“When it comes to community in particular, digital technology presents two interrelated dilemmas: (1) Digital technology has created the ability — and ensuing pressure — for us to “optimize” and be productive always, which often comes at the expense of time and energy spent building deep community. (2) Many digital technologies offer us the illusio... See more

Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are engines of distraction and cultural rot. They stand in front of the more difficult but more rewarding aspects of life: deep work, intimate connections with friends and loved ones, focused attention for hobbies with intrinsic rewards. By training users to crave constant novelty and the immediate approval of an... See more

This misuse of one of the most precious aspects of being alive is ubiquitous. Our children are growing into a severely fragmented world, our bodies are showing the illnesses of disconnection, and our communities are divided. Politics and technology are merging into an alarming communication horror story with AI to categorize us all into our algorit... See more

Unfortunately, the patterns of our techno-social order tend toward the fracturing of community and the isolation of the person. We are offered an array of tools that promise to assuage the resulting economic and psychic precarity, but, more often than not, their real aim implicit in their design is to perpetuate and accelerate social fragmentation ... See more

The insincerity, the rampant performativity, the illusion of urgency, the obsession with constructing futures at the expense of the present – for better or worse, these are all things I associate with being a technologist. And when I speak to my technologist friends, most of them share the same inkling that something is amiss .

Far too many of us g... 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

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Today, we are rapidly becoming ‘tech-vexed’ – my word for the gradual yet relentless seduction of computerised life. The COVID-19 pandemic simply accelerated a trend: many of us are now more intimately connected to smartphones than to nonmediated relationships with people. The net result of this insular life is that relationships with ourselves and... See more