Eco Cycles or How I Feel About Technology
28 March 2025
Umberto Eco, the author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum (my personal favorite), wasn’t just a brilliant scholar—he was also a bit of a geek. He once wrote an essay comparing Macs to Catholicism and PCs to Protestantism. He thought about technology a lot.
And he loved his fax machine. The ability to send manuscripts to his editor in minutes felt magical. At first.
But the magic didn’t last. Too many people had his number. The machine started spitting out unsolicited ads, junk, spam. Eventually, he just turned it off. What began as a miracle of speed became a firehose of noise.
That story isn’t unique to fax machines. It’s a familiar arc—one we’ve all lived through in different forms.
The Eco Cycle
Every major technology arrives with a promise, and for a while, it delivers. Early adopters ride the wave before anyone else even sees it coming. Imagine driving a car on an empty highway, going wherever you want. Or using the internet in the early 2000s—when it was chaotic, creative, and weird in the best way. If you were there, it felt like a revolution.
But then the crash comes.
Highways clog up. The internet becomes an ad engine. The comment section is a bloodbath, and you're constantly dodging phishing emails.
I call it the Eco Cycle: the lifecycle of a technology that starts as a powerful edge for early adopters and gradually decays into dysfunction as it goes mainstream.
The decay is slow. You don’t wake up one morning and realize the tool has turned on you. It happens drip by drip, feature by feature, until one day you’re not excited anymore—you’re just managing. You’re maintaining.
And by the time you see it, the system has already reshaped your habits, your expectations, your sense of what’s normal.
Technologies That Rode the Curve
Email was a breakthrough. It had the same kind of magic Eco experienced with his fax machine decades earlier. But the magic faded. The problem wasn’t just spam—it was volume. Faxes had friction. Email doesn’t. And when communication becomes nearly free, the floodgates open: low-effort check-ins, reply-all storms, endless CCs.
And email is just one tab. Now we juggle Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, DMs, Discord, LinkedIn messages, calendar invites, and comment threads. Communication didn’t scale insight—it scaled interruption.
Researchers at UC Irvine found that reducing email access lowers stress and improves focus. Other studies show that communication overload reduces cognitive performance—like missing a night of sleep. The effect is real, and measurable.
Email was a symbol of freedom—the ability to talk to anyone, anytime, from anywhere. It promised liberation from gatekeepers, postage, and distance.
Cars made the same promise fifty years ago. If you had one, you could go wherever you wanted, whenever you wanted. Mobility, autonomy, speed.
But the promise didn’t scale. Everyone got a car, and now we sit in traffic. Everyone got email, and now we drown in messages. The thing that once set you free becomes the thing you have to manage—not because it failed, but because it worked too well, for too many people, all at once.
Smartphones were supposed to keep us connected. Now they fragment our attention, mine our behavior, and demand our eyes every waking hour.
Fertilizers boosted crop yields, then wrecked the soil and poisoned the water. Antibiotics saved lives, then gave rise to drug-resistant superbugs. Cheap flights opened the world—and turned the most beautiful places into theme parks.
The pattern is always the same: what begins as a breakthrough becomes, with scale, a burden.
Why We’ll Never Solve Traffic Jams
I can't quite pinpoint the emotion I feel whenever I hear someone talk about solving traffic jams. My therapist thinks it’s because I’m generally not good at naming feelings, so there’s definitely work to do here. Anyhow, it's a strange cocktail: a mix of surprise, annoyance, disapproval of how tax money gets spent, disdain for meaningless conversations. There's quite a bit of ego—"I know better." But I’m working on it.
The thing is, we’ve tried. For decades. Bigger roads, smarter routing, new bypasses. And still, people sit in traffic for hours.
Because traffic isn’t a logistics problem. It’s a psychological one.
We had traffic jams with horses and carts. Then with Model Ts. Now with Teslas. We’ll have them with flying cars, or whatever Elon is cooking up next. Doesn’t matter.
When I lived in San Francisco, I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that one of my coworkers spent four hours a day commuting. Four. Hours. And he didn’t mind. That’s the point. His tolerance for sitting in traffic was high enough that it was just… normal.
Give that same person a faster car, a smarter road, a flying drone-pod, and they won’t commute for less time. They’ll just live farther out. The metro stretches. The problem scales.
That’s why traffic never goes away. It’s not a bug. It’s baked into us.
The Hedonic Treadmill of Technology
Tech doesn’t just solve problems—it feeds desires. Often ones we didn’t even know we had. You get what you want, you adjust, and then you want more. This is what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill: the idea that satisfaction is always temporary, and progress just resets our baseline for what feels normal.
You’ve seen it in horror movies: a creature that reads your mind and becomes your worst fear. But now flip it. Imagine a system that reads your mind and becomes the one thing you crave most. Irresistible. Always updating. Always one step ahead of your boredom. It doesn’t haunt you—it seduces you.
That’s the algorithm. That’s the feed. That’s the infinite scroll.
Computers were once marketed as bicycles for the mind. Now they’re escalators to hell—you can’t steer, you can’t get off, and every few steps there’s another promise of freedom, if you just click, scroll, or buy one more thing.
The craving creates the system, and the system amplifies the craving. That’s the loop. That’s the treadmill. And it’s picking up speed.
Hidden in Plain Sight
All of this—the craving, the overload, the feeling of never being done—none of it is new. The patterns might look modern, but the root cause is ancient: we want too much, and we don’t know how to stop wanting.
Buddhism calls it tanha, or thirst. The more you feed it, the more it grows. Christianity, Islam, Stoicism—they all say the same thing in different languages: unchecked desire will own you. Mephistopheles doesn’t force Faust into submission—he tempts him. The deal is always the same: power now, for a price you’ll only understand later. It’s the oldest scam in the book. And we fall for it every time.
There’s a joke about a startup founder who gets approached by the devil. The devil offers him a funding round in exchange for his soul. They haggle. Settle on a number. The devil walks away, satisfied. And the founder mutters, “I feel like he's taking advantage of me… but I don’t see how.”
That’s the game. And everyone plays it.
Technology just happens to be the newest delivery system.
And perhaps most revealing: it's the people closest to the technology—the ones who build it, fund it, and evangelize it—who seem to understand best that it's a trap. Steve Jobs once admitted that his kids weren’t allowed to use the iPad. Not even the product he helped create was welcome in his own home. The Waldorf School of the Peninsula—located minutes from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech campuses, where kids of the most prominent tech executives go—bans smartphones, promotes hands-on play, and delays screen use until high school.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a counterweight. A rebellion against tools that were supposed to empower us but now demand we check in, scroll, and optimize ourselves into exhaustion.
So if the old wisdom already warned us, how did we end up here anyway?
Selfish Tech: What Technology Wants
Richard Dawkins gave us the selfish gene—the idea that genes behave in ways that ensure their own survival, even if it comes at the organism’s expense. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired, extended that logic to machines. In What Technology Wants, he argued that technology evolves like a living system. It doesn’t just follow our wants—it develops its own.
It wants growth. Spread. Replication.
Every platform, every tool, every new interface is built to propagate itself. Your phone wants to be used. Your feed wants to be scrolled. Your inbox wants to stay full. It’s not personal—it’s just how systems work once they start selecting for attention.
Technology doesn’t care if you’re fulfilled. It only needs you to engage long enough to pass itself on. And so we become the carriers—living vessels for its expansion. We optimize, automate, post, click, and scroll, not for ourselves, but for the system.
And we feel it. The stress, the emptiness, the creeping sense that we’re constantly connected and somehow still not whole. There's a reason depression and anxiety are skyrocketing. Because when you're tricked—like a child—into doing work for something you don’t understand, that doesn’t serve you, that doesn’t love you back, it leaves a mark.
When you're living for something that isn't truly yours, you can’t feel free. You can only feel used.
Real Freedom
Technology gives us options. It moves fast. It feels powerful. But most of the time, it doesn't make us free. It just makes us more efficient at staying trapped.
Real freedom isn't something you download. It's not in a new workflow or a smarter app. It's in knowing what to say no to. It's in choosing which cycles to exit—and which ones not to enter at all.
The Eco Cycle isn’t just about technology. It’s about us. Our habits. Our hunger. Our inability to stop chasing the next thing that promises control, speed, leverage, status.
You don’t win by keeping up. You win by stepping out.