Unplugging Is Not the Solution You Want

Trigger agency by reminding ourselves how digital environments offer us endless possibilities of access, authorship and agency, not constraint

What we need is realistic

digital and media literacy from frank confrontations and discussion.

Instead of falling into endless content holes, how can we congregate and self-teach ourselves material which was once worth tens of thousands of dollars behind an ivy academic wall, and is now free on YouTube this very second?

It takes a certain privilege to opt out.

Most dramatic yet least questioned, AirPods and wearables continue to break sales records... Our tech is increasingly on and inside of our bodies. So much for “getting away.”

Exist, not exit.

I’m no transhumanist or accelerationist, but I am however interested in adaptation and resilience over rejection and denial. We could be a lot happier, healthier and again productive if we allocated a fraction of our time and energy on conditioning ourselves to new environments and ideas, instead of fervently stressing to avoid the... See more

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

Our strength should not be measured by our ability to push away our tech, but by our ability to hold and live with tech in peace.

In his latest work, Program or Be Programmed , the 15th anniversary edition, Rushkoff proposes four methods to avoid being programmed by digital technology, and to instead become the programmers of our world.

What we require is to:

1. Denaturalize power by revealing social constructions which are ideas we merely invented, and are not pre-existing laws w

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