In Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Mostly Noisy World,  Cal Newport explains how and why the impact of technological tools on most people’s personal lives “is complicated by the fact that these tools mix harm with benefits. Smartphones, ubiquitous wireless internet, digital platforms that connect billions of people — these are triumphant innovations!” Indeed they are. That said, he wrote this book to explain how most people can thrive in our current moment of  of technological overload. I call it digital minimalism, and it applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools.”

As I worked my way through Digital Minimalism, I recalled the concerns expressed by Shoshana Zuboff in her recently published book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, published by PublicAffairs (January 2019). As explains, “This book is about the darkening of the digital dream and its rapid mutation into a voracious and utterly novel commercial project that I call surveillance capitalism…At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential.  It revives Karl Marx’s image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human experience.”

She provides an abundance of information, insights, and counsel that she hopes will help those who read her book to contest and interrupt, then contain and vanquish an unprecedented threat to the human race. “At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential.  It revives Karl Marx’s image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human experience.”

According to Zuboff, her book documents “a journey to encounter what is strange, original, and even unimaginable in surveillance capitalism. She examines several major organizations — notably Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft — that are in various stages of developing a “technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction-operation.” Her journey’s ultimate destination? “Our aim in this book is to discern the laws of surveillance capitalism that animate today’s Trojan horses, returning us to age-old questions as they bear down on our lives, our societies, and our civilization.”

If knowledge has power, and I think it can, those who possess knowledge that has the greatest power will have a decisive competitive advantage over those who do not. Zuboff shares what she has learned from her wide and deep research in order to support what is best viewed as a call to action. In John 8:32, Jesus is quoted as saying, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Sustaining totalitarianism depends on severely limited access to knowledge but first it must be obtained by surveillance. Newport fully understands the nature and potential danger of this threat, as does Jeff Bezos and other leaders in the major multi-media companies.

These are among Cal Newport’s concluding thoughts: “In my experience, the key to sustained success with this philosophy is accepting that it’s not really about technology. but is instead more about the quality of your life. The more you experiment with the ideas and practices on the preceding pages [notably digital decluttering process], the more you’ll come to realize that digital minimalism is much more than a set of rules, it’s about cultivating a life worth living in our current age of alluring devices.”

He expresses a fervent hope that digital minimalism can provide “a constructive way way to engage and leverage the latest innovations to [begin italics] your [end italics] advantage, not that of faceless attention economy conglomerates, to create a culture” of which all of us can say with confidence, “because of technology, I’m a better human being than I ever was before.”

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On himself: “My name is Cal Newport. I’m a computer science professor at Georgetown University who studies the theory of distributed systems. In addition to my academic work, I’ve also written six books and numerous articles and essays for the general public. In recent years, my writing has focused on the intersection of technology and culture. I’m particularly interested in the impact of new technologies on our ability to perform productive work, and to lead interesting and satisfying lives.  My new book, Digital Minimalism, argues that we should be much more selective about the technologies we adopt in our personal lives, and my previous book, the bestseller Deep Work, argued that focus is the new I.Q. in the modern workplace.”

Digital Minimalism [colon] Choosing a Focused Life in a Mostly Noisy World, Jeff Bezos,  Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism [colon] The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, PublicAffairs, Deep Work