Cognitive Liberators of Substack
A luddite, tectonic shift, and real-life parables
“Technology has come to a point where it is no longer useful for humanity.
It is actually the opposite.”
- Phone technician who just hooked up services for us
We recently had phone and internet service installed by a new provider. Always up for conversation, I asked the technician whether he used this company’s service as well.
“No”, he answered.
“Oh, do you use a different one?”
Another, “No.”
Now I was getting a bit confused, “You mean you don’t use any service at all, no tv, no phone, no internet?”
“No, I don’t even have a cell phone.”
I was floored to have come across an internet service technician who is a certified luddite. As we continued talking I learned that, having grown up in a traditional Mennonite community, he understood what it means to be close to community and close to the land. Although he went on to lead a modern life, and even became a sound technician for famous musicians, he has thrown off the shackles of digital technology completely. He admitted it is challenging, but he has made a deliberate choice two years ago to cut off all tech use.
He uses the library across from where he lives if he needs to send an e-mail to arrange appointments. There he also borrows books to read. His family and friends are local, and he stays in touch with them in person. He commented, “you can either try and keep up with technology - which you never will - or actually focus on doing work.” He has decided to stay in the human, physical realm. He is hopeful that many more people will begin to recognize how tech distraction is undoing us as humans.
I found the conversation I had with this technician inspiring. He was a living manifestation of the concept of “digital minimalism”, not just pages in a book giving advice. He was actually living the advice, and so became a much more powerful, embodied example of a device-free life. While we may at some level admire the technician’s antediluvian lifestyle choice, few of us can imagine following in his footsteps. Indeed, most of us seem to be living as emergent, if reluctant, cyborgs. In Elon Musk’s words:
The thing that people, I think, don’t appreciate right now is that they are already a cyborg...If you leave your phone behind, it’s like missing limb syndrome. I think people—they’re already kind of merged with their phone and their laptop and their applications and everything.
While I recognize the undeniable seed of truth in this statement, the notion produces a deep-seated revulsion in me. And it evokes a surge of rebellion against the underlying assumption that we will simply need to accept this cyborg-like state as our new reality. I wholeheartedly reject this faux reality and reiterate the urgency to cut our ties with the digital demons that beset us.
In my post From Feeding Moloch to Digital Minimalism I discussed the undeniable and harmful effects of digital device use, especially on our children. Our unmitigated digital addictions are not only harmful on an individual level, but they are breaking down the fabric of our families.
Consider the following:
Does it compromise our marriages and lead to more marital problems? Yes, here is the research.
Does it compromise our ability to parent? Yes, it does.
Does it compromise attention and learning? Yes, here is the evidence.
Does it compromise our mental health of our children? Yes, most certainly
Does it cause long-lasting negative mental health effects into adulthood? Yes again.
Does it cause reduced time spent as a family"? Yes, and here is why.
The list could go on and you can find additional research on Ledger of Harms by Tristan Harris’ Centre of Humane Technology and
‘s substack After Babel.If this list were referring to harms caused by hard drugs or alcohol, we would not blink in affirming that drastic changes are needed now. So why are we willing to remain complacent when the harms are caused by digital addiction? It seems we are caught in collective denial, a clear indication that we are suffering from a mass addiction syndrome.
When we scratch at the surface, people are quick to admit that they wished that they could just ditch their phones, or that they would love nothing more than to smash their teenager’s phone. Many of us have ideas about what we could do differently, sometimes even very concrete ones. In a recent exchange on Notes,
commented,It would be so easy to designate e.g. a drawer in an end-table and make an individual or family policy: the phone stays there, and you go there to use the phone (and use it nowhere else in the house). You might put a chair by it and imagine that you’ll go, say, every X interval. That I’ve thought about doing this for years and never have, even once, tells the entire story, though. It would be easy; it would work; some part of me obviously does not want it.
You are likely familiar with the biblical quote, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” What chance do we stand if both the spirit and the flesh are weak?
In order to have a fighting chance against the onslaught of the mind and soul-destroying Machine, we need to strengthen our spirit, mind, and heart not only by shifting our phones from our pockets to a box (or a bin), we are in need of a tectonic shift in how we live our daily lives.
In her recent Front Porch Republic article, Joining the Dance: Setting Aside Screens to Build the City,
1relates an example of a community of families who has committed to such a shift:“In fact, every family at the dance was there because each had decided to be weird. That is, they’d decided being human was worth stepping away from the dominant technological trends of our society, and that their kids were worth swimming upstream for. Each family had recognized that decisions regarding how to raise our kids, like whether we let them have smartphones, were not neutral. Neither were they merely personal or familial. Rather, such choices reflected our view of how the world ought to be, of what a human being is—and those choices would affect everyone around us.”
My husband
and I have been discussing the encroaching onslaught of tech for many years, ever since our children were little and social media was in its infancy. We wondered what did it mean to be human in an increasingly technological world? How could we help them stay on the right path? Quoting from ‘s post A Pilgrim’s Creed,“In the end, our answers were home-baked, kitchen-table solutions, or hatched in discussions on the living room couch, in the night hours when the children were asleep. Amid our ramblings, some of which were scrawled on paper, was the idea of a creed: a brief, plain-language summary on how to maintain a Machine-resistant mentality.
The creed serves as a compass to those who recognize that the relentless intrusion of digital tech in our lives is ever more eagerly eroding what makes us human. While it is written from a Christian perspective, readers from different backgrounds will find resonance with the need to define where humanity needs to draw the line,… in order to anchor us to our core meanings in life and situate technology’s proper place in the order of things."
We cannot put food on the table for our families through words, but but must have action behind our words to provide nourishment. In the same way we cannot simply think about changing our digital dependency, but must start enacting a fundamental change in our relationship to technology. While books on digital detox or digital minimalism can provide the necessary starting points, they seem to miss the bigger picture. Tinkering with habits is grounded in psychological tactics that inherently step back from values judgements. This is what often leads to changes that blow away into dust.
Going forward, my writings on School of the Unconformed will focus on how we can bring about lasting change by building different life foundations that support this tectonic shift. The writings will offer support and practical guidance in strengthening the home and hearth, growing different daily rhythms and habits, parenting, taking charge of education, and embracing what Wendell Berry calls the Good Life.2 This bottom-up approach provides the life-blood for change that results not from shifting mind furniture, but from arranging solid cornerstones that shape everything we do.
The train to remaining fully human is leaving the station. The tickets are free, there’s lots of space. I am getting on.
Cognitive Liberators of Substack
Several writers on substack have been relating their experience of quitting (or trying to quit) social media and other digital addictions. Just as the conversation with the luddite technician inspired me, you may find encouragement, resonance, and the needed straw on the camel’s back in these real-life parables. Stories can often deliver a better punch than a list of reasons to make this your moment to ditch your digital dependency and commit to cognitive liberty.3
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute.
Wendell Berry
Substacks that offer digital minimalism strategies
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Tessa Carman interviewed
for Mere Orthodoxy. If you have not yet read it, you can find it here: https://mereorthodoxy.com/following-christ-in-the-machine-age-a-conversation-with-paul-kingsnorth. One reader commented that this is the most detailed interview with Kingsnorth he has ever come across. Worth your time.“Wendell Berry’s formula for a good life and a good community is simple and pleasingly unoriginal. Slow down. Pay attention. Do good work. Love your neighbours. Love your place. Stay in your place. Settle for less, enjoy it more.”
I will create a separate page for this post so that the stories can become a continuous resource and new posts can be added over time. If you know of post that could be added, let me know in the comments below.
I remember my dad yelling at me to turn off the tv or stereo or the Atari and do my homework. Now my kid has to do much of his homework on the same machine where he watches videos, plays games and listens to music. It was even worse in the pandemic when that was how he “attended” school. He’s a diligent student but even Odysseus had to be tied down to resist the sirens.
Your technician is my new hero.
Yes, the straw! Thank you. There is a book out there called "Tethered" by CM Collins, 2018. In it he posits the story of Daedalus and his son Icarus is a story about the clever tech of one generation killing the next. I think the genius of even the earliest writers seeing this is a very good lesson for our sophisticated, technical world.