2025 Tech Resolutions with Patrick from Hard Refresh
"Where in my life are algorithms determining and manipulating my choices and decisions?"
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Hi everyone,
The next interview as part of 2025 Tech Resolutions – a January mini series where we discuss tech habits we want to build or break in 2025 — features none other than Patrick from Hard Refresh ✨
Finding Patrick’s Substack last year was a perfect example of why I love this platform. Patrick and I are writing about very similar topics — the internet, social media, algorithms and capitalism — but from two totally different perspectives. His exceptional writing and clarity of thought finally made some messages “land” in my brain, like how and why we should limit our news consumption. I really can’t wait to see where he takes Hard Refresh in 2025, and I’m delighted to have him take part in this interview. If giving your life an algorithm audit appeals to you, then I suggest you keep reading!
Q: Hey Patrick! Before we get started, I’m going to ask for the obligatory elevator pitch. Tell us a bit about you and what you write about here on Substack.
Thanks, Caoilainn, I’m so pleased to be invited to join you here.
At Hard Refresh I write about the accelerating signs that we as a society have arrived at peak digital saturation, and how we’re reckoning with this moment, and especially about what comes after it.
The way we collectively talk about the online experience and things like social media and smartphones has gone through an extraordinary change over the past couple of years. Every day more of us realize that we’re the product on the internet, and that the reason we can’t stop looking at our phones isn’t because we lack willpower but because phones and apps are very carefully designed to be unputdownable. People are discovering that most of the internet is just an endless Rube Goldberg machine for collecting clicks and eyeballs, which is how they serve us ads. And people are fed up with the trolls, the AI slop, the disinformation, the bots, the corporate homogeneity, the amplified polarization, and the impact of it all on us and our kids. The signs that we’ve had enough are everywhere.
But I’m also hopeful and optimistic, because I think the zeitgeist is beginning to shift, and that people are realizing there must be a better way — that the current internet ecosystem is unsustainable for us individually and as a society. So part of what I do is to call attention to and celebrate the ways people and communities everywhere are beginning to recognize, push back against, and even exit the attention economy in ways that are more human-centered instead of technology-centered.
I’m a former journalist who’s been working for the past 15 or so years as a design ethnographer and strategist. So I sort of naturally come at this topic from the standpoint of a curious anthropologist documenting it as it happens. I also have taught internet culture and communications at universities internationally, and I have a strong point of view that I bring to my writing. Generally that point of view is that technology is not bad per se, but it should primarily serve the interests of people and society rather than mainly advertisers and shareholders (not the case presently!) And I love to see people using technology in new and unexpected ways towards that end. This stuff can sometimes feel like a downer, but I try to write about it in a lighthearted way and have some fun with it all while also taking it seriously. I think playfulness and seriousness can co-exist and even work together.
I’ve only been writing Hard Refresh for about three months, but already the response has been overwhelming, thanks to the Substack community and supporters like you. I feel like I’ve landed on just the right topic at just the right time on exactly the right platform.
Q: What tech habit are you trying to break or improve in 2025?
This year I want to become more aware of exactly where algorithms determine my choices and experiences, both online and off, and to begin to extricate myself from them wherever I can.
That’s easy to say, but I think it’s going to be harder than it sounds. I guess my reliance on algorithms is kind of an invisible habit, one that I’ve only slowly become aware even exists. Like so many of us, I didn’t knowingly sign up for these systems. Facebook, for example, didn’t even have a newsfeed when I created an account in 2007; but now it and all the major social media platforms are essentially nothing but algorithms, and they exert huge influence over not just the world but each of our lives from moment to moment.
So it probably begins with something like an algorithm audit. Where in my life are algorithms determining and manipulating my choices and decisions? (This really rolls up to the businesses who control the algorithms — the platforms and their owners and shareholders). Algorithms are everywhere now: determining the news we see (and what’s even reported), our potential partners, what parts of the web are visible to us, all our choices as shoppers and diners and consumers and readers, the TV and movies we watch, and on and on.
Then I’ll need to think about the costs and benefits of continuing to remain on those platforms — how much am I being controlled, and to what end, and with what consequences? And then if I decide the cost is more than I’m personally comfortable with, how do I yank the eject cord and, importantly, how might I replicate the value I was getting in other ways?
Take Spotify, for example. When I signed up for a Spotify Premium account in 2014, it seemed magical — all (or most of) the world’s music in a single streaming platform? But 11 years on, it’s become plain to me that the costs to artists and the music industry and to music itself as an art form are simply not worth that small convenience. And there’s the cost to me: my own musical tastes are being manipulated and shaped by Spotify’s algorithm and its need for ever more profit and endless growth.
That’s not how I want to experience music. What am I missing out on by allowing a corporate monolith with so little respect for artists or music shove its preferred content at me? I’m certainly not suggesting that all music on Spotify is bad; that would be ridiculous. And I’m not trying to say Spotify is evil or that there are no good things about it. But I know I’m no longer comfortable with the tradeoffs I have to make by being a puppet of its algorithm, both ethically and artistically.
Q: Why did you choose this particular habit?
First, I should say there are lots of ways algorithms influence our lives invisibly, and not always in nefarious ways. GPS wouldn’t work at all without algorithms, for example, or traffic signals, or online fraud detection, or any kind of web search. Algorithms by themselves aren’t inherently bad. But many of the purposes to which they’ve been set by Big Tech operate contrary to our interests in so many ways.
A big part of why the world is in this unholy mess (pick one…) is because we have created a global business ecosystem that’s almost entirely dependent on hacking human neurochemistry and encouraging and amplifying whatever content will capture the most eyeballs for the longest amount of time, whether that’s music or news or social posts or video, etc.
Consequently, trillions of dollars are made catering to the meanest and basest aspects of human nature. Because it turns out that’s what’s most ‘engaging.’ These upside-down incentives pretty much guarantee the worst possible outcomes for everyone except the owners of these platforms. (And even they aren’t immune — just look at what’s happened to Elon Musk, who used to be a semi-well adjusted human being.) The inevitable result is what technologist Jaron Lanier has called massive “behavioral modification empires.”
Recent works like the 2020 documentary films Coded Bias and The Social Dilemma, and books such as Cathy O'Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction and last year’s Filterworld by Kyle Chayka have pulled back the curtain on just how deeply algorithms and their agendas and their baked-in biases have embedded themselves into our personal lives, our financial systems, our national infrastructure, and our institutions.
A point Chayka made in Filterworld that has really resonated with me is that we have no real way of developing or knowing our own sense of taste if we’re living inside a box where all our ‘choices’ are served up to us by algorithms based on our previous history.
But I want to know and be able to explain my personal taste, not just accept one that’s been spoonfed to me because of a pay-for-play scheme at Spotify, for instance. I don’t want my behavior modified by a social media empire; I want to make all my own mistakes.
There’s already a nascent movement pushing back against algorithmic curation of what we hear, watch, see, and read. I believe this year we’ll see that shift gain a lot of traction. (I need a better name for this movement. The ‘Rithm Method? Open to suggestions here!)
I also think that trend will mirror the emergence of a movement toward healthier lifestyles in which, faced with an exponentially increasing flood of SEO-optimized online ‘content,’ we collectively begin to view personal attention as equally precious a resource as personal privacy.
I’ve seen hints of this paradigm shift out there at the end of 2024; I expect we’ll see much more of it in 2025.
The age of streaming platforms had also led me to the realization that what makes something valuable to me isn’t abundance but scarcity. Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.
Q: How do you carve out focussed time for your writing in our “always on” culture? Any tips you’d like to share?
I write every morning for about an hour. And if I have a need, often elsewhere in the day, but I make it part of my fixed morning routine every day. I also have a daily meditation practice: 30 minutes first thing in the morning, before writing, and 20 minutes after lunch. That helps with focus and presence when I write, among many other things. It probably goes without saying but I don’t look at my phone very often and I’m not on social media other than Substack.
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