From: Tiffany
To: Douglas
Hello!
From: Douglas
To: Tiffany
Hello - and gosh! It’s been a long time since I wrote “Cyberia” and you founded The Webbys. Back then we both thought the best way to promote a healthy digital society was to celebrate those who were envisioning and engineering positive, pro-social futures. But around the time of the AOL-Time Warner merger, around 1999, it became clear to me - and I’m guessing to you, too - that the net was about to be more about the growth of capital than the growth of culture. As a result, we got the surveillance economy and the attention economy, which instead of helping people create value for themselves and each other, simply use tech to extract value from people and places.
Right about that time is when I wrote this weird little piece for Adbusters called “The Sabbath Revolt,” where I was arguing that people should adopt a “one-seventh rule.” One day each week, not just away from tech, but away from buying and selling. Taking a day off would help people recalibrate their nervous systems and their social priorities.
It kind of fell on flat ears. But now with Day of Unplugging and your book “24/6” and Tristan Harris convincing tech companies to show us how much time we’re spending, I’m wondering: Is the amount of time we spend on our devices as important as how we’re spending time?
From: Tiffany
To: Douglas
For the last 10 years, my family and I unplug completely from all screens for one day a week, which has been extremely profound. Since we started this practice, our society has become more and more screen-obsessed - and the Web has become more and more beastly, trying to manipulate in more ways.
There was a moment when I founded the Webby Awards in 1996, where a lot of people got their hopes up for this open, decentralised system that everyone could contribute to. Then when it became centralised, the priorities changed and it was about sucking in all your time and monetising every moment of your life. So for me, the book is about a multi-pronged approach. One, you need a full day off the network once a week. Twenty-four hours is necessary to do the long-term thinking we’re not able to when we’re jacked into the network 24/7. You need the space to do the kind of thinking that drives culture forward.
Secondly, we need to change the models that are happening with the web. I don’t think it’s a mistake that there’s a reckoning in the gender movement and the tech movement at the same time. We need more diversity at every level of when we’re creating these tools.
So to answer your question: It’s not just about disconnecting. You need time away - real time away. Not just a couple hours before bed, but a full day off every week to regain perspective and bigger picture thinking.
And we need more diversity in the creation, oversight and regulation of everything having to do with technology and the web. We need to revisit the original vision of the web. We have lost the beauty and the power of what a decentralised network can do.
From: Douglas
To: Tiffany
The thing I start wondering, though, is now that we’re moving into the internet of things, the new Silicon Valley vision is for the web to go away, altogether. I’m wondering now if we’re going to remember the good old days when the internet was when you went online?
We’re already complaining that our phones are always on, but that’s nothing if your house is online. You know?
From: Tiffany
To: Douglas
I completely agree. But I still think we need to push back. I think that that’s part of what we need to be protecting - the boundaries of our own existence. It isn’t healthy to have a 24/7, completely-permeable society where there are no boundaries. One thing in terms of my family’s weekly day off screens: We call it “Tech Shabbat,” but in my mind it is not a religious practice. I am not a religious person. I want taking a “Tech Shabbat,” a full day without screens a week, to be like yoga and meditation. The practice of taking a day off of the network of life and work is over 3,000 years old for a reason. This is just an updated version for our modern age, when everything has become 24/7.
From: Douglas
To: Tiffany
Right. The one-seventh rule. But then we’ve really got to figure it out. Let’s say you have an advanced version of Nest - one of these digital thermostat-y things that’s on the internet. As you’re walking around in your house, you’re delivering data to the networked thermostat, which is then using it not just to govern your system, but to inform all these other parties about you.
I guess we want a way for the internet of things to go local…
From: Tiffany
To: Douglas
Let’s think of some different business models. I keep thinking, what would you pay to not have your data sold? For a device like Alexa, but with constraints around it? There are versions of these things that don’t have access to every aspect of your life all the time. They do have an off switch. I hope people are going to start to rise up and say, you know what, I don’t feel comfortable that my data being sold in this black market and influencing elections. We need a different model.
From: Douglas
To: Tiffany
Not to stroke their ego, but that’s why the original shareware / Mozilla/ Mosaic model for internet development is so much more resilient. It’s so much hardier. If they treat the data that we’re producing like a commons, rather than stuff that they’ve extracted, then we’re not being exploited by our technologies anymore. We’re all sharing in the benefits.
From: Tiffany
To: Douglas
It becomes a healthier environment.
From: Douglas
To: Tiffany
If we started a model for technology that was a commons… God. If we put our medical data and our personal data into a big commons, it would disrupt the business model of all the corporations overnight. Their proprietary data would be worthless.
From: Tiffany
To: Douglas
I feel like people don’t have a handle on the consequences of “free.” The free that’s not really free. Once people have a better handle on that, I hope and think it will inspire new models that give people more control over what they’re giving away. And, alternative models for a healthier web that returns to the commons and decentralisation.
From: Douglas
To: Tiffany
Yeah. It’s the equivalent of people understanding the difference between the low prices of Walmart and the high cost of Walmart.
From: Tiffany
To: Douglas
I feel a big shift. I feel like it’s top of everyone’s mind right now. Or, they know they should be thinking about it. We need to be having a global conversation.
From: Douglas
To: Tiffany
Most of our technologies are designed to use us. If that’s the relationship, of course it’s going to make you feel drained and sad and sick. The original purpose of the economy was to help people create and exchange value. Now our economy is here just to extract people’s value.
From: Tiffany
To: Douglas
This comes back to the original hopes for the web. We got so excited about the web in the early ’90s with this potential to extend our ability to create and connect. But I never thought everyone’s heads would be down all the time staring at their devices and it would keep people from being present with others right in front of them.
From: Douglas
To: Tiffany
It’s interesting. When the visual web emerged, it felt like a slight step back from the possibility of the internet. It was flat and opaque and more like television. I had this worry: This is going to be less about personal weirdness and expression, and a little bit more about conformity and what-can-l-sell. Then individual webpages became MySpace, and then the cookie-cutter profiles of Facebook.
From: Tiffany
To: Douglas
Completely.
From: Douglas
To: Tiffany
But the terrific pro-human, pro-social qualities of these spaces can be retrieved before it’s too late.
From: Tiffany
To: Douglas
Yeah. And to figure out how to make that happen, you need that day away every week to do some longer and bigger-term thinking. And it’s about reconnecting with yourself and your family.
From: Douglas
To: Tiffany
And it even makes you a better web developer and user.
From: Tiffany
To: Douglas
Exactly.