We’re going to use this as a jumping off point. I bet you we could, you know, run with this for many podcast episodes, but there were a few revelations or insights from the report that I wanted to talk about in particular today. You know, one of those was the idea of the home as being this place of sanctuary, that was in fact being invaded a little bit by technology. There were two areas that they highlighted in the report.

One was light, right. We think of light as sort of the seed of modern life, right. It enables us to continue working or playing well after the sun goes down in fairly significant ways. That you know, fire or candles alone just wouldn’t enable us to do. At the same time, as cities grow bigger, as you have lights for safety, lights for advertising, what have you. It also creates light pollution, which is a huge problem. I mean, there are parts of the country that really are never dark, and you really can’t even see the stars very clearly at night when you’re around some major cities. That’s a factor, both for people living in cities, and outside of them.

I mean, I live in the suburbs around Boston, and frankly, you know, it’s not dark very often in the suburbs. Between the lights on the houses, and the lights on the telephone poles. It never occurred to me really that the reason why I’ve designed aspects of my home the way we did … You know, we used the light darkening shades, you know, so no light can come in. We very specifically try to hide from that environment while we’re trying to sleep, or take a nap. When we go somewhere else where those darkening shades aren’t present, it really throws me off. If there’s light sort of bleeding into my sleeping space, like if I’m on the road, or you know, at a hotel. In unfamiliar territory, I really have to go to the extra effort to take those hotel blinds and push them as hard as I can, so that no slivers of light come in, and I can attempt to get a good night’s sleep.

It’s this sort of always on nature of technology. Not to mention, if you’re trying to sleep, you’ve also got light on your digital clock. You’ve got light, perhaps, coming from your computer. From any of the other electronic objects that, the technology that is meant to entertain and inform becomes really quite intrusive when you’re trying to get sleep. What’s your … I don’t know if your take on light pollution is quite the same as mine, Dirk. You know, what are your impressions of that? Both as a technologist and designer?

I see light pollution as sort of part of a bigger narrative. I think you’ve got some more things to talk about, and maybe I’ll get into that later. In terms of people, I don’t know. When we’re talking about sleep, it’s sort of individual based. I think, you know, I would bet for most people they don’t realize what they’re losing by virtue of the light. The example I’ll use is … You know, I grew up in a suburb in the Midwest. I mean, you know, homes were fairly close together, but we had half acre yards, or whatever, at the same time. You know, it felt pretty dark all the time, right.

Now, fast forward to 2005. Took a family trip way up into the Hinterlands of Northern Ontario. You know, my father said I want to show you guys something. Took us out in the middle of the night on the boat. We went in the middle of the lake, and he just said look up. There were orders of magnitude more stars in the sky than I had ever seen in my entire life. That’s obscured by the light pollution, and we don’t even realize it. We have no cognizance of it. It’s just kind of the way the world is.

I think there are ways to consider more of a, you know, as a consumer of digital things, when I can pull away from the system, and at least get some of that need taken care of without necessarily unplugging from everything. Setting the boundaries of my own interaction with the digital, and the world of, you know, all this light bleeding in. Then being able to turn that back on when I’m good and ready.

I don’t think these are considerations that we take as very important when we’re looking at a single piece of hardware. Or you know, just a single device. I think in aggregate, it becomes very important. It’s about context. It’s about culture, too, right. This is like this creeping, always on culture. Like we didn’t go out and say we want all of these things to be part of our lives all the damn time. It crept in, one piece at a time until it becomes … It could feel a bit overwhelming, right.

I’m interested in designing the push back a little bit. Not the divorce, but the deliberate separation, both culturally and from a design standpoint. If that makes sense.

Amen, brother. Certainly, we’ll get there at some point. We’re still not there. We’re still in the world of artificial ignorance, not artificial intelligence.

There weren’t a lot of things for … You know, my father grew up in sort of the World War II era. Where you patched, and replaced, and you made sure that that your things were taken care of, because you didn’t have necessarily the money to go and replace them. Obviously with our consumer digital culture, we’re upgrading even our phones on a fairly regular basis. Let alone all the other stuff that sort of creeps into our house. You know, whether it be devices, or for entertainment, or toys for the kids, you name it.

I’ve heard people call it, you know, we’re at peak stuff, right. There’s gonna be a moment when we’re all like hey, I don’t know if this consumer paradigm is gonna work anymore, because where am I gonna put this crap? While Ikea didn’t draw that out in its entirety, there is a burgeoning sensibility that having maybe fewer, but more meaningful useful things is better than having this incessant clutter, you know. We sort of live with clutter right now as the byproduct of the consumer, the always buying consumer paradigm. Maybe, you know, it is going to be about less stuff that’s more meaningful. Less stuff that, you know, maybe our stuff has more soul to it, and is less disposable.

I thought that was an interesting, maybe a trend is too strong a word for it … But observation from the Ikea report. It does resonate with me, because I certainly dislike clutter. I find that I’m always fighting with it. Being a person with a lot of digital devices, I feel like it’s a never ending fight. Similar to the light discussion that we just had. You know, we’ll call it the pollution of too many things. Dirk, I think we probably have similar perspective on that.

Yeah, for me, it’s like well, what took people so long, right. I mean, why is it now like oh my God, in 2016, this great revelation. You know, that was taught to me by my parents from the time I was young, and I’ve been living that way consistently as an adult. I mean, you know, we were in transitional housing over the last year. The possessions that we do have were in storage. What I realized in that transitional housing is that if I never saw any of my possessions, I really wouldn’t care. You know, there’s some old family photos that I’d probably want to scan first. There’s some art that, in a perfect world, I’d like to keep around … But if somebody said that that storage locker blew up, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

You mentioned giving experiences, you know. That was one of the trends that they highlighted. People were more interested in experiences than necessarily accumulating more stuff. That, in and of itself, is quite different from the idea that you’re going to get the next greatest gadget, or automobile, or whatever it is to sort of fill up all that space.

These are trends that bear watching, I think. Especially as we see emerging technologies on the rise. What does that mean for how these get implemented, and what is important for human interaction. What can be sort of dropped by the wayside.

You know, again, I’ve lived in cities, and there are things, conveniences that are nice about that sort of life. I think the migration into big cities that’s happening as the world changes is one that’s really bad for the human animal. The time horizon’s longer. It’s decades, not years, but probably not centuries either, where I think that’s going to flow the other way. There’s lots of land that nobody’s living in. You know, 90n percent of Canada, 90n percent of Russia.

It’s total bull shit because if you look at countries around the world, the higher educated the country, the lower the birth rate is. The birth rate problems we’re having is coming from low educated countries. Low educated, low socioeconomic class countries. What’s happening, unfortunately slowly for a lot of those people who I just referred to, but what is happening is that our planet is becoming more and more educated. As we become an educated species, largely in the aggregate. Not just in the sort of, what we today would consider sort of first world or emerging, people are going to be having less babies. We’re going to get to the point where’s there’s not gonna be problems with population in that same way that there seems to be, if we just project out. As if today was, you know, permanently fossilized.

I just felt very sad about all the people who are having to come into these cities, and adjust, and try and make the best of it. When, you know, it’s not the right way to live. There’s so many more places out there that we could be living instead. It will just take some time for our species, sort of as a whole global ecosystem, to catch up with that. To go from the contraction, back to an expansion, I think.

Listeners remember that while you’re listening to the show, you can follow along with the things that we’re mentioning here in real time. Just head over to thedigitalife.com, that’s just one “L” in The Digital Life, and go to the page for this episode. We’ve included links to pretty much everything mentioned by everybody. It’s a rich information resource to take advantage while you’re listening, or afterward if you’re trying to remember something that you liked. You can find The Digital Life on iTunes, Soundcloud, Sticher Player FM, and Google Play. If you want to follow us outside of the show, you can follow me on Twitter, at @JonFollett. That’s J-O-N F-O-L-L-E-T-T. Of course, the whole show is brought to you by Involution Studios. Which you can check at goinvo.com. That’s G-O-I-N-V-O.com. Dirk.