Good readers,
Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday and the beginning of the Lenten season of self-denial leading up to Easter. Lent can bring to mind self-righteous finger-wagging, but there are good reasons to go without certain desires and to rein in our appetites. Fasting for Lent won’t earn anyone Easter joy, though. A season of self-denial doesn’t have some new pleasure as its reward; its reward is the recovery of love itself. Because in the end, all fasting has the same goal. Whether we give up chocolate, answering work emails from home, or pornography, fasting is about reordering desires.
Going without is about reclaiming the pleasures dulled by familiarity and convenience. In Christian parlance, the goal is recapturing our first and best love.
Lent for the hijacked life
The need to reorder presumes disorder, and I can’t think of a better word to describe my relationship with most digital media. As software has eaten the world, aided by portals in every pocket, attention and silence have eroded. The true cost of this hyperconnectivity is still unknown, but the evidence of a problem is already here. In the most recent issue of WIRED magazine, a staff writer pined for a technique that would help him replicate the focus and creativity of his “shower thoughts” at work. He did so unironically, it seems. The breakthroughs people experience in the shower shouldn't come as a surprise, though, given the private, disconnected space showers still provide in a world of toilet scrolling and a general fear of solitude.
Disconnecting won’t make anyone a genius, but that doesn’t mean it can’t make space for unexpected insight. It’s a testament to the hijacking of attention we experience daily, driven by an attention economy focused on anything but our wellbeing.
It’s good to be alone with your thoughts. It can be terrifying, but it is good.
Of course, I’m not the first one to consider signing off social media for Lent, but I do hope to make the case that in its current configuration, all use of social media tends toward disorder. This is why I’m giving up social media for Lent.
How does using social media tend toward disorder? One way is by its invitation to look. The internet has brought many things within reach, but it has brought everything within sight.
Looking Away
L.M. Sacasas, an independent scholar and critic of technology, suggests the way digital media invite us to look at the lives of others is a kind of unchastity. The invitation to first “share” becomes an open invitation to observe, but to whose benefit? (Emphasis mine).
…it seems to me that the chaste look in the age of digital media involves not only a reclaiming of the senses so that we might see what is truly there, but also a refusal to gaze upon that which we ought not to see (indeed a recovery of the category itself). In this case, it is not necessarily a matter of illicit or obscene images, but of any phenomena in which we have no real part even if they are offered up to us freely by the participants, insofar as these are extracted by an emerging net of top-down and bottom-up surveillance and documentation, which is transforming the private and social human environment into little more than raw material or standing-reserve to be extracted for profit and social capital. To put it in Kantian terms, we risk transforming ourselves and others into means rather than ends in themselves. Put more straightforwardly, we are being primed to render others as merely things to be used. (The Convivial Society No. 3)
There is far more going on in our disordered use of digital media than simply wasting time. What's gained in looking away, in staring the FOMO in the face and actually missing out? Looking away from public displays requires a turn inward. Just like the “shower thoughts” mentioned earlier, turning inward can be uncomfortable or seem wasteful; there is rarely anything tangible to show for most private thinking or prayer. Yet, the lack of tangible results doesn’t necessarily equal a lack of value.
In an essay on Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind in Comment, Hannah LaGrand examines the meaning and purpose of privacy:
There is, instead, a distinct richness that the private lends to reality, which can and should be an aspect of every human life. As Arendt writes, “A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.” The public world of appearances must be rooted in something that does not appear.
There is no public virtue that will thrive in the world where it did not first grow in private. This is the reason to reorder unhealthy relationships with digital media. Because…
…what Arendt can help us to see is that what is potentially at stake is not simply the negative space of privacy, but the rich depth of our private lives. A robust protection of privacy then must include not only the enforcement and appreciation of our rights but also a new attention to the daily practices and rituals that form the patterns of our hidden lives, a new attention to those activities that have nothing to show for themselves.
Much more than the feeds we curate, the unseen and likewise necessarily unliked parts of life are what make space for a life worth living. To that end, I’ll share a few ideas of what a fast from digital media for Lent can look like.
Digital Minimalism for 20xx
Cal Newport writes about digital technology and the “struggles to deploy these tools in ways that support instead of subvert the things we care about.” That may sound easy, but it rarely is in practice. Newport advocates for what he calls digital minimalism, a pattern of technology use whereby users fast from digital technologies for 30 days and to refocus on “the type of activities that generate real satisfaction.” These include time alone, time spent in the presence of people, and other analog pursuits, such as sports and tactile hobbies
Then, after the detox, apps/services/devices are slowly reintroduced — but only if they pass a test:
Does this technology directly support something that I deeply value?
Is this technology the best way to support this value?
How am I going to use this technology going forward to maximize its value and minimize its harms?
What I like most about Newport’s approach is the focus on high-value alternatives to simply quitting a bad thing. Bad habits cannot be broken unless they’re replaced; something better must fill the space. If the goal of going without social media for Lent is to move toward more rightly ordered desires, then it won’t do to replace bottomless feeds with an endless Netflix queue. For myself, I’ll be focusing on the communal aspects of The Common Rule to deepen my relationships with my neighbours and spend more time considering the demands and joys Jesus places before me.
If you may want to reconsider the place and value of digital technologies in your life, Newport’s 30-day Analog Challenge is a rehab-level reassessment. If that’s too much of a commitment on such short notice, consider his starter version where you use your smartphone for only these select activities:
Phone calls/text messages
maps/navigation
audio (music, podcasts, etc.)
No feeds. No sharing to a vast, faceless public. No endless autoplay, scroll, or anything without a clearly defined purpose. If you’re a skeptic — of Lent or the technological skepticism I lay out here — this is the option for you. Start today, Ash Wednesday, and let me know how it went after Easter.
Establishing habits isn’t Failure is part of the process
-Matt
Resources
The Common Rule for Lent (Justin Whitmel Earley)
30-Day Analog Challenge (Cal Newport)
Simple digital hygiene advice (Cal Newport)
Only Telephones Are Good - The Atlantic
Yes, that’s a clickbait headline. Still, telephones are good, and we may yet begin to remember why they are good.
To [Ivan Illich], phones had the best quality that a technology could have: conviviality. “They can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user,” he wrote. Phones, in his view, were a tool of both liberty and equality.
“Reason and reflection cannot presume to govern faith, but they can precede it and clear space for it. Making room for Christianity is in fact the most promising response to technology. We should neither try to demolish technology nor run away from it. We can restrain it and must redeem it.”
- Albert Borgmann, Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology
Presented without comment
Trust Falls - Your Undivided Attention
A conversation between Tristan Harris and Rachel Botsman about trust in a time of distributed digital networks.
Harris: […] when you're running a startup and you've raised venture capital and you've got millions of dollars and you've got employees and their families relying on you — you’ve got to be successful. Like, if you doubt what you're doing, where can you safely express that doubt? I say this because as a tech founder, you're not often able to go anywhere, right? […] And so there's no safe place to go if you think about it, where you can actually completely epistemically doubt the foundation of what you're doing, whether it's even good at all?
Transcript, pg. 16 of 17
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