Digital Minimalism

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Part 1: Foundations

1. A Lopsided Arm Race

P15

Bill Maher ends every episode of his HBO show Real Time with a monologue. ... on May 12, 2017, when Maher looked into the camera and said:

The tycoons (巨头) of social media have to stop pretending that they're friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they're just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let's face it, checking your "likes" is the new smoking.

P21 What makes new technologies well suited to foster behavioral addictions?

I want to briefly focus on two forces ...: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

Part 1: Foundations

2. Digital Minimalism

P28 definition of digital minimalism

A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized ativities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

P28 "But what if there's something useful to you in there that you're missing?"

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.

P35

This magician's trick of shifting the units of measure from money to time is the core novelty of what the philosopher Frédéric Gros calls Thoreau's "new economics," a theory that builds on the following axiom, which Thoreau establishes early in Walden: "The cost of a thing is the amount of whatI will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."

P37

Thoreau's new economics was developed in an industrial age, but his basic insights apply just as well to our current digital context. ... When people cosider specific tools or behaviors in their digital lives, they tend to focus only on the value each produces. ... Standard economic thinking says that such profits are good, and the more you receive the better. ... Thoreau's new economics, however, demands that you balance this profit against the costs measured in terms of "your life". How much of your time and attention, he would ask, must be sacrificed to earn the small profit of occational connections and new ideas that is earned by cultlivating a significant presence on Twitter?