Digital intentionality: What's the point?

mingyuan

Going into November, I wanted to write a sequence of blog posts that would convince people to practice digital intentionality, and show them how to do it.

The theory of change was something like: A lot of people have written books on this topic, and they sometimes work to change people’s behavior. But the people who need the message the most aren’t reading books, because they can’t. The only things they read are online, so I should write to them online, on a platform that they’re already on, like Substack.

This was not crazy. But I now feel that it was confused.

Where was I coming from?

Reading Digital Minimalism led me to completely change my life. I was catastrophically miserable, and digital minimalism allowed me to fix that.

This experience filled me with a proselytizing urge. I looked around at my friends and family, and saw them all enslaved to their screens, and I imagined how much happier and more fulfilled they could be if they only got free.

Despite my zealousness (and/or perhaps a little bit because of it), I’ve only had one friend ask me to help them do a digital declutter in the two years that I’ve been talking up digital intentionality. Others keep saying they ‘should’ do one soon but never get around to it. Really low hit rate.

The thing is — the thing that I avoided mentioning in the posts I released in early November — is that digital intentionality is really fucking hard. It requires massive sustained commitment, and real sacrifices. Even I, who am publicly committed to it, strongly believe that it’s good for me, and have designed my entire life around it, find it to be a Sisyphean struggle.

Anyone who sets out to practice digital intentionality is fighting against multiple overwhelming tides: not only the engineering that makes our devices addictive, but also the social pressure and norms that have formed around the new order. Not having a smartphone with you at basically all times is an enormous inconvenience. And you can’t just unilaterally decide to live in the world as it would be without constant connectivity — that world is not there to be lived in, and creating something like it around yourself is hard.

What do I want?

I want it to be possible for the people I care about to be in control of how they spend their lives. I want people to not be actively on their phones while they’re also actively driving vehicles. I want children to play with each other. I want to be able to speak to the people around me as if we live in a society together, rather than everyone being walled off in their own highly-optimized personal cocoons.

But my current approach, of trying to convince people to convert to digital intentionality like I did, is so much effort for such an infinitesimal drop in the ocean. What are the alternatives?

Regulation

In an ideal world, I’d want regulation. Social media and smartphones are in the equivalent of the early days of the tobacco industry: everyone is fucking addicted, the extremely rich companies that produce them have every incentive to keep it that way, and there is basically no regulation at all. Digital intentionality as currently practiced is the equivalent of smoking cessation interventions for individuals — it’s good to innovate there, but it’s never going to solve the problem on its own.

Infinite scroll could be illegal. Autoplaying videos could be illegal. Black-box algorithms that end up promoting outrage just to keep eyeballs on the screen could be illegal. Ad-funded platforms could be illegal — everything could have to be subscription- or donation-based, which would remove much (though not all) of the pressure to be ever engineering new ways to keep users spending more and more time on their screens.

I want this, but I have no idea how to make it happen, and getting involved in politics is my worst nightmare.

Digital intentionality at the community level

Maybe more attainable, I want digital intentionality for communities and not just individuals. I want children raised without screens. I want homes and group houses with a landline, no WiFi, and only a single desktop computer. That’s what life was like just a couple decades ago; it shouldn’t sound insane to contemplate returning to it.

I want an assurance contract where fifty people in my community agree to do a month of digital intentionality at the same time. I have been too afraid to propose this seriously, but it’s the only concrete plan I’ve come up with.

So what now?

I’m not sure. The problem is vast and all-encompassing, and most of the things I want feel impossibly far out of reach. But there are things that I can do now, so I’ll focus on three of those.

Community assurance contract

If you have thoughts on why an assurance contract is a good or bad idea, or how I can actually implement it in a way that’s good, I would love to hear them.

The current idea is: People in the SF Bay community sign up to do a month of digital intentionality if and only if at least forty-nine other people agree to do the same. That month is maybe March (not a lot of people traveling, also it’s Lent). And assuming it actually happens, we set up events that month, like various rationalist houses having an open-door policy on specific days.

I don’t know, it’s all very vague at this point.

Coaching?

If you are interested in doing a thirty-day digital declutter yourself, I’d be interested in seeing how it goes to coach someone through that. In person would be best, but if you’re serious about it, I’m happy to work with you remotely. This would be free.

There seems to be something in the air. I just had a conversation with Gen-Z teenager (who has never known a world without this stuff) about a new movement called Technoromanticism that solves this problem in a really cool way, and then right after I posted my blog post I noticed yours.

Infinite scroll could be illegal. Autoplaying videos could be illegal. Black-box algorithms that end up promoting outrage just to keep eyeballs on the screen could be illegal. Ad-funded platforms could be illegal

Seems like this would have massive free speech implications. The obvious difference between tobacco and digital content is that digital content is speech, tobacco is not, and legal restrictions on speech have a rather unpleasant history.

I'm definitely more open to your community level interventions, though I don't think I can go to no wifi and one desktop computer in the house, and I'm not sure if that is what you mean by "digital intentionality" or if you have some lesser standard that you would want everyone to pledge to? Like, I could definitely benefit from less youtube in my life.

The obvious difference between tobacco and digital content is that digital content is speech, tobacco is not, and legal restrictions on speech have a rather unpleasant history.

We are so lucky the tobacco companies didn't think of printing some texts on the cigarettes.

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. Are you suggesting that printing text of some kind on cigarettes would have created some kind of Free Speech Clause barrier to regulations on cigarettes? Because I don't think that's true.

It was a joke. But trying to get "speech" involved in your product seems like an obvious idea if you want to get some constitutional projection. It just probably wouldn't work with literally food.

Even outside of food, if there is a regulation that targets the product irrespective of what text is printed on it, printing text on it will not defeat the regulation.

I agree that regulation could solve some problems, but I keep thinking about other solutions.

Many people do not decide in detail what their communication infrastructure looks like. They choose one of the existing solutions, and sometimes all simple solutions suck.

For example, I wanted to have a blog. Decades ago, I tried to program my own content management system in PHP, which in hindsight was incredibly stupid. I wasted lots of time creating a barely working product with minimum functionality. I should have spent that time writing the articles instead, even if I'd have to post them as HTML pages with no interaction. It took me months of works, with fewer than 10 articles total.

Then I decided to switch on an existing system instead of creating my own. There was a newspaper that included a blogging section open for everyone, so I created by blog there. My writing productivity increased by an order of magnitude. Now I didn't have to write and maintain the code, only to write the text and add a few pictures. But the framework was no longer under my control. If the owners wanted to display ads next to my article, or track my readers, there was nothing I could do about that. (A few years later I have abandoned the system; not because of any of these reasons, but because I was not allowed to moderate the comment section, and it got too bad for my taste.)

Today I have a blog on Substack. There are no automatically playing ads and similar things. There may be other annoying things, such as the buttons telling you to subscribe. Whenever these annoyances are optional, I avoid them.

My point is, doing everything myself is too much work, and when I use someone else's system, I don't have the control. My blog on Substack is much better than my previous blog, but it's not because of me. It is because I now have an option, infrastructure, that I didn't have previously. However, if tomorrow Substack decided to add automatically playing videos under my articles, my options would be to either give up, or try finding another imperfect solution.

If someone could create something like Substack, but technically better, and less annoying and more respecting of privacy, I would be happy to move there. Similarly, if someone invented a less annoying version of Facebook, that would still be simple enough for my mother to use.

But these things cost money, and are typically created with a profit motive. And once you do something with a profit motive, it is tempting to start profit maximizing... and then you get all the bad things.

A possible solution would be to create a non-profit organization for creating alternative infrastructure. Simple to use, so that a person with almost zero tech skill could start using it in five minutes. Perhaps with some way to make money (e.g. I think it is fair when Substack takes a fraction of the subscriber money; generally, if you help people make money, taking a cut not exceeding 30% sounds fair), ideally to make just enough money to support the development and maintenance of the system. Make a better version of Substack, and a better version of Facebook, perhaps both of them, integrated. Avoid all the features that maximize engagement. I think this could still work, if you could get some good bloggers to move there, then a few people would start debating under their articles, then they would create their own timelines... and gradually the network would grow.

Making this as a non-profit that explicitly tries to do the right thing sounds to me more reasonable that playing whack a mole with profit-maximizing organizations -- trying to ban specific problematic things, while they keep inventing new ones.