Cal NEWPORT
Digital minimalism - On living better with less technology
New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2019, 903 blzn. (epub)
ISBN-13: 978 05 2554 2872

(7) Introduction

"In September 2016, the influential blogger and commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote a 7,000-word essay for New York magazine titled “I Used to Be a Human Being.” Its subtitle was alarming: “An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too.”"(7)

"I began more seriously researching and writing on this topic, trying to both better understand its contours and seek out the rare examples of those who can extract great value from these new technologies without losing control."(18)

"In my work on this topic, I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else."(22)

"Of the different philosophies I studied, however, there was one in particular that stood out as a superior answer for those looking to thrive in our current moment of technological overload. I call it digital minimalism, and it applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools."(23)

[Dit boek is ook en misschien wel vooral een zelfhulpboek.]

(36) Part 1 - Foundations

(36) 1 - A Lopsided Arms Race

"We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life. We didn’t, in other words, sign up for the digital world in which we’re currently entrenched; we seem to have stumbled backward into it."(45)

"The techno-apologists are right in their claims, but they’re also missing the point. The perceived utility of these tools is not the ground on which our growing wariness builds. If you ask the average social media user, for example, why they use Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, they can provide you with reasonable answers. Each one of these services probably offers them something useful that would be hard to find elsewhere: the ability, for example, to keep up with baby pictures of a sibling’s child, or to use a hashtag to monitor a grassroots movement.
The source of our unease is not evident in these thin-sliced case studies, but instead becomes visible only when confronting the thicker reality of how these technologies as a whole have managed to expand beyond the minor roles for which we initially adopted them. Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable. What’s making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control—a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child’s bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience.
It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy."(46-48)

"As I’ll argue next, it’s probably more accurate to say that we were pushed into it by the high-end device companies and attention economy conglomerates who discovered there are vast fortunes to be made in a culture dominated by gadgets and apps."(50)

"[Tristan] Harris had the moral courage to warn us about the hidden dangers of our devices. If we want to thwart their worst effects, however, we need to better understand how they’re so easily able to subvert our best intentions for our lives. Fortunately, when it comes to this goal, we have a good guide. As it turns out, during the same years when Harris was wrestling with the ethical impact of addictive technology, a young marketing professor [Adam Alter] at NYU turned his prodigious focus to figuring out how exactly this techno-addiction works."(61)

"By this point, of course, others had already started asking critical questions about our seemingly unhealthy relationship with new technologies like smartphones and video games, but what set Alter apart was his training in psychology. Instead of approaching the issue as a cultural phenomenon, he focused on its psychological roots. This new perspective led Alter inevitably and unambiguously in an unnerving direction: the science of addiction." [mijn nadruk] (65)

Psychologene definiëren verslaving als volgt:

"Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences."(67)

"First, our new technologies are particularly well suited to foster behavioral addictions. As Alter admits, the behavioral addictions connected to technology tend to be “moderate” as compared to the strong chemical dependencies created by drugs and cigarettes."(69)

"The second thing that became clear to Alter during his research is even more disturbing. Just as Tristan Harris warned, in many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features." [mijn nadruk] (70)

"I want to briefly focus on two forces from this longer treatment that not only seemed particularly relevant to our discussion, but as you’ll soon learn, repeatedly came up in my own research on how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval."(71)

"Let’s now consider the second force that encourages behavioral addiction: the drive for social approval. As Adam Alter writes: “We’re social beings who can’t ever completely ignore what other people think of us.”"

[Het lijkt me onzinnig om er van uit te gaan dat dat iets is dat we 'van nature' zouden hebben. Biologisch determinisme als verklaring van gedrag is altijd te simpel en schuift de verantwoordelijkheid voor ons eigen gedrag af op iets of iemand anders. Waarom willen mensen aardig gevonden worden en erbij horen? Dat is iets sociaals. Je moet niet, je laat het gebeuren.]

"As I just detailed, we’ve been engaging in a lopsided arms race in which the technologies encroaching on our autonomy were preying with increasing precision on deep-seated vulnerabilities in our brains, while we still naively believed that we were just fiddling with fun gifts handed down from the nerd gods."(90)

[In feit is ook dit gewoon weer evolutionaire psychologie. ]

(91) 2 - Digital Minimalism

Eerst maar eens de definitie

"Digital Minimalism - A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else."(95)

"The problem is that small changes are not enough to solve our big issues with new technologies. The underlying behaviors we hope to fix are ingrained in our culture, and, as I argued in the previous chapter, they’re backed by powerful psychological forces that empower our base instincts. To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation." [mijn nadruk] (93)

[Nu komt ineens de cultuur om de hoek kijken samen met waarden en normen. Uiteraard is dat veel belangrijker dan 'instincten'.]

"This argument sounds absurd to digital minimalists, because they believe that the best digital life is formed by carefully curating their tools to deliver massive and unambiguous benefits. They tend to be incredibly wary of low-value activities that can clutter up their time and attention and end up hurting more than they help. Put another way: minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good."(98)

"Before I can ask you to experiment with digital minimalism in your own life, however, I must first provide you with a more thorough explanation for why it works. My argument for this philosophy’s effectiveness rests on the following three core principles:
Principle #1: Clutter is costly.
Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.
Principle #2: Optimization is important.
Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology.
Principle #3: Intentionality is satisfying.
Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. This source of satisfaction is independent of the specific decisions they make and is one of the biggest reasons that minimalism tends to be immensely meaningful to its practitioners.
The validity of digital minimalism is self-evident once you accept these three principles. With this in mind, the remainder of this chapter is dedicated to proving them true."

"It’s important for our purposes to understand this more pragmatic side to Walden, as Thoreau’s often overlooked economic theory provides a powerful justification for our first principle of minimalism: that more can be less."(119)

"This is why clutter is dangerous. It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life. This is also what makes Thoreau’s new economics so relevant to our current moment."(129)

"The reason I’m introducing this idea from economics in this chapter on digital minimalism is the following: if you’re willing to accept some flexibility in your definition of “production process,” the law of diminishing returns can apply to the various ways in which we use new technologies to produce value in our personal lives."(134)

"These observations dismiss the popular belief that the Amish reject all new technologies. So what’s really going on here? The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology perfor"(151)

"Kevin Kelly goes a step further and claims that it’s a form of modernity that we cannot ignore given our current struggles."(154)

"Pulling together these pieces, we arrive at a strong justification for the third principle of minimalism. Part of what makes this philosophy so effective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to avoid."(164)

(166) 3 - The Digital Declutter

"Assuming I’ve convinced you that digital minimalism is worthwhile, the next step is to discuss how best to adopt this lifestyle."(167)

"As noted earlier, the second part of this book will provide ideas and strategies for shaping your digital minimalist lifestyle into something sustainable over the long term. My suggestion, however, is to start with this declutter, and then once your transformation has begun, turn to the chapters that follow to optimize your setup."(170)

[Nu komt er een soort zelfhulpadvies en dat interesseert me niet of nauwelijks.]

(218) Part 2 - Practices

(218) 4 - Spend Time Alone

"You can enjoy solitude in a crowded coffee shop, on a subway car, or, as President Lincoln discovered at his cottage, while sharing your lawn with two companies of Union soldiers, so long as your mind is left to grapple only with its own thoughts. On the other hand, solitude can be banished in even the quietest setting if you allow input from other minds to intrude. In addition to direct conversation with another person, these inputs can also take the form of reading a book, listening to a podcast, watching TV, or performing just about any activity that might draw your attention to a smartphone screen. Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be."(237)

(309) 5 - Don’t Click “Like”

"In the pages ahead, I’ll detail the ways in which our brains evolved to crave rich social interaction, and then explore the serious issues caused when we displace this interaction with highly appealing, but much less substantial, electronic pings. I’ll then conclude by suggesting a somewhat radical strategy for the digital minimalist looking to sidestep these harms while maintaining the advantages of new communication tools—a strategy that puts these new forms of interaction to work supporting the old."(316)

"The idea that real-world interactions are more valuable than online interactions isn’t surprising. Our brains evolved during a period when the only communication was offline and face-to-face. As argued earlier in the chapter, these offline interactions are incredibly rich because they require our brains to process large amounts of information about subtle analog cues such as body language, facial expressions, and voice tone. The low-bandwidth chatter supported by many digital communication tools might offer a simulacrum of this connection, but it leaves most of our high-performance social processing networks underused—reducing these tools’ ability to satisfy our intense sociality."(342)

(390) 6 - Reclaim Leisure

"Inspired by these observations, the goal of this chapter is to help you cultivate high-quality leisure in your own life. The three sections that follow each explore a different lesson about what properties define the most rewarding leisure activities. These are followed by a discussion of the somewhat paradoxical role new technology plays in these activities, and then a collection of concrete practices that can help you get started cultivating these high-quality pursuits."(400)

"We might tell ourselves there’s no greater reward after a hard day at the office than to have an evening entirely devoid of plans or commitments. But we then find ourselves, several hours of idle watching and screen tapping later, somehow more fatigued than when we began. As Bennett would tell you—and Pete, Liz, and Teddy would confirm—if you instead rouse the motivation to spend that same time actually doing something—even if it’s hard—you’ll likely end the night feeling better. Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption."(416)

"My core argument is that craft is a good source of high-quality leisure. Fortunately, when it comes to supporting this argument, treatises on the value of craft are numerous... Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world."(419)

"These benefits of old-fashioned, in-person playing help explain why even the fanciest video games and shiniest mobile entertainments haven’t ruined the board game industry. Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions."(435)

"Fortunately, this circularity is easily broken. The state I’m helping you escape is one in which passive interaction with your screens is your primary leisure. I want you to replace this with a state where your leisure time is now filled with better pursuits, many of which will exist primarily in the physical world. In this new state, digital technology is still present, but now subordinated to a support role: helping you to set up or maintain your leisure activities, but not acting as the primary source of leisure itself. Spending an hour browsing funny YouTube clips might sap your vitality, while—and I’m speaking from recent experience here—using YouTube to teach yourself how to replace a motor in a bathroom ventilation fan can provide the foundation for a satisfying afternoon of tinkering."(455)

(500) 7 - Join the Attention Resistance

"Pulling together these pieces of evidence points to a clear conclusion: if you’re going to use social media, stay far away from the mobile versions of these services, as these pose a significantly bigger risk to your time and attention. This practice, in other words, suggests that you remove all social media apps from your phone. You don’t have to quit these services; you just have to quit accessing them on the go."(523)

(580) Conclusion

"A telegraph message or phone call or email or social media ping is somehow different. We lack an intuition for flowing electricity and the complex components that control it, and the concept of back-and-forth conversation existing outside the context of two people talking in close proximity is completely foreign to our species’ history. The result is that we’ve always struggled to imagine the consequences of the electronic communication revolution started by Samuel Morse, and often find ourselves scrambling to make ex post facto sense of its impacts on our world."(589)

"compulsive communicating and connecting—supported by mysterious, almost magical innovations in radio modulation and fiber-optic routing—swept our culture before anyone had the presence of mind to step back and re-ask Thoreau’s fundamental question: To what end?"(588)