♦ 9 ♦
A Personal Epilogue
Almost immediately after we pitched this book to our publishers, criticism broke out about the business practices, ethics, and values of the big technology companies. In August 2017, sociologist Jean Twenge published her book iGen, which examines how teenagers are growing up with technology dominating their lives while being completely unprepared for adulthood.1 Her September 2017 article in The Atlantic, discussed in chapter 6, sparked a firestorm of commentary and criticism. Former New Republic editor Franklin Foer published World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech in September 2017, a polemic that criticizes Google, Facebook, and other tech giants for what he regards as soulless monopolism that seeks to understand every facet of our identities and influence every decision of our lives for profit.2 In a blog post titled “Hard questions: Is spending time on social media bad for us?” Facebook’s director of research, David Ginsberg, finally acknowledged that perhaps the social network was not so good for its users.3 (The eye-popping irony of the post was that the prescription to solve the problem was even more in-depth Facebook participation!)
That’s not all. In early 2018, Roger McNamee stoked the fires with articles in Washington Monthly and the Washington Post. Then came an open letter to Tim Cook from Jana Partners and CalSTRS about the impact of the iPhone on children. One of the biggest advocates for technology on the planet then came down hard on Facebook: on January 23, 2018, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff compared Facebook to the tobacco companies and urged that we regulate the social network.4
A backdrop to all this is the steady stream of revelations about how Russian intelligence agencies used the social-media platforms Twitter and Facebook and the search engine Google to target political ads with the aim of swaying the most critical counties in swing states for Donald Trump and away from Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Evidence also emerged that Russia had sought to influence the Brexit vote regarding whether the United Kingdom should leave the European Union.5
Within a very short span, we watched the world’s suspicions of big technology companies hit a fever pitch. The theme was how technology—specifically products and applications and devices built by the largest, richest technology companies—has come to dominate our lives, stamp out innovation, and put our democratic values at risk. This culminated in October 2017 when the New York Times ran a feature article in its Sunday Review opinions and commentary section titled “Silicon Valley is not your friend.”6 The situation had gone from quiet, whispered concerns among our techno-savvy friends to an international debate about how much responsibility the giant tech firms (and all tech firms, really) had for the health and well-being of their users.
This is why, in retrospect, we are doubly glad to be writing this book. However widespread criticisms of tech might be, Big Tech is not going away. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Amazon are not going to be regulated out of existence. And, frankly, what they do is valuable to us individually and collectively.
It is unlikely that any regulation will happen. That said, the electric cattle prod of nasty public comeuppances has awakened the sleeping giants of Silicon Valley from their slumber and naïveté. They are now at least open to the idea that pushing every psychological button possible to ensure we never leave Facebook or that we buy more and more products from Amazon or that we retweet and post more and more content on Twitter is not only against our best interest but also against the best interest of the companies themselves over the long haul. Something better will come along, with a better monetization model that is more in harmony with the needs of users. Already Google and Facebook are facing higher costs of acquiring users.
Congressional hearings come and go. As observers of Silicon Valley from the pre-Google and pre-Facebook eras, we find that the criticism of technology and its makers, the questioning, resonates with most of the people we have spoken with. A wholesale change in public opinion has occurred. We firmly believe that people—including users—are more closely scrutinizing Big Tech and that we are now readier to push for meaningful changes in the way tech interacts with us than we have been at any time in recent memory.
This is why writing this book has been one of the most rewarding experiences we have ever had. In our discussions with dozens of friends and colleagues, and with thousands of people on line, every single individual we spoke with said that the issues of technology pervasiveness resonate and are of utmost importance to them personally and to society as a whole, showing us how similar their struggles are to our own. They worry about what technology is doing to their brains and to their families. They feel a loss of control over their lives. Some have taken steps to regain their lives. A handful of people aggressively limit the way their children are permitted to use technology. Many people pointed us to primers on how to shut down auto-play videos on Netflix and YouTube. Others have decided to put their phones on Do Not Disturb during the workday.
One senior executive at a Fortune 500 retailer began locking his smartphone in the glove compartment whenever he parked in his driveway. A department at a company where Alex used to work instituted meeting-free Fridays (a policy Alex had championed while he worked there). We spoke to several executives who, at the admin level, shut off employees’ e-mail accounts while they were on vacation and set up autoresponders. None of these steps were nuclear strikes against technology. No one stripped away technology use entirely or got off the grid. But many people took steps to regain some control and approach a saner, more balanced life.
These people more than once spoke of beginning to notice all the little ways in which technology had limited their choices and control. Many were saddened by it. They noticed the compulsion to check e-mail while they were out on rare dates with their spouses. Newly sensitized, they began to count all the small ways in which Facebook tries to manipulate them and engage them more deeply. They complained about the difficulty they experienced in putting boundaries on their digital lives across their myriad services, screens, and systems. They were finding it painful and cumbersome to treat the problem.
We also began to slowly change our lives. Alex banned screens in the bedroom and no longer works on computers at home after 6 p.m. (at least, when he is not on book deadlines). He installed a router that is designed to put in place policies on who can use what on the Internet. And in his house, the Internet goes dark at 8 p.m. for everyone. When he needs to work, he goes to a coffee shop or some other place to allow his family a safe space in the evenings, away from technology.
Following the lead of his executive friend, Alex began to shove his phone in the glove box of his car or in the door slot whenever he drives anywhere. He has stopped worrying about making sure that some form of useful information is coming out of the speakers or is on the screen for reading at every moment of the day, freeing him from fiddling with the phone at stop signs to find a replay of a good podcast.
In conversations and in meetings, Alex places his phone out of sight in his book bag or his pocket. He turns on Do Not Disturb for most of the day, allowing calls to go to voicemail to be triaged later in the day. In writing this book, Alex (like Nicholas Carr) shut off Internet access or wrote in places with no mobile phone or Internet reception. He continues to struggle with a nasty e-mail addiction and may do so for the rest of his life.
Alex has begun using a tool for managing social media, in order to limit his social-media interactions to one check per day. He schedules, in advance, posts of news he finds interesting. He also tries to batch his writing and reading of e-mail into three windows per day. As a result of these changes to his life, he has been able to increase the amount of deep work he is doing, and he now schedules outside time nearly every day: either a walk in the woods or a jog on a trail or some kind of sports with his son and his friends. His kids are very resentful that he now imposes limits on them, but that’s not surprising.
Vivek has started turning his computer off for two hours at a time to read and think and take breaks from technology. He turns his computer off and puts his phone into Do Not Disturb mode at 9 p.m. After more than a decade of being hyperactive on social media, Vivek now disconnects from Twitter (his favorite outlet) for a full day each weekend, and for a half a day during the week. He still feels the strong pull to check social media, because he loves the conversations, but he recognizes that they are frequent enough to detract from real-world interactions. He has also stopped responding to the majority of the messages he gets on Twitter, having learned that one usually comes out ahead by not saying anything on social media.
Vivek also schedules regular walks in the county and state parks around Silicon Valley and completely disconnects on Sundays. He has stopped listening to voicemails. And when he’s with his children, he puts his devices away.
Like Alex, Vivek continues to struggle with compulsive smartphone and screen behaviors that have been burned into his brain through many years of unconscious consumption. He hopes to further reduce screen time and spend more time reading books and talking with people face to face. He already recognizes that those in-person meetings are both more fulfilling and more useful.
Our goal for this book is that it may actually make an impression on enough people to change their view of technology. We don’t want to convince them that technology is dangerous and bad, or that technology should be banned or technological innovation halted. Rather, we want readers to understand the importance of mindful use of technology. All of us should use these products, these miracles of silicon and software, only on our own terms. We should demand more control and simpler choices. For their part, the technology companies, and the employers and others who impose technology use upon us or design our user experiences, must begin to factor in the human costs.
And, yes, we do believe that some government intervention may be required. In China, for example, the government has imposed limits on the amount of time per day that children under eighteen can play video games. That doesn’t seem like a bad idea here in America. Children are treated differently in every other form of media right now and are prevented from watching movies with excessive violence or nudity. Why not require game makers to limit how long kids and teens can play?
We sincerely hope that all of us have crossed over from the early days of unconscious tech consumption to a period of much more attentive and considered use—and that, in the future, our relationship with our technology will be healthier and more sustainable, without costs we’re unwilling to bear. If we can make these kinds of changes, we will all be less lonely and less isolated. We will spend more time talking to each other, walking outside, connecting with nature. We will still have everything technology brings: online maps and navigation, social media, smartphones, e-mail and text, photo sharing, and more. But we will be much smarter about the ways in which we choose to use these tools.
At work, we will have more time to focus on the critical tasks, with fewer interruptions. Our bosses will be happy to see us spend hours of focused work and will not mind that we have not responded to an e-mail promptly. And our vacations will be truly unplugged and restorative. The companies that make all these technological miracles happen will endow us with easier ways to turn off features we don’t like and, in general, to design our lives and our days so that tech fits our needs and wishes rather than assuming control over our impulses and lives.
Most important of all, we hope that our children’s children will not be part of a generation unable to conceive of unplugged time or to endure sitting and reading a print book for half an hour.
Yes, we must change the old ways and adapt. We recognize that. But the new ways must not obliterate and dominate the old ones. Those ways are the product of millennia of evolution and clearly have enduring value. Modernity, and its close cousin technology, must not demand that we as users either adapt or be miserable and lonely. Modernity must be a choice that suits us, our children, and our children’s children.