Gabe Bullard describes his deliberate technology choices while writing a book critiquing convenience culture, rejecting AI tools despite their popularity while selectively adopting older digital methods like library databases and Zotero. He found that many modern conveniences had degraded in quality and that AI, unlike genuine innovations, offered little time savings while introducing distrust and surface-level analysis into his research process.
The Monobloc chair is a lightweight, stackable polypropylene chair injection-molded as a single piece, with origins traced to designs in the 1940s–1970s by Simpson, Massonnet, Colombo, and Magistretti. Billions have been manufactured worldwide due to cheap production costs (~$3.50), making it ubiquitous in both developing and developed nations, though its global prevalence has drawn both praise as a perfectly designed object and criticism as a symbol of homogenizing globalization.