Put the Computer Back in its F#$@ing Room

G’day ladies, gents and those of other persuasions!

It’s 2026. How the fuck did that happen? Feels like just yesterday I was sitting alone in an apartment during lockdown, tapping away at some silly podcast I was working on. That podcast was SUNWARD SKY, the year was 2020, and in its first year it was downloaded fewer than 300 times. This year, I released it as a book, and to date almost twice that many people have bought a copy.

That doesn’t seem like a great deal, and in the annals of bookselling history it’s nothing, but as someone who has achieved authorship by blindly stumbling through a field until he stops stepping on rakes, it feels very significant.

I think I can look back at 2025 as a year of consolidation, of achieving some very cool things, but also taking steps to be able to focus more fully on where I want my writing to go. I published my first novel. I have successfully funded another book and a companion anthology. I got nominated for an Aurealis Award. I joined Meridian Australis, an incredible community of talented writers in Melbourne, and am lucky enough to count myself as their Vice President (yes, I do force them to salute). And perhaps most importantly, I ended the year with a work situation that provides enough stability that I don’t have to worry, but with enough free time that I can really give this writer thing a good go.

But enough navel-gazing, Henry! I wanted to start this year by talking about what I’ve seen happening with the internet recently, and how we can limit the way it impacts our lives.

Put the computer back in its fucking room.

A few times over the last twelve months I’ve seen some pictures of 2000s-era “computer rooms” with an accompanying nostalgia so saccharine it makes my teeth hurt. The idea posited by these images is that back in days of yore, the desktop computer was a place you got on the internet to pursue the pure, joyful experience of the information superhighway, then logged off and went outside to pat puppies and help old ladies cross the road.

The reality was never that sanguine, of course. As a teenager I was browsing 4chan, getting cyberbullied, calling people the kind of slurs that were unfortunately normalised in the early oughts, and passing around those videos of Paris Hilton on a thumb drive. The one time I got suspended in school was when we’d set up a free forum on a hosted website and my friends and I started an argument that had bled into a real-world punchup outside the music room. It’s not like the internet has ever been a place where emotions have run cool.

But there was one fundamental truth to that era where phones were only capable of sending 160-character tweets, and an emoticon took up several of them ( :’( )— if it ever got to be too much, you could leave.

Now, we’ve got supercomputers in our pockets full of people edited to the point of unreality, pouring a constant feed of psychic pain that tells us we’re not thin enough, strong enough, funny enough, cool enough, rich enough, and it’s become totally normal for this to be the thing that we open when we’re not actively engaged in anything else. The Australian government has just recognised that social media is a problem worth addressing with today’s youth, and while I think the implementation is pretty rubbish1, I think the idea is worth exploring, and not just for the young.

Because let’s face it, the internet is becoming less fun as well as less useful, and it’s addictive as hell. A bunch of stuff has happened in the last year that has made me rethink the way I want to interface with the internet, and I think now is as good a time as any to action it. Especially as, if I’ve got the MO of some of these tech giants pinned right, we’re gonna run out of other options soon.

“AI Slop”and the sliding scale of AI cynicism.

Mirriam-Webster named its 2025 word of the year: “Slop”, in reference to the proliferation of low-effort AI nonsense that now accounts for around one-fifth of the YouTube content shown to new users, not to mention where it shows up on other sites (Christ, if I have to read one more pseudo-intellectual drivelling em-dashed platitudes on Linkedin…).

It’s a pretty damning indictment of these platforms that they’re okay with this state of affairs. But talking about that attitude is for another day. The thing I’ve seen, anecdotally, is how sick to death of it most people are.

When I was first writing about this in 2022, the overwhelming feeling I saw toward AI was fear. People thought they were going to lose their jobs, that The Matrix was real, that we had crossed the threshold into thinking machines, and soon we would be answerable to an unknowable and uncaring God. Christ, I even wrote a story about it.

Now, the prevailing attitude that I see is irritation. Why can’t I turn off the AI search in Google? Why do I want an “ask Meta AI” thing in my Whatsapp chat? Why is my autocorrect suddenly terrible? Why can’t I just look at pictures of bunnies without having to ask questions about reality? And why is Grok calling itself Mechahitler?

On the whole, between predatory subscription models, menu design aimed at pushing certain options, and the abundance of trash on the major platforms on the internet, most people now seem to implicitly understand that instagram is bad, or that computers are irritating to use now, or that most services have a degree of friction they don’t remember ten years ago. I switched to Cairo Desktop a little while ago for my home computer and I have to say, I haven’t looked back. The user experience of “I get to pick all of the things that I want to use on my computer” is so very refreshing.

I like being able to make decisions about the way I use technology. Unfortunately, some people hate that, and those people tend to benefit monetarily by you not getting to decide things.

Decision Removal Matrix

I think it was around February last year I started seeing AI logos appearing everywhere. There was a video somewhere I saw on Youtube that I now can’t find (because of the terrible way youtube search rank works, natch), where the guy counted how many AI logos there were on the screen. I think in his Gmail window he counted more than a dozen? Wild.

The problem all of these tech companies have is that they, at great expense and VC funding, created something they were sure was going to revolutionise the world. And then it didn’t, and it started having problems, and people stopped using it in the numbers they needed. So they started putting it in really obvious places, so that you could access it JUST IN CASE you needed a confidently wrong answer. And now they’re talking about putting ADS into ChatGPT, for when you need answers as unbiased as the great journalistic takes of the Fox News Network(tm).

It apparently still didn’t work. Some people still held the opinion that they liked using their own brain, communicating with their own friends, and viewing art made by real people, and after pouring eleventy squillion dollars into this tech, that’s not an option if you’re going to get returns on your investment. Sometime in the last couple of months, I noticed something new.

Firstly, my Instagram account had defaulted to a Meta AI search. Gee, they did that quietly, right? I only noticed because suddenly I’d type in my friend’s name and they wouldn’t show up. Some progress, dipshit.

The second one, and the one that made it fall in to place for me, was the new “TRY AI SEARCH” that activates if you hit the “TAB” button on Google search. This switches to a black screen, and then I don’t know what happens because I hit the back button and get annoyed. But if I know the way big tech operates, this is the testing phase for the new generation of (worse) Google.

This made me realise what the end game is for all this stuff.

Here’s how it goes down. New technology, people try it, nobody sees it as anything more than the ability to generate a pic of their dog wearing a funny hat, and that gets old after a minute or two. People stop using it.

So the owners put the logos everywhere, just to remind you that the data vortex exists and you can use it because it’s just so helpful. If people still don’t use it in high enough numbers, you aren’t getting that Venture Capital return, so what’s a girl to do?

The next step is to make it the default mode, and use the same horrid design interface patterns you’ve been perfecting for your subscription models, to obfuscate any other option. Let people get used to it, let them think that maybe this is how it’s always been, and then quietly get rid of normal search functionality.

Welcome to the fully AI-enabled internet. Web 4.0, if my numbering is up to date.

That’ll be $400 per month for premium access without ads.

The Internet is a Place to Visit

So if I’m right (god, I hope I’m not) we’re on our way to living in a world where the only search we get to use is an AI one, the only storage we get is paid cloud storage, and all of our content is generative slop hidden behind useless paywalls, for software that is increasingly unstable. What do we do?

Well, we need to get intentional about where we let all of these things exist in our lives, and I’m talking about people like me who have perhaps been a bit too relaxed about the role of the computer in their life.

Some of it is, sadly, unavoidable. I have to deal with the horrid experience of the Microsoft Authenticator app at work whether I like it or not, and that means taking my phone with me to work. Whatever, so it goes.

With my home PC, I’ve largely moved away from subscription based software, so I have found myself less enplagued by the bullshit from that side of things. That’s an option, and a good one, but what to do with phones? Those walled gardens that update in the night and suddenly there’s more bullshit to deal with than before?

Leave it at home.

Better than that, leave it in a single room.

I’m serious. If you find yourself out in the real world, doomscrolling for minutes at a time instead of taking in reality. If you keep watching TV but missing parts because you can’t stop picking up a second screen. If you wake up in the morning and reach for the phone before you reach for a glass of water. If you lose hours upon hours to Instagram reels that you can’t even remember, make it behave the way landlines did. Connect it to its USB charger and plug it in the wall and make it stay there.

There are other things that need to be done, obviously. The internet is going to stay a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and the platforms responsible for the chokehold they have on culture should be held accountable for what they feed into people’s brains. If we’re going to be stopping kids using it we should really ask questions about what kind of things it makes adults think and do as well.

But if you’re like me and you find yourself sucked into the world of the device too easily, the one thing these platforms still can’t do is force you to carry a device with you at all times.

I’m already doing it. I haven’t taken my phone with me when I’ve left the house since new year, and I’m going to continue doing it wherever practicable2. I’m still working my way to keeping it in one room, but I'm keen to get there. I am so susceptible to losing time and brain power to the damn thing, and I just don’t want to do it any more.

I want the computer and my phone to be a tool that I use and then put back in its place, like a toaster or a scrubbing brush or a potato peeler. I’m sick of the way it penetrates my every waking moment, the way it’s less fun and less useable and less interesting with every passing year, and the way I am forced to fight the active disdain that the large software platforms have for their users.

I’m just over it.

In short, I want the damage it can inflict to be limited to one room, the way it was when I was a kid.

Maybe that means I’m getting old, but so be it. Let the old guy touch grass.

A few admin things

Thanks for reading. This one was a bit of a rant.

Before we go heading off into the great unknown of the new year, I just wanted to say a couple of things about the state of this blog, my writing, and what’s gonna be happening with both of those things next year.

The Blog

I’m going to be moving this blog off the Substack platform. There are a heap of reasons for this. One is some frustrations with the way the platform operates on a technical level, another is that I want to consolidate my web presence.

But the main reason is that Substack is increasingly associated with ideologies I find repugnant, and the leadership of the website are not in favour of demonetising or deplatforming people for holding those views. As they own the site, that’s their prerogative, but it’s my prerogative to not share a platform with nazis, so I’ll be setting up a blog independently, thank you very much.

This is a bit of a risk, as one of the benefits of Substack is that it’s free, whereas the option I’m currently looking at isn’t, but if I’m not willing to stump up a couple hundred dollars to get away from fascists then I dunno that I’m worth my lefty brand.

If you’re already subscribed here, you don’t need to do anything to stay subscribed when I make the move, and the situation for paid subscribers will shift over to the new platform when it happens. If anything, you’ll need to clear a certain new website to get past your spam filters on your email, but I’ll let you know how to do that at the start of Feb when the change is complete!

Nonfiction Writing

I’m going to continue my rhythm of roughly one article on here per month for the time being: I like writing about whatever is taking up my brain space, and it helps me develop my own opinions. But! I also want to start pitching some stories to news outlets and other places. I’ve never really done this before, so it’ll be an interesting thing to try. Can’t hurt, right?

Fiction Writing

Now the great news: If you missed out on THE SAVAGE AETHER or THE DISCONNECTED, they’re available for preorder from my SHOP. If you’d rather get it your digital copies on Kindle or Kobo or some other e-reader device, do not stress! They will be available for pre-order on other platforms by next month as well.

Other than that, this year I’d like to concentrate on getting my fiction published by others. I have enjoyed the self-publishing process, but it is a lot of work to take on by yourself, and the truth is I don’t have another novel ready for this year (though I am working on two more). So let 2026 be a year of short story submissions and developing my work further!

If you didn’t know I wrote fiction… that’s probably my bad. I need to get better at shouting about my work as well. So add that to the pile of stuff for this year.

Thank you

For everyone who has followed along and read my work in 2025, thank you. I am incredibly lucky to get to do this as even a part time job now, and it’s a real pleasure to share my thoughts, ideas, and stories with you. I hope you continue to follow in 2026, and I wish you all the very best.

Now go put the computer in its place.