Declutter Your Digital Life

People are sometimes confused about my personal relationship with digital communication technologies.

On the one hand, I’m a computer scientist who studies and improves these tools. So as you might expect, I’m incredibly optimistic about the role of computing and networks in our future.

On the other hand, as a writer, I’m often pointing out my dissatisfaction with certain developments of the Internet Era. I’m critical, for example, of our culture’s increasingly Orwellian allegiance to social media, and I am indifferent to my smartphone.

Over the past half decade or so, I’ve been trying to clarify the underlying philosophy that informs how I think about the role of these technologies in our personal lives. My thoughts over time have come to orbit around a concept that I call digital minimalism.