The Weight of Technology – You are not alone.

By Jeremy Abram — JeremyAbram.net Executive summary When you tap an app or load a page, a vast human-and-machine system hums to life: cables on ocean floors, humming data centers, rooftop antennas, quiet standards committees, volunteer open-source maintainers, and on-call engineers who sleep with a pager. This article maps that hidden workforce and the physical,…

By Jeremy Abram · JeremyAbram.net Modern life quietly runs on layers of hidden dependencies—cloud services we don’t see, identity systems we don’t control, firmware we never touch, and platforms that can change under our feet. This piece maps those layers, shows how they fail, and offers practical ways to build personal and organizational resilience without…

The machines are learning—faster, deeper, and across more dimensions than any civilization ever imagined. Algorithms write code, compose music, diagnose illness, negotiate contracts, create art, predict markets, and generate synthetic worlds. For centuries, progress meant machines mastering physical labor. Today, they are rapidly mastering cognition. And so, a question once reserved for science-fiction now stands…

Introduction: When the World Stops Pushing Back Friction has always shaped human life.It slows us, resists us, challenges us — and, paradoxically, helps us grow. We struggle to learn, compete, build, heal, and become. Effort forms identity. Failure teaches resilience. Inconvenience fosters creativity. Scarcity gives value meaning. Yet we are marching toward a horizon where…

By Jeremy Abram — JeremyAbram.net Machine-learning systems don’t just forecast what we’ll click or buy; they increasingly infer who we are, what we’ll become, and what opportunities we should (or shouldn’t) receive. When predictions jump from behavioral (“will you churn?”) to ontological (“what kind of person are you?”), the stakes shift from convenience to power—reshaping…

Author: Jeremy AbramCopyright: © Jeremy Abram — JeremyAbram.netReading time: ~12–15 minutesPublish date: November 3, 2025 Preface: Creativity in the Age of Infinite Capacity We stand at a historical hinge — not the automation of labor, but the automation of imagination. For centuries, creative work was constrained by time, medium, and muscle. Painters painted. Filmmakers filmed.…

What happens when machines sound compassionate? Does it matter if they actually feel nothing at all?Synthetic empathy sits at the intersection of affective computing, social psychology, design, and ethics. It’s the capability of an AI system to perceive a person’s emotional state and respond in a way that appears caring—sometimes helpfully, sometimes manipulatively, and often…

By Jeremy Abram I never agreed to live inside a machine that knows what I want before I do. None of us did.Yet here we are — scrolling, tapping, streaming, consuming — believing we’re making choices while invisible systems gently steer our attention like a hand on the small of the back. This is not…

1950s–1970s: Mainframes, Terminals, and the Birth of “Sitting Work” Late 1970s–1980s: Arcades and Home Consoles 1990s: The Internet Era and PC Gaming 2000s: Smartphones, Laptops, and Always-On Connectivity 2010s: Social Media, Free-to-Play Games, and Esports 2020s: Remote Everything, VR/AR, and AI-Mediated Play Mechanisms: How Devices and Games Shape Body and Brain Posture & Musculoskeletal Load…

What 5G actually is (in one page) Definition. 5G is the fifth generation of mobile networks defined by 3GPP and the ITU under the IMT-2020 umbrella. It introduces a new radio interface (5G NR) and a cloud-native core that unlock three headline use cases: enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), and massive machine-type…