The Contradiction Machine

I wrote a post last year about how the Apple halo had fallen away and that I was done with iOS. A few months before that, I’d written about privacy being something worth protecting. Before that, I defended app subscriptions while simultaneously complaining about the cost of digital life. Now I’m using Google everything, handing over data I spent years arguing should be kept private, training for a marathon using a Garmin watch I once would have mocked, and writing this post with the help of an AI tool I’ve been sceptical about in public.

If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you could build a pretty compelling case that I don’t know what I believe.

The easy thing to do here would be to explain each change as growth. To frame every contradiction as evidence of an open mind. That would be comfortable and self-serving, and I don’t think it’s entirely true. Some of these shifts happened for principled reasons. I genuinely believe Android is a better operating system for me right now. I looked at what Siri offered versus what Gemini offered and made a practical choice. That’s not hypocrisy, that’s just responding to what’s in front of you.

Other shifts are harder to defend. The privacy one stings. I spent years writing about controlling your data, about not giving everything to one company, about the importance of owning your digital life. Now my calendar, email, search history, and voice commands all run through Google. Every query I make, every appointment I set, every question I ask Gemini paints a more complete picture of my daily existence than I’d be comfortable describing to a stranger. I did it for convenience. I did it because the alternative stopped working properly and I got tired of fighting my own tools. That’s not a principled stance, that’s just giving in.

The thing about writing a blog for more than a decade is that the archive doesn’t let you forget. Every strong opinion I’ve ever held is sitting there, timestamped and public. Some of them I still agree with. Some of them make me cringe. A few of them directly contradict whatever I wrote the following year. The idea that treating your beliefs like hypotheses is healthy, that changing your mind should be celebrated rather than treated as weakness. I still believe that. The scientific method works precisely because it demands you update your position when the evidence changes.

The problem is that not all of my contradictions are the result of new evidence. Some of them are just me getting tired. Getting comfortable. Choosing the path of least resistance and then writing a blog post to justify it after the fact. There’s a difference between updating your beliefs and just doing whatever’s easiest and calling it progress.

I use AI tools to help me think through blog posts. I’ve been open about that. I ask them to poke holes in my arguments, to find the counterpoints I’m missing, to tell me when I’m being unclear, and then I make my own decisions about what stays and what goes. I’m comfortable with this arrangement. I’m aware, though, that if someone had described this workflow to me three years ago, I’d have had opinions about it. Strong ones, probably, delivered with the kind of confidence that only comes from not having tried the thing yourself.

That’s the pattern, isn’t it? Confidence before experience, followed by a quieter, less photogenic compromise once reality gets involved. I was confident about privacy until the tools that respected it stopped working. I was confident about Apple until the experience degraded to the point where loyalty felt like a tax. I was confident about AI until I used it and found it genuinely useful for the thing I care most about, which is writing clearly.

None of this makes me special. Everyone holds contradictions. The difference with a blog is that mine are public, searchable, and linked to each other in ways that make them impossible to ignore. I can’t pretend I never said those things. I can’t quietly update my positions without someone noticing. The archive is the archive.

I think the honest answer is that consistency is overrated. Not in the way that phrase usually gets deployed, as a get-out clause for people who don’t want to be held accountable. More in the sense that a person who never changes their mind about anything isn’t principled, they’re just not paying attention. The world changes. Tools change. What you need from your technology changes. If your positions don’t shift at all over a decade of writing, you’re either remarkably prescient or you’ve stopped thinking.

I’d rather be the person who contradicts himself in public than the person who pretends they had it right all along. The blog is the record. It’s messy and inconsistent and full of positions I no longer hold. That’s the whole point of it.