Against Waldenponding

But as an attitudinal foundation for relating to society and technology, Waldenponding is, I am convinced, a terrible philosophy at both a personal and collective level.  It's a world-and-life negation. A kind of selfish free-riding/tragedy of the commons: not learning to handle your share of the increased attention-management load required t

The reason the unplugging doesn't work for most people is not that the Evil Platform Companies are trying to hack your attention and turn you into a helpless addict (though they are) but because you rationally realize  you need a job in the GSCITC. (Giant social computer in the cloud)

FOMO is good. Being plugged in is good. There is valuable info at all levels from twitter gossip to philosophy books. You should stay plugged in. You can manage anxiety and beat the House without resorting to shaming social platforms into managing attention for you. That's a terrible yielding of agency.

If you don't manage your information economy career, you will default to the lowest-level job in the social computer: processing very low-latency information with small-minded cognition (bottom left) for small bets. It's the equivalent of low-level bug reporting/testing.

It's not addictive FOMOing that kills you, but not being able to translate the information consumption/production choices you're making into winning bets.

The fact of the matter is that information distribution has become free/cheap, so the firehose is going to have flows at all timescales, time constants, and abstraction levels no matter what designers and advertisers want or don't want.  It's the information firehose itself that's creating this environment not evil designers.

Whether you choose a Soft or Hard Waldenponding, and whether you choose it as an occasional break or a regularly scheduled retreat, just recognize that it is not a self-evidently more "moral" attitude then getting your mind all dirty and entangled in the "toxic" information streams.

For several years now, I've been developing a growing discomfort with a philosophy of relating to technology I call  Waldenponding  (after Thoreau's Walden Pond experiment on which  Walden  is based). The crude caricature is "smash your smart phone and go live in a log cabin to reclaim your attention and your life from being ha