So, here I am, I’m doing it.
I’ve been ‘off my feed,’ (hah Hah) for three weeks at Facebook, slowly picking away at Newport’s new book, Digital Minimalism. The full scope of his plan now apparent, I am going to do the full-bore brain reboot until September 26, which will give me seven weeks off FB (my biggest issue) and a month of other interventions which I am still working out.
Newport tells us to classify our use of interruptive technologies into essential and non-essential. Interruptive is my word. CDs are digital but listening to CDs isn’t a problem; same goes with DVDs. Youtube, spotify and Netflix, on the other hand, are digital in the problematic sense of the word–networked, always available, ie, a feed, with reward mechanisms built in, (likes, shares, and followers.)
Addictive, in other words. The problem is with tech that is addictive.
Were we addicted to vinyl, the radio, broadcast TV, VHS cassettes? Neil Postman said we were in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Now? Watching TV, all together, a family, now seems quaint and healthy, a damn near Little House on the Prairie level of togetherness.
There’s a gen Z (Cap Newport calls them ‘igen’, for ipod and iphone, which is, uh, strange.) meme that derides a clueless boomer blaming the waves of mental llness plaguing young people on smartphones, tossing out other possibilities, including the rise of fascism and the imminent collapse of civilization and mass extinction events around climate change. So you don’t want to be that guy, that out of touch boomer.
But Newport trots this out, that there’s this GIANT spike in mental health issues that corresponds to smart phone usage, and if we take the blame the victim out of the suggestion, if we attribute a lot of this damage to the policies of the tech monopolies which prioritize profits over user sanity, then we can still constructively poke at this idea, look at the research, without being totally dick-ish boomer trash.
Because people do embrace habits and addictive products, that make rich people richer, to their detriment. Tobacco is the classic case in point.
Anyway. Look, I’m an SF guy. I wanted a global computer network a lot lot like the one we now have. I dreamed of it. SF writers have been dreaming it up for three quarters of a century.
Robert Heinlein, (yes, I know you hate him, let me just get this out, because it’s fun) envisioned this wonderfully steampunk kind of wikipedia global library network that consisted of telegraphically linked pneumatic tubes and microfilm.
So you would do your ‘google’ search, which of course, spat out whole books, but still, and a few minutes later, THUNK! A spool of microfilm would arrive in your delivery slot. RAHs steampunk online network morphed into a super-compuserve with fantastically high fees associated with them. In the novel Friday, an agent is giving an _unlimited feed budget_ and discovers amazing things by following her subconscious in areas of seemingly unrelated research; she is awoke in the middle of the night by her superior who asks when the next outbreak of the plague will occur, and without conscious thought she spews out the answer, having run her brain through a lot of this data.
But we all know that wikipedia, by any other name, isn ‘t really the problem with the network. I’m guessing the number of people damaged by wikipedia is similar to the number of people crushed under the weight of their VHS collections.
Not to paraphrase Newport too heavily, but he relates the discovery of a ‘default network’ detected with PET scans during experiments, brain regions that light up as soon as you complete any task.
They put you in the scanner and have you do stuff, math in your head, remember grandma’s pudding, whatever, and when you stop doing that, bingo, back to the default network.
The default network spends its time in rumination on social interactions. IE, when we aren’t thinking about anything else, we are trying to figure out other people, and our relationships to other people. We really are social animals.
This is where the lovecraftian horror of social media clicks in.
Social media gives you a fake, always on, monetizable and thus monetized (Late stage capitalism!) version of this thing your brain craves 24/7. Likes, shares, and followers are to in person social contact what corn sweetener is to fresh fruits and vegetables.
As we gorge on fresh followers and likes and shares we have a tendency to slowly starve. The corn sweetener lacks nutrients. As with corn sweetener, of course, it is better than nothing. Corn sweetener isn’t poison. Neither is social media.
But it often, maybe usually, displaces something better for you, and this isn’t your fault.
It’s designed to do this.
Thus, the brain reset.
Cut out the non-essential stuff; see how you feel, see what you get done, and then reintroduce the optional stuff, and see if it actually makes you happier.
I’ll keep posting on this I got another month to go.
Ugh.
