Dear reader,
We often treat new technologies as gifts with clear benefits: faster travel, better communication, instant knowledge; but the more I look around, the more I notice a strange paradox. The promises get fulfilled, in a way; but not in the world we used to live in. Instead, the world shifts, rearranges itself around the new capability and, in the end, we’re back at the start, or sometimes even worse off. Technology doesn’t just help us do things: it changes what we have to do. And so the gains it offers are too often swallowed by the systems they reshape.
Take the car, for instance. When it was invented, it seemed like a clear win: personal freedom, faster travel, new horizons. And for a while, that was true. But soon enough, cities stretched to fit the car, not the pedestrian; suburbs bloomed outward; commutes grew longer. What was once a ten-minute walk became a thirty-minute drive. We didn’t just get faster travel: we got a world that demands it. The gain was real, but so was the cost, and somehow we find ourselves spending the same amount of time getting from place to place, just over greater distances.
Or think about the internet. It promised knowledge at our fingertips, and in theory, it delivered. But instead of enlightenment, we got fragmentation. Information is everywhere, but it's scattered and shallow. To find what we once could learn in a focused book now takes scrolling, filtering, second-guessing. We got access, but at the cost of clarity. The abundance overwhelmed the utility. So we spend just as much time trying to piece things together, only now we're flooded with noise.
And then there’s email. It was supposed to simplify communication: faster than letters, more convenient than phone calls. But now we’re buried under it. The ease of sending a message made messages multiply. What once took a formal letter or a deliberate conversation is now a never-ending stream of tasks, follow-ups, threads, and pings. We didn’t just get efficient communication: we got an expectation of constant availability. The tool became the task.
Why does this keep happening? I think it’s because technology doesn’t exist in isolation: it plugs into culture, economics, expectations. The moment something becomes easier or faster, our standards shift. We expect more, respond faster, do more. The old effort becomes the new baseline. And because the system around the technology adapts so quickly, the gains are short-lived. What began as a solution becomes the new condition, and we start solving for that.
So what should we do? I don’t think the answer is to reject technology outright. That’s neither practical nor fair, many tools genuinely help. But we can get better at noticing the hidden trade-offs. We can slow down our embrace, ask who benefits, who adapts, and at what cost. We can resist the reflex to match every new capability with a new expectation. Maybe it means using the fast tools more slowly. Or turning them off, now and then, to remember what they replaced. Not because the past was perfect, but because some of its limits kept things human-sized.
Vale,
Davide