This past summer, between interning and rewatching Adventure Time, I have been preoccupied with a quest to further denature myself from invasions of privacy and, in general, the online world. Some actions I’ve taken include quitting social media on a semi-permanent basis, buying a “dumb” phone with a new phone number, and switching much of my online services to non-BigTech alternatives. Specifically, I’ve done the following:
I bought a “dumb phone” called the Punkt MP02 which can essentially only call, text, and tell the time. I also obtained a new phone number for this device on a limited cell plan. Only my closest friends and relatives have this number. I even went clubbing once in the West Village with only the Punkt in my pocket!
On my actual smartphone (an iPhone 15 Pro Max), I deleted every non-essential app including all social media (Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter/X for me). My iPhone at the moment can only call, text, listen to music, take photos, and read the news. I went a step further and deactivated all three of my Instagram accounts on a semi-permanent basis. I found myself redownloading TikTok a lot more as I have an unhealthy obsession with cool edits to my favorite movies and TV characters. In the end, I ended up switching to the browser version of TikTok, keeping it off my phone. There were many instances during the summer where I killed four to five hours doomscrolling and then beat myself up for not reading for my thesis, completing work for my two jobs, spending time with my family, going to the gym, preparing for graduate school applications, etc… This new system relegates TikTok consumption to my laptop where I am all the more conscious about seeking it out. I scroll a bit less since I need to press my up and down arrow keys to scroll instead of haphazardly swiping.
I invested in several paid services and encrypted platforms including YouTube Premium (switched from regular YouTube), Tidal (from Spotify), Tuta Mail (from Gmail), Bitwarden (from Apple Passwords and NordPass), Mullvad VPN (from NordVPN), Scrivener (from Google Docs), GoodNotes (from Notability), DuckDuckGO (from Chrome). I also also set up a separate email for all my streaming services. This was all due to my hatred of ads and love to localize my data on only the machines I used. I’m still actively discovering new services. The general theme with this software is that by paying a a fair bit of money, I can be ad-free and feel more secure digitally.
I started reading The Privacy Dad Blog which introduced me to literature on surveillance capitalism and maintaining one’s sanctity on an increasingly invasive web.
Philosophically, I began to adhere to the concept of compartmentalization. I basically try to only use devices for their strict purpose. This means if I want to watch YouTube, I’d watch it on my laptop, not my TV, if I want to watch something on Hulu, I’d use my TV not my iPad, if I wanted to text or call someone, I’d use my phone not my MacBook, and so on. If you split up your digital needs across a variety of devices, you automatically have to limit your individual device use and think more considerately about why you’re using the Internet. My favorite example is my iPad. I’ve essentially reduced it to a eReader using GoodNotes6 as a way to markup PDFs of books and articles.
There’s more but, at this point, you’ve probably gotten the gist. Pay for services to reduce ads; compartmentalize machines; read more books and articles; live slower and be kind to myself.
This crusade all started with a book. It’s called The Burnout Society, written by philosopher Byung-Chul Han. I encountered his work after watching a video essay on YouTube (with ads at this time) about how Kendrick Lamar raps about the pitfalls of the American Dream on his album To Pimp a Butterfly. I know. Artistic discovery is such a unique process.
Anyway, Han writes in this short monograph of the transition from the “immunological age” of the 20th century to the “post-immonological age” of the “postmodern.” The former sought to clearly delineate between “inside and outside, friend and foe, self and other” (1). This line of thinking stems from the Cold War where immunological defense of capitalism against global communism dominated much of Western society. Immigrants from such places are foreign threats that can infect local society. In the latter, however, the foreign/order doesn’t infect. “Post-immunological difference does not make anyone sick… it represents the same” (2). Immigrants are less likely to be perceived as threats and more likely to be perceived as burdens (3). In the immunological age, foreignness is a negative. The “Other” is the bad thing that “intrudes” into the “Own,” a KGB spy infiltrating a nice American town to wreak havoc (3).
However, “Otherness,” he argues, is evaporating from 21st century society, induced by the digital age. People are becoming more similar because of a more universally accessible internet culture. Thus, the “neuronal” illness of the 21st century is not a “dialectic of negativity” but rather a dialectic of positivity (4). Since difference is more or less flattened out in a digital age, there is no “formation of antibodies,” no construction of defense mechanisms against a foreign invader. This, for Han, makes discussing culture and sociology in terms of immunology a futile task. This is because the problem isn’t an overwhelming negative virus invading every crevice of society. No, the problem is the opposite. There’s “too-much-of-the-Same, surplus positivity.”
A philosophical diagnostician, Han pinpoints that the “violence of positivity” is drawn from “overproduction, overachievement, and over communication” (5). The violence of the 21st century isn’t immunological, it’s “neuronal,” entirely from our own “psychic infarctions” (6). Positivity doesn’t deprive, it “saturates,” it “exhausts” (7). Depression, ADHD, and burnout syndrome are products of our society riddled with excess positivity. 21st century capitalism has rendered us “achievement-subjects” whose sole imperative is to entrepreneurialize ourselves beyond our physical and mental capacities. “Disciplinary society,” he continues, “transformed into achievement society” (8). What used to be an age of restrictions up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 was replaced with an age of economic opportunism.
Writing incredibly aphoristically, Han summarizes this progression through verbs, “May Not” became “Should’ which became “Can.”
What does this mean?
“Yes, we can” is the phraseological personification of an achievement society. Anything is possible, so we should strive our very hardest to achieve as much as we can, consume as much as we can, work as much as we can. Disciplinary society, by contrast, is governed by a negative modal verb, “no.” A disciplinary society creates “madmen and criminals” while an achievement society creates “depressives and losers” (9). There isn’t a stark shift between the two stages. “Should” in fact emerges from “May Not.” What you should do is a direct result of what you may not do. What you can do is an expansion of what you should do that ultimately remains outside of what you may not do. Late modernity’s endless, excessively positive emphasis on achievement is a product of the panopticon-like cage that the disciplinary society put us in the first place. Han simply suggests a new vocabulary for analyzing this newfound condition. All “yes, we can” did was increase our level of productivity (9). This is “compulsive freedom” or “the free constraint of maximizing achievement” (11). We are not actually free to do what we want, we are free to achieve what we want.
What is the way out of the “free constraint”?
Han hates multitasking. It’s animalistic to him. “Such an aptitude amounts to regression,” he writes, “Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals” (12). It’s a survival technique. Humans are different. We are capable of “contemplating immersion” unlike animals (12). Here, Han begins to diagnose issues pretty familiar to Generation Z: hyper attention, “a low tolerance for boredom,” obsessed with quick bursts of dopamine. What we lack is “profound boredom,” the phase of quietness where true immersive thinking can emerge, where all we are left with is our selves and thoughts. Only in this state can one access, the “gift of listening,” which he defines as “the ability to grant deep, contemplative attention—which remains inaccessible to the hyperactive ego” (13).
Jumping ahead a bit, the passivity of the achievement society paired with its hyperactivity have put us all on a track to “lose our capacity for rage” (22). This is terrible because rage provides us with a “capacity to interrupt a given state and make a new state begin” (23). Rage gives us the emotive toolkit to be displeased with and challenge our surroundings. The same can be said of dread and mourning. Such negative feelings allow us to recognize what is displeasurable in our condition. With “mounting positivizaton,” capacity for these emotions are neutered. The flattening of our emotions puts us closer and closer to computers and robots, “machine[s] of positivity” (24).
How do you reject positivizaton?
According to Han, there’s two types of “potencies,” the power to do something (positive potency), and the power to say no (negative potency). Negative potency isn’t the opposite of positive potency. That’s impotence: not doing anything is not the same thing as saying no. You need to actively reject doing in order to embody negative potency. Achievement society leads to a society of tiredness, a profound nigh-universally felt exhaustion with the ever constant pursuit of achievement. This is the title of his book. This is The Burnout Society. People have been made achievement subjects and performance machines, over-reliant on hyper attention, and unable to think slowly, carefully, and deliberately.
We must then, to break out of this status, gather the strength to say no to excess positivity. This means, as a first step, to reject hyper attention. This is why I spent so much time detoxifying my digital life, removing myself from the digital auspices of algorithms and advertising campaigns that seek to commodify my attention.
It’s okay to be bored. In fact, you should be bored.
That is all to say the following: water your plants, drink some tea, get off your phone, read a book, and chill the hell out.
Cheers,
Ayaan
Bibliography
Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2015.