Newport, Digital minimalism

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I read this, iRoNiCaLlY, as a PDF on my phone. I was seized by a compulsion to read it on Friday afternoon; it wasn’t on the Libraries NI Libby subscription (here’s a secret: Barely Anything Is), so I googled* it as a reminder to take it out physically and found to my amusement that the third result was a direct link to a PDF of the book hosted on archive dot org (god bless america???).

*I don’t actually use Google.

It’s a good book with, satisfyingly, more tangible advice than many in the “technology bad” genre: an effective mix of concrete examples showing why social media companies are ethically unsound, descriptions of pre-digital-age thinkers and the ways they connected with their community and environment, and juicy morsels of human interest. The 30-day “detox” period looked like it could work pretty well, although I didn’t really feel able to apply it myself because I’d already implemented many of the things it suggested. So I guess I was able to interpret this book as validation of my own decisions over the years, and that probably conversely explains why I liked it, because we all love being told we’re doing the right thing. In my case it wasn’t so much a temporary cold turkey experience as a gradual strategic withdrawal from social media, moving from mainstream to smaller platforms and therefore, I think, decreasing the various dopamine hits available to me such that it never felt like a great loss when I removed them entirely. It’s easier to move from a Facebook account with 500 friends to a fediverse account with 20 followers than it is to leave social media completely – but it’s also not that difficult to delete a fediverse account with 20 followers either. In my case this is a process that has been going on, in some form, for around fifteen years, but the outcome is that I feel able to describe myself as someone who “doesn’t have social media”.

There’s something to be said about permacomputing and intentionality, both of which I believe were discussed in the book, and how these intersect with the way people who maintain personal websites should approach the principle of digital minimalism, which wasn’t. I understand that the target audience was the average social media user rather than people who enjoy sshing into the server of an evening. Nonetheless I think there is a need for website maintainers to be reflective in similar ways about the amount of digital junk we accumulate and the ways in which we can lighten our digital footprint – not only in an environmental sense, but also in terms of strengthening personal security, as well as ensuring that what we’re doing has some kind of point to it. I see a lot of “you should have a blog” discourse but few suggestions that there is a need to be purposive in terms of what one actually blogs about. Far too often I come across blogs by people who seem like they could have something intelligent to say, but every post is a variation on “I’ve decided to blog”, “I’ve introduced this new technology into my blogging workflow”, “wow I really ought to blog more often”, “I’ve switched from static site generator one with one hundred dependencies to static site generator two with two hundred dependencies”.

Anyway, I think there’s a need to consider the concept of digital minimalism in a wider sense, linking to broader concerns about sustainability and security beyond the initial “free yourself from the tyranny of the smartphone”-type messaging (rightly) directed at the normies. Here are some arguably digital-minimalist practices that could apply in the personal website realm, and which may explain some recent structural changes on this site:

• Ensuring files on the server are in small formats and deleting those not used.
• Deleting internal and external accounts and services when they have outlived their purpose (rather than abandoning them, surely a security risk).
• Minimising the use of purely aesthetic external links and instead prioritising their use for signalling specific pieces of information.
• Using one’s online presence as a way of facilitating or recording offline activities rather than an end in itself.

There probably aren’t any critical publications about independent personal websites in the same way as there are about big social media platforms, and most of what’s online is understandably very celebratory and earnest. And needless to say it’s the big platforms and their hair-raising moral codes that deserve thorough scrutiny (another book I read recently was Careless people, so, yeah, obviously), but I think some good could be done by reflecting critically on why and how we should use the internet as a hobby space. (Related: if you ever see this site on any blog aggregators please let me know so I can ask to be removed from them.)