Analogue life for internet people

The sun is out where I am, and the last thing anyone wants to do is be glued to a screen for longer than is useful or pleasurable. I’ve argued before that children’s screen time is the tip of the iceberg in a society that treats the screen with such reverence that Brits and Americans spend half of their waking hours looking at one (not counting work). In recognition of people’s growing displeasure with their own screen time, a cottage industry of hardware and software solutions has sprung up to meet the demand for ‘willpower support’. You can get a staggeringly expensive dumb phone, a digital camera, or set time controls on your smartphone, or ‘Brick’ your phone to temporarily remove distracting apps. While these systems may help, they don’t support people in meaningfully evaluating the shape of their digital lives. It’s like hiring a cleaner without considering why your house gets so messy. What I would like to normalise is treating our relationship with tech as something to audit on a regular basis.

As technologies, devices and our personal circumstances change and evolve, so will our interactions with technology. Without being too much of a freak about it, I like to view every screen-based activity as a two-way value exchange, and ask myself if the value is being extracted mostly by me or mostly from me. If I’m enjoying a film I paid for, the value is clearly flowing both ways—great. But if I open the weather app and suddenly find myself reading a Substack article about Chinese peptides, I have 100% been taken for a ride. Overall, my goal is to enjoy many of the amazing and useful things the internet has to offer without sacrificing my privacy, my ability to focus or a disproportionate amount of my time. I hope these ten ideas help you do the same.

I. Algorithmic media audit

I have to declare my personal bias here: I am a huge hater of short-form ‘social’ ‘media’. I had Twitter for about two minutes in 2019 and found the majority of the content there so utterly lobotomised that I had no issue deleting it. I also struggle with Diet Twitter, i.e. Substack notes. As a neuroscientist, here are my three NON-NEGOTIABLES to help my kids regulate their nervous systems. Truly, people are desperate to waste each other’s time. I deleted Instagram because it felt weird putting in all these unpaid shifts on Mark Zuckerberg’s data harvesting platform, which for some reason was always trying to sell me ‘timeless basics’. I deleted Facebook when the ratio of ‘broadly normal’ to ‘clinically insane’ people on the platform became so unfavourable that you could no longer post about your missing cat without someone replying that the government is trying to kill you with fluoride. I ended my brief stint on TikTok upon realising the app was designed to make me into one of the fitless humans from Wall-E, which did not feel like the right fit for me at the time.

It’s become fashionable to complain that Substack is basically the same as all those other platforms. And certainly there are people who use it like Twitter, compulsively broadcasting every half-baked thought that comes into their head for public validation, and then complaining that it feels like Twitter. This has simply not been my experience. I primarily engage with people through their long-form writing, and do so in a deep and narrow way: I keep my subscriptions in the double digits and regularly prune them to make sure that what lands in my inbox feels fun and relevant. All my subscribers seem to be the result of simply working hard to create writing that brings clarity and humour to a subject in a way that hopefully saves people time and money in the long run. I don’t post on a regular schedule because it takes me a while to shape something that I think is worth people’s time. I don’t bombard the world with notes. 99% of my readers engage with me in a thoughtful and generous way—it seems like most of them also have a ‘deep and narrow’ mode of engagement. This is just not something that could ever happen on Instagram.

With all that said, I do accept there are solid use cases for the other platforms. When I suffered from abysmal pregnancy sickness, I actually wanted to put myself in a disembodied trance and make a few hours disappear—although this is more an emergency back-stop than my idea of leisure. I do appreciate that there are some serious people out there who have publicised their work on X or boosted their small business sales on Instagram. I get all that. But for the rest of us, the cost of engagement likely outweighs the benefit. Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism does a great job of explaining this. The author is a professor of computer science at MIT, so it is safe to say he bloody loves the digital world: but is known for ruthlessly assessing the benefits as well as the costs of his engagement with it.

II. Sending a mercenary into the scroll

As much as I love explaining to my extremely offline husband that Zyzz walked (into his early grave, 15 years ago) so that this stupid Clavicular kid could run (someone over with his Tesla Cybertruck), I’m not going to dive into the primary sources. I am completely unwilling to spend any of my time actually watching videos made by someone called ‘Alix Earle’ or reading a tweet some guy wrote while sitting on the toilet at work. Enter: internet culture aggregators who do this for me.

Cartoons Hate Her’s ‘Many Such Takes’ is best in class because it does what it says on the tin: it stays up to date with the latest and most chaotic Twitter discourse so you don’t have to. Even though it’s a free segment, it’s the reason I initially became a paid subscriber. It feels fair: I pay CHH a small monthly fee and she gives me a 7-minute snippet of the discourse, meaning I can see what the crazies are up to without wading through the sewer myself. Embedded is another good one for picking up and dissecting microtrends, like the vibe shift against laptops, which I am choosing to disregard by doubling down on my laptop usage—but at least I am doing this in a self-aware way! Outer Frequencies is my go-to music page, helping me to break out of the Spotify algorithm at a time in my life when I don’t have time to hang out at record stores. I’m sure there are cultural aggregators for your individual interests that will keep you connected to things you enjoy (restaurants, fashion, travel) but cost you 10 minutes a week, not 10 hours. Don’t be scared to delete and delegate.

III. Personal stories are for friends

We are undoubtedly living through the most insane personal essay boom, and personally I kind of hate it. I am not anti-humanities, or anti-creativity, or anti-self-expression, and I do love the fact that more people than ever in history can share their talent and expertise with the world. But not everyone is talented and/or in possession of expertise to share. On rare occasion, a brilliant writer will leverage a personal experience to capture something about the Zeitgeist or the human condition in such a unique way that their piece goes viral and stimulates weeks of heated cultural debate. I’m not talking about that. I am talking about the endless drip-feed of personal essays about friendship, sleep training, giving up sugar, starting therapy, the moment someone realised something, managing interpersonal conflict and or making some inconsequential lifestyle choice which clearly feels immensely important to the author, but is of not importance whatsoever to strangers on the internet. My qualm with these terabytes of oversharing is that they scratch our itch for personal connection without actually generating any real connection.