The Current - The downsides of retreating into ‘cosy tech’

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

Global uncertainty and a relentless news cycle are leading some people to embrace “cosy tech,” — a world of low-stakes, colourful video games to friendly AI companions. But while the trend may seem benign, writer Kyle Chayka says digital cocooning has its downsides.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. We are all familiar with video games and the idea of cozying up at home, especially during winter. What about cozy gaming? In case you haven't heard that term, let's head over to TikTok. A woman wearing comfy loungewear and slippers sits down her cup of tea and flops

into an enormous armchair. It is draped in fuzzy blankets and she picks up a gaming console. Cozy games to play on those days where you're not feeling well physically or mentally or both. In Bun House, you're playing as bunnies tending to a little greenhouse.

Cute and calm is all you could want in these moments. Haley is the most chill farming and adventure MMO ever. Truly spend the days doing whatever you want. I love the low stakes creativity of Happy Home Paradise. And nothing makes you feel better than galloping around in Breath of the Wild. That's TikToker Cozy K, one of a growing number of influencers

who post about self-soothing with cozy games. Games with low stakes, friendly setting, cute characters like bunnies tending to a greenhouse. Doesn't that sound nice? It's part of a wider trend around cozy tech. People using devices to create a buffer between themselves and the outside world. Kalcheka is a staff writer with The New Yorker. He recently wrote about cozy tech for the magazine.

Kyle, good morning. Thanks for having me. This piece is titled The Fantasy of Cozy Tech. How do you define that cozy technology? I was really inspired by noticing this cozy gaming content that was going on, like the one that you just highlighted. And I started seeing this feeling of coziness in different places too, not just on TikTok or with video games.

So it's all of this stuff that kind of makes you more passive in your life. It's AI devices, it's projectors that turn your room into a fantasy landscape. It's role-playing a farmer, even though you can't own a farm in your real life. And I think it's just this desire to escape from the world and build a more comfortable internalized space for yourself. We heard a little bit of it out there. I mean, what are the games that these cozy gamers are playing? Stardew Valley is a big one. So that's the farming sim. It's pixelated. It looks like a kind of cute Super Nintendo game. It's super, super popular. It came out in 2016,

and it's still getting updates today. Animal Crossing from Nintendo is another big one where you kind of play a little anthropomorphized animal and inhabit your village of other animals, building little buildings and designing an island. There's another one that I enjoyed seeing called Vampire Therapist, where you are a vampire giving cognitive behavioral therapy to other vampires.

So it's these things about kind of improving your life. And they're a far cry from the first-person shooter archetype of a video game. You said this is, I mean, it's not a social media genre, but a lifestyle. Yes. So I think the cozy gamers are turning this into social media content. But I think a lot of people are doing this at home. They're kind of making themselves cozy. They're doing things they enjoy, like reading a Kindle or drinking their tea

or putting on cozy ambient lighting. And it expands into the physical surroundings, I think. That's what struck me about this. It's not just something on a screen, or not just something on a screen, but everything in your physical environments. Why did you want to write about this now? I think there's a sense that I still have that the pandemic caused a lot of lifestyle changes for people, that quarantine made us more introverted, more stuck in our houses, more used to being comfortable at home. And I thought in cozy gaming, that kind of lifestyle was continuing. It was this persistent thread of our lives

where we exist in, you know, the difficult outside world more than we did in 2021. But we're still making ourselves comfortable using this technology. And I think it hints at maybe what's coming for technology in terms of it serving our comforts

and just building this barrier around ourselves. I mean, in some ways you draw a line between this and weighted blankets and luxury candles, right? For sure. How is the vampire therapy like a weighted blanket? I think maybe it's the digital equivalent of a weighted blanket. Like you retreat into your Stardew Valley farm or your Animal Crossing world that you've arduously constructed for yourself as a way to show that you do have control of your surroundings and as a way to kind of block out all the sensations of the real world. So the weighted blanket weighs you down and buffers your body in a way, and the cozy video game buffers your mind.

You talk to a lot of cozy gamers who post on TikTok, and we spoke with some of them as well, including a Canadian musician, Liv Charette. She lives in Nashville. Have a listen to what she had to say. Cozy gaming really does feel like having your own little bubble, your own little cocoon to just kind of retreat into, escape, you know, the stresses or the world for a little bit, the pressures of your job, you know, other outside pressures that there may be. I think that cozy gaming really allows you to have that time for yourself, whatever you need a little, you know, escape from. What do you think those people are escaping from?

Chaos, instability, economic problems. I think the pandemic, you know, circa 2020 was this global problem that was very blatant that people wanted to escape from. problem that was very blatant that people wanted to escape from. And now, you know, we still have plenty of problems that we want to escape from. And we probably always will. In the United States, the election caused a lot of instability and fear and anxiety. You know, we don't quite understand as consumers what's going on with the economy. Is it good or will i a millennial ever be able to buy a house it's just this kind of pursuit of control of the uncontrollable uh and the simulation of what you might have in a very normal life on the screen that you may not be able to access in real life how is this any different than the ways that people have escaped from all of the nastiness

in past i I mean, and it's not just, you know, your blanket that weighs a ton or your candle that smells like cedar. I mean, people have spent time watching terrible television programs. They scroll on social media for hours on end because it allows them to detach from what's going on outside of their window. How is this any different, do you think? For sure. I mean, I think novels themselves were once criticized as being too escapist and now, now we see them as, you know, an aspirational form of culture. But I think, you know, it's, it's just people are seeking this out in order to comfort themselves.

And I think what makes it different is the kind of all-encompassing quality of it, at least in terms of what I was observing. We think of phones and social media as something that happens on our screen. We think of video games as a form of entertainment that we pick up when we're bored. But this coziness really represents turning it into an immersive simulation that you inhabit with your physical body. Like the bedrooms of cozy gamers to me are this technological cocoon that's like surrounded with digital and physical inputs and this total sensory simulation. And I think that kind of experience hasn't really been so mainstream before. So it would have been seen as kind of isolating. Liv, who we spoke with, I mean, one of the things that she talked about was that she doesn't think it's particularly unhealthy to get a break from everything else.

This is part of taking a break, like reading a book or trying to distract your mind from other things. Have a listen again to what she says about how and why she does this. Too much of anything can turn negative, I guess. You know, if you start clothing yourself off from the world completely, totally. But I think, yeah, just everything in balance. That's kind of how I see most things, like going to the gym too much can also be in excess, but can also bring a lot of good health benefits. So I think being able to sort of know where that line is, for me, I find I actually sometimes don't give myself enough time.

So tell me more about this. I mean, one of the things in addition to writing about CozyTech, you'd written recently about noise cancelling headphones and you looked at wearable devices more broadly and a way that we have engineered products to kind of shut ourselves off from what's happening around the world there are artificial intelligence devices like one called friend that helps us do that what does friend do friend is this little pendant that you wear around your neck. And it is a microphone that's always listening to what you say and what's going on around you. And it uses generative AI to text you about your own life. So it's kind of responding to your situation, asking you questions, maybe prompting new behaviors or urging you to do something new.

So what does that mean? So it's listening to you and then it's giving you feedback on your own life. Exactly. So it's always listening through its microphone. It's digesting that text through AI and then it's using AI to respond to that and engage you in some kind of dialogue. And so it's this kind of omnipresent companionship that you can have through this machine. What concerns you about that? I think, I mean, it's a simulation of companionship.

It is not a true companion. It is not a true interaction with another living thing. Like so much of AI, it's a digestion of a pile of data that may or may not have been legally acquired into a facsimile of another human being. So I think it replaces what might be a more satisfying experience of interacting with another human with this machine. And I kind of see the same thing with coziness and video games where you are pursuing comfortable experiences that you can't necessarily access already. Do you think, is there a link between that sort of technology and isolation or loneliness? I think so. I mean, the founder of Friends, Avi Skiffman,

told me that he thinks tech caused the loneliness epidemic, but it will also solve it, that he thinks tech caused the loneliness epidemic, but it will also solve it, which just seems like avoiding the central problem to me. So we retreat into social media to connect with people outside of the physical world. We retreat into video games for these comfortable sensations. But those things are dead ends in a way. They comfort us, they give us positive sensations, but they don't urge us to

change our lives as much. They don't urge us back out into the world, except maybe if you're a vampire cognitive behavioral therapist. But it's a real change in how we use technology, right? Social media, whether it was real interactions or not, it did steer us outside, right? You had, in the old days, we've talked about this, in the old days of Twitter, it actually felt like a conversation with other people. And this is really different. Yes. In the early days of social media, you were urged to interact with other humans. So you're connecting with other people around the world, observing what's going on in other places. And I think that did have its own problems. I mean, we see the hatred and bias and violence on Twitter and elsewhere. And now social media just seems to have reached this dead end. And the new technology that's picking up is about a simulation of conversation, like a facsimile of conversation. It's not connecting you with another person. It's just providing you with this numbing entertainment. I mean, I got back on Facebook recently, and five out of 10 posts were just garbage generative AI

images. So that's not real people posting photos that I want to see. Do you think people want this? I mean, again, you walk around the streets and you see so many people with earbuds in, with noise-canceling headphones. But also, Apple launched this, people with earbuds in with noise canceling headphones, but also Apple launched this, what was it? The vision pro, uh, virtual reality headset. And I don't know, a handful of people, not, well, not a handful, but certainly it didn't take off in many ways. Do people actually want this? I'm kind of cheered by the failure of the VR helmet. I mean, I'm glad that it didn't become a massive mainstream thing and we're not all wearing them right now. I think on some level, people crave that feeling of being surrounded by technology and digital images, but it's not all the time. And I think right now we're in a moment where

tech companies are racing ahead of consumer desires. Generative AI has very few use cases in a normal person's life. This AI companion is not something that the public is clamoring for. Maybe we will want it once it is mainstream and is available. But I think we're kind of being led down a slippery slope that I personally don't particularly enjoy. You don't want to particularly be cut off from the rest of the world? No, I would prefer to interact with real people, maybe through the medium of a screen or through a video game. But ultimately, the goal for me is how technology can connect you into the world rather than barricade you away from it. Kyle, thank you very much. Thanks for having me again. Kyle Chayka is a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and the author of Filter World,

How Algorithms Flattened Culture. He was in Washington, D.C. and the title of the piece that he wrote about cozy tech is the fantasy of cozy tech. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.