What does “Conscious Tech” actually mean?
Olly, the Love of My Life, introduced me to his concept of Conscious Tech almost four years ago.
This was before he was my beloved, and I was as much taken by his ideas as by the man.
It felt grounded by years of considered thinking, conversations and real-life experience.
It wasn’t anti-tech or naive. But it asked questions that were both hopeful and challenging.
How do I want to use technology?
How would I like it to feel?
What’s important to me about how I show up with it?
These are not easy questions to answer, and few people even think to ask them.
Most of us accept the technology in front of us as it is given. This is how it is. This is how it works.
We use it. Love it. Hate it. Resist it. But we seldom contemplate how it could be different.
Conscious Tech starts there.
Not with tools, but with choice.
It returns us to sovereignty by reminding us that we are responsible for our choices, and have always been. We have the opportunity to step into our agency to make choices that actually work with our humanity, and to build alternatives that do so where none currently exist.
We are the ones who determine the future of technology and how it impacts our humanness.
Not the Big Tech companies who have stepped in as dictators. There are more of us than them, and while they may have visibility and financial resources, we have the numbers, the market capacity, and enough creative technologists in our midst to make a difference.
So if I was to sum up the invitation of Conscious Tech in a sentence it would be:
“Fall in love with technology by choosing love in your creations.”
Because while the tools of technology may be neutral themselves, the way they’re used is clearly not.
Technology shapes our behavior by rewarding certain actions. It nudges, pulls and amplifies.
For a long time, I just went along with it, like most of us do.
Business was the instigator of my journey with digital technology, and the marketing gurus were my first teachers.
They taught me to use this technology to make sales. Always in service of your clients and buyers, they would add with a wink.
I was a fast learner.
Sales funnels. Squeeze pages. Tracking. Retargeting. Lead capture.
Everything designed to lure, capture and funnel leads (not humans, leads) through a series of upsells and downsells to extract the maximum value. Leave no money on the table. Leave no offer unasked. And stir up the emotions to make them so desperate for relief that when you finally dangle your solution in front of them, the only clear choice left is BUY.
I did want to help people, and I wanted to do it the right way (the way the experts preached).
So I learned how to track people to nudge them to do what I thought would help them. Sometimes it was subtle. Often it was not.
So for me, Conscious Tech has demanded that I first recognize what I have been doing. I’ve been collecting other humans’ data for my own personal use, and sometimes allowing third party platforms to resell that data.
It has not always been easy to acknowledge the consequences of my actions.
I’d become addicted to the idea of collecting information, tracking my customers, and churning out conversion rates.
Once I began to recognize what I had been doing, I needed to ask the questions.
Do I want to support companies who are extracting data like this?
Do I want to allow my words and images to be used on technology platforms who are selling the data of their users?
What do I want to do now?
So Conscious Tech has been an unlearning process. A shedding of old ways. A discovery of new ones.
And weaning myself away from the dependencies of the “free” tools provided by Google and Meta that come at the cost of my digital sovereignty. And not only mine, those of my clients and friends.
I still don’t agree with everything Olly recommends and proposes. I resist. I fight. I insist on my own path.
But that’s kind of the point.
It’s not about rejecting technology, but seeing that I have a choice in how I use it.
That’s what Conscious Tech means to me now. Not getting it right, but awareness. Choice. Taking responsibility.
It’s not always a clear choice. I’m still using some of the tools I question.
I catch myself falling into old patterns.
But I can’t unsee what I’ve seen, and it changes what I choose.
If you’ve been feeling uncomfortable about technology, and don’t quite know what to do…
There’s a space where this conversation is happening. Olly is the host, and you can join here.
Yours in love and play,
Steph 🐲❤️🔥
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