Whereas, if you think of the healthiest person you know, it’s almost certainly someone who has a named philosophy of health and fitness. They’re Paleo or Vegan or they’re a Crossfitter. They have some sort of philosophy that’s based on values they can believe in and it gives them a consistent way of dealing with these issues in their life. It’s ground into their values and doesn’t require them to make a lot of decisions on the fly.
I’ve noticed that the same thing is happening digitally. So everyone has read the same article about turning off notifications. Everyone has read the same article about doing a digital Shabbat once a week and it doesn’t seem to be working. So I became convinced that we basically need the digital equivalent of Veganism or Paleo or crossfit. Something that’s an actual philosophy of technology use. Something that you can say I am a digital minimalist, and this is what it means because it typically requires something like that to overcome strong cultural and biological forces. At least that’s what we’ve observed in a lot of different areas in human life.
You have previously defined digital minimalism in a number of ways. Is it an idea that’s evolved over time? And do you see it evolving into the future?
Yeah, I think so. In some sense, there’s two things going on here. The first contribution is more fundamental, which is just let’s start thinking in terms of philosophies. In that sense, I’m completely happy if another philosophy comes along for tech users. If a dozen philosophies come along for tech use, I would still be completely happy. What I would define as success is that we get to a place where when you ask people about how they use tech in their personal life, they have some philosophy. The idea is that you don’t just do this in an ad hoc fashion. I think if we get there, we’re gonna be in a much better place.
Now, is digital minimalism the right philosophy? Well, probably not for everyone. It seems to be working pretty well. I think it’s a good one. I came up with the term, but there were a lot of people who were doing this and just didn’t have a name for it. The people [who] take this on seem to be having a lot of success. So as a first philosophy, I think it’s a good one. But more important to me is the idea that most people have some philosophy when it comes to this part of their life.
There are a lot of people who try and frame you and digital minimalism as anti-technology, which is obviously not true. Are there any services or tools that you use that you think facilitate concentration, and deep work, and your work life?
As a computer scientist it would be self-defeating if I was anti-technology. That’d be a self-hating career case that I’d made. What I’m pro is critical engagement with technology.
其实,什么是科学上网呢?-小嵘源码博客:2021-10-31 · 这次,小编就来给大家说说关于“什么是科学上网?如何科学上网?”的问题。 科学上网 1)什么是科学上网呢? 实际上,科学上网是现在的网络流行用语,是指某种通过科学的方法绕过上网限制访问。 某种通过科学的方法绕过上网限制访问,利用vpn或者修改hosts文件的方法实行。
In terms of my own engagement with technology, especially in the personal sphere, I’ve never had a social media account. I do really like blogging though, I’m a huge booster of blogging. I think the social internet, which has been around since the early ‘90s, is a great way to express yourself, connect with people, and find interesting ideas. When I’m against social media, for example, I’m not against a social internet. I’m against the idea that we need to have one or two companies build their own private internet, behind a wall, guarded, in which they watch everything we do. I’m an old fashioned net nerd. I mean, learn some HTML! I have my own server with my own WordPress instance running on it. No one’s tracking any data on it and it’s all mine. That’s the type of thing that us old tech geeks get a lot of interest out of.
I have a smartphone, an old generation iPhone, but it doesn’t really have much on it. It’s my wife’s old phone. I’m on a laptop right now. I don’t web surf for the most part so I don’t have a cycle of sites I go through. I also don’t believe in bookmarks because my idea is it’s a perfect filtering tool. You can only remember so many websites so the ones you like the best will be the ones you remember. Whichever ones I happen to remember, those are probably the ones worth checking out anyways.
I have a tech footprint that is pretty similar to someone in the year 2001. I don’t look at my phone a lot. I don’t entertain myself with my computer that much but I have tools. I connect, I do things on the Internet, and so I’m like a circa 2001 tech denizen at this point.
In the past one or two years, we’ve seen a handful of tech companies going against the grain, taking a step away from what Facebook and Instagram are doing with attention economies. They’re maybe trying to build products and tools that make people happy rather than hold their attention. Is that something that you’ve seen as well?
电脑科学上网工具介绍 PC电脑免费伕理上网方法介绍 ...:2021-3-26 · 电脑科学上网工具介绍 PC电脑免费伕理上网方法介绍 admin 发布于 2021-09-18 分类:网络技术 评论(0) 现在这个社会生存还真困难,上个网也要被监视、审查,我就想说:世界那么大,我想出去看看! 下面我收集了一些电脑上用的科学上网软件,都是 ...
I think that it’s good for the internet. The more that we have smaller, more agile companies, and products, and people are piecing together more heterogeneous collection of tools. I think it is for the better.
There’s not a clear winner in this space yet, but there’s a lot of interesting movement going on. One thing I’ve been tracking has been this broader IndieWeb movement, which is trying to push people back towards this idea that you should have your own domain. You should have your own server. You should have your own WordPress instance. There could be tools to make this easier, but you own your own stuff, you’re posting your own stuff. Then there could be other services that come along that can help aggregate this.
Now, with the IndieWeb movement, there might be some sort of portal that you log into to help arrange content from a lot of people’s privately owned servers into a way that maybe it looks like a social media feed but they don’t own any of the information. That’s all on your server and you push your information to ten other services if you want to as well. I’m interested in this IndieWeb movement, of getting back to individuals owning their own data, expressing themselves not through the auspices of another company. It’s the original vision before the social media guys came along. I think that’s kind of interesting.
Also, I think different models, more niche social media where you pay. I think there’s a lot of interest in that. Where they don’t make money off trying to get you compulsively use it so now they can focus on things you actually care about.
The final thing I’ve written about recently is this network effect argument that the large social media platforms use to justify themselves, I think is largely built on hot air. This idea says that you have to have everyone on a service like Facebook before it’s useful, therefore no one else can compete because no one else will ever get a billion users. This is largely untrue because everyone always has access to the infrastructure that allows you to connect with people, communicate with people. It’s the internet and the associated protocols.
I think there’s a lot more room out there for niche and interesting behavior because we have this underlying universal framework already. We have email and HTML, and all these protocols that already exist and are free and completely decentralised. They already exist, so you don’t actually have to have a new private internet in order for people to find each other and communicate. I think there’s a lot more room for smaller and niche plays than the larger companies would want you to believe.
You’re talking about decentralization of power, which hasn’t been the way things work, historically. Do you see the tech space, and internet in particular, do you see that as being different?
Well, I think the social internet is largely decentralized and actually works really well. I came up in the age of the blogosphere, which actually worked out to be an incredibly effective decentralized publishing platform. People owned their own servers, people posted their own stuff, they connected to other people with hyperlinks. And reputation and visibility within this world grew as more links came to you, and those links came from people that themselves were more linked to. It’s the same logic that Sergey Brin and Larry Page used to come up with the original Page Rank algorithm that runs Google’s search engine. It worked really well, and it was a decentralized trust hierarchy, and it was pretty good at finding voices that were interesting and letting new voices in.
There was no centralized editorial overview or censorship. And yet, it did a really good job of implicitly censoring out the crazy stuff and giving emphasis to the good stuff because it was all humans making decisions. I want a link to this, this person that has a lot of links to them, which gives them social capital. Now they’re linking to this person, which gives them the social capital. It worked really well. That was essentially the original vision of the internet. Humans linking to other humans, information linking to information, itself creates this web. That’s where we got the original name, The World Wide Web. It’s really effective for expression and spreading information.
Maybe it’s because I used to work a floor above Tim Berners-Lee when I was at MIT but I think his vision is actually a powerful one. And stands in strong contrast to the alternative, which is that we need a company to build its own version of the internet. We all have to use this internet version two. But the difference between internet one and internet two is that also the company who built internet two watches every single thing you do.