# Digital intentionality: What's the point?

Going into November, I wanted to write a sequence of blog posts that would convince people to practice digital intentionality, and show them how to do it.

The theory of change was something like: A lot of people have written books on this topic, and they sometimes work to change people’s behavior. But the people who need the message the most aren’t reading books, because they can’t. The only things they read are online, so I should write to them online, on a platform that they’re already on, like Substack.

This was not crazy. But I now feel that it was confused.

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Where was I coming from?
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Reading *Digital Minimalism* led me to completely change my life. I was catastrophically miserable, and digital minimalism allowed me to fix that.

This experience filled me with a proselytizing urge. I looked around at my friends and family, and saw them all enslaved to their screens, and I imagined how much happier and more fulfilled they could be if they only got free.

Despite my zealousness (and/or perhaps a little bit because of it), I’ve only had one friend ask me to help them do a digital declutter in the two years that I’ve been talking up digital intentionality. Others keep saying they ‘should’ do one soon but never get around to it. Really low hit rate.

The thing is — the thing that I avoided mentioning in the posts I released in early November — is that **digital intentionality is really fucking hard.** It requires massive sustained commitment, and real sacrifices. Even I, who am publicly committed to it, strongly believe that it’s good for me, and have designed my entire life around it, find it to be a Sisyphean struggle.

Anyone who sets out to practice digital intentionality is fighting against multiple overwhelming tides: not only the engineering that makes our devices addictive, but also the social pressure and norms that have formed around the new order. Not having a smartphone with you at basically all times is an enormous inconvenience. And you can’t just unilaterally decide to live in the world as it would be without constant connectivity — that world is not there to be lived in, and creating something like it around yourself is hard.

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What do I want?
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I want it to be possible for the people I care about to be in control of how they spend their lives. I want people to not be actively on their phones while they’re also actively driving vehicles. I want children to play with each other. I want to be able to speak to the people around me as if we live in a society together, rather than everyone being walled off in their own highly-optimized personal cocoons.

But my current approach, of trying to convince people to convert to digital intentionality like I did, is *so* much effort for such an infinitesimal drop in the ocean. What are the alternatives?

**Regulation**
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In an ideal world, I’d want regulation. Social media and smartphones are in the equivalent of the early days of the tobacco industry: everyone is fucking addicted, the extremely rich companies that produce them have every incentive to keep it that way, and there is basically no regulation at all. Digital intentionality as currently practiced is the equivalent of smoking cessation interventions for individuals — it’s good to innovate there, but it’s never going to solve the problem on its own.

Infinite scroll could be illegal. Autoplaying videos could be illegal. Black-box algorithms that end up promoting outrage just to keep eyeballs on the screen could be illegal. Ad-funded platforms could be illegal — everything could have to be subscription- or donation-based, which would remove much (though not all) of the pressure to be ever engineering new ways to keep users spending more and more time on their screens.

I want this, but I have no idea how to make it happen, and getting involved in politics is my worst nightmare.

**Digital intentionality at the community level**
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Maybe more attainable, I want digital intentionality for communities and not just individuals. I want children raised without screens. I want homes and group houses with a landline, no WiFi, and only a single desktop computer. That’s what life was like just a couple decades ago; it shouldn’t sound insane to contemplate returning to it.

I want an assurance contract where fifty people in my community agree to do a month of digital intentionality at the same time. I have been too afraid to propose this seriously, but it’s the only concrete plan I’ve come up with.

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So what now?
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I’m not sure. The problem is vast and all-encompassing, and most of the things I want feel impossibly far out of reach. But there are things that I can do now, so I’ll focus on three of those.

**Community assurance contract**
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If you have thoughts on why an assurance contract is a good or bad idea, or how I can actually implement it in a way that’s good, I would love to hear them.

The current idea is: People in the SF Bay community sign up to do a month of digital intentionality if and only if at least forty-nine other people agree to do the same. That month is maybe March (not a lot of people traveling, also it’s Lent). And assuming it actually happens, we set up events that month, like various rationalist houses having an open-door policy on specific days.

I don’t know, it’s all very vague at this point.

More posts!
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I still have a lot to say about implementing digital intentionality, and it could still be useful to people, so I’ll still publish it. I have at least a dozen more posts in my drafts, and honestly I could probably just keep going forever.

Coaching?
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If you are interested in doing a thirty-day digital declutter yourself, I’d be interested in seeing how it goes to coach someone through that. In person would be best, but if you’re serious about it, I’m happy to work with you remotely. This would be free.