Homeless Minds

in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 

Zuboff traces the aggressive way in which the great research engines, specifically Google and Facebook, have intruded into the most intimate and personal dimensions of our experience. Indeed our “experience” has been transposed into marketable “behavior,” so that Google and Facebook sell data about our experience to marketers in a way that contributes to the ruthless, uncaring commoditization of our lives. 

She describes our new social reality as one of “exile” in which we experience a loss of a capacity for privacy and intimacy... those with homeless minds (generated by the new intrusive technologies) are not likely to notice those with homeless bodies (of the left out and left behind who live in economic isolation).

 - Walter Brueggemann, Materiality as Resistance. 2020.

Don’t Click LIKE

 To click “Like,” within the precise definitions of information theory, is literally the least informative type of nontrivial communication, providing only a minimal one bit of information about the state of the sender (the person clicking the icon on a post) to the receiver (the person who published the post).

 

Instead of seeing these easy clicks as a fun way to nudge a friend, start treating them as poison to your attempts to cultivate a meaningful social life. Put simply, you should stop using them. Don’t click “Like.” Ever. And while you’re at it, stop leaving comments on social media posts as well. No “so cute!” or “so cool!” Remain silent.

 

The reason I’m suggesting such a hard stance against these seemingly innocuous interactions is that they teach your mind that connection is a reasonable alternative to conversation. The motivating premise behind my conversation-centric communication philosophy is that once you accept this equality, despite your good intentions, the role of low-value interactions will inevitably expand until it begins to push out the high-value socializing that actually matters. If you eliminate these trivial interactions cold turkey, you send your mind a clear message: conversation is what counts—don’t be distracted from this reality by the shiny stuff on your screen. As I mentioned before, you may think you can balance both types of interaction, but most people can’t.

 

I want you to replace this with a state where your leisure time is now filled with better pursuits, many of which will exist primarily in the physical world. In this new state, digital technology is still present, but now subordinated to a support role: helping you to set up or maintain your leisure activities, but not acting as the primary source of leisure itself. 

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport

Reclaiming Conversation

To be clear, conversation-centric communication requires sacrifices. If you adopt this philosophy, you’ll almost certainly reduce the number of people with whom you have an active relationship. Real conversation takes time, and the total number of people for which you can uphold this standard will be significantly less than the total number of people you can follow, retweet, “like,” and occasionally leave a comment for on social media, or ping with the occasional text. Once you no longer count the latter activities as meaningful interaction, your social circle will seem at first to contract.

This sense of contraction, however, is illusory. Conversation is the good stuff; it’s what we crave as humans and what provides us with the sense of community and belonging necessary to thrive. Connection, on the other hand, though appealing in the moment, provides very little of what we need.

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport

iGen

Young people born between 1995 and 2012, a group Twenge calls “iGen,” exhibited remarkable differences as compared to the Millennials that preceded them. One of the biggest and most troubling changes was iGen’s psychological health. “Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed,” Twenge writes, with much of this seemingly due to a massive increase in anxiety disorders. “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades.”

 What instigated these changes? Twenge agrees with the intuition of the university mental health administrator when she notes that these shifts in mental health correspond “exactly” to the moment when American smartphone ownership became ubiquitous. The defining trait of iGen, is that they grew up with iPhones and social media, and don’t remember a time before constant access to the internet. They’re paying a price for this distinction with their mental health. “Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones,” Twenge concludes.

 

As part of his reporting, Denizet-Lewis interviewed Jean Twenge, who made it clear that she didn’t set out to implicate the smartphone: “It seemed like too easy an explanation for negative mental-health outcomes in teens,” but it ended up the only explanation that fit the timing. Lots of potential culprits, from stressful current events to increased academic pressure, existed before the spike in anxiety that begins around 2011. The only factor that dramatically increased right around the same time as teenage anxiety was the number of young people owning their own smartphones.

 

Returning to our canary-in-the-coal-mine analogy, the plight of iGen provides a strong warning about the danger of solitude deprivation. When an entire cohort unintentionally eliminated time alone with their thoughts from their lives, their mental health suffered dramatically. On reflection, this makes sense. These teenagers have lost the ability to process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power down their critical social circuits, which are not meant to be used constantly, and to redirect that energy to other important cognitive housekeeping tasks. We shouldn’t be surprised that these absences lead to malfunctions.

 

But once you begin studying the positive benefits of time alone with your thoughts, and encounter the distressing effects that appear in populations that eliminate this altogether, a simpler explanation emerges: we need solitude to thrive as human beings, and in recent years, without even realizing it, we’ve been systematically reducing this crucial ingredient from our lives.

 

Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport

Solitude Deprivation

A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.
 
The concern that modernity is at odds with solitude is not new. Writing in the 1980s, Anthony Storr complained that “contemporary Western culture makes the peace of solitude difficult to attain.” He pointed to Muzak and the recent invention of the “car telephone” as the latest evidence of this encroachment of noise into all parts of our lives. Over a hundred years earlier, Thoreau demonstrated similar concern, famously writing in Walden that “we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” The question before us, then, is whether our current moment offers a new threat to solitude that is somehow more pressing than those that commentators have bemoaned for decades. I argue that the answer is a definitive yes.
 
To understand my concern, the right place to start is the iPod revolution that occurred in the first years of the twenty-first century. We had portable music before the iPod, most commonly in the form of the Sony Walkman and Discman (and their competitors), but these devices played only a restricted role in most people’s lives—something you used to entertain yourself while exercising, or in the back seat of a car on a long family road trip. If you stood on a busy city street corner in the early 1990s, you would not see too many people sporting black foam Sony earphones on their way to work.
 
By the early 2000s, however, if you stood on that same street corner, white earbuds would be near ubiquitous. The iPod succeeded not just by selling lots of units, but also by changing the culture surrounding portable music. It became common, especially among younger generations, to allow your iPod to provide a musical backdrop to your entire day—putting the earbuds in as you walk out the door and taking them off only when you couldn’t avoid having to talk to another human.
 
To put this in context, previous technologies that threatened solitude, from Thoreau’s telegraph to Storr’s car phone, introduced new ways to occasionally interrupt time alone with your thoughts, whereas the iPod provided for the first time the ability to be continuously distracted from your own mind. The farmer in Thoreau’s time might leave the quiet fireside to walk to town and check the evening telegraph dispatches, fragmenting a moment of solitude, but there was no way that this technology could offer continuous distraction to this same farmer as he went about his day. The iPod was pushing us toward a newly alienated phase in our relationship with our own minds.
 
This transformation started by the iPod, however, didn’t reach its full potential until the release of its successor, the iPhone, or, more generally, the spread of modern internet-connected smartphones in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Even though iPods became ubiquitous, there were still moments in which it was either too much trouble to slip in the earbuds (think: waiting to be called into a meeting), or it might be socially awkward to do so (think: sitting bored during a slow hymn at a church service). The smartphone provided a new technique to banish these remaining slivers of solitude: the quick glance. At the slightest hint of boredom, you can now surreptitiously glance at any number of apps or mobile-adapted websites that have been optimized to provide you an immediate and satisfying dose of input from other minds.
 
It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life. Thoreau and Storr worried about people enjoying less solitude. We must now wonder if people might forget this state of being altogether.

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport

Solitude

 “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal famously wrote in the late seventeenth century. Half a century later, and an ocean away, Benjamin Franklin took up the subject in his journal: “I have read abundance of fine things on the subject of solitude. . . . I acknowledge solitude an agreeable refreshment to a busy mind.”
 
The academy was late to recognize the importance of time alone with your own thoughts. In 1988, the noted English psychiatrist Anthony Storr helped correct this omission with his seminal book, Solitude: A Return to the Self. As Storr noted, by the 1980s, psychoanalysis had become obsessed with the importance of intimate personal relationships, identifying them as the most important source of human happiness. But Storr’s study of history didn’t seem to support this hypothesis. He opens his 1988 book with the following quote from Edward Gibbon: “Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.” He then boldly writes: “Gibbon is surely right.”
 
Edward Gibbon lived a solitary life, but not only did he produce wildly influential work, he also seemed perfectly happy. Storr notes that the need to spend a great deal of time alone was common among “the majority of poets, novelists, and composers.” He lists Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein as examples of men who never had families or fostered close personal ties, yet still managed to lead remarkable lives. Storr’s conclusion is that we’re wrong to consider intimate interaction as the sine qua non of human thriving. Solitude can be just as important for both happiness and productivity.
 
 Woolf would agree with Storr that solitude is a prerequisite for original and creative thought, but she would then add that women had been systematically denied both the literal and figurative room of their own in which to cultivate this state. To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.
 
Harris argues, perhaps counterintuitively, that “the ability to be alone . . . is anything but a rejection of close bonds,” and can instead affirm them. Calmly experiencing separation, he argues, builds your appreciation for interpersonal connections when they do occur.
 
Wendell Berry summarized this point more succinctly when he wrote: “We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.”

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport

Principles of Digital Minimalism

The best way to fight the tyranny of the digital in your life is to embrace a philosophy of technology use based in your deeply held values. I then proposed digital minimalism as one such philosophy, and provided examples of it in action. Before I can ask you to experiment with digital minimalism in your own life, however, I must first provide you with a more thorough explanation for why it works. My argument for this philosophy’s effectiveness rests on the following three core principles:
 
Principle #1: Clutter is costly.

Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.
 
It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life.
 
Principle #2: Optimization is important.

Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology.
 
Once you break free from this mind-set, however, and begin seeing new technologies simply as tools that you can deploy selectively, you’re able to fully embrace the second principle of minimalism and start furiously optimizing—enabling you to reap the advantages of vaulting up the return curve. Finding useful new technologies is just the first step to improving your life. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use them.
 
 
Principle #3: Intentionality is satisfying.

Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. This source of satisfaction is independent of the specific decisions they make and is one of the biggest reasons that minimalism tends to be immensely meaningful to its practitioners.
The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values. As Kraybill elaborates, they confront the following questions: “Is this going to be helpful or is it going to be detrimental? Is it going to bolster our life together, as a community, or is it going to somehow tear it down?”

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport

Reestablish Control in the Digital Age

 A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.
 
     To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation.
 
    Notice, this minimalist philosophy contrasts starkly with the maximalist philosophy that most people deploy by default—a mind-set in which any potential for benefit is enough to start using a technology that catches your attention. A maximalist is very uncomfortable with the idea that anyone might miss out on something that’s the least bit interesting or valuable.
 
    This argument sounds absurd to digital minimalists, because they believe that the best digital life is formed by carefully curating their tools to deliver massive and unambiguous benefits. They tend to be incredibly wary of low-value activities that can clutter up their time and attention and end up hurting more than they help. Put another way: minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport

Autonomy in the Digital Age

 As argued, our current unease with new technologies is not really about whether or not they’re useful. It’s instead about autonomy. We signed up for these services and bought these devices for minor reasons—to look up friends’ relationship statuses or eliminate the need to carry a separate iPod and phone—and then found ourselves, years later, increasingly dominated by their influence, allowing them to control more and more of how we spend our time, how we feel, and how we behave.
 
    The fact that our humanity was routed by these tools over the past decade should come as no surprise. As I just detailed, we’ve been engaging in a lopsided arms race in which the technologies encroaching on our autonomy were preying with increasing precision on deep-seated vulnerabilities in our brains, while we still naively believed that we were just fiddling with fun gifts handed down from the nerd gods.
 
    When Bill Maher joked that the App Store was coming for our souls, he was actually onto something. As Socrates explained to Phaedrus in Plato’s famous chariot metaphor, our soul can be understood as a chariot driver struggling to rein two horses, one representing our better nature and the other our baser impulses. When we increasingly cede autonomy to the digital, we energize the latter horse and make the chariot driver’s struggle to steer increasingly difficult—a diminishing of our soul’s authority.
 
    When seen from this perspective, it becomes clear that this is a battle we must fight. But to do so, we need a more serious strategy, something custom built to swat aside the forces manipulating us toward behavioral addictions and that offers a concrete plan about how to put new technologies to use for our best aspirations and not against them. Digital minimalism is one such strategy. It’s toward its details that we now turn our attention.

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport

Digital Addiction

Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences.

 
I. Intermittent Positive Reinforcement
 
We begin with the first force: intermittent positive reinforcement. Scientists have known since Michael Zeiler’s famous pecking pigeon experiments from the 1970s that rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern. Something about unpredictability releases more dopamine—a key neurotransmitter for regulating our sense of craving. The original Zeiler experiment had pigeons pecking a button that unpredictably released a food pellet. As Adam Alter points out, this same basic behavior is replicated in the feedback buttons that have accompanied most social media posts since Facebook introduced the “Like” icon in 2009.
 
“It’s hard to exaggerate how much the ‘like’ button changed the psychology of Facebook use,” Alter writes. “What had begun as a passive way to track your friends’ lives was now deeply interactive, and with exactly the sort of unpredictable feedback that motivated Zeiler’s pigeons.” Alter goes on to describe users as “gambling” every time they post something on a social media platform: Will you get likes (or hearts or retweets), or will it languish with no feedback? The former creates what one Facebook engineer calls “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure,” while the latter feels bad. Either way, the outcome is hard to predict, which, as the psychology of addiction teaches us, makes the whole activity of posting and checking maddeningly appealing.
 
Social media feedback, however, is not the only online activity with this property of unpredictable reinforcement. Many people have the experience of visiting a content website for a specific purpose—say, for example, going to a newspaper site to check the weather forecast—and then find themselves thirty minutes later still mindlessly following trails of links, skipping from one headline to another. This behavior can also be sparked by unpredictable feedback: most articles end up duds, but occasionally you’ll land on one that creates a strong emotion, be it righteous anger or laughter. Every appealing headline clicked or intriguing link tabbed is another metaphorical pull of the slot machine handle.
 
II. The Drive for Social Approval
 
The second force that encourages behavioral addiction: the drive for social approval.
 
Consider, once again, social media feedback buttons. In addition to delivering unpredictable feedback, as discussed above, this feedback also concerns other people’s approval. If lots of people click the little heart icon under your latest Instagram post, it feels like the tribe is showing you approval—which we’re adapted to strongly crave. The other side of this evolutionary bargain, of course, is that a lack of positive feedback creates a sense of distress. This is serious business for the Paleolithic brain, and therefore it can develop an urgent need to continually monitor this “vital” information. 
 
The power of this drive for social approval should not be underestimated.

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport

Is Technology Neutral?

 Bill Maher ends every episode of his HBO show Real Time with a monologue. The topics are usually political. This was not the case, however, on May 12, 2017, when Maher looked into the camera and said:
 
The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.
 

“There’s always this narrative that technology’s neutral. And it’s up to us to choose how we use it. This is just not true—”

“Technology is not neutral?”

“It’s not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that’s how they make their money.”

 
Bill Maher, for his part, thought this interview seemed familiar. After playing a clip of the Harris interview for his HBO audience, Maher quips: “Where have I heard this before?” He then cuts to Mike Wallace’s famous 1995 interview with Jeffrey Wigand—the whistleblower who confirmed for the world what most already suspected: that the big tobacco companies engineered cigarettes to be more addictive.
 
“Philip Morris just wanted your lungs,” Maher concludes. “The App Store wants your soul.”

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport