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Welcome to Night Vale host Cecil Baldwin shares his tech pet peeves

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Why This Matters

Cecil Baldwin highlights common tech frustrations that impact user experience and safety, emphasizing the need for better design and regulation in digital and mobile technology. His insights reflect broader concerns about safety, convenience, and the quality of media consumption, which are relevant to both industry developers and consumers. Addressing these issues can lead to safer, more enjoyable, and more mindful technology use for all.

Key Takeaways

is the Verge’s weekend editor. He has over 18 years of experience, including 10 years as managing editor at Engadget.

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Cecil Baldwin’s résumé includes appearances on Gravity Falls, narrating the documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street, and performing as part of the New York Neo-Futurists theater company. But he is best known as the host of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, a long-running fiction show that blends macabre Lovecraftian horror with absurdist comedy. As Cecil Palmer, the voice of Night Vale Community Radio, Baldwin keeps the people of the titular town abreast of all the goings ons with the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home and offers tips on how to best maintain their Bloodstone circles.

He also cohosts Random Number Generator Horror Podcast No. 9 with Night Vale cocreator Jeffrey Cranor, recently directed the play As Sylvia and raises awareness for LGBTQ+ issues and HIV. In short — he’s a busy man. So we’re excited that he found some time to tell us about his tech pet peeves.

What is one thing you wish you could change about your phone?

I wish it were impossible to manually text and drive a vehicle at the same time. We are collectively way worse at it than we think.

What is your happy place online?

Adding books to my Favorite list on Amazon so I remember titles/authors, and then taking that list to my local new and/or used bookstore and buying them there.

Which tech trend do you wish would go away?

Please, I’m begging you, let me watch the credits of the film or television show in peace. I just finished a movie, you don’t need to roll me right into a whole new one. Let me digest for just a second.

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