Digital Minimalism • Cal Newport

Digital minimalism, the new method to regulate how you want to relate to technology: disconnect from the internet, reconnect with the real world.

Digital minimalists are already among us.

They are relaxed people who can have long conversations, lose themselves in a good book, do crafts or go for a run without constantly looking at their mobile phone.

Using common sense and adopting subtle techniques, Cal Newport will teach us when to use technology and when to do without it to fully enjoy the offline world and reconnect with ourselves.

Technology is not bad or good in itself, the key is to use it according to our values ​​and needs.

Excerpt from the book Digital Minimalism (Paidós), © 2019, Calvin C. Newport. © 2021 Translation: Montserrat Asensio Fernández. Courtesy granted under permission of Grupo Planeta México.

Cal Newport is Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. He is the author of five books and writes the popular blog Study Hacks,

whose purpose is to decipher the "codes to be successful" both in studies and at work.

Digital minimalism | Cal Newport

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Chapter 1

AN UNBALANCED ARMS RACE

THIS IS NOT WHAT WE EXPECTED

I remember the first time I heard about Facebook, it was the spring of 2004 and I was a senior in college when I started noticing more and more of my friends were talking about a website called www.thefacebook.com. The first person who showed me a Facebook profile was Julie, who was my girlfriend at the time and now she is my wife.

“I remember seeing it as insubstantial at the time,” he told me recently. “It had been sold to us as a virtual version of the printed student directory, something we could use to look up the boyfriends and girlfriends of our acquaintances.”

The keyword for this memory is "insubstantial." Facebook did not come into our world with the promise of radically transforming our social and civic lives. It was just one more diversion among many others. In the spring of 2004, people I knew who had profiles on were spending far more time playing Snood (a Tetris-like puzzle game that gained inexplicable popularity) than redefining their profiles or contacting their virtual friends.

"It was interesting," Julie summed up, "but it really didn't seem like we were going to spend a lot of time on it."

Three years later, Apple released the iPhone and sparked the mobile revolution. However, what many forget is that the original "revolution" that the device promised was much more modest than the actual impact that it ended up having. Today, smartphones have reshaped our experience of the world, offering a constant connection to a matrix of chatter and distraction. In January 2007, when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone during his famous speech at the MacWorld conference, the image was far less grand.

One of the main selling points of the original iPhone was that it integrated the iPod into the mobile phone, thus avoiding having to carry two different devices. (I remember thinking that was one of the great things about the iPhone when it was announced.) So when Jobs demoed the iPhone during the speech, he spent the first eight minutes of it explaining the multimedia features, before concluding. exclaiming, "That's the best iPod we've ever made!"

When it was released, another of the device's main selling points was based on the many ways it improved the phone call experience. At the time, it was big news that Apple forced AT&T to open up its voicemail system to give the iPhone a better interface. It was also clear on stage that Jobs was enamored with the ease with which you could scroll through phone numbers and the fact that the dial keys appeared on the screen instead of requiring permanent plastic buttons.

“Calls are the key app,” Jobs exclaimed to applause. He didn't mention features like improved messaging or internet access, which now dominate our use of cell phones, until he had been speaking for thirty-three minutes.

To confirm that this limited vision was not a quirk of Jobs' speech script, I spoke with Andy Grignon, one of the original iPhone team. "It was supposed to be an iPod that you could talk to on the phone," he confirmed. "Our main mission was to play music and make phone calls." As Grignon explained to me, Jobs initially rejected the idea that the iPhone was going to become some kind of all-in-one mobile computer that would run multiple third-party applications. "The day we let a brainless programmer write code that crashes it," Jobs told him one day, "is the day someone needs it to call 911."

When the first iPhone hit store shelves in 2007, there was no App Store, no social media notifications, no direct photo upload to Instagram, and no other reason to surreptitiously avert your gaze at the screen over dinner. And Steve Jobs had no problem with that, as did the millions of people who bought his first smartphone during that period. As with the early adopters of Facebook, few could have predicted how much our relationship with this brilliant new tool would change in the years that followed.

***

It is widely accepted that new technologies such as social media and smartphones have radically changed how we live in the 21st century. We can capture this change in multiple ways. I think the social critic Laurence Scott is quite right when he describes modern hyperconnected existence as one in which "a moment can be strangely monotonous if it exists solely in itself."

What I intend with these observations is to insist on something that many forget: that these changes, in addition to being colossal and transformative, were also unexpected and unplanned. It is highly unlikely that any of the college students who signed up to find classmates in 2004 could predict that the average modern user would spend an average of two hours per day on social media and associated messaging services and that almost half of that time would be dedicated only to Facebook products. Similarly, the first people who in 2007 opted for an iPhone for the music functionality would have been much less enthusiastic if they had been told that, in less than a decade, they would be staring at the screen compulsively 85 times a day. This is a "feature" that we know Steve Jobs never thought of while preparing his famous speech.

These changes caught us unawares and happened with great rapidity before we had even a chance to step back and ask ourselves what we really wanted from the rapid advances of the past decade. We add new technologies to the periphery of our existence for minor reasons, and wake up one morning to find that they have colonized the very depths of our daily lives. In other words, we did not expect the digital world in which we now find ourselves immersed. It is as if we have fallen face down into it.

We tend to forget about this nuance in the cultural conversation about these tools. In my experience, when concerns about new technologies are publicly discussed, techno-apologists are quick to defend themselves by steering the conversation toward their usefulness and, for example, presenting the case of struggling artists who found an audience through social media. social networks or deployed military members who can keep in touch with their families thanks to the WhatsApp app.* So they come to the conclusion that we cannot dismiss these technologies as useless, a tactic that is often enough to close the discussion.

The technoapologists are correct in their assertions, but they miss the point: the perceived usefulness of these tools is not the ground on which our growing ennui rests. If you ask a regular user of social networks why he uses Facebook or Instagram, he will surely give you reasonable answers. In all probability, each of these networks offers us something useful that would be difficult to find elsewhere: for example, the possibility of keeping up with the photos of our newborn nephew or using a hashtag to follow a social movement.

The origin of our uneasiness is not evident in these very specific cases, but it is visible when we look at the situation as a whole and realize how these technologies in general have managed to go far beyond the minor functions for which we chose them originally and end up dictating our behavior and emotions. Technological applications somehow force us to use them more than we ourselves consider healthy, and often at the expense of other activities that we find more interesting. In other words, what bothers us is the feeling of loss of control, a feeling that invades us in many different ways every day, such as when we get distracted by our phone during our child's bath time or when we lose the ability to enjoy ourselves. of a pleasant moment without the urgent desire to document it for a virtual audience.

The problem is not utility, but autonomy.

Of course, the next obvious question is how the hell did we get ourselves into this mess? In my experience, most people who have difficulties with the virtual side of their lives are not stupid or lacking in willpower. On the contrary, they are successful professionals, diligent students, and loving parents; they are organized people who are used to pursuing complex goals. And yet, the apps and websites that call to them from the other side of their mobile or tablet screens (unique among the many temptations they resist on a daily basis) have managed to expand and proliferate greatly. beyond its original functions.

A large part of the answer to the question of how this has happened is that many of these new tools are not at all as innocent as they might appear at first glance. People succumb to screens not out of laziness, but because billions of dollars have been invested to make that outcome inevitable. I have commented before that it seems that we have fallen headlong into a digital life that is not what we wanted. As I'll explain below, it's perhaps more accurate to say that high-end gadget companies and attention economy conglomerates have pushed us into it, because they've discovered that they can amass colossal fortunes in a culture dominated by gadgets and gadgets. Applications.

TOBACCO SELLERS IN T-SHIRT

Bill Maher ends episodes of his HBO show Real Time with a monologue that is often political. However, this was not the case on May 12, 2017, when he looked at the camera and said:

Social media moguls need to stop posing as god-like friendly brainiacs building a better world and start admitting that they are nothing more than T-shirt-clad tobacco salesmen selling addictive products to our children. Because let's face it, checking the number of likes is the new smoking.

Maher's concern regarding social media had to do with a 60 Minutes documentary that had aired a month earlier. The documentary is titled "Brain Hacking," and Anderson Cooper begins by interviewing a thin, red-haired engineer with the neatly trimmed stubble that characterizes young men in Silicon Valley. His name is Tristan Harris, and after founding a tech start-up and working as an engineer for Google, he strayed off the beaten track to do something decidedly unusual in this closed world: uncover reality and report it knowingly.

Early in the interview, Harris holds up his smartphone and claims it's a slot machine.

"What do you mean it's a slot machine?" Cooper asks.

"Well, every time I look at my phone it's like I'm playing the slot machine to see 'What did I win?'" Harris replies. "There's a whole manual of techniques that [tech companies] use to get us to use our phones for as long as possible."

"So, is Silicon Valley programming apps or people?" Cooper asks.

“They program people,” Cooper says. “There is always a narrative that claims that technology is neutral and that we are the ones who decide how to use it. And that's not true at all."

"Isn't technology neutral?" Cooper interrupts.

"No, it's not. They want us to use it in a certain way for long periods of time, because that's how they make money."

Bill Maher thought the interview reminded him of something. He played a snippet of the interview for the HBO audience and asked "Where have I heard this before?" Then, he reproduced Mike Wallace's famous interview with Jeffrey Wigand in 1995, in which the interviewee confirmed to the world what most of us already suspected: that tobacco companies adulterated cigarettes to make them even more addictive.

“Philip Morris just wanted your lungs. The App Store wants your soul," concludes Maher.

***

The transformation that led Harris to reveal the secrets of her industry is exceptional, in part because her life up to that point was pretty normal in Silicon Valley terms. Harris, who is in her mid-30s at the time of writing this book, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Like so many other engineers, he grew up hacking into his Macintosh and writing computer code. He studied computer science at Stanford University and, when he graduated, continued his training with a master's degree while working at B.J. Fogg's celebrated Persuasive Technology Lab, which studies how technology can be used to change the way people think and act. . Fogg is known in Silicon Valley as the "millionaire maker," referring to the large number of people who have passed through his lab and then applied what they learned to build lucrative tech companies (a group that includes, among other dotcom luminaries, to Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram). Harris followed the established itinerary and, once sufficiently schooled in the art of the interaction between the mind and technological devices, he dropped out of his master's degree and founded Apture, a technology company that used pop-up content to increase the time users spent on the websites.

In 2011, Google acquired Apture and Harris started working there. And it was at Google that Harris, now working on products that could affect the behavior of hundreds of millions of people, became concerned. After an eye-opening experience at Burning Man, Harris, in a move worthy of a Cameron Crowe script, wrote a 144-slide manifesto titled "A Call to Minimize Distractions and Respect Users' Attention" and sent it to a small group of friends on Google. He soon reached thousands of people in the company, including co-CEO Larry Page, who called him into a meeting to discuss those groundbreaking ideas. Page invented for Harris the title of "product philosopher."

However, nothing changed. In a 2016 interview in The Atlantic, Harris attributed the lack of change to the organization's "inertia" and a lack of clarity about what he stood for. Of course, the main cause of friction is almost certainly much simpler: minimizing distractions and respecting the user's attention would mean lower revenue. Compulsive use sells, something Harris now acknowledges when he says that the attention economy drives companies like Google into a "race to the bottom of the brainstem."

So Harris resigned and founded a nonprofit, Time Well Spent, whose mission is to demand technology that "works for us, not advertising"8 and went public with his warnings about how far the technology companies are willing to arrive to "hijack" our mind.

I live in Washington D.C. and here it is assumed that the biggest political scandals are those that confirm something negative that most people already suspected to be true. This may explain the fervor with which Harris's revelations were received. Shortly after his first remarks, he appeared on the cover of The Atlantic, was interviewed on 60 Minutes and PBS's NewsHour, and was invited to give a TED talk. For years, those of us who complained about the apparent ease with which people were becoming slaves to their cell phones had been accused of being alarmists. Then Harris came along and confirmed what many of us increasingly suspected to be true. These fancy apps and websites were not, as Bill Maher put it, gifts from "friendly godlike brainiacs building a better world." Rather, they had been designed to put slot machines in our pockets.

Harris had the moral courage to warn us of the dangers behind our devices. However, if we want to avoid their most pernicious effects, we need to better understand how they can so easily subvert our best intentions in relation to our lives. Luckily, we have a good guide who can help us achieve this goal. During the same years that Harris was grappling with the ethical dilemma posed by the impact of addictive technology, a young marketing professor at New York University devoted prodigious attention to figuring out exactly how this technology addiction works.

***

Prior to 2013, technology offered little interest as an object of study to Adam Alter.9 A business professor with a Ph.D. in social psychology from Princeton, Alter studied the broader question of how features of the world around us influence our thoughts and our behavior.

For example, Alter's doctoral thesis studies how casual connections between two people can affect how they feel about each other. "If you find out that you share a birthday with someone who has done something terrible," Alter explained to me, "you'll hate it more than if you didn't know that fact."

His first book, Drunk Tank Pink, cataloged numerous examples where seemingly insignificant environmental factors had led to major behavior changes. The title, for example, alludes to a study that showed that drunk and aggressive inmates at the US Army Correctional Facility in Seattle calmed down significantly after spending just fifteen minutes in a cell painted a particular shade of pink. gum, just like the Canadian children who studied in a classroom of that same color. The book also reveals that wearing a red shirt on a dating site profile will generate far more interest than any other color and that the easier your name is to pronounce, the faster you'll advance in the legal profession.

2013 marked a turning point in Alter's career, due to a cross-country flight from New York to Los Angeles. «I had plans for that trip: I was thinking of sleeping for a while and then doing some work, but while the plane was heading to the runway I started playing 2048, a simple strategy game on my mobile. When we landed six hours later, he was still hooked on the game," he explained.

After the publication of Drunk Tank Pink, Alter had started looking for a new research topic. And the search brought him back again and again to the same question: "What is the single factor that most shapes our lives today?" After his compulsive gaming experience during the six hours of the flight, the answer revealed itself precisely: the screens.

By now, many other people had begun to ask important questions about our apparently toxic relationship with new technologies like smartphones and video games, but Alter stood out from the rest with his background in psychology and, rather than address the issue as a cultural phenomenon, he focused on its psychological roots. This new point of view inevitably and clearly led Alter in a troubling direction: the science of addiction.

*This example is from my personal experience. In the fall of 2016, I went on a national radio show on CBC in Canada to discuss a column I wrote for The New York Times questioning whether social media promotes professional development. The presenter surprised me already at the beginning of the program when he invited an unexpected participant into the conversation: an artist who promotes his works on social networks. The most curious thing was that, during the interview, the artist admitted (spontaneously) that social networks were beginning to distract him too much and that he was now taking extended vacations from them to be able to advance in his work.