My car, a Toyota, is seven years old this year, and I have yet to figure out most of what its buttons, knobs, dials, symbols, beeps, and tones do or mean.

For example, according to my owner’s manual, there’s a total of 52 icons that can show up on my dashboard. In the seven years I’ve owned this car, I don’t need both hands to count the ones I know. There’s the low fuel light, high beams on the headlights, tire needs air, and my favorite—road may be icy. Because, well, being a New Englander, I can’t possibly figure out if the roads are icy all by myself.

The few times one of the other icons has dared to light up, I’ve had to wait until I got home to find the manual or do a Google search to figure out what the heck it means.

And am I the only one who thinks that those car icons resemble Egyptian cuneiform?

The car rides fine, gets great gas mileage, handles well but all of that gadgetry–plus the lidless eyeball of a screen in the middle of my dashboard –just drives me crazy. Especially when, as I start the car, the screen reminds me that I should not be reading anything on it while driving.

Which, of course, is why it lets me know that someone’s trying to contact me by cell phone. Something I couldn’t know unless I was reading.

All of that gadgetry represents nothing more than a myriad of things that can go wrong.

I know I am not alone in my growing frustration and outright hatred of technology not because of tech itself but because someone, somewhere else is making decisions that take more and more out of my control.

So imagine my satisfaction when I found a book that explains in very plain language—some of it in words of four letters—that my feelings, experiences, and observations are very, very, very real.

The book, by author Cory Doctorow, has a somewhat crude title: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to do About It. Trust me. It’s so worth the read.

The term enshittification was coined by Doctorow a few years ago and in 2023, the word was chosen as the “digital word of the year” by the American Dialect Society. It encapsulates what we are all experiencing—the deliberate degradation of the internet by the tech bros for the enrichment of the tech bros.

In other words, the fact that nothing works the way it should is deliberate. And we are the victims of tech-bro greed.

The book has become part of my personal quest to understand what technology is doing to our lives, and what I can do to limit its impact. And slowly but surely, I am making changes for the better.

For me, it begins with awareness, just simply noticing where and when technology interferes with my life as a biological organism. Like knowing there’s over 50 icons and warning lights and buzzes and beeps in my car, the majority of which I can ignore because they’re useless.

How many icons, dashboard lights, signals, and tones does your car have? How many of them can you recognize on sight? How many of them do you really need?

Because my blog goes where I point it, posts about this subject are going to show up here regularly. I hope you’re interested because the pushback against the tech bros is happening. If you are paying attention, you’ll find more and more articles, blogs, and videos about how to end or truncate the time you spend with technology.

Let’s join them, shall we?