The world, filtered through the apps, is not the world we want

The world, filtered through the apps, is not the world we want

This sounds spectacularly self-centered: that you can only quit a thing, or modify your usage of it, when it fails to serve you. But if we think of our phones and social media as addictive products, which they certainly are, then the classic addiction model makes sense: you only consider quitting when the negative impacts (the dead feeling of the soft-brain scroll, the loss of attention span, the weight of comparison, the exposure to trolls, the…

New on OnlySky: The benefits of disconnecting

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how the internet has made everyone connected all the time, and why we may want to think about reversing that trend. Thanks to computers in every home, smartphones in our pockets, smart-home appliances, and networked cars, the average middle-class Westerner spends their life at the center of a digital spiderweb of connectivity. But it seems clear that all this information hasn’t improved our li…

The benefit of disconnecting

Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... The acceleration of technology has put an endless river of information at our fingertips. Is this an unalloyed blessing? Is more information always better—or is there a point where it tips over into too much?The digital spiderwebIt used to take an active effort to connect to the internet. Most houses used to have one clunky desktop computer, hidden in the basement or in the corner of a …