Cal Newport's Blog, page 30

Yoshua Bengio’s Deep Thoughts on Deep Thinking

Thinking about Thinking

One of the things that surprised me when researching Deep Work was how rare it was to find examples of smart people talking coherently about the process of effective thinking.

This is why I was pleased when a reader recently pointed me toward a video interview with computer scientist Yoshua Bengio — one of the big names in machine learning.

Around an hour and ten minutes into the interview, Bengio turns his attention to the topic of productive thought:

“There is also something to be said about concentration…to really make big progress in science you also need times when I can be very focused and where the ideas about a problem, and different points of view, and all the elements sort of fill my mind. I’m completely filled with this…that’s when I can be really productive.”

Filling your mind with a single problem, Bengio emphasizes, is not a fast process, noting:

“It might take a really long time before you reach that state…”

Hard problems are hard to understand. The best researchers in my field of theoretical computer science, for example, tend to be those who have the drive, brain power and flexibility to read other peoples’ papers constantly to spark a new recombination or extension that advances the field — an exhausting process.

But as Bengio emphasizes, this effort is worth it:

“[After you fill your mind with a problem is] when you can really start seeing through things and getting things to stand together and solving…now you can extend science, now when things are solid in your mind you can move forward.”

Our culture likes to emphasize eureka moments, but we often miss the hard, patient work that goes into preparing the mind to generate breakthroughs.

(Hat tip: Daniel)

Ready Player Productive: On Virtual Reality and Cognitively Demanding Work

Location-Boosted Cognition

A few days ago, I wrote about the converted barn where Simon Winchester writes. By working in a quiet and scenic location, surrounded by books and nature, Winchester is leveraging a key principle of attention capital theory that I call location-boosted cognition.

Put simply, this principle claims that the details of the physical space in which you perform cognitive work can substantially increase the value of what you produce.

Many writers swear by location-boosted cognition. I include myself in this category (the above picture is from the mini-library I built in my new house to support my deep work.)

This shouldn’t be surprising. Writers make their living almost entirely based on the quality of their thoughts, so they tend to care a lot about maximizing what they get out of their brain.

A point I made at the end of my Winchester article, however, is that many other knowledge work endeavors might also benefit from leveraging location-boosted cognition.

Organizations that depend on elite-level thinking — tech companies, law firms, high-end advertising boutiques, and so on — already spend fortunes to hire and retain top talent, and to provide them access to the best information and tools, so it’s only natural that they might deploy extreme work environments to further increase productivity.

Unfortunately, this idea is plagued by logistical obstacles. As a reader noted in the comment thread of my Winchester post: “not everyone…has the resources or possibilites to buy a farm with a place like that [to work].”

He’s right. As our economy increasingly shifts toward advanced knowledge work, location-boosted cognition in the style practiced by writers like Simon Winchester simply doesn’t scale. There are only so many fantastical huts, forest sheds and personal libraries available for the aspiring deep workers of the world.

Virtual Depth

It’s here, however, that I want to return (tentatively) to an idea I first floated two years ago: using virtual reality (VR) to create similar immersive single-tasking experiences.

As I outlined here and here, one of the little-discussed professional applications of VR is its ability to transport the user to a setting that might be capable of enabling some of the benefits of location-boosted cognition — without the need to actually travel to a new physical space.

To make this concrete, let’s consider an example…

Imagine a programmer working from her apartment. Her goal is to master an advanced graph algorithm that she needs to improve the performance of a module she’s coding.

Now imagine that she has a room-scale VR setup (like the HTC Vive) in her apartment living room. She slips on the helmet, picks up the motion-tracked wands, and finds herself transported to a small wooden hut, cantilevered off the side of a snow-capped mountain, overlooking a scenic valley below.

Perhaps her view is something like this:

The clever use of mounted sensors allows the table and chair from her apartment living room to be replicated in the virtual scene in such a way that she can walk over, pull out the chair, and sit down simultaneously in the real and virtual settings — making the illusion of the virtual room exceedingly convincing.

On the virtual desk is a wooden half-lectern, of the type used to hold up large pulpit bibles. When our programmer looks down at the lectern, she sees a page from an algorithm textbook. A swipe of her hand, flips the pages.

Because it’s room-scale VR, she’s free to stand up and wander the hut when stuck on an idea — looking out the windows, and hearing the wind and birds through her rig’s stereo headphones.

Killer App…

The hope is that entering this awe-inspiring scene would allow the programmer in our example to learn the hard material more effectively than if she had simply cracked a textbook in her apartment, at the same table where just moments before she had been web surfing on her laptop, and where, in an hour or two, she’ll eat lunch while watching TV.

The VR, in other words, is meant to enable the same type of location-boosted cognition that Simon Winchester leverages to write smart books.

From a practicality perspective, note that the room-scale VR technology required to implement this scenario already exists, and the image resolution of these systems is rapidly reaching the point where reading dense text in a virtual world will become comfortable.

The table/chair sensors I mentioned don’t exist exactly as described, but similar tools are available and wouldn’t be hard to adapt to this purpose. We are also not that the far from the availability of tactile gloves that enable typing on virtual keyboards, or the use of high-speed internet connections to enable multiple remote workers to collaborate in the same virtual space.

Based on current prices, systems of this type would almost certainly cost less than $10,000. If they produced significant and sustained productivity boosts for elite knowledge workers, this would be a bargain for the individual and organizations that deploy them.

…or Weird Techno-Novelty?

The reason, however, I used the term “tentatively” above when introducing this concept is that it’s also possible that immersive single-tasking simply wouldn’t work.

We don’t yet have evidence that a virtual scene can induce the same state of location-boosted cognition generated by real world environments such as Simon Winchester’s writing barn.

It’s possible, for example, that the programmer in our above example would feel silly putting on a helmet and wandering around a virtual mountain hut like a kid in a video game.

It’s also possible that location-boosted cognition leverages other factors not captured in immersive single-tasking. Perhaps, for example, a big part of the advantage Winchester gains from his writing barn is the chance his brain gets to relax on the long drive from Manhattan to the western Massachusetts farm where the barn is located.

Worth a Closer Look

To summarize, leveraging VR to enable location-boosted cognition is both promising and risky. It might be a killer app for VR in the professional space, or it might be a silly diversion.

What does seem clear, however, is that it’s an idea worth further exploration.

Which is to all to say, if you’re a VR company that’s interested in experimenting with immersive single-tasking, drop me a note — as a promoter of attention capital theory, and the interesting intersections between tech and productivity this theory will inevitably create, I’m particularly eager to learn firsthand what happens when we attempt to shift our deep efforts to deeply inspiring virtual locations.

Simon Winchester’s Writing Barn

Photo by Holly Pelczynski/Berkshire Eagle Staff

The Part-Time Farmer

I’ve been reading Simon Winchester ever since I came across a paperback copy of The Professor and the Madman in my first year of college. Winchester writes on an eclectic mix of topics — from dictionaries, to natural disasters, to bodies of water, to, most recently, the history of precision engineering (naturally) — and his audience follows him because he’s good at what he does.

As I’ve noted many times on this blog, and argued in Deep Work, thinkers who produce unusually original and productive bodies of work often operate in environments that they specifically contrived to help support these cognitive efforts.

Winchester, I was pleased to recently discover, provides a nice case study of this rule in action.

As reported by the Berkshire Eagle, the British-born author splits his time between New York City and a small  farm in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, nestled in the southern Berkshire Mountains: “a bucolic agrarian space with geese, chickens and gardens.”

While in Sandisfield, Winchester lives in an old farmhouse where he keeps his collection of old clocks. When it comes time for deep work, he retreats to a writer’s barn (see above picture) with an interesting history.

Here’s Winchester:

“[It’s an] old timber-framed barn, a onetime granary built in upstate New York back in the 1820s. It was a tumbledown ruin when I bought it, and so I had its posts and beams trucked down to where I live…”

As he elaborates:

“Now it’s filled with books and so much sunlight that in the winter I have to take a break from writing for a while. My view is a line of pine trees, a meadow and newly planted apple trees. And there’s an owl that often comes in the evening.”

One of the more interesting ideas emerging from attention capital theory is the surprising role environment can play in supporting elite cognitive performance.

Professional writers seem to be at the cutting edge of this experimentation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the near future, we start to see more serious attention paid to constructing seriously deep spaces as our economy shifts towards increasingly demanding knowledge work.

In the meantime, if you need me, I’ll be browsing Berkshire farmland on Zillow…

#####

Speaking of intentional living, one of my favorite bloggers, Liz Thames of Frugalwoods fame, recently published her first book: Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living. It tells the story of how she and her husband Nate left a busy life in Cambridge, MA, to live simply but richly on a 66-acre homestead in Vermont. I recently interviewed Liz for my upcoming book on digital minimalism, and was fascinated by the conversation. I recommend both her blog and book.

My New Project, Part 3

Joshua Francis Newport. Born April 25, 2018. Joins his brothers Max and Asa as another future Study Hacker…

Beyond Black Box Management

An Exciting Way to Make a Living

Alex Honnold is an adventure climber. He specializes in free solo ascents, which means he climbs tall things with no ropes. If he falls, he dies.

He’s perhaps most famous for being the first person to free solo Yosemite’s 3000-foot El Capitan wall (see above).

Not long ago, at a live event at the USC Performance Science Institute, Honnold described an interesting technique he used to help prepare for his El Capitan ascent:

“For the full month before I soloed El Cap, I erased all social media off of my phone…I [also] stopped responding to email so much that I stopped getting emails…”

Free soloing turns out to be an endeavor that’s as cognitively demanding as it is physically demanding. Honnold’s distraction-free month was about getting his mind into shape for the big climb.

Alex Honnold’s feats are clearly awe inspiring, but I’m mentioning him here for another reason: his cognitive training provides a hint about a major transformation that might soon upend the world of knowledge work.

A Cursory History of Modern Management Theory

To understand the transformation I predict is coming, we must first (briskly and incompletely) review some management history.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford independently developed the concepts that came to be known as scientific management.

The basic idea of this movement was that experts should study a given production system, figure out the most efficient way to run it, and then pass down these empirically-validated instructions to a largely de-skilled group of workers to execute.

Both Taylor and Ford also experimented with using salary and bonuses to help motivate workers to operate at their maximum efficiency.

As the 20th century progressed, the knowledge sector became more prominent. Despite some early attempts to adapt scientific management-style ideas from the factory to the cubicle (c.f., this unintentionally dystopian monograph), it soon became clear that “knowledge work” was too amorphous and dynamic to reduce to a set of optimized instructions.

It’s here that Peter Drucker enters the scene.

Emerging in the 1940’s as a forward-looking business thinker, Drucker popularized (among many influential contributions) the idea that knowledge workers are best managed by objectives.

Instead of providing knowledge workers precise operating procedures, he argued, it was more productive to get them to buy in on important objectives, and then allow them flexibility in figuring out how to achieve them.

This management by objectives (MBO) strategy proved enormously effective. Though it has evolved over the years, its theoretical descendants are still deployed to great success today (c.f., John Doerr’s fascinating new management book on the topic.)

Black Box Management

Though different in their details, both scientific management and management by objectives build on the same general foundation: the worker treated as a black box.

In more detail, both philosophies conceive of workers as opaque vessels that receive instructions and incentives as input, then produce valuable artifacts as output.

The key is to figure out which types of instructions and incentives produce the best output:

Scientific management used step-by-step procedures as the instructions, and bonuses as the incentives.
Management by objective , by contrast, uses shared objectives as the instructions, and commitment to the organizational mission as the incentives.

Neither approach, however, is interested in the internal processes within the black box that actually perform the messy work of producing the output.

Attention Capital Theory

Modern black box management theories are important, as there’s no doubt that instructions and incentives are crucial to run an effective organization. People need to know what they should do and why.

But as knowledge work becomes more complex and more cognitively demanding, I’ve come to believe that these black box approaches are insufficient by themselves.

To obtain the high cognitive performance required by modern knowledge work will increasingly require that we open the knowledge worker black box and actually confront the reality of how human brains take in input, process it through complex electrochemical circuits, and produce valuable output.

Which brings me back to Alex Honnold.

His “job” is cognitively demanding. Unlike most cognitively demanding jobs, however, the consequence of operating below his maximum is gruesome death — leading Honnold to care quite a bit about getting the most out of his brain.

The result is his willingness to deploy seemingly extreme strategies — such as quitting social media and abandoning email — to ensure his brain is producing at full capacity on the things that matter most.

I strongly believe that more knowledge work organizations should follow Alex Honnold’s lead.

What I mean by my above claim is that knowledge work management cannot stop at the boundary of the black box: providing workers only shared objectives and the tools/information needed to act on these objectives.

It must also consider what occurs inside the box — setting up cultures, workflows, and environments optimized to help the human brain act on these objectives with maximum effectiveness.

To put this in (admittedly dehumanizing) economic terms, in knowledge work, the largest investment and most valuable resource is the attention capital latent within each worker’s brain — that is, their potential to process information into something more valuable.

To optimize the return on this capital requires that you care about what helps the human brain best pay attention to what matters and think deeply about it.

And yet, almost no one does this.

Both organizations and individuals in knowledge fields tend to prioritize increasing convenience and avoiding small losses over supporting Honnold-style states of maximum cognitive production.

For example:

Constant, unstructured communication delivered through email and IM tools is the standard in knowledge work organizations mainly because it makes life easier for everyone — not because it’s helping people produce tighter code, more impactful research or smarter strategy.
Similarly, creative entrepreneurs tolerate concentration-shattering social media use because they fear they might lose some small benefit if they leave these platforms, even though this behavior might be significantly reducing the value of what they produce (c.f., Tammy Strobel’s recent article on this topic.)

My conjecture is that this reality will soon shift. Simply put, knowledge work organizations that prioritize helping brains operate at peak effectiveness over other priorities will be more profitable.

These organizations will be a massive pain to run (imagine how much extra overhead will be introduced into your daily routine when you can’t simply email someone when you need something), but they will also produce a much better return on their investment in attention capital.

Once the market realizes this truth, embrace of these ideas — which I loosely call attention capital theory — will spread swiftly.

At least, I hope this is true.

If ten years from now the average highly-trained knowledge worker is still compulsively checking their inbox, I just might have to switch my career to adventure climbing.

#####

(Hat tip to Mark for pointing me toward the Alex Honnold interview.)

The Disturbing High Modernism of Silicon Valley

A Revealing Memo

A couple weeks ago, BuzzFeed leaked a memo written by Facebook VP Andrew “Boz” Bosworth in the summer of 2016. It contained the following controversial passage:

“[Connecting people] can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.

And still we connect people.

The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”

The reaction to this memo has been muted by the larger data privacy issues afflicting Facebook at the moment, but those who did object, did so mainly on the grounds that Boz was being callous about the potential for this platform to cause harm.

In my opinion, however, this memo contains hints of an even more insidious mindset…

The Disasters of High Modernism

In his new book, Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker lays out a 550-page argument supporting the core Enlightenment values of reason, science, humanism and progress. Even Pinker, however, is quick to point out the danger of pushing these ideas too far.

Where we’ve gotten in trouble, he notes, is when we “[deny] the existence of human nature, with its messy needs for beauty, nature, tradition and social intimacy” — leading us to believe that we can radically reshape humans through technology and reason alone into a better, more efficient existence.

Political scientist James Scott (the source of Pinker’s comments) calls this movement “High Modernism.” He’s not a fan.

Scott blames the technocratic hubris of High Modernism for some of the great social engineering disasters of the 20th century, from Stalin’s famine-inducing farm collectivization, to our own country’s failed mid-century urban renewal projects, which, to quote Pinker, too often “replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises, windswept plazas, and brutalist architecture.”

Technology has undoubtedly created massive benefits for humanity. But it can cause problems — shifting into High Modernism territory — when it ignores, or even tries to replace our complex humanity instead of working with it.

All of which brings me back to the Facebook memo…

From Utopia to Dystopia

What scares me about the leaked Facebook memo is not the passage where Boz acknowledges the harm this platform can create, but instead what he says next: “we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”

Why is this goal a “de facto good”? Boz elaborates:

“The natural state of the world is not connected. It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products.”

Facebook can fix this. As Boz explains, growing their reach is more important than their stock price and more important than creating great products. “[C]onnecting people. That’s our imperative.”

I read these lines as arguing that the natural state of human interaction is hopelessly irrational and ineffective. Facebook hopes to replace this “fragmented” state of human sociality with something better; something that spans borders and languages; something that offers many more connections; something that can leverage big data and smart AI to direct our relationships in an optimal manner.

This vision is classic High Modernism — merely shifted from city cores and farm fields to the digital realm. It should, therefore, scare the hell out of us.

If you went back in time 15 years, and showed James Scott a draft of Boz’s vision, Scott would almost certainly warn you that an attempt to reshape something as fundamental and messy as human sociality with a “better” technological solution would backfire in unexpected, dark, and painful ways.

This is, of course, exactly what happened. The shift from real to virtual connection paradoxically made people more lonely, depressed, and anxious, while simultaneously sparking unexpected increases in tribalism, authoritarianism, extremism, disinformation, and hyperbolic outrage.

Social media executives seem genuinely surprised by these outcomes, but at the same time, they’re not overly concerned. As Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated in yesterday’s congressional testimony, they see these issues as bugs in their master plan that can be patched with even smarter technology (Zuckerberg’s new hope is that clever AI will save the day).

The study of High Modernism, however, undermines this optimism. The problem with social media’s attempt to improve human sociality is not the details of its implementation, it’s instead the very fact that they’re pursuing such a utopian objective in the first place.

A Tale of Two Motives

This discussion of Silicon Valley’s High Modernist aspirations injects extra complexity into our current cultural conversation surrounding social media.

In writing on this topic, I tend to describe social media companies as cynically addicting users to maximize the data they can then extract, package, and sell. From this perspective, the user is merely a pawn in the game of revenue projections and market expectations. Much of the recent coverage of Facebook’s data privacy issues adopts this perspective.

The Boz memo, however, literally laughs at this notion: “[This] isn’t something we are doing for…our stock price (ha!),” he writes. High modernism is more about perfecting human society than making money.

I think the most accurate thing to say is that both factors are at play and that they combine in complex ways. For a true believer like Boz, who has been at Facebook for a long time, perhaps this vision of upgrading human interaction is his primary driver. Zuckerberg, on the other hand, probably tempers this bold vision with the more pragmatic necessity to please his board from quarter to quarter.

I’ve come to realize that when thinking about social media, it’s important to keep both motives in mind, as they spark different reactions.

When confronting the cynical side of the social media business model (as we’ve all being doing in recent weeks), the relevant follow-up question is pragmatic: How do we prevent these companies from abusing our private data?

When confronting the utopian side, by contrast, the relevant question becomes sharper: Should these companies even exist at all?

On Analog Social Media

The Declutter Experiment

In late 2017, as part of my research for a book I’m writing on digital minimalism, I invited my mailing list subscribers to participate in an experiment I called the digital declutter.

The idea was simple. During the month of January, 2018, participants would take a break from “optional technologies” in their lives, including, notably, social media. At the end of the 31-day period, the participants would then rebuild their digital lives starting from a blank slate — only allowing back in technologies for which they could provide a compelling motivation.

I expected around 40 – 50 people would agree to participate in this admittedly disruptive exercise.

My guess was wrong.

More than 1,600 people signed up. We even received national attention when the New York Times wrote a nice article about the experiment.

Since January, I’ve been reading through the hundreds of reports that participants sent me about their experience with the digital declutter. I’ve been learning a lot from these case studies, but I want to focus here on one observation in particular that caught my attention: when freed from standard digital distractions, participants often overhauled their free time in massively positive ways.

Here are some real examples of this behavior from my digital declutter experiment…

–> An engineer named James realized how much of the information he used to consume though social media during the day was “unimportant or useless.” With this drain on his attention removed from his routine, he returned to his old hobby of playing chess, and became an enthusiast of architectural Lego kits (“a wonderful outlet”).

–> Heather, a writer and mother of three homeschooled kids, completed a draft of a book, while also reading “many books” written by others.  “I’m recapturing my creative spirit,” she told me.

–> An IT professional named Andy noted that he typically reads 3 – 5 books a year. Free from the time sink of social media, he’s on track to finish 50 books in 2018.

–> Angie is a yoga instructor, but she also has BFA and used to be a professional artist. “Not spending time on social media had me thinking,” she told me, “what do I want to get good at? Making social media posts, or getting back into painting?” She choose painting. During her declutter she booked three new art shows and had her work accepted at a juried exhibition. “For me, it was simply a refocusing of my time and commitment to myself, to get better at something I love,” she said.

–>  A retired stockbroker named Bob began to spend more time with his wife, going for walks, and “really listening.” He expanded this habit of trying to “listen more and talk less” to his friends and family more generally.

–> A PhD candidate named Alma described the experience of stepping away from distracting technologies as “liberating.” Her mind began “working all the time,” but on things that were important to her, and not just news about “celebrities and their diets and workouts.” Among other things, she told me: “I was more there for my girls,” I could focus on “keeping my marriage alive,” and at night “I would read research papers [in the time I used to spend scrolling feeds].”

–> Another PhD candidate named Jess tackled Anna Karenina and Infinite Jest during the declutter. “Now that I feel like I’m actively choosing what I do with my downtime, I find [hard] activities like reading more pleasurable.”

–> A government worker named Ari replaced his online news habit with a daily subscription to the Wall Street Journal print edition. “I still feel perfectly up to date with the news, without getting caught up in the minute-to-minute clickbait headlines and sensationalism that is so typical of online news,” he told me.

–> When a publishing executive named Leonie gave up Facebook, she had an epiphany: “I do want to connect socially,” she told me, “but for a bigger purpose, and with a specific group of people, and to share a valuable message.” So she started her own blog on a topic she finds important. “It’s early days yet, but I’m enjoying this redirection my time and creative energy into making something that’s uniquely me, instead of getting caught up in the ‘compete and compare’ culture of social media.”

–> David was a former professor looking for a new job after moving to a different state. Ignoring the traditional advice that social media is key to finding jobs (as I also recommend), he deleted his accounts and dedicated his newfound free time to a more traditional job search. “I started getting more and more job interviews,” he told me, attributing his success to being able to deeply research open positions. This effort culminated in the last last week of the declutter: “I had five job interviews in five days and two offers.” He also competed a full rewrite of a young adult novel he was writing. “So I would say this experiment was a wild success,” he concluded.

Analog Social Media

My initial interpretation of stories like the above was that tools like social media consume lots of time. Therefore, when you minimize their role in your life, you free up time for other, more valuable pursuits.

On closer inspection, however, I refined this take. Many of the people who sent me declutter stories were not simply replacing social media use with unrelated activities. In many cases, they were instead finding improved sources of the benefits that drew them to social media in the first place.

For example…

One reason people use social media is that browsing their accounts provides a quick hit of entertainment. As many of the participants in my declutter discovered, however, old fashioned, analog activities can provide much richer entertainment. Just ask Angie about her rediscovery of painting or James about the return of his chess hobby.
Another reason people use social media is to connect with family and friends. But many of my participants found that real world efforts to stay in touch proved more rewarding than clicking “like” or scrolling timelines. We see this, for example, in Alma spending more time with her daughters, or Bob investing energy into seriously listening to his family.
People also use social media to stay informed and learn new ideas. But a consistent theme in the declutter stories was the overall negative impact of trying to keep up with breaking news online. Ari’s experience, in which he discovered that reading a print newspaper kept him both informed and much less anxious, was shared by many participants who explored “slower” ways to keep up with the news. And when it comes to learning new ideas, perhaps the most common observation made by declutter participants was that they ended up reading many more books. Jess and Andy’s experience of rediscovering the joy of reading are just two case studies among many similar stories that I received.

In some sense, the participants in my digital declutter experiment developed analog alternatives to social media, in which they recreated many of the benefits promised by these digital tools using more intentional real world activities.

The resulting analog social media tended to prove significantly more satisfying and rewarding than the addictive experiences offered through screens by the algorithmic attention economy.  It also had the advantage of freeing participants from the sense that their personhood is constantly being sliced, diced and packaged into digital bundles to be sold to the highest bidder.

Beyond Loss Aversion

In recent decades, our culture has developed a strange loss aversion when it comes to digital consumer products.

Even people who are fed up with the deprivations of the algorithmic attention economy are often reluctant to give up services like social media because doing so might lead them to lose some benefits. Loss aversion teaches them to avoid such losses at all costs.

The experiments in analog social media described above, however, highlight an alternative to this obsession with loss aversion. Instead of treating all benefits as equal, you can instead ask what activities provide the best benefits.

Facebook, for example, might help your social life. But redirecting the 50 minutes per day the average Facebook user spends using these services toward phone conversations and real world outings will likely benefit your social life much more.

To focus on the latter is not missing out on the benefits of Facebook. It’s instead replacing Facebook with an activity that boasts an even better return on investment.

To state this more abstractly:

Focusing on the most beneficial activities to the exclusion of less beneficial alternatives can leave you better off than trying to clutter your life with everything that might offer some value.

This idea is not new. It’s the foundation of all minimalism philosophies, including my own concept of digital minimalism. But I wanted to emphasize its importance in our current moment because I think it should be part of the recently energized cultural conversation surrounding social media.

When it comes to tools like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram: don’t let the fear of missing out dictate how you live your life. The most productive and fulfilled people I know often got where they are by doubling down on the activities that return them huge benefits, while happily ignoring everything else.

Beyond #DeleteFacebook: More Thoughts on Embracing the Social Internet Over Social Media

A Social Transition

Last week, I wrote a blog post emphasizing the distinction between the social internet and social media. The former describes the internet’s ability to enable connection, learning, and expression. The latter describes the attempt of a small number of large companies to monetize these capabilities inside walled-garden, monopoly platforms.

My argument is that you can embrace the social internet without having to become a “gadget” inside the algorithmic attention economy machinations of the social media conglomerates. As noted previously, I think this is the right answer for those who are fed up with the dehumanizing aspects of social media, but are reluctant to give up altogether on the potential of the internet to bring people together.

The key follow up question, of course, is how to fruitfully engage with the social internet outside the convenient confines of social media. In my last post I pointed toward one possibility: the development of open social protocols that support the network effect usefulness of large social networks without a centralized company in charge.

This solution, however, requires that you wait for others to make progress on a somewhat complicated technological agenda.

In this post, I want to discuss two additional approaches that individuals can put in place right now to begin their transition from social media to the social internet.

The first approach provides an intermediate step — a way to minimize the worst effects of social media without fully leaving its ecosystem. The second approach describes a more severe separation.

Approach #1: The Slow Social Media Philosophy

In my 2016 book, Deep Work, I proposed a strictly binary approach to social media: you should perform an honest cost/benefit analysis on the social media platforms in your life, and quit all services that don’t provide substantially more benefits than costs with respect to things you truly value.

The issue with this idea, as I discovered, is that many people could identify a small number of important benefits provided to them by particular social media platforms that couldn’t be easily replaced. Two common examples of such benefits include sharing photos of your kids with relatives on Instagram, and keeping up with important community or support organizations that coordinate using Facebook Groups.

This is problematic because once you allow one of these platforms into your life for any reason, they have a way of annexing your cognitive landscape well beyond the boundaries of your original intent.

The average user now spends almost two hours per day on social media — at best a small fraction of this time is dedicated to the “important” reasons most would list when asked why they need to use these services.

In other words: it’s not just what social media you use, but how you use it.

With this in mind, in the two years that have passed since the original publication of Deep Work, I’ve evolved a more nuanced philosophy that I call slow social media.

Here are the basic principles:

Only use a given social media service if it provides valuable benefits that would be hard to replace. Use these services only for these purposes.
Delete all social media apps from your phone. (Few serious uses for social media require that you can access it wherever you are throughout the day.) Instead, access social media through a web browser on your laptop or desktop, once or twice a week.
When logged onto a social media service, don’t click “like” or follow links unrelated to your specific, high-value purposes — these activities mainly serve the social media conglomerate’s attempts to package you into data slivers that they can sell to the highest bidder.

Practicing slow social media allows you to maintain the hard to replace value that these services might provide you, while at the same time neutering their ability to transform you into a pawn in their algorithmic attention economy games.

Adding these restrictions also has the benefit of clarifying the true value of the activities that keep you in the social media orbit. If you find that the extra obstacle of using a web browser instead of your phone prevents you from using a given service for more than a month, than you should quit it altogether.

I was surprised by how many of my readers reported exactly this experience, proving that the stories they told themselves about social media’s importance to their existence were more fictional than they had realized.

Approach #2: Own Your Own Domain

In a recent issue of The Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs wrote an interesting essay titled “Tending the Digital Commons.” In this piece, Jacobs highlights the dangerous tradeoff implicit in using the major social media platforms.

These services, he notes, provide you convenience (they’re easy to learn and use, and provide access to a large existing network of users), but in exchange, they maintain control over the information your produce.

They can then monetize your work in any way that suits their bottom line. As Jacobs writes, it’s incorrect to call the major social media platforms “walled gardens,” because…

“…they are not gardens; they are walled industrial sites, within which users, for no financial compensation, produce data which the owners of the factories sift and then sell.”

This is an economic state that the techno-critic Nicholas Carr provocatively describes as “digital sharecropping.”

Perhaps more pernicious than the ability of these “walled industrial sites” to exploit your labor, however, is their ability to control your behavior — nudging you toward certain ways of describing yourself and encountering the world that make you more profitable to the social media barons, but might alienate you from your humanity.

(This is the chief concern voiced by Jaron Lanier, who first warned us about these issues over twenty years ago.)

What’s the solution? Here’s Jacobs:

“We need to revivify the open Web and teach others—especially those who have never known the open Web—to learn to live extramurally: outside the walls. What do I mean by ‘the open Web’? I mean the World Wide Web as created by Tim Berners-Lee and extended by later coders.”

To be more concrete, he’s suggesting that if you want to connect and express yourself online, the best way to do so is to own your own website.

Buy a domain. Setup a web hosting account (my host, A2, has introductory packages that cost less than $4 a month). Install WordPress or hand code a web site for this account. Let people follow you directly by checking your site, or subscribing to an RSS feed or email newsletter.

In other words, acquire your own damn digital land on which you can do whatever you want without anyone else trying to exploit you or influence your behavior.

I’m biased, of course, because this is my approach to the social internet. I’ve never had a social media account. (For the record, @CalNewport is not me — it’s a fake Twitter account that I know nothing about.) Instead, I’ve built my own little empire here on calnewport.com where no one can bother me, or insert advertisements against my will, or, ahem, use my behavior to help influence political campaigns.

I can tell you from experience that this approach is harder than simply setting up a Twitter handle and letting the clever hashtags fly, but it’s immensely more satisfying to produce things when you’re not a data point in some Silicon Valley revenue report.

It’s also, however, humbling.

As I wrote in Deep Work, part of the power of the social media business model is that it  introduces a type of attention collectivism, where I’ll promise to pretend to care what you have to say (by clicking “like” or leaving a quick comment), if you do the same for me. This is incredibly seductive, though ultimately hollow.

When you run your own site, reality is harsher. If people don’t truly care about what you have to say, or don’t truly care about you, they’re not going to stick around. You have to earn their attention. Which can be really, really hard.

But I don’t think that this is a bad thing.

For those who want recognition, this reality provides a useful forcing function for helping them through the deliberate work of cultivating thoughts worth sharing.

For those who don’t crave recognition, it induces a digital life that’s more localized to closer friends and family — a state that’s more congruent with our fundamental human instincts.

Conclusion

Slow social media and escaping the walled factories of industrial social media are two ways to step toward a more authentic social internet experience. They’re not, however, the only ways. As with my last post on this subject, I’m more interested in sparking new ways of thinking about your digital life than I am in providing you the definitive road map.

On Social Media and Its Discontents

Split Reactions

As someone who has publicly criticized the major social media platforms for years, I’ve become familiar with the common arguments surrounding this topic.

One of the more interesting trends I’ve observed about this conversation is the split reaction to social media I used to hear from the political left before the 2016 election scrambled everything.

This split was defined largely by age.

Younger progressives were fiercely in favor of social media and were often appalled that people like me might say something negative about these services.

I remember one particularly lively radio debate, held on the Canadian equivalent of NPR, in which one of the other guests fought my suggestion that users should perform a personal cost/benefit analysis for these tools by arguing that even discussing this strategy was problematic as it might trick people into not using social media — a self-evident tragedy.

Older progressives, by contrast, were more skeptical of these platforms. This was especially true of tech-savvy activists like Jaron Lanier or Douglas Rushkoff who were connected to earlier techno-utopian movements.

On closer analysis, this gap seemed to stem from how these different cohorts understood social media’s relationship to the internet.

Two Visions of The Internet

The young progressives grew up in a time when platform monopolies like Facebook were so dominant that they seemed inextricably intertwined into the fabric of the internet. To criticize social media, therefore, was to criticize the internet’s general ability to do useful things like connect people, spread information, and support activism and expression.

The older progressives, however, remember the internet before the platform monopolies. They were concerned to observe a small number of companies attempt to consolidate much of the internet into their for-profit, walled gardens.

To them, social media is not the internet. It was instead a force that was co-opting the internet — including the powerful capabilities listed above — in ways that would almost certainly lead to trouble. (See Tim Wu’s The Master Switch for an interesting take on this inevitable “cycle.”)

I’m introducing this split because I think the older progressives largely had it right. There’s a distinction between the social internet and social media.

The social internet describes the general ways in which the global communication network and open protocols known as “the internet” enable good things like connecting people, spreading information, and supporting expression and activism.

Social media, by contrast, describes the attempt to privatize these capabilities by large companies within the newly emerged algorithmic attention economy, a particularly virulent strain of the attention sector that leverages personal data and sophisticated algorithms to ruthlessly siphon users’ cognitive capital.

I support the social internet. I’m incredibly wary of social media.

Understanding the difference between these two statements is crucial if we’re going to make progress on the issues surrounding social media that have, during the last year, finally entered our mainstream cultural conversation.

If we fail to distinguish the social internet from social media, we’ll proceed by attempting to reform social media through better self-regulation and legislative controls — an approach I believe to be insufficient on its own.

On the other hand, if we recognize that the benefits of the social internet can exist outside the increasingly authoritarian confines of the algorithmic attention economy, we can explore attempts to replace social media with better alternatives.

In my opinion, any vision of a better future for the internet must include this latter conversation.

One Possible Solution: Social Protocols

The tricky question, of course, is how exactly one enables a useful social internet in the absence of the network effects and economic resources provided by the algorithmic attention economy.

One intriguing answer is the idea of augmenting the basic infrastructure of the internet with social protocols.

In short, these protocols would enable the following two functions:

A way for individuals to create and own a digital identity that no one else can manipulate or forge.
A way for two digital identities to agree to establish a descriptive social link in such a way that outside observers can validate that both identities did in fact agree to form that link.

There are few serious technical obstacles to implementing these protocols, which require only standard asymmetric cryptography primitives. But their impact could be significant.

As proponents of this approach have pointed out, social protocols hold the potential to revolutionize the social internet.

In more detail, these protocols could enable a version of the internet that includes a vast and descriptive social graph that’s owned by the users themselves, instead of existing in the private database of a single monopolistic company.

In this ecosystem, many different applications can leverage this distributed social graph to offer useful features to users. By eliminating the need for each such social application to create a network from scratch, a vibrant competitive marketplace can emerge.

Crucially, this marketplace could then offer useful alternatives to the increasing number of people fed up with the excesses of the algorithmic attention economy.

People like Facebook. But if you could offer them a similar alternative that stripped away the most unsavory elements of Zuckerberg’s empire (perhaps funded by a Wikipedia-style nonprofit collective, or a modest subscription fee), many would happily jump ship.

This discussion of social protocols, of course, elides many important details. For an interesting take that fills in some of this missing information, check out Steven Johnson’s recent New York Times Magazine article.*

In Conclusion

My point with this essay is not to present detailed technical proposals. I’m interested instead in providing a flavor of the types of options that emerge once we begin to realize that the social internet and social media are not the same thing, and that this reality gives us more options than we might have first imagined for improving our digital lives.

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* While reading the Johnson article, keep in mind that I don’t necessarily share its conviction that blockchain technology is somehow fundamental to implementing these social protocol visions. As a computer scientist who specializes in the theory of distributed systems, I’ve become increasingly wary of the  arguments that lead blockchain enthusiasts to believe that “trust” requires the disintermediation of any formal organization or institution in the design of a distributed system. But this is a different conversation for a different time…

Stephen Hawking’s Radical Thinking

The Death of a Genius

Earlier this week, Stephen Hawking died. It was a sad day for lovers of science.

Hawking’s breakthrough work from 1974 provided the world a new understanding of black holes. It also unified, for the first time, quantum mechanics with gravity — laying the conceptual foundation on which any attempt at a unified theory of physics must build.

There is, however, another important insight to extract from Hawking’s efforts — one that’s less often discussed…

New Thinking

Hawking began serious work on his breakthrough calculation a decade after he was diagnosed with ALS. By this point, he was unable to read books on his own or write down equations.

As the New York Times reports in their (excellent) obituary, Hawking had friends “turn the pages of quantum theory textbooks as [he] sat motionless staring at them for months.”

Unable to write, he then attacked the problem through mental “pictures and diagrams,” seeking visual intuition (a technique also deployed by Einstein).

“People have the mistaken impression that mathematics is just equations,” he once explained. “In fact, equations are just the boring part of mathematics.”

When it came time to work out the “boring” equations for his breakthrough work, he did the whole calculation, carefully, step-by-step, in his head.

The resulting 1974 article, published in the journal Nature, was described by Hawking’s thesis adviser as “the most beautiful paper in the history of physics.”

This part of Hawking’s story is important because it underscores how little we still understand about the attention capital latent in the human brain.

Driven by the constraints of his affliction, Hawking approached his research with an inventive cognitive style that allowed him to make progress where his peers were stuck.

In doing so, he demonstrated that when it comes to feats of inventive concentration, our brains are likely capable of much more than we suspect.

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When I first got started in writing, as a nobody 21-year-old with a modest book contract from Random House, the NPR host and career coach/writer Marty Nemko was one of the first professionals to take me and my ideas seriously. He recently published a book of some his favorite essays. In the spirit of returning the favor, I want to bring it to your attention.