“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” the philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, in 1654. According to Screen Time, a recent addition to the iPhone’s operating system that purports to help users deal with the addiction to screens which the iPhone is designed to foster, my typical daily phone activity includes ninety minutes of texting, one hour of reading, another hour of e-mail, yet another hour of social media, and about seventy “pickups,” meaning that I check my phone about four times per hour. I carry my phone around with me as if it were an oxygen tank. I stare at it while I make breakfast and take out the recycling, ruining what I prize most about working from home—the sense of control, the relative peace. I have tried all sorts of things to look at screens less often: I don’t get push notifications or use Facebook or watch Instagram stories; on my home computer, I have installed a browser plug-in called StayFocusd, which turns off Twitter after forty-five minutes of daily use. On my phone, I use an app called Freedom to block social media for much of the workday. If any of my digital chastity belts malfunction, I start scrolling like a junkie, pulling myself away just long enough to send frantic e-mails to the apps’ customer service with subject lines like “Freedom not working!”
For journalists, Twitter, in particular, functions as an increasingly familiar form of contemporary labor: paid in exposure, pitched as fun. Some of us also write about the online world, making the use of social media a professional necessity. Every week, it seems, a journalist will proclaim, on Twitter, that he is leaving Twitter, or will write an op-ed about how he’s stepping away from social media—a style of essay so common that it was parodied, last month, in the Wall Street Journal. “Fifteen minutes ago, I stopped using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter,” the writer Jason Gay began. “Within seconds, I noticed I am happier, less irritable, more contemplative and balanced. I’m kinder to neighbors and pets. I’m spending more time on activities that matter.” It’s true that, after months or years of gazing at pixels and transcribing the minutiae of life, a writer contemplating a single unshared sunset can become a smug transcendentalist, high on an ephemeral taste of analog Nirvana. But it is not only journalists who are struggling to escape from the endless loop of flattery, anxiety, and distraction that social media provides. Nearly three-quarters of Americans have taken steps to distance themselves from Facebook. Entire families try to observe a “digital Sabbath.” Parents seek screen-time alternatives to the Jungian horrorscape that is children’s YouTube. And yet a mood of fidgety powerlessness continues to accumulate, like an acid snowfall on our collective mind.
According to the Georgetown computer-science professor Cal Newport, “willpower, tips, and vague resolutions are not sufficient by themselves to tame the ability of new technologies to invade your cognitive landscape.” In “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World” (Portfolio), Newport argues that we must establish a “philosophy of technology use.” He recommends a monthlong digital detox—a Marie Kondo-like decluttering period, in which a person takes a complete break from all optional technologies. When it’s over, the digital minimalist slowly reintroduces these technologies on her own meticulous terms. She might need only an hour of Instagram each week to catch up on her favorite babies and dogs. She might, Newport suggests, prefer to hold “conversation office hours” at a local coffee shop rather than constantly text with her friends and acquaintances.
Newport defines a digital minimalist as someone who drops “low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and halfhearted binge watching” in favor of high-value leisure activities such as board games, CrossFit, book clubs, and learning to “fix or build something every week.” The goal is a permanent change of outlook and behavior, like converting to veganism or Christianity, in service of a life that is more holistically productive—one in which we turn to digital technology only when it provides the most efficient method of serving a carefully considered personal aim. When you’re first learning to become a digital minimalist, it’s important, Newport explains, to keep doing stuff. “Reducing the easy distraction without also filling the void can make life unpleasantly stale,” he writes. Sitting quietly in a room alone is for experts.
At the beginning of March, I decided to embrace the cliché and try to follow Newport’s advice. I bought a basic watch, adjusted the settings on StayFocusd to cut my home-computer social-media allowance to fifteen minutes, and changed my Freedom settings to block Twitter and Instagram altogether. (I had already deleted both apps, but I re-downloaded and re-deleted Instagram frequently, and I used my phone’s Web browser to look at Twitter.) I vowed to leave my phone in the apartment whenever I walked my dog. It didn’t feel feasible to quit social media entirely—I am, after all, a journalist—but I wanted to stop picking up my iPhone every time I felt even a moment’s mental pause.
More than twenty years ago, the writer Michael Goldhaber observed, in Wired, that the Internet drowns its users in information while constantly increasing information production; this makes attention a scarce and desirable resource—the “natural economy of cyberspace.” Goldhaber speculated that, when the “attention economy” had matured, nearly everyone would have her own Web site, and he warned readers that “increasing demand for our limited attention will keep us from reflecting, or thinking deeply (let alone enjoying leisure).” In other words, he roughly outlined the social-media age.
Social-media companies monetize everyday selfhood: our preferences and personal data are tracked and sold to advertisers; our relationships are framed as potentially profitable conduits; we continually capture one another’s lucrative attention by performing some version of who we think we are. Over time, we have absorbed these terms and conditions: we might retain very little of the value we create, but we have allowed social media to make us feel valuable. These platforms encourage compulsive use by offering forms of social approval—likes on Facebook and Instagram, retweets on Twitter—that are intermittent and unpredictable, as though you’re playing a slot machine that tells you whether or not people love you. Dependency, eventually, assumes its own logic. Recently, vague reports circulated that Twitter was considering getting rid of likes. Users protested. If I could flip a switch that would allow me to get book recommendations from Twitter and puppy photos from Instagram without seeing how many followers I was acquiring or how many people had liked my posts, I would. It would help me waste less time on the Internet, and feel less invested in it. Of course, this would not provide me with as many regular infusions of useless dopamine, or make Twitter or Instagram—or the companies that advertise on them—very much money.
During the first few days of my Internet decluttering, I found myself compulsively checking my unchanged in-box and already-read text messages, and scanning the same headlines over and over—attempting, as if bewitched, to see new information there. I took my dog out for longer walks, initially trying to use them for some productive purpose: spying on neighbors, planning my week. Soon I acquiesced to a dull, pleasant blankness. One afternoon, I draped myself on my couch and felt an influx of mental silence that was both disturbing and hallucinatorily pleasurable. I didn’t want to learn how to fix or build anything, or start a book club. I wanted to experience myself as soft and loose and purposeless, three qualities that, in my adulthood, have always seemed economically risky.
“Nothing is harder to do than nothing,” Jenny Odell writes, in her new book, “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” (Melville House). Odell, a multidisciplinary artist who teaches at Stanford, is perhaps best known for a pamphlet called “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Watch,” which she put together while in residence at the Museum of Capitalism, in Oakland. Odell investigated the origins of a blandly stylish watch that was being offered for free (plus shipping) on Instagram, and found a mirrored fun house of digital storefronts that looked as though they had been generated by algorithm. The retailers advertised themselves as brands that had physical origins in glitzy Miami Beach or hip San Francisco but were, in fact, placeless nodes in a vast web of scammy global wholesalers, behind which a human presence could hardly be discerned.
Like Newport, Odell thinks that we should spend less time on the Internet. Unlike him, she wants readers to question the very idea of productivity. Life is “more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized,” she writes. To find the physical world sufficiently absorbing, to conceive of the self as something that “exceeds algorithmic description”—these are not only “ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.” Odell details, with earnest wonder, moments in her life when she was reoriented toward these values. After the 2016 election, she began feeding peanuts to two crows on her balcony, and found comfort in the fact that “these essentially wild animals recognized me, that I had some place in their universe.” She also developed a fascination, via Google Maps, with the creek behind her old kindergarten, and she went to see it with a friend. She followed the creek bed, which, she learned, runs beneath Cupertino’s shopping centers and Apple’s headquarters. The creek became a reminder that under the “streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews” there is a “giant rock whose other lifeforms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic.”
Odell elegantly aligns the crisis in our natural world and the crisis in our minds: what has happened to the natural world is happening to us, she contends, and it’s happening on the same soon-to-be-irreparable scale. She sees “little difference between habitat restoration in the traditional sense and restoring habitats for human thought”; both are endangered by “the logic of capitalist productivity.” She believes that, by constantly disclosing our needs and desires to tech companies that sift through our selfhood in search of profit opportunities, we are neglecting, even losing, our mysterious, murky depths—the parts of us that don’t serve an ulterior purpose but exist merely to exist. The “best, most alive parts” of ourselves are being “paved over by a ruthless logic of use.”
“Digital Minimalism” and “How to Do Nothing” could both be categorized as highbrow how-to—an artist and a computer scientist, both of them in their thirties, wrestling with the same timely prompt. (At one point, Odell writes, she thought of her book as activism disguised as self-help.) Rather than a philosophy of technology use, Odell offers a philosophy of modern life, which she calls “manifest dismantling,” and which she intends as the opposite of Manifest Destiny. It involves rejecting the sort of progress that centers on isolated striving, and emphasizing, instead, caregiving, maintenance, and the interdependence of things. Odell grew up in the Bay Area, and her work is full of unabashed hippie moments that might provoke cynicism. But, for me—and, I suspect, for others who have come of age alongside the Internet and have coped with the pace and the precariousness of contemporary living with a mixture of ambient fatalism and flares of impetuous tenderness—she struck a hopeful nerve of possibility that I hadn’t felt in a long time.
Odell writes about the first electronic bulletin-board system, which was set up, in Berkeley, in 1972, as a “communal memory bank.” She contrasts it with Nextdoor, a notoriously paranoid neighborhood-based social platform that was recently valued at $1.5 billion, inferring that the profit motive had perverted what can be a healthy civic impulse. Newport, who does not have any social-media accounts of his own, generally treats social media’s current profit model as an unfortunate inevitability. Odell believes that there is another way. She cites, for example, the indie platform Mastodon, which is crowdfunded and decentralized. (It is made up of independently operated nodes, called “instances,” on which users can post short messages, or “toots.”) To make money from something—a forest, a sense of self—is often to destroy it. Odell brings up a famous redwood in Oakland called Old Survivor, which is estimated to be almost five hundred years old. Unlike all the other trees of its kind in the area, it was never cut down, because it was runty and twisted and situated on a rocky slope; it appeared unprofitable to loggers. The tree, she writes, is an image of “resistance-in-place,” of something that has escaped capitalist appropriation. As Odell sees it, the only way forward is to be like Old Survivor. We have to be able to do nothing—to merely bear witness, to stay in place, to create shelter for one another—to endure.
Despite the political edge in her writing, Odell does not recommend particular legislative policies that might address the current situation. She locates the potential for change in individual acts of refusal, which, she argues, make space for others to follow. She cites the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike, the origins of which can be traced to an anonymous protest publication that appeared in 1932, called the Waterfront Worker, and the union reorganization that followed the National Industrial Recovery Act, in 1933. The strike spanned nearly two thousand miles and was supported by sympathizers across the country. Farmers contributed food; women formed a relief agency. The protest affected all of San Francisco: after employers broke the picket line, and at least two people were killed by police, more than a hundred thousand people across the city staged a general strike. This, Odell writes, is what we need: a project of “refusal, boycott, and sabotage”—a “spectacle of noncompliance that registers on the larger scale of the public.”
If I were to go on strike from my nebulously compensated quasi-job as a purveyor of stupid tweets about my writing and my personal problems, there would be no way for me to make that action visible on Twitter without negating its effect: to speak out against something within the confines of the attention economy is, inevitably, to bring it more attention. It is hard to grasp how individual acts of refusal would build collective momentum outside the platforms that they aim to refuse. Last year, after a former employee of the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica revealed that the firm had collected the data of millions of Facebook users and given that data to the Trump campaign, the hashtag #deletefacebook trended—on Twitter.
Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, has called the platform a “social-validation feedback loop” built around “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” Tristan Harris, who worked as a “design ethicist” at Google, has said that smartphones are engineered to be addictive. The U.S. government already regulates a number of addictive substances, and plans are afoot to monitor social-media companies more aggressively. Mark Warner, the Democratic senator from Virginia, has issued a series of proposals, such as requiring platforms to identify foreign agents posing as Americans and allowing the federal government to set mandatory standards so that algorithms could be audited. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi commissioned Ro Khanna, the California representative whose district includes the headquarters of Apple and Google, to draw up a ten-part “Internet Bill of Rights,” which addresses access and privacy and net neutrality. Senator Elizabeth Warren argues that Amazon, Facebook, and Google have become monopolies, and need to be broken up. But none of these proposals directly concern the monetization of attention that both Newport and Odell worry about. Legislators might succeed in granting citizens more control over the data that they generate by using the Internet, but social-media companies will, presumably, continue to treat their users like little countries that can be strip-mined to make other people rich.
We remain attached to these technologies in a way that is clearly affecting the health of the body politic. Newport insists that our Internet-fuelled lack of mental peace and quiet is a better explanation for the current wave of American anxiety than “the latest crisis—be it the recession of 2009 or the contentious election of 2016.” He cites Virginia Woolf’s case for productive solitude, in “A Room of One’s Own,” the 1929 manifesto in which Woolf explains that a sixteenth-century woman with a gift for poetry would have been a “woman at strife against herself. All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain.” Newport writes, “In Woolf’s time, women were denied this liberation by a patriarchal society. In our time, this oppression is increasingly self-inflicted by our preference for the distraction of the digital screen.”
Reading that sentence produced a reaction I often experience when I look at Twitter: first, I burst out laughing, and then I felt sad. Newport, who wrote the books “How to Win at College” and “How to Become a Straight-A Student” before making a philosophical turn, acknowledges that several of the world’s biggest companies now rely on profit models that “reduce autonomy, decrease happiness, stoke darker instincts, and distract from more valuable activities,” but he never identifies as a culprit the ideology that has allowed these profit models to flourish unchecked. He describes smartphones and social media as technologies that seek to exploit you, and, in a chapter titled “Join the Attention Resistance,” he counsels aspiring digital minimalists that they will need a “ruthless commitment to avoiding exploitation.” He does not, however, suggest that exploitation might be actively curtailed rather than merely avoided. Even when comparing social media to cigarettes, he does not mention the possibility of government regulation. These days, and in no small part because of the atomization engendered by social media, it can feel that every last thing has been privatized and individualized. In “Digital Minimalism,” ethics and politics, too, are reduced to the individual: it is not, it seems, the system of power that matters but what you, alone, choose to do about it. “Vive la résistance! ” Newport writes.
Odell and Newport cite a common philosophical inspiration: Henry David Thoreau. Newport admires Thoreau’s idea that the “cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” Odell praises Thoreau’s orientation toward “a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.” But Thoreau, whose mother, famously, did his laundry during his two years of camping on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s property at Walden Pond, is an inadvertent exemplar of the difficulty of setting oneself apart from society. He is also a reminder that living a life of enriching separatism is more attainable for those with certain preëxisting advantages.
I first began tweeting about seven years ago, after I’d moved from Texas to Michigan to get an M.F.A. I began publishing essays and interviews, and tweeting links to them; to make my Twitter account less boring, I shared my most earnest and most flippant thoughts. I got a part-time job as an editor, and then a full-time one, in New York, and then a writing job at this magazine. My ability—my eagerness, even—to render myself digitally available played a role in this: by giving the attention economy access to my selfhood, I accrued the professional capital that now allows me to stop doing so, if I want to. Odell, who uses Twitter, and believes that “total renunciation” of such a culturally central medium would be, for her, both a moral and a pragmatic mistake, recognizes that this is a time “when everyone from Amazon workers to college students see their margin of refusal shrinking, and the stakes for playing along growing.”
Many people still earn their livelihoods offline, but an online presence is often a requirement not only for jobs in the gig economy but in order to piece together a financial safety net. (One in three GoFundMe campaigns is for medical care.) More and more of us cannot afford to step away. Practicing digital minimalism may be akin to getting a personal trainer or developing a Transcendental Meditation practice—a rarefied form of self-improvement. Odell believes that this sort of change will nonetheless reverberate, that it will revive support for noncommercial public spaces that benefit everyone. “If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should,” she writes. Newport quotes the comedian Bill Maher, who, two years ago, on his HBO show “Real Time,” said, “Checking your likes is the new smoking.” In the past year, both Twitter and Facebook have faced waves of bad press. For all its current ubiquity, social media might someday occupy a status akin to cigarettes, which are peddled as a pleasure and a relief to the lower classes but which élite Americans largely attempt to avoid.
My Newport-inspired Internet cleanse happened to coincide with a handful of other events that made me feel raw and unmanageable. It was the end of winter, with its sudden thaws and strange fluctuations—the type of weather where a day of sunshine feels like a stranger being kind to you when you cry. I had just finished writing a book that had involved going through a lot of my past. The hours per day that I had spent converting my experience into something of professional and financial value were now empty, and I was cognizant of how little time I had spent caring for the people and things around me. I began thinking about my selfhood as a meadow of wildflowers that had been paved over by the Internet. I started frantically buying houseplants.
I also found myself feeling more grateful for my phone than ever. I had become more conscious of why I use technology, and how it meets my needs, as Newport recommended. It’s not nothing that I can text my friends whenever I think about them, or get on Viber and talk to my grandmother in the Philippines, or sit on the B54 bus and distract myself from the standstill traffic by looking up the Fermi paradox and listening to any A Tribe Called Quest song that I want to hear. All these capacities still feel like the stuff of science fiction, and none of them involve Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. It occurred to me that two of the most straightforwardly beloved digital technologies—podcasts and group texts—push against the attention economy’s worst characteristics. Podcasts often demand sustained listening, across hours and weeks, to a few human voices. Group texts are effectively the last noncommercialized social spaces on many millennials’ phones.
On the first day of April, I took stock of my digital experiment. I had not become a different, better person. I had not acquired any high-value leisure activities. But I had felt a sort of persistent ache and wonder that pulled me back to a year that I spent in the Peace Corps, wandering in the dust at the foot of sky-high birch trees, terrified and thrilled at the sensation of being unknowable, mysterious to myself, unseen. I watered my plants, and I loosened my StayFocusd settings, back to forty-five daily minutes. I considered my Freedom parameters, which I had already learned to break, and let them be. ♦
