This is just a reminder of how really different people are. There are folks who really do want their Slack to be blowing up all the time, while I cannot imagine anything more hellish and productivity-destroying.

If nothing were in Slack all week, I’d love it. That’d never happen, but it’s a damn beautiful dream. When someone messages me in Slack I delay responding for as long as possible (sometimes even if it’s my boss) as I hate that useless chatter channel so much. Any other medium to contact me is better and more trackable. Slack is a huge productivity destroyer and concentration conflagrator.

I’d bet $100K (if there were any definitive way to prove it) that one reason productivity numbers have stagnated is due to use of Slack and other Slack-like tools. They are just a playground for extroverts who prevent others from getting work done.

Sometimes, I don’t respond to Slack messages for 2-3 days and then say, “Oh! You should’ve put a ticket in. My team would’ve taken care of it nearly immediately.” This has been working fairly well.

Watched Oppenheimer today in 70mm IMAX. Was worth it to see in that format. It’s a bigger than life tale so seeing it six stories tall only makes sense.

At one point Oppenheimer says/implies that even though the atom bomb didn’t end up literally starting an uncontrolled ignition of the atmosphere that destroyed the planet, the advent of the nuclear weapon would nevertheless likely conclude in the annihilation of the world anyway.

With smartphones, though people are loathe to admit, we’ve also managed to accidentally arrive at an event of nearly the same import. And we’re just as poorly-prepared for it as when nuclear inferno bloomed in the New Mexico desert in 1945. Just as we were not ready for the implications of nuclear weapons, we are not at all savvy at evaluating at Level 1 cognitohazards as we have no framework for thinking about them outside of science fiction (which is why I very intentionally used the term “cognitohazard”).

But we live in a science-fictional world now is the thing. Smartphones compress the world in a way that is novel in human history and transform the entirety of the human collective meta-nous into a very different place than even the internet did. The effects of this — though Ian Welshian type idiots deny it — are absolutely enormous. We’ve set off an uncontrolled chain reaction in each human’s mind and that is going about as well as you’d expect.

We live in apocalyptic times, in the ancient Greek sense. That is, a malign revelation is occurring as our minds are tampered with by unaccountable and unknowable techno-deific entities that we have no defense against. Denial of this only increases their power. Their agent is smartphones and their method is subjugating, hegemonizing and homogenizing the human mind with the false idols of convenience, simple answers, and puerile propaganda.

Our cognizance is ashes before these forces, a new nuclear fire obliterating minds screen by screen.