David Pennington

If Aldous Huxley had known about endlessly scrolling short videos from a handheld device, he would have made it the preferred media interface of his Brave New World .

He wisely understood—unlike Orwell or Bradbury—that ruling elites don’t need censorship and book-burning if they can convince people to voluntarily abandon literacy.

The pleasure of this depraved human state lies, I think, in the contradiction: Resting in the literal physical sense, persisting in the toxic spiritual one. It’s a state that suggests a low tolerance for understimulation, a common modern condition.

I was supposed to be the example. I was supposed to be the good influence. It was only a matter of time until there was a division between “I should do this” and “I want to do that.” In my youth, there is the universal idea that my enjoyment always comes at the cost of someone else’s despair. How can you rest when your neighbor is working?

Addressing those who are critical of using the technology in this way, Zuckerberg said, “If you think that something someone is doing is bad, and they think it’s really valuable, most of the time, in my experience, they’re right and you’re wrong, and you just haven’t come up with a framework yet for understanding why the thing that [they’re] doing... See more

It’s not that Krishnamurti saw the mind as anything close to a computer. While a computational functionalist might argue that building a mind is as simple as building a machine, Krishnamurti believed our minds are so much more. But he worried we were selling ourselves short, letting our minds get stuck in mechanical routines like memory and... See more

atomization encourages us to reduce multivariate experiences, often the most important parts of life, to their single most obvious element

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.

If the early internet was serving beer and wine that brought people together, today’s internet is dealing crack and fentanyl that tears people apart. The consumer isn’t winning when they are addicted to a product that makes them unhappy, and when they are spending hours each day using products they would pay money to make disappear.

Boredom has a purpose. To understand and harness it, we need to give our minds more opportunities to experience it. In the rest of this post, I will explore the many ways our efforts to conquer boredom through technology have produced unintended consequences, including the near-total capture of our attention, the death of daydreaming, and the end... See more