It always feels such an anti-pattern this kinda stuff. Nothing stops you from having a healthy, limited relationship with the technology you have, however you define that to be.
Buy a dumb phone because you feel some aspect is addicting to you rather than meaningfully addressing it. Get an ipod because spotify is bad rather than learning to play music files in some capacity on your phone. Start buying VHS tapes and dvds because netflix is clearly the only option.
The list goes on, and all too often rather than fixing habits they just consume in a different sense until they lapse and go back to hold habits. By trying to be the opposite of 'thing' they still let 'thing' control them. Although the fact all this author's examples are still posting about it all on tiktok doesnt have me sold one bit on them healthily disconnecting.
This seems ubiquitous (in baby steps) in my social circles. I think there's a big difference between general ai (LLMs) and the troubling implementations of ai like flock, and other surveillance implementations, spotify and their distortion of music, and their investment into ai military drone tech, etc. and how wrapped up politics has become in everything. Its a bad time to have a browser in your pocket.
> I think there's a big difference between general ai (LLMs) and the troubling implementations of ai like flock ... spotify and their distortion of music ...
I'm curious about the distinction you're making here. If we accept mainstream uses of LLMs, such as writing online content or generating images, why is music different?
As for the surveillance stuff, outside some geek bubbles, it's really not something that people care about. The prevailing narrative is that crime is getting worse and when the push comes to shove, most residents want more policing, more license plate readers, etc.
I don’t know how ubiquitous it is in my circles, but I have noticed a lot of folks in their 20s and 30s tell me they only buy paper books, never Kindle. I started buying only the latter years ago because of the convenience and lack of a need for storage, but have recently switched to getting everything I can (digitally) through the library and the Libby app.
I've stopped with Kindle books (or e-books in general). It's been a while. But my kindle got destroyed by my then 3 yr old going all crazy on it. The screen just froze and nothing made it unfreeze. I was moving towards paper books anyway. So I just did not buy another Kindle.
From new reports it seems Denmark is rolling back a lot of e-learning/screen usage. I hope the same comes to pass in the US. My daughter gets an iPad for her high school and while its locked down it is incredibly distracting. It is also restrictive. You can't read your notes and make summaries and write your own interpretation of what you've read without switching context between apps. As a whole I think its a bad option for learning.
We have also seen the Boomer's cannibalize themselves, even my 7 year old can see that her grandma's screen addiction is a very scary thing and something to be avoided; very cautionary. The Boomer's inability to defend themselves against the algorithms is a wild case study in screen addiction.
I think AI is just a tipping point and an easy target.
I think it's more that AI is the final straw for many. Social media exhaustion. Everything needing an account or (worse) subscription. The stupidity of smart devices/appliances. Software and media not being ownable anymore. Constant data breeches.
Chatbots are just the latest in a long line of everything digital being little more than a rent-seeking, ad-riddled, privacy-invading scam.
The work required to protect yourself from it all is an arms race, and LLMs only dialed up the cost.
If you're running ublock, [edit: after accepting] just block the elements - kill the dark overlay, kill the big subscribe box that slides in at the bottom. There's nothing else.
CNN still doesn't have much worth reading, certainly not this. This isn't a real trend, this is a party a friend of the author threw.
"It’s hard to quantify just how widespread the phenomenon is, but certain notably offline hobbies are exploding in popularity."
Assuming this is an actual trend that is actually "exploding"... I wonder what this means for the short term in the AI industry? Could we see a drop in users and then a big popping of the bubble?
That does seem like a really big assumption though.
The number of knitting kits sold (an example from the article) to me sounds like it might correlate more with the number of TikTok videos about knitting than the hours spent knitting.
The article almost encourages this interpretation, although I'd praise it for at least acknowledging the "performance" part.
It seems to mash consumerism, commercial Social Media and GenAI into one though.
Still, I try to see the positive side, and I think there certainly could be such a trend.
No idea if it's just a small part of people going against the grain, or a broader shift.
Regarding media addiction, there is a pattern that would be kind of similar, the large cohort of elderly people who are addicted to media and the commercial web, compared to the comparatively smaller portion of younger people falling victim.
Among my "elder millenial" friends, I can only say that abstinence from doomscrolling and modern tech (especially smartphones and SM) seems to correlate with integrity and smartness.
> The number of knitting kits sold (an example from the article)
Also, "knitting kits" were not a thing for most of my life. You'd just buy yarn needles and yarn. This is not some kind of a craft where you need dozens of implements.
The kit is pretty much a product of the TikTok / YT influencer era. Indeed, a typical kit will often contain needles, yarn, and a... link to a video you can watch:
I am one of those analog people, and have been long before it was (apparently?) cool.
- I have not had a cell phone in 5+ years
- I do not use LLMs at all outside of occasional experimentation to understand the current capabilities I am knowingly giving up
- I subscribe to no streaming services, favoring my VHS/DVD/Blu-ray/laserdisc/vinyl/cassette/cdrom/cartridge collection
- I have an extensive collection of paper, books, magazines, etc to browse and inspire me.
- I have an extensive board game collection to play when friends are around.
- I only use desktop computers at home, keeping me offline and present when not in front of one.
- I have 40+ pre-internet game consoles hooked up in my garage to 25+ CRT TVs, along with a pinball machine, 3 arcade cabinets, and an OG VGA PC gaming station.
- I have an EE/craft corner with soldering irons, 3D printers, hand tools, and everything I need to make a lot of my own stuff at home.
- I have an extensive collection of mechanical puzzles to keep my mind constantly solving new deductive reasoning problems with no screen time
- I rarely leave home with any electronics, favoring an analog watch, cash, paper maps, and recently, a film camera.
- I exclusively rely on, mostly self hosted, open source software for all my work so I am the one in control of what it does and how I use it. I also FOSS license 100% of my work as well.
- I co-run two tech companies from Silicon Valley
- I regularly invent and deploy new security defense tactics and tools
- I hang out with maybe 10 IRL friends every week on average
- I travel often, including internationally. (I do take a tiny laptop with me when traveling)
- I have a family
Turns out, all of the above balances out just fine, and I am so much happier keeping as much of my life and mind grounded in the real world as possible.
I still think the internet could undergo a "collapse" and rapidly shrink to something resembling the 2000's internet. The enshitification of everything is quite literally, "mining out" the value of the internet, hollowing everything from below. At some point, nothing is believable and putting your "content" online amounts to giving it away. Eventually, the users _will_ walk away and suddenly the whole affair falls apart.
I think rather than collapse it may get filtered down more. I've already got ad blockers and some similar stuff like fbpurity which removes the sponsored nonsense from facebook. LLM type AI might help there by filtering down to things you are interested in and connecting with real friends rather than the junk that commercial algos push at you.
It’s not gonna collapse. It can only grow bigger; the entire world economy runs and depends on the internet.
Rather, what will happen is a bunch of us will willingly stop participating and stepping away from the technological singularity. A bit like the Amish, this time not for religious reasons. Let the urbanites enjoy their AI-generated virtual realities, with work, sex, and food from the comfort of your phone, competing for fewer and more bullshit office jobs creating more addictive apps; I just want to live on a farm with solar panels, grow tomatoes and write code for fun.
You can still share via torrents, but Soundcloud seems to be the main place, as it has been for almost 20 years now.
On a separate note, I must say that starting to read your comment, I was sure it'll be going towards "Back in 2000 I cudda made a song outta that... Now, in 2025, I just use suno"
Why have I been seeing people use "enshitification" so much lately? Yes I know where it comes from and what it means. It's like Cory Doctorow is the new Noam Chomsky of IT and enshitification has replaced "manufactured consent".
My belief is that its rise to popularity is a result of the underlying concept being something that everybody has been feeling for a long time, but lacked a word that could serve as its face in a satisfying manner. It's snappy and encodes a certain frustration and anger with the state of things that isn't conveyed as well or as succinctly with other terms.
Also there seems to be more of it about. Like facebook is crazy these days if you don't have things to block the junk. What used to be holiday pic from friend, post from mum is now holiday pic then three in your face hot / AI generated influencers doing in your face stuff then maybe your mum. It makes my head hurt.
Its the current term-slop to label anything changing in a way they dislike without nuance.
Yes many things are incredibly getting objectively worse, but it enables them to look at unsustainable practices in the eye and feign shock when it fails to keep steam.
Some have walked away from the worst sites already but the majority are undiscerning and if they haven't left by now I don't think anything will be different in 2026.
The 2000s internet was way bigger than the 2026 internet. Every google search pulls up the same 50 sites now, and the first page will be split between just two sites, as if I needed 6 slightly different Amazon links about a book I was googling.
In the 2000s you could literally use google to scrape for open camera feeds; it was just internet-grep. Random people had extensive pages about their random hobbies. The actual internet was buried when the search engines decided to ignore queries and guide traffic, and eventually mostly disappeared. Back then there was more variety on youtube; there was more variety on myspace than is now on facebook.
People spend more time on the internet now, but it's just scrolling versions of the same 20 stories of the day linked from the same 50 sites on the same 5 social network feeds. Even those 50 sites are all owned by the same 10 people, which means you get between one and two self-interested perspectives on those 20 stories. The rest of the internet is filled with slop and the rest of your feed (from real people you don't even really know) is repoasts that they imitated from seeing them updooted somewhere else. It's positively claustrophobic.
The catch is that they eliminated public space and made unmediated communication suspicious and borderline illegal, so where are you going to go? Find somebody on an app to hang out with? Watch some netflix? Isn't that still the internet? Make your kids put down their phones and talk to you? How are you going to have a party if you don't post it on facebook?
For the, the difference, and why I'm really disgusted by AI is that the sole reason there is so much money being dumped in it, not because it'll create a service that the common people will like, but for the dream of CEOs to be able to lay off many people.
I think if AI succeeds in this way, it's going to be extremely bad.
This seems like a predictable pendulum swing. I love AI, but I also love the phenomenon of people turning more toward IRL and tangible activities.
Anecdotally, I have friends who have recently bought turntables out of the blue and gotten into vinyl. Other friends who never had any interest in my analog cameras are asking about film. My wife has even switched from scrolling Instagram at night to working on a crossword book with a pencil.
None of them have put it exactly this way, but in divisive times, I think social media is just exhausting. And now you can't even really tell what's real.
It always feels such an anti-pattern this kinda stuff. Nothing stops you from having a healthy, limited relationship with the technology you have, however you define that to be. Buy a dumb phone because you feel some aspect is addicting to you rather than meaningfully addressing it. Get an ipod because spotify is bad rather than learning to play music files in some capacity on your phone. Start buying VHS tapes and dvds because netflix is clearly the only option.
The list goes on, and all too often rather than fixing habits they just consume in a different sense until they lapse and go back to hold habits. By trying to be the opposite of 'thing' they still let 'thing' control them. Although the fact all this author's examples are still posting about it all on tiktok doesnt have me sold one bit on them healthily disconnecting.
This seems ubiquitous (in baby steps) in my social circles. I think there's a big difference between general ai (LLMs) and the troubling implementations of ai like flock, and other surveillance implementations, spotify and their distortion of music, and their investment into ai military drone tech, etc. and how wrapped up politics has become in everything. Its a bad time to have a browser in your pocket.
> I think there's a big difference between general ai (LLMs) and the troubling implementations of ai like flock ... spotify and their distortion of music ...
I'm curious about the distinction you're making here. If we accept mainstream uses of LLMs, such as writing online content or generating images, why is music different?
As for the surveillance stuff, outside some geek bubbles, it's really not something that people care about. The prevailing narrative is that crime is getting worse and when the push comes to shove, most residents want more policing, more license plate readers, etc.
I don’t know how ubiquitous it is in my circles, but I have noticed a lot of folks in their 20s and 30s tell me they only buy paper books, never Kindle. I started buying only the latter years ago because of the convenience and lack of a need for storage, but have recently switched to getting everything I can (digitally) through the library and the Libby app.
I've stopped with Kindle books (or e-books in general). It's been a while. But my kindle got destroyed by my then 3 yr old going all crazy on it. The screen just froze and nothing made it unfreeze. I was moving towards paper books anyway. So I just did not buy another Kindle.
From new reports it seems Denmark is rolling back a lot of e-learning/screen usage. I hope the same comes to pass in the US. My daughter gets an iPad for her high school and while its locked down it is incredibly distracting. It is also restrictive. You can't read your notes and make summaries and write your own interpretation of what you've read without switching context between apps. As a whole I think its a bad option for learning.
We have also seen the Boomer's cannibalize themselves, even my 7 year old can see that her grandma's screen addiction is a very scary thing and something to be avoided; very cautionary. The Boomer's inability to defend themselves against the algorithms is a wild case study in screen addiction.
I think AI is just a tipping point and an easy target.
I know language evolves over time, but I can’t help but be irritated when people refer to anything non-computerized as analog.
If it isn’t representing something with a continuously various signal then it ain’t analog!
Also - Analog Computing [0] seems like it could be particularly well-suited for AI, e.g. by leveraging optics [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09430-z
I think it's more that AI is the final straw for many. Social media exhaustion. Everything needing an account or (worse) subscription. The stupidity of smart devices/appliances. Software and media not being ownable anymore. Constant data breeches.
Chatbots are just the latest in a long line of everything digital being little more than a rent-seeking, ad-riddled, privacy-invading scam.
The work required to protect yourself from it all is an arms race, and LLMs only dialed up the cost.
Wow CNN's website is awful. They only let me accept tracking cookies, then threw 'subscribers only' at me.
I'm not sure I'll ever click a CNN link again.
Change the subdomain to lite for a more text-oriented experience. https://lite.cnn.com/2026/01/18/business/crafting-soars-ai-a...
There might be a browser plugin to automatically do this, like exist with old.reddit.com.
This JavaScript (make a bookmarklet) should open the latest archive.ph snapshot of any page you're on:
Indent the line with two spaces so it’s rendered as code.
Thank you!
If you're running ublock, [edit: after accepting] just block the elements - kill the dark overlay, kill the big subscribe box that slides in at the bottom. There's nothing else.
CNN still doesn't have much worth reading, certainly not this. This isn't a real trend, this is a party a friend of the author threw.
I am seeing more ads for physical books, and myself I am buying more physical books myself.
That does seem like a really big assumption though.
It's "exploding" in the same way like "quiet resignation" was "exploding". In other words - it isn't.
The number of knitting kits sold (an example from the article) to me sounds like it might correlate more with the number of TikTok videos about knitting than the hours spent knitting.
The article almost encourages this interpretation, although I'd praise it for at least acknowledging the "performance" part.
It seems to mash consumerism, commercial Social Media and GenAI into one though.
Still, I try to see the positive side, and I think there certainly could be such a trend.
No idea if it's just a small part of people going against the grain, or a broader shift.
Regarding media addiction, there is a pattern that would be kind of similar, the large cohort of elderly people who are addicted to media and the commercial web, compared to the comparatively smaller portion of younger people falling victim.
Among my "elder millenial" friends, I can only say that abstinence from doomscrolling and modern tech (especially smartphones and SM) seems to correlate with integrity and smartness.
> The number of knitting kits sold (an example from the article)
Also, "knitting kits" were not a thing for most of my life. You'd just buy yarn needles and yarn. This is not some kind of a craft where you need dozens of implements.
The kit is pretty much a product of the TikTok / YT influencer era. Indeed, a typical kit will often contain needles, yarn, and a... link to a video you can watch:
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Knitting-Kit-Beginners-Acces...
It fits into a broader pattern of hobbies turning into trends, and then products, I guess.
Social Media and E-commerce + dropshipping, optimized supply chains etc brought it to a new level though, in all kinds of domains.
Audio equipment, musical instruments, sports or home accessories, for example.
People having offline hobbies is healthy and completely separate from AI providing real value to society.
If the AI industry takes a hit because people are returning to offline hobbies, it’s a signal we’ve been building the wrong things.
I am one of those analog people, and have been long before it was (apparently?) cool.
- I have not had a cell phone in 5+ years
- I do not use LLMs at all outside of occasional experimentation to understand the current capabilities I am knowingly giving up
- I subscribe to no streaming services, favoring my VHS/DVD/Blu-ray/laserdisc/vinyl/cassette/cdrom/cartridge collection
- I have an extensive collection of paper, books, magazines, etc to browse and inspire me.
- I have an extensive board game collection to play when friends are around.
- I only use desktop computers at home, keeping me offline and present when not in front of one.
- I have 40+ pre-internet game consoles hooked up in my garage to 25+ CRT TVs, along with a pinball machine, 3 arcade cabinets, and an OG VGA PC gaming station.
- I have an EE/craft corner with soldering irons, 3D printers, hand tools, and everything I need to make a lot of my own stuff at home.
- I have an extensive collection of mechanical puzzles to keep my mind constantly solving new deductive reasoning problems with no screen time
- I rarely leave home with any electronics, favoring an analog watch, cash, paper maps, and recently, a film camera.
- I exclusively rely on, mostly self hosted, open source software for all my work so I am the one in control of what it does and how I use it. I also FOSS license 100% of my work as well.
- I co-run two tech companies from Silicon Valley
- I regularly invent and deploy new security defense tactics and tools
- I hang out with maybe 10 IRL friends every week on average
- I travel often, including internationally. (I do take a tiny laptop with me when traveling)
- I have a family
Turns out, all of the above balances out just fine, and I am so much happier keeping as much of my life and mind grounded in the real world as possible.
I still think the internet could undergo a "collapse" and rapidly shrink to something resembling the 2000's internet. The enshitification of everything is quite literally, "mining out" the value of the internet, hollowing everything from below. At some point, nothing is believable and putting your "content" online amounts to giving it away. Eventually, the users _will_ walk away and suddenly the whole affair falls apart.
I think rather than collapse it may get filtered down more. I've already got ad blockers and some similar stuff like fbpurity which removes the sponsored nonsense from facebook. LLM type AI might help there by filtering down to things you are interested in and connecting with real friends rather than the junk that commercial algos push at you.
It’s not gonna collapse. It can only grow bigger; the entire world economy runs and depends on the internet.
Rather, what will happen is a bunch of us will willingly stop participating and stepping away from the technological singularity. A bit like the Amish, this time not for religious reasons. Let the urbanites enjoy their AI-generated virtual realities, with work, sex, and food from the comfort of your phone, competing for fewer and more bullshit office jobs creating more addictive apps; I just want to live on a farm with solar panels, grow tomatoes and write code for fun.
> I just want to live on a farm
> with solar panels, grow tomatoes
> and write code for fun.
Back in 2000 I cudda made a song outta that, recorded it to mp3, and uploaded it to Napster.
25 years later? aren't many places to upload naked audio to.
You can still share via torrents, but Soundcloud seems to be the main place, as it has been for almost 20 years now.
On a separate note, I must say that starting to read your comment, I was sure it'll be going towards "Back in 2000 I cudda made a song outta that... Now, in 2025, I just use suno"
There's sound cloud, band camp, any video host like YouTube or vimeo.
You can seed a torrent and put it on w/e pirate site is cool right now.
Why have I been seeing people use "enshitification" so much lately? Yes I know where it comes from and what it means. It's like Cory Doctorow is the new Noam Chomsky of IT and enshitification has replaced "manufactured consent".
My belief is that its rise to popularity is a result of the underlying concept being something that everybody has been feeling for a long time, but lacked a word that could serve as its face in a satisfying manner. It's snappy and encodes a certain frustration and anger with the state of things that isn't conveyed as well or as succinctly with other terms.
Also there seems to be more of it about. Like facebook is crazy these days if you don't have things to block the junk. What used to be holiday pic from friend, post from mum is now holiday pic then three in your face hot / AI generated influencers doing in your face stuff then maybe your mum. It makes my head hurt.
Because it's such a great word! It names something we have all begun to see but didn't have a name for.
Its the current term-slop to label anything changing in a way they dislike without nuance. Yes many things are incredibly getting objectively worse, but it enables them to look at unsustainable practices in the eye and feign shock when it fails to keep steam.
Even enshitification suffers enshitification.
Some have walked away from the worst sites already but the majority are undiscerning and if they haven't left by now I don't think anything will be different in 2026.
> the majority are undiscerning
this has always been true, and might be a real reason to have public standards?
The 2000s internet was way bigger than the 2026 internet. Every google search pulls up the same 50 sites now, and the first page will be split between just two sites, as if I needed 6 slightly different Amazon links about a book I was googling.
In the 2000s you could literally use google to scrape for open camera feeds; it was just internet-grep. Random people had extensive pages about their random hobbies. The actual internet was buried when the search engines decided to ignore queries and guide traffic, and eventually mostly disappeared. Back then there was more variety on youtube; there was more variety on myspace than is now on facebook.
People spend more time on the internet now, but it's just scrolling versions of the same 20 stories of the day linked from the same 50 sites on the same 5 social network feeds. Even those 50 sites are all owned by the same 10 people, which means you get between one and two self-interested perspectives on those 20 stories. The rest of the internet is filled with slop and the rest of your feed (from real people you don't even really know) is repoasts that they imitated from seeing them updooted somewhere else. It's positively claustrophobic.
The catch is that they eliminated public space and made unmediated communication suspicious and borderline illegal, so where are you going to go? Find somebody on an app to hang out with? Watch some netflix? Isn't that still the internet? Make your kids put down their phones and talk to you? How are you going to have a party if you don't post it on facebook?
> The 2000s internet was way bigger than the 2026 internet. Every google search pulls up the same 50 sites now ...
Poorer discoverability through search doesn't mean the internet is smaller.
"For me, it meant ditching my three iPhones, one MacBook, two even bigger desktop monitors [...]"
Is it so unusual for "desktop monitors" to be bigger than a MacBook that it needs to be pointed out?
The original article title read “doomscrolling” instead of “AI”…
For the, the difference, and why I'm really disgusted by AI is that the sole reason there is so much money being dumped in it, not because it'll create a service that the common people will like, but for the dream of CEOs to be able to lay off many people.
I think if AI succeeds in this way, it's going to be extremely bad.
Fake trendspotting for ad views.
This seems like a predictable pendulum swing. I love AI, but I also love the phenomenon of people turning more toward IRL and tangible activities.
Anecdotally, I have friends who have recently bought turntables out of the blue and gotten into vinyl. Other friends who never had any interest in my analog cameras are asking about film. My wife has even switched from scrolling Instagram at night to working on a crossword book with a pencil.
None of them have put it exactly this way, but in divisive times, I think social media is just exhausting. And now you can't even really tell what's real.