distinctly conservative reaction, one whose traits remind me of an enduring conservative ideal: the pastoral.

Quick explainer: The pastoral ideal is, as the name implies, a romanticized abstraction of the feeling of the way of life of a sheepherder. Though echoes of it exist pretty much everywhere, the artistic genre of the pastoral, where the ideal originates, stays mostly in the realm of so-called "high art", serving as a voyeuristic object of delight for many who hold the bucolic lifestyle in high regard but have never lived it, and almost certainly never intend to. Most importantly for this essay, it does not concern itself with the less romantic aspects of this way of life. Its art will never depict the dirt under its countryman's nails, the many insects that surround him and his animals, or the assortment of horrible odors all around him. Even when it opts to depict the arduous manual labor involved in the lifestyle, it won't choose to do so in a negative manner. It's an aestheticized ideal that has historically been a vehicle for conservative thought leaders to extrapolate their ideological opposition to the 'modern', 'urban' way of life from, while averting the reality of the material conditions of the very lifestyle they idealize.

It is precisely this process of conservative ideological construction that cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams examines in his book The Country and the City, where he noted how the pastoral showed the same ever-shifting temporality of the 'before times' that we now see everywhere in tech detox culture. The genre and its ideal had been built on one central conceit: a return to a life that symbolized a "Golden Age" we've since strayed away from, yet every tangible definition of when this era happened and what its customs was incongruous with one another. One decade would admire the simplicity of a previous era, yet reports from that era would be pining for an even earlier era while denouncing the excesses of their contemporaries. As he put it: "When we moved back in time, consistently directed to an earlier and happier rural England, we could find no place, no period, in which we could seriously rest."

Decades later, our search for rest remains unfulfilled. If we were to repeat this same backwards movement Williams described in '73 (but with a focus on communication technologies), we'd no doubt find ourselves jumping from cellphones and social media, to desktop computers and internet forums, to television, to radio, to the penny press, to books inked and bound by hand, to rolls of papyrus, to words etched in stone; and still never find a truly ideal era where we had no complaints about our choice of devices for communication.

Therefore, continuing with this analogy to the pastoral, exchanging Spotify for a decades old iPod is to me something more akin to deciding to live in the woods after you've earned your money working a corporate job, rather a real truly impactful ideological choice. Your taste, your friends’ taste, the culture around you and the artists you listen to will all still be deeply impacted by Spotify's algorithm and horrifically low pay — much like how a picturesque country house is still just a little retreat that nevertheless exists inside A Modern Society which you can't escape from and must always interact with in some capacity (not to mention that you need to be quite well-off in the first place to even be able to make the decision to escape the city).

The Future

When we dream of MySpace pages, MSN Messenger chats and iTunes libraries, we're not creating a different future, we're collectively rewriting our own past while carefully neglecting to mention the downsides. Technology sucked back then too. We don't need to be singing the praises of the record companies, the Apple Computer or the Nintendo of the 90s just because they've all gotten even worse since then. When we do so, we're retroactively approving of their past methods, and laying the groundwork for us to retroactively approve of their current methods once something worse inevitably pops up.

When we celebrate the way technology influenced our lives in the past, we're creating a world where someday streams that pay fractions of a cent, predatorily monetized children's games and maybe even "prediction markets” may get glossed over as ‘not that bad’ by the rose tinted glasses of hindsight. We should be careful not to signal that the conflict that matters in our judgement of technology is that of the familiar vs. the new, that of nostalgia vs. novelty. We ought to seek a relationship with the technology that surrounds that isn't avoidant and regressive. Indulging in the comfort of our uncritical and fallible memories is not the same as developing media literacy.

Whether we're legislating or just personally negotiating what technology should do and how it should mediate the present and the future, the past should never be a golden idyllic standard we strayed away from. Our current issues have antecedents. As a great thinker once put it: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

Because, fundamentally, even if I chose to opt for something more analogue in my moments of leisure, my family will still message me on WhatsApp, my friends will still be on Discord, and the writers I enjoy will still be writing on Substack. I can’t opt out, and it's likely you can't either. I want to find a way to exist in this world without enabling its worst habits. Let's find a way to make this work.

Welcome to the first ever article on noReturn! This’ll be a (hopefully) weekly newsletter, out every Friday (subject to change), consisting mostly of my musing on everything Media™ related. Tech, film, music, whatever really.

If you want to come along for the ride, consider subscribing to be emailed every time I make a post. If you enjoyed what you read, consider donating on Ko-fi.