Revisiting the 3Rs of Unmachining: Guideposts for an Age of Technological Upheaval
"The Look of Silence", a scandalous proposal, and a practical beginning
Last October my husband and I wrote in collaboration for the first time, capturing our efforts to point a hopeful path through an age of technological upheaval. We had lived “unconformed” lives for many years and wanted to share the foundational ideas behind the choices that we have been discussing for almost two decades. We were surprised at the positive reception, rich discussion (we even hosted a live online event), and requests to reprint the essay in other publications. Most recently it was referenced earlier this month in The Epoch Times by Larson in ‘Tech Resistance’ Movement Offers Freedom From the Web.
Since we first published the 3Rs of Unmachining many thousands of readers have joined in, and there have been tremendous developments in resisting “addictive, distracting, and omnipresent digital technology” in our homes and daily lives, including Jonathan Haidt’s Free the Anxious Generation, UK’s Smartphone Free Childhood, Erin Loechner’s The Opt-Out Family, and many other movements.
We thus decided to share a revised version of our initial essay and hope that you will find encouragement and practical catalysts to help you on your journey. If you are among our long-time readers, we would love to hear if you have made any changes in tech use in your family, have found a like-minded community, or have joined in any of the recent movements. Please share your experiences and reflections in the comments section!
Also, if you would like to have a unique experience of “opting into life”, come and join us on A Pilgrimage out of the Machine! For details see the end of this post.
A five-minute drive from our home—or thirty minutes by horse and buggy—is a Mennonite shop where the price of 20kg bags of unbleached local flour is noted on a chalkboard, dozens of fresh loaves of bread are baked daily, customers’ tabs are written neatly in a black ledger, and ice cream cones still cost $1.50.
Wearing a traditional home-sewn dress and head covering, Esther greets us cheerfully and asks how we have been keeping. We chat about cell phones, which at times we’ve spotted in the hands of Mennonites at farmers’ markets and in horse-drawn buggies. Esther tells us that each “fellowship” sets their own guidelines regarding cell phone use, although they always include strictures around filters.
“Do you have a cell phone?” Ruth asks.
“Oh, no!” Esther smiles.
“Do you ever miss not having one?”
“I wouldn’t know what I am missing,” she laughs. “At times I think it might be convenient, but I always find a way to make do without it.”
Esther’s attitude toward cell phones might seem regressive, nothing more than a byproduct of traditional Mennonite thinking. But the goal of this thinking, which also eschews many other technological conveniences like automobiles, is to prevent assimilation into modernity and the destruction of the Mennonite way of life. Sometimes regressive is progressive. As C.S. Lewis observed:
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake…Going back is the quickest way on.
Lewis was talking about Moral Law, but we can apply his words to technology: somewhere in history we took a wrong turn on the road of technology, and it’s time for a course correction.
But where do we make the correction? Nobody seems sure where to turn. Do we go back in time and, like the Mennonites and Amish, draw a clear line around what technologies we will and won’t accept into our lives? Or, instead, should we strive to be digital “minimalists”? Or should we move away from the cities, and seek refuge in nature?
Of all the new technologies, none have thrown us off course, none have penetrated the human mind, so profoundly as digital devices. We’ve all experienced this penetration. No relationship, no intention or goal, no commitment in our lives, no appointment, no schedule, no conversation, not even God, is sacrosanct when we’re in front of a screen, near a screen, or just thinking “Where did I put my phone?” A steady irresistible push has conditioned us to accept that portable digital tech is indispensable for all aspects of our daily lives, from coupon savings to choosing a dating partner, from social affirmation to soothing babies in their cribs. Our concentration—the very essence of human awareness—drifts toward our screens, as if carried on a breeze, like a feather floating on the breath of Big Tech.
Many of us experience these impacts at an existential level. We feel our lives are becoming extensions of technology, components of a larger digital machine. If we could make a course correction to “unmachine” our lives, then where? What is the turn in the road that would radically limit the negative impact of technology?
Importantly, this turn should be so fundamental that it can be followed by anyone, irrespective of whether they live in a condo tower in Toronto or on a farm in the countryside, and span the ecumenical trenches of religious belief, or even non-belief.
We have developed a framework to support people in this course correction. It isn’t a narrow lifestyle solution, but three broad principles or “guideposts” that can help us to more clearly see the harms of digital technology, encourage us to live more fully within our human parameters, and reorient us toward embodied reality. We call it the “3Rs of unmachining”.
Guidepost 1: Recognize
And in the naked light I saw, Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share, And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.
from “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel
We were driving along a road bustling with university students making their way from fast food plazas to the campus, and as our car came to a halt at the intersection, we looked over at a bus stop. A dozen students stood waiting, each with their head bent and gazing down at a smartphone. We happened to be listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence on the CD player, and as the song resounded through the speakers, we saw it displayed in a living tableau, in the mesmerized faces of those students. Our youngest son, observing through the back window of the car, spontaneously commented it was “the look of silence”.
We aren’t the only ones who have noticed that mesmerized gaze and wondered what it means. In
’s The Benedict Option, a Catholic monk describes the trance-inducing power of our devices as both an individual and civilization-destroying force:When the light in most people’s faces comes from the glow of the laptop, the smartphone, or the television screen, we are living in a Dark Age…They are missing that fundamental light meant to shine forth in a human person through social interaction…Love can only come from that. Without real contact with other human persons, there is no love. We have never seen a Dark Age like this one.
Not everyone will agree we are in a “Dark Age”. But most of us can identify areas in our lives where digital technologies are having a negative impact. At the most basic level we may notice a change in our attention and cognitive (mental) abilities due to the often shallow way that we process information when we’re online. We click, scroll, share, comment, link elsewhere. Our attention shifts quickly, nibbling on selective or surface details like goldfish, and often moving across the screen in a non-linear way. Meanwhile we know that many digital platforms are addictive, with expert Anna Lemke describing the smartphone as a “modern-day hypodermic needle” that gives us a quick hit of pleasure with every tap and swipe. We also know our devices are deliberately designed this way, resulting in an “eyeball economy” that, in the words of Cal Newport, is in a “race to the bottom of the brainstem” to capture our attention and keep us compulsively hooked1.
More than anything, perhaps, digital technologies have destabilized the fundamental bedrock of human connection. In our digital relationships we share snippets; we are atomized, never fully human. We avoid dull moments, boredom, the tedium of life. When we meet people in real face-to-face encounters, we falter in moments of silence and reach to the phone to share a meme, or take pictures of each other with funny filters. Most disturbing is that children and youth, whose brains are immature and still developing, are the most vulnerable contestants in the race down the brainstem, the most likely to get hooked on the digital needles.
We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, and yet we have allowed them to diminish us. The prospect of loving, or being loved by, a machine changes what love can be. We know that the young are tempted. They have been brought up to be. Those who have known lifetimes of love can surely offer them more.
from Alone Together by Sherry Turkle
The first of the 3Rs is to Recognize these impacts, to deepen our awareness and understanding of them, so that we can make wiser and more deliberate choices about the role of technology in our lives.
During the course of our writing on technology, we have become aware of two broad camps of people. One group might be called the Practical camp. This group has specific and pragmatic concerns about technology, including many of those we listed earlier: poorer attention spans, porn addiction, increases in depression and anxiety among youth, impacts on children’s development, social and political division.
There is a second camp, however, which we might call the Machine camp. This camp often agrees with the specific concerns identified by the Practical Camp, but goes further. This camp sees “the Machine”, a metaphor for expressing the idea that technology is increasingly controlling and profoundly distorting our society, our human nature, even our understanding of the spiritual.
So, while Practical people might worry about smartphone addiction or how the internet is “dumbing us down”, Machine people might additionally worry that technology will one day be used to monitor, reward, and punish human beings based on their level of compliance with government values and policies—in essence, a worry that our society will evolve into a social credit system, as in China. People in the Machine camp may also fear, more fundamentally, that digital technologies might one day be directly integrated into our bodies not for necessary medical reasons, but simply to enhance our normal functioning. Still others in the Machine camp may worry that new technologies are, or may become, a powerful tool that can be used against us by demonic forces.
Spiritual issues tend not to be a concern in the Practical camp. Practical people might find Machine people alarmist or overly religious; Machine people might find Practical people naive and short-sighted. The most prominent representatives of the Machine Camp are Wendell Berry and
. In an essay published in 2000, Berry wrote that “it is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” This is clearly Machine camp concern, emphasizing how—beyond any particular impacts—technology may transform human nature.Two decades later, writing in his essay The Universal, Kingsnorth expressed the spiritual anxiety of the Machine camp this way:
Imagine that some being of pure materiality, some being opposed to the good, some ice-cold intelligence from an ice-cold realm were trying to manifest itself here. How would it appear? Not, surely, as clumsy, messy flesh. Better to inhabit - to become - a network of wires and cobalt, of billions of tiny silicon brains, each of them connected to a human brain whose energy and power and information and impulses and thoughts and feelings could all be harvested to form the substrate of an entirely new being.
As the Practical and Machine camps overlap, we might also think of them as polarities on a continuum rather than categories. Still, the distinction is useful, as it may clarify areas of “common cause” with others concerned about technology, as well as areas of difference.
Whatever camp we lean toward, the first of the 3Rs—Recognize—encourages us to increase our awareness and understanding of our own and others’ concerns about tech. The more deeply we appreciate these concerns, the more we can develop a narrative of conviction that will help us make positive and sustained changes in our lives.
Guidepost 2: Remove
In 1991, Mark Weiser, the father of “ubiquitous computing”, wrote that “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” That much is now true of screens and the internet. Our society is saturated with devices, and WIFI is the oxygen that we must constantly breathe in order to work, shop, navigate, and entertain ourselves.
Whether our concerns are coming from a more Practical or Machine perspective, the second of the 3Rs—Remove—encourages us to structurally reduce or eliminate digital technologies in our immediate physical environment. The goal is greater cognitive liberty and healthier social functioning.
By way of analogy, we can imagine individual human beings as electrons, those tiny particles that circle around the nucleus of an atom. Each electron has a “spin” that gives it a tiny magnetic force. Under normal circumstances electrons spin in random directions and their individual magnetic forces cancel each other out. But when a more powerful magnetic force is applied to a group of electrons, they all stop spinning randomly, and instead start spinning in the same direction.
This is one way of thinking about how digital devices affect us collectively. Our devices are like giant magnets, scattered throughout society—bedrooms, living rooms, vehicles, stores, workplaces. In the face of this magnetic saturation, our tiny individual magnetic forces are too weak to resist the pull, not matter how much we try, and invariably we all start spinning in the same direction. Like the students at the bus stop, our heads invariably bend toward our screens, and our concentration becomes fixed.
This is why efforts at “digital minimalism” tend to fail when based on willpower alone. The wraparound structural forces are too strong. The smartphone bleeps on the night table, and our hand unthinkingly reaches for it. We’re having lunch with a friend at a restaurant, but in the middle of the conversation our eyes keep wandering to the big screens on the wall. No matter how great our self-discipline and commitment to avoid digital technology through sheer effort, it is in a war of attrition against a foe that does not sleep or tire.
If we want to free ourselves of the giant magnets and recover our unique “spin”, then we need more than willpower to limit our device use. We need structural change in our environment, by radically limiting or eliminating the physical presence of devices from certain situations and encouraging a moral awareness that makes this a reasonable demand. Only a few decades ago, you could have visited a friend’s house and lit up a cigarette with children present, and possibly nobody would have cared—while today it would cause an outrage. But to suggest that people don’t bring their phones into your home, or use them in front of your children, would itself be a scandal in most homes today.
And yet, this sort of suggestion isn’t as scandalous as it sounds. School jurisdictions in France, Australia, Canada, and several U.S. states2, have already decided to ban phones in classrooms. Some students at Christian colleges are not merely discussing the impact of technology, but are collectively committing to spending time tech-free. We know of a small Catholic university that does not offer WIFI on campus. Our homeschool co-op had a phone-free policy for both parents and students3.
Some experts, like
, are even suggesting the need for new laws around internet and social media use, like enacting a complete ban on social media for those under age 18, or giving parents the power to sue Big Tech for damages for exposing their children to dangerous material. The U.S. Surgeon General’s recent call for a warning label on social media is a clear sign that the tide is turning. Even in the entertainment and hospitality industries, phone-free policies are a growing trend, as in the case of digitally uninterrupted shows or tech-free date nights where phones must be dropped into paper bags upon entering the restaurant.Some of these initiatives above might seem excessive or wildly at odds with our default assumptions about technology use. Our first instinct might be, “Are you kidding? Do you seriously expect us to adopt these ideas for society as a whole?” And yet it’s only by taking these ideas seriously—by discussing, debating, and disseminating them—that we can start to question the current “normal” and begin a process that might move us toward a re-normalization of our values around technology.
We were promised a bicycle for the mind…We were not promised the disengagement and dullness of boring robots. We were not promised the addiction and anxiety of devices that tempt us with superpowers and leave us drained, that dangle hopes of satisfaction but leave us empty, that offer to recognize us but rob us of the face-to-face life for which we were made.
from The Life We’re Looking For by Andy Crouch
It's also important to remember that we as individuals have agency. We don’t have to wait for others to legislate change, or for top-down reforms. We can start from a bottom-up direction and sow seeds of change by unsettling our own assumptions about omnipresent technology use.
The average U.S. household boasted 11 connected devices in 2019, with some statistics suggesting that this number went up to 22 devices per household post-pandemic. Just looking around our own home, we can often pinpoint the digital magnets that we don’t want in their current location. We might keep the supper table or the bedroom free of devices. We might store laptops in a storage trunk or turn off WIFI after 8 pm each evening. Arranging our main living space without screens directs our attention towards each other, our present environment, or ideas and projects we are pursuing4. When screens are visibly present, even if turned off, they are a constant distraction, continually reminding us of how easily we could dive into waves of entertainment.
The more we can physically and permanently restructure our environment so that we don’t see or can’t easily access our devices, the more we will refresh—even “reset”—our experience of our mind and body, and the people around us. When our electrons are spinning more freely, we become a little more human, perhaps even a little more original.
The goal of Remove isn’t to eliminate all digital technology, but to make structural changes that are big enough and permanent enough to create a meaningful difference in our lives. When this happens, we might recover an awareness of the things we were missing, like ordinary conversations with real people, or our thoughts flowing in a liberated and spontaneous way, free of the relentless cajoling of Big Tech’s algorithms.
Some people who have succeeded in the Remove step have told us it has strengthened their appreciation of the Recognize step. Sometimes, we need to experience being free of devices before we can really understand what we were missing. In this way, the 3Rs are not a one-way stairway, but rather each “step” can move us toward the others.
Guidepost 3: Return
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
G.K. Chesterton – The Everlasting Man
The current default around digital tech is something like, “anywhere, anything, anytime, for anyone”, whereas the place we need to get to is, “only in certain places”, and “not everything”, and “it depends on your age”. The goal of the first two Rs, Recognize and Remove, is to get us closer to this new arrangement, and paves the way for the third step—Return.
Return means moving toward a more human experience of daily life, direct and unmediated by screens and devices. We don’t pretend that this transition is easy. By design, devices and many forms of social media hijack the brain’s feel-good dopamine system, keeping us compulsively hooked on an artificial experience of life. The Remove step, which limits or cuts off this compulsion loop, can leave people initially feeling worse off, empty, unable to focus, and yearning to get back on their screens. Some of us will need patience as our brain goes through a process of neuro-adaptation to a lower-tech way of being.
For others, the transition from Remove to Return will involve different challenges, like limiting screen time for young children, or negotiating new rules with teenagers about tech use in the home. But what happens next? Once tech is removed, what do we need to do?
Surprisingly, part of the answer is nothing. For some people, positive changes will happen spontaneously. When our kids were small, a reliable solution to their boredom was to set them loose in a local park or forest. They didn’t require instructions or demos. They instinctively knew what to do. Games materialized ex nihilo. Sticks became swords. Trees became hideouts. Shadowy thickets demanded exploration. Pathways became stages of song, dance, speeches, debate, laughter.
Children abhor a vacuum. So do adults. If we take away devices, we don’t suddenly lose our capacity for joy, stimulation, and meaning. We can rediscover them—not in the virtual world, but in the real world of actual people, actual things. Free of the magnetic pull of devices, our “electron” selves will naturally reorient to their local realities, exploring new orbits of focus.
We might also embrace simple anachronistic practices that reflect reality-focused choices. These could include, for example:
Going cell-phone free or moving to a flip phone. While there are situations, like caring for an elderly or ill parent, when being reachable is important, most everyday situations don’t require us to be completely tethered to our devices.
Walking. Life is tuned to the speed of feet. Walking helps to reorient us to a slower pace, is conducive to conversations, and ties us to reality.5
Reading. The simple act of reading may improve concentration, vocabulary, mood, slow mental decline, while reading fiction in particular can improve empathy6.
Writing by hand. This practice attaches weight and meaning to our words, slows down our thinking process, and allows time for deliberate expression.
Completing household tasks. Mundane tasks like cooking, housecleaning, or gardening can often seem like intrusions to more urgent things in our schedule, yet if we complete them with enough attention and care, we are not only disconnecting from screens and un-chairing our sedentary bodies but re-affirming one of the most “primitive” values of all: manual labor.
For an extensive downloadable list, complied with the input from hundreds of readers, see:
It can be extremely difficult to maintain a Return in isolation. For this reason, of all the various Returns we might make, the most important is being in closer relationship with real people. Stable close relationships can support a lower-tech lifestyle when individuals Recognize shared concerns about tech and agree on what to Remove.
Some families have decided to follow the Postman Pledge, by committing to create a lower-tech environment for themselves and their children. Many of you have taken concrete steps and participated in our communal digital fast which we reported on here. Jonathan Haidt’s recently released book and his movement to Free the Anxious Generation has gained international attention and offers parents, communities, and schools concrete advice for taking action together.
and Clare Fernyhough created a grassroots parent movement in the U.K. that 75,000 parents joined, determined to offer their children a smartphone free childhood.Other groups are coming together to form new communities based on wider shared values. Some are Christian, such as Benedict Option7 and Bruderhof communities8, while others are not necessarily religious or spiritual, as in the case of the cohousing movement, where families live in their own private dwellings but share common spaces like kitchens, play areas, and gardens.
Relationships are foundational in the shared struggle against the destructive side of technology. Many things apart from relationships matter, of course, but our view is that unless we prioritize our marriages, children, extended/blended families, and human connections in our local communities, unless we make this the alpha and omega of our efforts, nothing else will work—not religion, not philosophy, not retreating into nature. It will all flounder, because it will miss something more basic than all of these things: we are embodied relational creatures who thrive only when we are known and loved.
The more freedom we regain from tech, the better we come to know each other as real people, and the better we become at that complicated dance of “being together”, with all its power dynamics, shifting emotions, dueling viewpoints, personality differences, and most of all, the struggle to love and support one another within appropriate boundaries.
To take the contrary position, that we should accept a life of isolated or disembodiment digital relationships—as if love could fully flow through a screen or retinal projection—as if the deepest needs of the human heart could be filtered through Big Tech’s corporate ambitions—is to risk distorting an essential part of what makes us human. In our virtual, curated social selves, we are never fully known.
At the core of the Christian faith is the belief that other-centered relationships of love express the very nature of God and the Great Commandment. But even for people of a different religion or no religion, the premise of hope we’re suggesting isn’t difficult to grasp. We all know what sacrificial love means. Every infant knows it in a mother’s cradling arms; every elderly parent knows it in a child’s embrace. And even if our lives, by some misfortune or circumstance, have been so hard that we don’t know it, or have forgotten it, the proof is in the pain of its glaring absence.
The first two signposts—Recognize and Remove—open the path to Return to the tangible realities of life, and most of all to the people around us. In the end, the turn on the road is not a turn backward, but away from the virtual and toward each other.
We would love to hear from you! Please share your comments, reflections, examples, and questions below.
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Further Reading on:
Recognize / Remove
reflects on deleting social media: one year later on Life After Becoming a Screen Strong Family offers A Parents Guide to Understanding the Harms of the Phone-Based Childhood, Along With Ten Tips for Rolling It BackCaleb Silverberg trades his phone for an axe
Matthew B. Crawford aims to stay connected to physical reality
Big News: The Surgeon General Calls for a Warning Label on Social Media by Jonathan Haidt and
Return:
Love and Sacrifice in the Pax Machina by
Calling all Gen Z: Phone Free Friday Summer Challenge by
What City Kids Learn on My Farm by Larissa Phillips in
Neighbourhoods that Nurture by
How to create a free-range neighbourhood by
The Repository - A list of schools compiled by
“which are not only forming their students in theology and/or the liberal arts, but also require either learning a trade or working in one on-campus during their time as part of their core programming”.Tech-Free Resistance for Introverts by
Against a Frictionless Life by
Leah Libresco Sargeant provides a “practical handbook” with Building the Benedict Option
The Revolution Has Begun in the UK by
If you would like to have a unique experience of “opting into life”, come and join us on A Pilgrimage out of the Machine!
My husband Peco and I will be leading an eleven-day pilgrimage on the Camino trail in Spain next year, from June 14-24, 2025. Joining us, as co-leader, will be writer/photographer
from . Space is limited so reserve your spot now :) You can read all about it here or view the brochure here. This is open to everyone, irrespective of religion or background.We would love to walk together with you!
For a more comprehensive list of social and mental harms caused by social media and digital device use, consult the Ledger of Harms by Tristan Harris’ Center of Humane Technology and Jonathan Haidt’s Substack After Babel.
L.A. just became the largest district to ban phones in class
Our daughter designed this logo during her time at the Classical Homeschool Co-op, which she sported on her book bag and t-shirt.
For practical ideas on creating a human-centered home see:
We will be walking the Camino in Spain next year and would love to have you join us! For more details see our post A Pilgrimage out of the Machine.
For reading lists and a guide to building your own “book monastery” see:
When asked about specific examples of Benedict Option communities,
provided the following list:a Catholic agrarian community around Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey in eastern Oklahoma.
The lay community gathered around St. John Orthodox Cathedral in Eagle River, Alaska.
Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, which “is working towards incorporating a version of the Rule of St. Benedict within its congregational life.”
Rutba House, a New Monastic community in Durham, North Carolina, and its School for Conversion.
The Scuola G.K. Chesterton in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy, is “run by Catholics for Catholic children, following the vision of the late Stratford Caldecott (see his essay, “A Question of Purpose”).”
Bruderhof communities have settlements around the world including the U.S., U.K., Germany, Austria, Australia, Paraguay, and South Korea. You can read about their experiences at Seasons of Community Living.
After six years in this field. I’ve started a substack aimed at Christian parents calling on them to say no to the phone based childhood. https://dearchristianparent.substack.com/p/hey-christians-smartphones-arent?utm_campaign=post&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Thanks for revisiting this topic and essay. Since it's debut I've changed my phone display to B&W - it made a huge difference and also keep the ringer continuously in silent mode. I simple check for calls or messages at 9, Noon, and 3 - otherwise the phone is out of sight, and out of mind.
Thank you for your good work!