Of Analog and Offline Things

All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working

... See more

This isn’t to say the digital won’t remain, or even that it won’t remain the primary medium. Rather, I think there are going to be more efforts to make the digital experience more human, to shift our relationships with it. Some say AI threatens this, I say it only reinforces it: nobody, really, likes AI, and our general distaste for it is going to... See more

We create more than ever, but it weighs nothing.

AI now promises results without the reckoning, but frictionless creation leads to weightless rewards. No one dreams of merely pushing a button to generate their magnum opus. The output matters, but the intention, the struggle, the care is what makes it count — what gives it weight…

Weight is tangible

... See more

I’m convinced that it’s going to become a straightforwardly high-status, elite play to renounce phones, social media, and many other aspects of digital culture. In a world of insane information abundance and always-on connection, reclaiming the stillness of your own mind will be akin to flying private.

If I’m right, we’ll see a growing divide

... See more

Arriving at Camp Grounded, visitors passed through a “cultish tech-check tent run by the International Institute of Digital Detoxification,”4 where they recited a pledge, watched a five-minute video involving sock puppets, and handed their phones over to camp guides wearing hazmat suits, who sealed them in plastic bags labeled “biohazard.” They

... See more