state of tech | 2026

My takes personally, artistically, and epistemologically, in reverse.

Our world is beginning to recognize the facts of fiction: that fabrications can appear anywhere, as anything, about anyone.
Understandings of truth previously dislodged by information environments rampant with bad actors are finding even less solidity in this new age. We have yet to establish ways to discern right from wrong, truth from falsehood, social connection from simulation.

I’ve long been excited for this move because of its catastrophic implications for those ever-present platforms that rule our lives, but the reality of its impending second and third order effects loom large. A breakdown in trust of institutions, experts, and sources of truth already occurred post-pandemic and created rifts seemingly too wide to bridge. The professionally religious, the carefully scientific, and the hierarchically motivated all face scrutiny at a level that fractures and siloes the rest of society into camps and partisan belief systems that have become the new religions of the West.

Overcoming our lost capacity to know will be the defining challenge of the next age.

In tandem with crumbling of the once pivotal foundations of knowledge, artistic expression came heavily under fire.
Deepfakes undermine both our trust in the authority-information chain and the creator-patron relationship. As people have begun to reshape their conception of what is true, they have also reevaluated their opinions on what they appreciate from their entertainment and experience of the arts. AI or computer-generated could have been words of the year (if not for more sticky and pedantic phrases like “agentic” and “multi-modal” that buzz) as the question of who serves us our digital distractions faded into the background behind the veil of ubiquitous, over-sensationalized slop.

The benefit for creatives is in the rise of in-person experiences. Live lives on as concerts, movie theaters, comedy shows, and more find their way back into the spotlight in a post-iPhone world. People are searching for moments in a way they realize online interaction, infinite clips, and the revolving doors of the media circuses’ entertainers can never provide.

The opportunity here is one of connection as artists who capitalize on their thousand true fans will flourish.

My life has been an experiment in all things ethical technology and digital minimalism. Having pruned some branches and sheared some stems this past year, the current tech tree for our family of four looks like two work MacBooks, one iPhone, one LightPhone III, two Kindle devices (shoutout Boox Palma), one Spotify subscription, and a Remarkable paper tablet.

In the past 12 months, we fully ditched in-home Wifi, AirPods (this was a massively hard, but undefinably important one), my LinkedIn account (too many thoughts I need to get down about this, but here’s one from the start of my long discernment process), an iPad that collected dust in a drawer, and a number of redundant productivity softwares and tantalizingly useless AI-services.

The hope for this coming year is to switch off our last subscription (Spotify) and return to the ownership of tracks and fair pay of artists while also finding a monthly magazine or newspaper to fully get away from digital news sources (looking at the New Yorker, NYT, the Paris Review, and Houston Chronicle as options to mix & match for a good rhythm).

The Machine of Paul Kingsnorth’s conception has little regard for the humane, deeper needs of a people. It chips away at the rough edges of personhood and carves its way into the identities of those unable to fight back. As we look ahead at this next season, the technological environment and information flow we allow ourselves to be awash within dictates the strength of our resistance. Every year, every day is a chance to push back on machine drift and choose new ways of being in the world.