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 morefreddiedeboer.substack.com • You Are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.
... See moreWe 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
One of the greatest tragedies of modern technology is entire generations afraid to sit with their own thoughts.
Bryce Robertsx.comJCCFS
folkschool.org
Inspiration for an offline adult summer camp.
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 moreJenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
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
Digital platforms used to bring our physical lives online, but now that we have uniquely digital experiences and relationships, we don’t have products that let us successfully bring those offline.