There is a new edition of Delicacies out. You can read it here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan/issues/petervan-s-delicacies-issue-126-205279

I believe the file-rouge of this edition’s collection is the challenging of “traditional” internet critics. Forget what you know, unlearn, and develop your own new insights.

As a teaser, check out Utopian Overreach, a great counter-narrative to the narrative of staying human by being disconnected.

The digital-wellness movement, though it seems to counter the grandiose schemes of the tech industry, shares a similar aspiration of fixing people for their own good, prescribing a specific one-size-fits all relationship with technology as a way to build an ideal society. This movement is typified by former Google employee Tristan Harris’s Center for Humane Technology, books like Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and Catharine Price’s How to Break Up With Your Phone, and software such as the Before Launcher and Google’s new suite of experiments aimed at “balancing life and tech,” including a counter that tells you how many times you’ve unlocked your phone in a day.

What these interventions all have in common is how they frame our problems with technology as a matter between the individual and a specific device or app rather than the social, moral, and infrastructural relations that ultimately bind them together.