There is nothing accidental about how hard your phone is to put down. The pull you feel is not a character flaw and it is not weakness — it is the intended output of some of the best-funded engineering on earth. Thousands of people, many of them brilliant, go to work every morning with the specific job of taking more of your attention today than they took yesterday.
This page is the part of the course where we look straight at that machine: who built it, what it wants, how it pays for itself, and where it is heading next. It is not comfortable material. But you cannot get free of something you have not yet let yourself see clearly, and almost everyone who has done this work says the same thing afterwards — the seeing is what broke the spell.
Watch the two films first. Then work through the ten recordings underneath at whatever pace suits you.
The Dark Side of Facebook
- This Video Will Shock You
"Mass" - How Future Wars Will Be Fought
The Secrets They Don't Want You to Know
Ten short recordings. Each one takes a single piece of the machine and shows you how it works on you: the business model, the surveillance, the comparison trap, the open loops that keep pulling you back, and what the constant documenting of your life is quietly costing the life itself. Play them in order or pick the one that describes your week.
First published 21 June 2018
Michael has spent much of his working life online—and much of the rest of it trying to stop that technology taking over. He has thrown a phone into a lake, locked devices in boxes and experimented with long periods offline. He writes about what helped, what failed and how to keep the useful parts of digital life.