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My notes on Digital minimalism, by Cal Newport

  • “A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimised activities which strongly support things you value and then happily miss out on everything else”
  • Two mechanisms for [[persuasive design]]: variable reinforcement and social approval but lots of design designs through which these can be pursued / even mild addiction can be a problem if there’s low barriers to indulging it
  • He identifies three principles for digital minimalism:
    • Clutter is costly
      • We tend to only focus on the value which digital tools bring us and not recognise the losses which come with them. For example if you spend ten hours on Twitter per week the limited benefits it returns (e.g. new connections, exposure to interesting ideas) are likely outweighed by this time. He suggests going to an interesting talk every month and chatting to three people when there.
      • The costs of our digital engagement tend to compound to produce a broader pattern of engagement which takes up many hours and only brings limited awards.
      • “The cumulative costs of the non-crucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises”
    • The return curve
      • The returns we get from our digital media use tend to decline with quantity, or rather the costs increase. For this reason we need to find ways to restrict our use to ensure we get what’s needed out of them while minimising our exposure to the costs.
      • This means we need to have protocols which restrict our use e.g. only watching netflix with friends, not installing social media apps on our phones.
    • Living intentionally
      • Is it going to be helpful? Or is it going to be detrimental? Will it help our community? Or detract from it? What will the impact be on the things the community value most?
  • He talks about a prioritisation of communication over reflection, as if we don’t reflect through communication. What I find frustrating is how he ignores thinking together as a salient feature of our shared lives. There’s a sense in which thinking together can even be an internal process in so far as that we are grappling with real or imagined interlocutors. He defines [[solitude]] as a freedom from the input of other minds. In this sense he is reasserting a liberal individualism in which we need a sealed domain of mental privacy in order to keep the capacity to act in autonomous ways.
  • Newport explicitly dismisses social crisis explanations (e.g. gen Z are anxious because they see the planet is fucked) and suggests adolescent mental health entirely explained by the ‘complete elimination of solitude’. This psychological imperialism is really crude and the fact he doesn’t see the need to further justify it is itself quite telling.
  • I like the idea of operating procedures for technology which specify how and when you use devices. These should be informed by specific rather than general statements of value which identify concrete conditions under which it does things for you rather than for people in general. This expectation of specific conditions makes it much easier to see how the value of technology to us can be inflated, leaving us over estimating the benefits and underestimating the costs.
  • It’s interesting that Newport ignores the infrastructural requirements for smart phones e.g. two step authentication, online banking. The costs involved in not having a smart phone are rising quickly and dramatically.
  • I find his account of active leisure extremely compelling. He’s suggesting that we need to use our free time in ways which are fulfilling in their own terms rather than serving other purposes i.e. what Macintye would call ‘internal goods’. Unless we find this purpose in our leisure activities the pseudo-activity of social media will inevitably retain its appeal. He makes the inspiring case that we don’t need ‘downtime’ (in which we passively consume content) but rather switching between different types of activity and different types of pleasure we might take in them.
  • He advocates default blocking as a solution to the problem of multi-use computing. The fact our computers enable us to do a vast range of things can often be distracted. It means we try and do multiple things concurrently rather than taking advantage of this functionality sequentially. By blocking things like social media as default unless we really want to use them, it becomes much easier to ensure that we don’t get pointlessly distracted.
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