Digital Minimalism

Newport's argument is that the problem with personal technology is not any single application but the absence of a philosophy for using it. Left without one, people accept every tool that arrives, and each arrives with its own design intent, so the sum of those small acceptances is a life organised by other people's interests. The remedy the book proposes is severe. Rather than trimming habits at the edges, he proposes cutting time online sharply, choosing a small number of activities that clearly serve something a person values, and letting everything else go without ceremony. The word minimalism is doing precise work there: the test is not whether a tool offers some benefit, since almost all of them do, but whether it is among the best uses of the attention it costs. The book is aimed at readers who already feel the unease and have found that willpower and app timers do not touch it, and it treats solitude and offline leisure as things to be rebuilt rather than simply recovered. It is a position rather than a research review.

Written from the publisher description, Open Library.

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• Cal Newport