Strained And Ambivalent

My relationship with the digital world as a dyspraxic person with NVLD

A thought I have had more times than I care to admit. Please note that no defenseless and inanimate digital devices were harmed in the writing of this post.

In my last piece The Phone Was Never The Problem, I described my experience of temporarily reverting to a retro flip phone and tablet to minimize online distractions and simplify my life. As a disabled person, I had succumbed to nearly obsessive news consumption habits in the wake of Donald J. Trump’s presidency. I felt increasingly compelled to keep up with the news, always on high alert for political actions that could have deleterious consequences for me as a disabled person living under America’s version of a fascist regime.

My flip phone experiment ended when it began to impede my social life, and I found a much more effective solution within the smartphone’s ecosystem: a widget that lets you temporarily turn off distracting apps. Perhaps I got so caught up in a sense of reactive nostalgia that I never considered the device itself wasn’t the source of the problem, and that it may have even had the solution within it.

My decision to revert to an earlier stage of digital life, while admittedly extreme, was also a manifestation of my ongoing ambivalence toward technology. While I obviously find digital technologies highly useful, I sometimes harbor a bitter resentment toward them, rooted in how my natural, functional proclivities impede my ability to leverage them optimally. Moreover, the difficulties I experience in assimilating new digital technologies lead me to be more broadly critical of such technologies, particularly their detrimental environmental and societal impacts.

However, as I will explain later, I wonder to what extent my personal difficulties with digital technologies, as well as their broader ecological and societal harms, stem from how these technologies manifest under capitalism.

How I experience the digital realm:

As a dyspraxic individual with NVLD¹ (Non-Verbal Learning Disabilities), I often have a slower learning curve with unfamiliar digital technologies and, once learned, tend to apply them rather inefficiently.

When acquiring proficiency in new digital technologies, I generally need more tinkering, repeated practice, and occasional guidance from others to understand how the various components work. Many challenges stem from symbol coding—correctly interpreting unfamiliar icons or symbols without sufficient contextual cues. Determining which application, icon, or widget serves a particular purpose can be difficult for me. Establishing associations between unknown symbols and their functions in low-context, two-dimensional interfaces does not come instantly. Furthermore, my learning process may involve an extended period during which I depend primarily on rote memorization of procedural steps, rather than a comprehensive understanding of the underlying systems and algorithms.

Once I know what to do, I’m often less efficient in practical applications of digital technologies. For example, even when I know which app I need, it can take me longer to find it on a screen because of visual-processing inefficiencies. This also makes me less efficient and more error-prone when entering data into digital spreadsheets like Excel. Moreover, I’m more likely to accidentally tap wrong buttons or keys due to motor and perceptual impairments, so I must think carefully about what I’m doing. Even at that, I’m more likely to have to go back and make a few corrections. This gives you a sense of how I experience the digital realm.

I am also a late adopter of digital technologies, but once I do integrate them into my life, I quickly realize their benefits.

For example, after acquiring my first smartphone and familiarizing myself with its features, I quickly realized its undeniable utility in many aspects of my lifestyle. For example, if I wanted to identify a plant, I could quickly snap a photo and use Google Lens or look it up in a local field guide to find out what it is. I could even zoom in on key botanical features, such as leaf venation and seed-pod arrangements, to better inform identification. And given my inability to drive, which leaves me more exposed to the weather, I consider weather apps indispensable for accurately monitoring conditions when planning my activities. I also appreciate the convenience of checking my bank account balances online, without having to travel to the nearest branch or affiliated ATM.

My Indictment of Late-Stage Capitalist Digital Culture:

Despite the clear benefits I gained from smartphones and other digital technologies, these devices never quite sat well with me. Obviously, part of this ambivalence stems from how my NVLD hinders my ability to grasp such technologies beyond a superficial level. But I am keenly aware of the detrimental environmental and social impacts digital technologies have had, and as a Gen Xer, I have clear memories of a time when most people lived completely oblivious to the digital sphere, and the world still turned. Thus, I’m often inclined to wonder how necessary the prominence of digital life in our society really is.

Yet if I am to be perfectly clear, much of my critique of technology is not of the devices and implements themselves, but rather how they show up in the context of a late capitalist social and economic order, characterized by accelerated growth and extraction. I hypothesize that many of these negative externalities stem from systemic issues inherent to capitalism, which render the digital realm one of several barriers experienced by some neurodivergent individuals in contemporary society.

While I’m no longer as stridently anti-technology as I was after finishing high school, I often wonder if the fast-paced technological changes typical of late-stage capitalism are truly beneficial to society, or if they are merely an outcome of the planned obsolescence designed to drive growth, which is fueled by intensified competition. Obviously, much of the dynamism of the digital realm would be simply tied to increasing volumes of data, but the question is how much? Thus, to what extent are the difficulties some neurodivergent people face in keeping up with such rapid technological growth another marginalizing externality of late-stage capitalism?

Then there are the effects digital devices have had upon our culture writ large. It is widely hypothesized among researchers and social thinkers that overuse of digital devices has shortened our attention spans, blunted individual self-awareness, and made us more self-referential and exhibitionistic, while making us less thoughtful and observant of the three-dimensional space around us. And quite frankly, I can’t help but think there could be some truth to this claim.

In my time, I’ve noticed that average driving behavior has become much more reckless, aggressive, and dangerous since smartphones became ubiquitous. As a vulnerable road user who is unable to drive and walks and cycles for transportation, I actually suffer from C-PTSD as a result of nearly being run over multiple times. At 51, I’ve relied on walking and cycling since my early teens, and I distinctly remember when roads were much safer than today.

In general, I feel smartphones and the seamless online access they provide have normalized, perhaps even elevated, the most crass, debased, and obnoxious expressions of human behavior as a legitimate way to conduct oneself in public. Thus, in recent years, I have become something of a shut-in because I find the general public so difficult to be around. It sometimes troubles me that I have become something of a dour, judgmental misanthrope, as I was not always this way.

With regard to societal harm likely attributable to digital technology, it is important to recognize that the broader effects of any technology are largely determined by the economic and cultural context in which it is deployed.

While I can’t quite do this subject justice in the scope of this essay, I would like to toss out some ideas to stimulate thought and raise questions for discussion. This is also a topic I can easily see myself revisiting in future writings.

In a well-educated, degrowth-oriented socialist society characterized by reduced inequality, lower levels of consumption, strong work-life balance, cohesive geographic communities, and an economy prioritizing qualitative progress over financialization or quantitative growth, it is conceivable that the relationship between society and digital technologies would develop in a manner that is less marginalizing and less socially and environmentally harmful.

Within the framework of degrowth socialism, digital technology would be oriented toward developing regenerative, publicly owned, and durable solutions that prioritize social well-being over corporate profit. The approach would emphasize repairability, open-source software, and localized networks, shifting away from planned obsolescence and data-intensive surveillance toward a lower-energy, sustainable society.

Key strategies for implementation may include:

A Comprehensive Digital Tech Deal (DTD): This would establish a formal structure to diminish Big Tech’s dominance by socializing infrastructure and promoting decentralized innovation.

Repair and Reuse Economy: Facilitating repair cafes, device-sharing libraries, and knowledge exchanges to extend the life cycle of digital devices.

Slowing Digitization: Undertaking critical evaluations of digital interventions, adopting “low-tech” or community-oriented alternatives where suitable to minimize energy consumption.

In a degrowth economy, the technology sector would likely be subject to public ownership. This transition could foster a more environmentally sustainable material culture and increase accessibility of digital tools to diverse populations, regardless of ability. By slowing digitization, such technologies may become less intrusive, enabling roles and lifestyles that require minimal interaction with digital systems, thereby reducing barriers for individuals less adept at adapting to rapid, capricious technological change.

Additionally, a degrowth economic model—without the imperative to produce surplus value—would be better positioned to reduce reliance on digital and other technologies, particularly in arts and humanities education and academia, where excessive technification has been counterproductive. Again, this is one way in which a degrowth socialist paradigm could expand opportunities for low-tech occupations and lifestyles, reducing social and economic marginalization among neurodivergent individuals who encounter difficulties with digital technologies.

It should be noted that these observations merely represent speculative assessments on my part, rather than definitive conclusions.

If anything I said may have resonated or raised any thoughts or questions, please feel free to share them in the comments section below. Those always make for interesting discussions.

1. Nonverbal Learning Disability (i.e.NVLD or NLD) is not an officially recognized diagnosis but primarily entails impairments in visual-spatial processing, executive functioning, understanding mathematical concepts, and socialization differences that aren’t better accounted for by autism, ADHD, or any of the current officially recognized neurodivergences