The Tech Practitioner isn’t just a place for me to talk about my adventures with large language models and certification courses. When I decided to call myself The Tech Practitioner, I did so with the intent of talking trash about all technology. I’m an equal opportunist in that regard. I hate technology as much as I love it. It has made my life so much easier while being annoying at the same time. Let me explain.
My immediate focus in this essay: TVs. The overarching reason I am aggravated enough to write about it: Big data and the mundane tech they use to buy and sell us.
The Not-So-Smart TV
My Samsung TV is gradually dying; I think I need some more backlights or something. It's a common issue with the model I have, apparently. However, the cost of backlights is almost the same price as a new TV altogether. The thing is, I don't want another smart TV. I want a regular TV. Retailers don't sell regular TVs anymore. The TV in my living room is a basic 48” RCA flatscreen TV that I'm sure my uncle owned for forever before I moved into his apartment after he died five years ago. The Samsung TV was fairly new at the time. The RCA TV works beautifully. The 32” Vizio that's in my daughter's room is a basic TV. It works fine. My only gripe about the RCA and the Vizio televisions is that they don't have any buttons really, but they still have great pictures. Why do all the new TVs have to be smart TVs? Because they (the manufacturers and big-name companies) want our data. You gotta sign in just to watch TV, and I don’t like it. Nope. My uncle still had an old CRT TV (back when I was a kid, it was just a TV—no qualifiers necessary) tucked in the corner that I am 90% convinced probably still works if I ever take the time out to pull it out and test it. I’m not sure why he never threw it away when he upgraded to the Samsung TV that’s on the wall now. I don’t care if that old TV doesn’t work; I’m keeping it forever for historical purposes.
I've seen several YouTube videos and comments online about people complaining about every appliance being "smart." Everything doesn't have to be smart. Sometimes, I just want my fridge to keep things cold, and that's it. Sometimes, I just want to turn on the TV and watch it, and that's it. I like having a separate device (Roku) plugged into the RCA TV. It works great. And if the Roku gives out, I can just buy another one and keep the TV. I can't do that with the Samsung Smart TV. Even when I am watching something "over the air" with my antenna, the TV still won't half-ass work without the WiFi. Even when I worked as a brand ambassador for Sony in 2016 and I was instructed to push the newer flagship 4K UHD Smart TVs because they were new to the market, I knew I didn’t want one. Basic TV for me, please. This was why I didn’t do well in sales. I’d steer people to the 65” non-smart models, going totally against my directives.
We Can’t Even Cook Without Wi-Fi
As much trash as I talk about my stove sometimes (I’m almost positive that thing is older than me—a woman born in the late 1900s), I am so grateful that it is just a regular gas stove. As long as there is gas available to it, all I have to do is turn a knob, and it’ll light. No electricity required.
In my work as a loss control inspector, specifically for high-value homes appraised for at least half a million dollars, I’ve encountered many styles of ovens, microwaves, coffeemakers, and cool yet very unnecessarily smart appliances and devices. There’s one interaction I remember having with a homeowner who had recently moved into her new construction home. When I came to take photos and inventory of her kitchen, I asked her about the oven to be sure that it was indeed an oven. It was an oven, and she had no idea how to use it. I asked her if she minded if I played around with it to see if I could figure it out. Apparently, it was stuck in a loop of asking her to log in and connect the oven to her home WiFi. I thought that surely there was a way for her to just turn the oven on without needing to provide her personal information and a metaphorical drop of blood. Alas, there was not. It didn’t matter how many times we powered it off and on and factory reset it. I walked out of there with a greater appreciation for my old but faithful gas stove that I have to remove the center knob for in order to adjust the oven temp. At the time of this recollection, that inspection happened about a year ago. I hope she’s figured out how to use her oven since then.
Back to the Basics: Local-First
And another thing, I've gotten back into the habit of using LibreOffice to write my drafts, and I only upload them to the cloud when I'm done. I feel a bit old school again, but I like it. I just have to remember to save my stuff in more than one spot, like I did back in high school and college. Computer hard drive first, then a portable drive or the cloud. While I was writing this, I learned that this is actually a recent trend called "local-first." Folks come up with names for everything.
I have gradually ventured back towards doing my heavy publishable writing on my local device—directly on my computer with no internet connection required—because I’ve gotten too comfortable with all the convenience that being constantly connected provides. I've used Microsoft OneNote for years as a personal journal where I’ve kept my private thoughts, tarot readings, lesson notes, shopping lists, and everything else. The problem I kept encountering with OneNote is that syncing from one device to another could be problematic. Sometimes what I typed on my phone wouldn’t completely sync online, so when I moved to my computer to do my real writing, not all of my changes would appear. I fear I’ve lost many good word combinations that way over the years. I finally decided to do something about it a couple of months ago by switching to a different service. I love OneNote and the ability to create digital notebooks. There’s something about the aesthetic of it that makes it feel different from using Microsoft Word or Google Docs. I searched for an alternative and learned about Notion.
The Cloud Can Kick You Out
Notion has been great for me so far, but in my search to learn exactly what Notion is, I came across a very interesting yet concerning post on Reddit (because there’s an answer for every question one can think of on Reddit). I saw a Reddit user complain that Notion had banned them from their own account. It never crossed my mind that they could do that. I don’t remember exactly why they said Notion banned them. I think they were using it to create some sort of database. For the sake of my argument, it doesn’t really matter because the bottom line is that Notion didn’t like what this person had put in their private digital notes, so they banned that person from their service. Apparently, it is in Notion’s terms of service that most of us blindly agree to that they can and will occasionally scan your content for whatever reasons they deem fit. I did a little investigating and learned that Google and Microsoft do the same thing, all in the name of safety. I get it, but I don’t like it. Granted, I’ve used Google and Microsoft services for most of my life. There’s not a whole lot that they don’t know about me. I just like a lil' space every now and then. I knew it was a possibility that somebody would probably read my online diary and documents, but it never occurred to me until then that it would be a regular thing or even that my personal documents could be and probably are used to help train artificial intelligence. But we all know that nothing is truly secure on the internet, right?
Stop Following My Every Move!
That’s the whole point of this tangent. Nothing, not even a basic TV, is safe anymore. It doesn’t matter if we have nothing to hide. I’m not a criminal. Still, I don’t like the thought of having these folks constantly in my digital face, all in the name of learning every single little thing about me to get me to spend money that I don’t have on stuff that I don’t need. Back up!
Now, I have a couple of conspiracy theories about what else some of these companies may be doing with our data, but I won’t go off into the rabbit hole today. However, Senator Bernie Sanders has been on a mission lately to stop new AI data centers from being constructed and has gone so far as to have an “interview” with Claude AI. One of the things I love about Anthropic, the company that owns Claude, is that they know they are part of the problem. A lot of other companies try to feign innocence. Claude essentially told Bernie that we should be very concerned about AI having our data.
Nothing is sacred anymore. Not your personal notes. Not your TV. Not even your stove. I’m not anti-technology by far. As a matter of fact, I’m in the market for AI ethics job opportunities for this very reason. I just want us all to be more cognizant of how we use technology because, to some degree, it is already using us.
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