There’s a popular thread that makes the rounds with increasing frequency in which we lament our fragmented, jittery, manipulated attention economy and the nervous lives that we get in that realm, and the antidotes tend to go by neat-sounding titles like “the revenge of analog” or “going analog,” all amusingly laid out in detail on means of communication that are clearly digital, like online video, “social” media, and podcasts, among other channels of interpersonal communication that are the realm of the world on this side of the computer revolutions that have brought us here.
I don’t disdain the digital, though—I adore digital things, like digital communication, digital synthesis, digital tools for composing, editing, and distributing new ideas and creative work. Where I land is more that when we feel anxiety about the pace of the world, and the way so much of it gives us less joy than frustration and exploitation. It’s not the digital that gets me—it’s the corporate invasion of our attention and the way these tools have become increasingly enshittified by corporate owners who care for nothing but quick profit and regard the users as data to be mined, and “content creators” (and to be clear, fuck that phrase and every stupid asshole who uses it, regardless of whether they’re the bad guys who invented it or the suckers who took the bait).
We live in an era where we shouldn’t be struggling for time and the energy to be social, and it’s pretty clear how we were tricked into handing over our resources to people who don’t value us in exchange for the pittance of easyish connections and the consequent feeling that we need to be constantly connected, checking in, scrolling through, and engaging, because otherwise we’ll have to face the terrifying prospect of occasionally experiencing silence or a moment where we’re not caught up in the firehose of scroll because we’ve become trained to fear missing out on anything.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
—Blaise Pascal, Penseés
But we’re not, as yet, forced into this hyperactive world of chattering nonsense, advertising, and techbro-wet-dream doomscrolling bullshit. We can still talk, still meet, still enjoy phone calls, letters, and moments together…or on our own.
So I’m going to move slower, unplug more and more, balancing the benefits of these tools against their costs and consequences, and I’m sure I’ll miss out on a lot of the stuff that the algorithms, beancounters, influencers, and marketing types insist I can’t live a happy modern life without, and you know what? Fuck it.
The people who care know where to find me, whether it’s here on my own site (self-hosted and controlled by me and not some ravening invasive CEO or private equity gestalt. Let’s see where things stand in a month, when we fire up another year in a shaky climate of rampaging assholes, and then a month after that, and after that.
I control my speed, and for now, it’s going to be slow.
Try to keep up.
© 2024 Joe Belknap Wall