Intermittent tech fasting: my mini revolt for 2025

I made the decision to do a thing this upcoming quarter; No tech for 12 hours a day, broken up into three hour intervals.

I made the decision to do this towards the end of Fall quarter, after spending entire days at the computer, and spending weeks without getting any research done. Part of my revolt is against the habits that I'm forming, and the loss of the feeling of agency. But the bigger part is the creeping of tech into every aspect of teaching in a way that would be crazy to explain to myself 20 years ago. Twenty years ago, believe it or not, I could spend an entire course without needing tech, up until the end when I put grades into a spreadsheet. (When I taught my first Math 125 at UW in 2003, I actually wrote out worksheets and exams by hand and fed them to the copier.) Now it's all tech.

Certainly, a research mathematician who spends several hours per week writing on a chalkboard in front of a class, hours preparing lecturers, and supposedly, hours doing math research, shouldn't need to be literally at the computer more than 6 hours on a workday, right?

My observation was that I was constantly accessing documents for details I can't remember, grazing emails for my most immediate task, fussing over details in the syllabus, Webwork, Canvas, intermittently scrolling social media, google/LLM-querying how to format LaTeX in a slightly more accessible way, composing emails, making sure that the information I was about to ask someone for wasn't sitting somewhere among my 800 emails I received the previous week, asking AI how to turn off unwanted AI, etc, I don't like the way my brain feels.

I seem to have lost the ability to determine which details are important and remember them. Dozens of times I googled myself, to get to my webpage, to get to my teaching page, to get to my office hours, just to find out if I was currently having office hours or not. So many oldschool solutions to this.

Outside the office, similar phenomena: I find myself using google maps to drive places I've been 50 times before, desperately curious about whether or not the route will take 12 minutes or if there's a alternate route that will take 11 minutes. I am always 2.6 elusive pieces of information away from optimizing my life perfectly. Constantly checking the whether as if 35% chance of precipitation vs 45% isn't going to change whether I'm going to go for a run or not.

I've hit the "jump to recipe" button probably hundreds of times this year, cursing as nowadays even this is requiring more scrolling - But I really don't need the internet to hold my hand held while I cook quinoa.

It goes without saying, unwanted AI is getting worse everyday, this is the accelerated age of enshittification (a more appropriate family-friendly term I'm preferring of late is "ratfuckification"). The ultimate tech dystopia is appearing on the horizon; nobody dare do anything without first consulting with an LLM about it (which obviously leads to, your behavior is sold to the highest bidder, which surprisingly few extra steps.) I'm absolutely opting out of this.