Digital minimalism makes a distinction between connection and conversation that is used to determine what tech tools to use, and how to use them.

Newport borrows this idea from another text–his book is basically the synthesis of a half dozen others he cites plus his reactions to them. I should go dig it up for you but I’m lazy and I want to get in and out of this post fast, for obvious reasons; just be aware, that Digital Minimalism isn’t a Newport invention; it is an amalgam of six other books, plus Newport’s last book, with an extra dollop of opprobrium directed at the tech giants for behaving like tobacco companies thrown on top.

Oh, and his case studies, garnered through his platform, a self selected group of folks he puts through a few experiments, and some other successful people who have shared their stories.

Anyway, social media likes, shares, follows, are connections.

Conversations are one on one, phone, video conference, or in person, with the last being best, the first the worst. The high-bandwidth, real time communication between individuals is supposedly the source of human empathy, the learned component, the training ground, with a few studies mentioned. Conversation is what we crave. What we really need.

Connection, is a poke, nudge, wink, smile, heart, like, follow, mass email, one to many posting, a tweet, whatever.

Connections are okay, but when they displace conversation? Yeah. It’s the corn syrup idea I mentioned in a previous post.

I can’t remember if I’ve said this yet or not, but again, here goes, but the act of doing a one-to-many conversation yourself, spewing something into the world, to a lot of people, and getting feedback, actually feels good and in social media friendly studies seems to be a Good Thing,.

The problem is the one-to-many from the other side; imbibing a ton of the one-to-many posts, reading a ton of other people sharing or venting or bragging? That is NOT correlated to happiness.

This causes FOMO, this is a feeling of inadequacy, the sense that others are having more fun than you, leading more fulfilling or meaningful lives. This is a kind of vicarious living that isn’t really being alive. It used to be you could only get so much of this stuff, a columnist or two or ten. A celebrity life column, People magazine.

Twenty million oversharing quirky quasi columnists of every possible political and social and racial and sexual make-up?

That’s a firehouse of corn syrup. That’s an endless IV drip of comforting noise that leaves you empty and depleted.

This is the the thing I take away today. Sure, I could get a few hundred folks engaging with my social media content. They’d enjoy it. But maybe they have better things to do. If I want them to read books? Leave them alone. Even if they don’t read my books. If all of us writers did this? I’d get more readers too.

You’ll see big name folks who basically post in their feeds and react only to the stuff in their feeds. They don’t have to shop around for interaction. Social media is a bottomless pit of folks chatting them up. With a button that ejects the assholes.

The only way this damages the big name is she is distracted from work; she’s not getting FOMO, she doesn’t feel invalidated, her life is a source of endless fascination and conversation, her work, her opinions. The toxicity is vastly reduced.

The downside?

I am thinking of a beloved author I know who writes, conservatively, 2-3k of social media, Facebook–a day. It is exquisite. It feels _copyedited_. This writer grew up on typewriters. The text is clean, the voice is perfect, effortless, the prose is interesting, the viewpoint is engaging and intelligent, and the topics are topical, up to the second reactions to the news of the world.

Readers have been awaiting the next book in one of the writer’s series since the early 90s.

Converting the social media output into fiction would produce the book in two months.

Let’s say there’s a big research component. Four months? Six?

Anyway. I love this guy. His life and his work is his own, and I have no right to complain. I bring him up as the example, of someone getting as much as they possibly can out of social media… and the perhaps unintended consequence of this enjoyable diversion.

And the time it eats. The words it devours. The eyeballs it catches.

The life that rushes by.

So, we’ll call yesterday day one, as I finally got around to deleting the social media apps from my phone, one of my long-term goals is to not check social media on the phone… hey, let’s throw down a disorganized list of crap I’ve been ruminating on based on the book.

Minimalist Goals

• No social media apps on phone DONE!
• Social media Saturdays only (for after the 30 day fast, we’ll see if that makes sense)
• Daily blog posts 500 words or under (this is my conversational typing; skipping the blog and writing one on one emails is probably better. I need conversational typing. It’s like warming up for me.)
• Half hour walk without phone daily (phone in backpack in a zipped bag) I walk an hour or two a day. Dedicated some of that time to silent walking, no books, no possible interruption, seems like a good goal. I do it fairly often, just shut off the audio feed, but sometimes I talk to friends instead, which for me, is a dangerous activity. I can talk to friends for fucking hours.
• Turn off notifications, disable that cruft of marketing emails that grow like weeds in the inbox, one by one as they pop up, unless they seem VERY useful. IN PROGRESS.
• Unsubscribe from underused paid services (IN PROGRESS xbox live went yesterday) Not really digital minimalism, but an adjacent idea that Newport cites without naming it’s souce, the Your Money or Your Life movement.
• Cut streaming channels that are under-used (IN PROGRESS Acorn went, but kept BritBox; maybe Shout goes next, but I keep the Rifftrax friends channel)
• Read a print book or kindle or comics on the iPad once a day. ( so far, so good. I read a new issue of Wonder Woman, which was good enough to make me cry. Very much in the vein of Neil Gaiman, it seemed to me, who I love.)
• Shut off all notifications on iPad.
• Listen to ALBUMS on Spotify. As a kid, it was understood that listening to  singles was a juvenile activity. My school-age brother and I listened to the vinyl Beatles albums my parents bought, lifting up the needle to avoid George. Harrisons weird ass sitar music. I would eventually love the whole Beatle cannon, but as a kid a single off putting song had to be stopped. Immediately. As a teen I realized that the songs I liked on an album often taught me to like others, and even if I liked some more than others, that was Okay, albums were supposed to be like that, songs that drifted to the back of your attention, and songs that smacked you in the face.
• Subscribe to the NYT news I want to read as email. Make those emails the whole written news ration.
• Set up a RSS Feed reader with aspirational reading to satisfy the urge to poke around at links
• Unsubscribe from Washington Post (Trump is gone. We helped save journalism. Now just the NYT will do. Yes, I know the NYT isn’t perfect.)
• IMPORTANT: Log the joyless ticks that fill the spaces left by removing these things, the fresh weeds cropping up, because my distraction problem lies deeper than any technology. I delight in the erasure of my own consciousness. I demand immersive narrative, or a perfect work flow state; almost anything between is excruciating. Also, getting into flow is like getting in freezing water. I avoid doing it with time wasting tics.
• Meditate daily again, using some of the empty real estate

That’s more than enough to think about for now.

If you have had issues with interruptive technology, let me know what you have done to limit the damage in the comments below. It might be fun to share.

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.

So I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work, some time ago, and enjoyed it. I wrote a blog post about it, as I recall. That ten people read. Or whatever. One of the things Newport didn’t really tackle head-on was the full-bore evil of social media companies which prioritize engagement over the mental health of their users, and over the continued existence of democracy.

Oh, and of course, valuing engagement, clicks, hits, eyeballs, which means MONEY over, say, hundreds of thousands of extra folks dying in agony from the current plague.

So. Right. Facebook and Twitter are both fucking evil. Full stop. It’s not ‘how you use,’ the tools. These things are intrinsically bad for everyone. You can switch to a low tar cigarette by taking the app off your phone or avoiding your feed and using groups and sticking to small circles of friends, but the apps will resist every single thing you do to lessen the amount of time you use them.

They have to. They give you ‘friends’ but they are not your friend.

Social media is compelled by fiduciary responsibility to the shareholder to maximize short term profits, at the expense of their users time, sanity, privacy, their employees quality of life, public health, democracy, because that’s how capitalism works now, and social media, big tech in general, is as capitalistic as capitalism gets.

Move fast, break things. Democracy? Oops. Public health? Eh.

Anyway. Sidetracked there. Breathing heavily. Hey, you know what? That’s the rage I have welling up in me that hasn’t had an outlet, because I’m a few weeks into a FB and twitter fast. Look, I was never sweetness and light. My rage at my species that could create a paradise that instead actively destroys itself and the planet didn’t materialize overnight.

But the sensation, of living in that rage, constantly, of someone or something constantly poking a stick into the festering wound… that’s sorta a post millenium thing.

I responded to this political rage by writing, and sharing what I wrote, and… I was gonna say ‘building community’ around that but who knows what I was really doing. Spreading a disease? I did have folks tell me I was keeping them sane, back during the Bush administration, before Paul Krugman started saying exactly what I was saying with the NYT and a Nobel prize to back it up, as opposed to my BFA from Syracuse University and freelance design career.

I was addicted to writing mass emails that went out to yahoo groups. I had a few thousand readers. We tried to monetize the lists and use the money to work at lobbyists and got pretty much nowhere, netting a few thousand bucks over the eight years which we turned into trips taken to protests where we sold buttons and shirts and jumped up and down and watched our numbers underreported by the MSM. We tried to stop the wars, see, the useless wars that are finally ending now. We failed.

The wars that did nothing to make anyone safer, twenty years of burning billions of dollars and thousands of lives in vast stupid bonfires, to replace the Taliban with the Taliban and transform Saddam into ISIS.

Me and my people knew these wars were worthless. They were built on lies, that we knew they were lies, and we knew this before the first bombs were dropped. We were screaming at the top of their lungs. The best experts agreed–there were no weapons of mass destruction.

And you know–there weren’t.

Sad basoon music. Rage.

Anyway. So we can see that social media, primitive at the time, was this place where I played at politics, where I performed a political identity. Now I have known people that actually worked in politics, at the local, state, and national level, and so I knew in my heart of hearts that I was mostly doing nothing, sitting in a little virtual bar ranting at people to little or no effect.

But… Jesus, it felt like I was doing something. They wanted me to feel like I was doing something. Social media was designed to make me feel like I was doing something. 

Jumping up and down and bellowing at people, who were going to vote for the right people and donate to the right causes anyway, enjoyed my content, but they all read the NYT and WAPO and The Nation and The Atlantic and everything else, you know, stuff written by people who were paid enough to copyedit what they did.

I did a few real things. Showed up at a few protests that mattered. Shut down a right wing radio program. Worked for Liz Warren, on her first campaign. Donated some money here and there to campaigns, wrote some letters, did some call center stuff. That stuff mattered, and matters, and it is so, so, so boring and hard to do.

Going door to door, again,  you are only ever talking to the converted, trying to get a democrat to vote for the democrat, but in this case? Yeah, every now and then you actually make that happen.

Stacy Abrams did this, right? It mattered, what she did, and actually, it wasn’t just her, she was part of a huge huge effort. Of people doing stuff in the real damn world. If these activities had been confined to social media?

I can assure you, it would have come to nothing. Because social media likes things they way they are.

So we can see, for me, social media was part of a political life that began with listening to my father rant and rave about Nixon and watergate, listen to him dictate angry telegrams to the white house, the supreme court. That political life is significant, and it has counted for something, maybe, but every step forward was also a step back as I donated my time, my effort, my voice, my writing, for free, to comically evil techno billionaires.

Facebook elected Trump.

Now in a close election, you can say that about anyone, any small number of votes; the leftists too pure to vote for HRC, the POC unenthused by mass incarceration, that stayed home, the men who didn’t vote for her because she was a woman, the people she didn’t bother to court in the swing states that decided the electoral collage, and on and on, but one thing is certain.

The mis-information created by Russia, pushed through FB, elected Trump and Trump has killed us by the hundreds of thousands.

And every anti-trump FB post I wrote was gluing in eyeballs and generating revenue for a company that shrugged at white supremacy, at best, if it wasn’t an active campaign contributor. This company prioritizes its bottom line over everything else. This is what most companies do all the time, but when that company is an unregulated monopoly?

Yeah. That’s when we get epic tragedies on the scale of Trump.

So, Facebook and Facebook products make up, what, 20-40% of all internet traffic? You can’t get off Facebook if you’re a business, not really; we’re yolked to this thing. I can’t blame anyone for being on FB who has to be there. I’m not judging anybody but myself.

But you know? I don’t have to be on FB. And I blame myself for Trump, a little bit. I fought for HRC at the end, but not hard enough, and not for long enough. I didn’t think Trump could win, and if it hadn’t been for social media… he wouldn’t have. I didn’t know sick we were.

I didn’t realize the way the right-wing disinformation machine had dovetailed with facebook and youtube to sell white supremacy and conspiracy theory. Some science fiction writing, technology loving, naive fool remembered Google’s motto–don’t be evil, remembered the dream of an internet that made us smarter, instead of one that drove us mad and empowered idiots.

Oops.

So. That’s enough for now. That’s why we leave FB. Sure, it’s bad for us, blah blah blah. Ruined attention span and being intentional and whatever, I’ll talk about that later. But the one two punch… bad for you, and bad for everyone else? Bad for the country? Bad for humanity?

Yeah.

I gotta stop being part of this problem. I have to.

I have been amazed, over the years, at my love for Sue Grafton’s work, because so much of it consists of minutely observed details that have no bearing on plot whatsoever. Theme, tone, of course, is reflected in every part of the world, or rather the parts of it a POV or narrator chooses to call out, Grafton spends perhaps 10-20% of each of her books describing the interiors of spaces.

I’m one of those readers that let the specifics of a space wash over them, but tune into the details. I will not remember which wall the bookcase is shoved against, whether it’s opposite the king sized bed or the broken window, at all. There are readers that do, though.

But I do love me some details.

The interiors reflect the characters of the people that inhabit them; bring them into tighter focus.

The average private investigator in fiction will tell you the job is mostly boring details; Grafton makes you live every single one. The plot coupons, the stuff she uses to put her cases together, are completely invisible to me on every read. There’s so much detail to lose the important ones in. She has never once telegraphed an ending.

I have, at times, wondered how the hell she figured out what was going on; I have at times, been confused during the climax, because I have been mesmerized by all the ashtrays and tatty slip covers.

There’s a thing, where a writer describes some perfectly ordinary thing that you can’t recall anyone ever describing in prose before, and it makes you weirdly happy. I remember this during my first Salinger readings. I get that from Grafton a lot, in an among the turns of phrase we’ve all read ten thousand times.

Still, it’s an odd recommendation.

“Wanna read endless descriptions of rooms, houses, faces, lonely spaces, a made up stretch of coastline this detective runs every single goddamn morning?”

Turns out? You do.