Your Loneliness Was a Design Decision Made by Your Enemy
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Georges Bataille
14 min read
The article directly references Bataille's concept of sacrifice and rendering things unproductive. His philosophy on expenditure, excess, and the sacred provides deep theoretical grounding for the author's argument about productivity and meaning.
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Attention economy
13 min read
The article's central thesis about design decisions that harvest loneliness and drive engagement directly describes the attention economy. This concept explains the economic incentives behind the algorithmic manipulation the author decries.
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Votive offering
15 min read
The author describes Celts in Gaul digging holes and throwing art into them as an example of sacred unproductive activity. This is the archaeological concept of votive deposits, which provides fascinating historical context about ritual sacrifice of valuable objects.
The best days of my life, I barely notice my phone. If I spend the day out in the world, I forget that I have social media accounts that I could be checking, news I could be doomscrolling. The best days of my life, I’m usually, but not always, with people (or my dog, who counts as people) and it simply doesn’t occur to me to look at a tiny screen. Some of the best days of my life are spent in my hammock reading print books.
I think everyone I know has the fantasy of destroying their phone or their computer. Everyone has a different but oddly specific way they’d do it: smash it with a rock, throw it off a skyscraper, set it on the train tracks. Myself, and I know this isn’t environmentally friendly, I imagine myself on a tiny sailboat somewhere on the ocean (even though I don’t sail) and I cast my devices overboard. I don’t want to just destroy my phone or my computer, I want to sacrifice these machines to the gods of the ocean.
We have these thoughts, but we’re mistaken about why we have them. Most of the time, when I’m imagining the depths swallowing my phone, I think it’s because I want to disappear from society, that I want to leave the world of people behind. I want to set the computer on the tracks and then walk into the woods, forever.
The thing is, I’m doing that fantasy wrong, even in my own head. We’ve decided somehow that our phones, with their promise of constant interconnectivity, are representations of people, of society, of community. We think we want to be done with our phones because we want to be done with people. But that’s simply not the case. What we wish to be done with are hollow, disconnected interactions. We wish to be done with notifications and engagement. If socializing were food, we want a meal but we’re given empty calories.
Because nearly (but not all of) the entire online ecosystem is designed not to bring us together, but to keep us apart.
That’s not an accident. It was designed that way. It was designed that way by our enemies.
I know it’s easy to blame all our problems on capitalism, but this is a problem created by capitalism.
Sacrifice, as I understand it (related to me by ...
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