Digital Minimalism: Less is More

We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. Why I’m following Cal Newports “Digital Minimalism” now.

Maybe I just grew too old for this. Anyway, the fascination of Twitter and LinkedIn has given way to a feeling of strain and sometimes overload. At least since the increasingly acrimonious and strongly polarizing discussions around COVID-19. For a long time I didn’t want to admit what is obvious. In social media I am not the customer, but rather the product. It’s all about capturing my attention with insidious addiction-enhancing mechanisms for as long as possible. With success, as a sober look at the screen time of my iPhone shows:

In his TED-Talk, Tristan Harris explains the issues very well. And he should know, because he has studied these mechanisms at the “Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab” and applied them at Google until one day doubts came over him. He then wrote a slide deck that went so viral internally at Google that Larry Page invited him to talk and named him “Design Ethicist”. However, since Google is part of this attention industry and earns its money from it, his effectiveness there remained…