Unplugging Is Not The Solution You Want

Instead of pointing out, “What tech is doing to us...” what if we asked, “What are we doing to

ourselves

?”

This past year I ate at a restaurant which placed cute, chest-like boxes on each table. It was a gentle, decorative nudge to place your phones in there while dining. I loved it . Past tense. After the third time eating there, I thought: “ How... See more

By portraying our opponents as beyond persuasion, social media sorts us into ever more hostile tribes, then rewards us, with likes and shares, for the most hyperbolic denunciations of the other side, fuelling a vicious cycle that makes sane debate impossible. We mustn’t let Silicon Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time... See more

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

... See more

You could say that our current technological arrangement has spread out too far, and it is starting to look and feel wrong. Fortunately, we can treat this over-expansion just like everything else I’ve mentioned. We can draw a line, and create a point of reassembly for what we’ve made. We can think about how to shift, move, and resize the pieces so ... See more