Quotes About Technology

Is Silicon Valley programming apps or are they programming people?" Cooper asks. "They are programming people,

or eliminate the need to carry a separate iPod and phone—and then found ourselves, years later, increasingly dominated by their influence, allowing them to control more and more of how we spend our time, how we feel, and how we behave.

We eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling, but soon realized that in doing so we were accidently degrading our humanity.

Every appealing headline clicked or intriguing link tabbed is another metaphorical pull of the slot machine handle.

All things being equal, workflows that minimize this never-ending stream of urgent communication are superior to those that instead amplify it. When you're at home at night, or relaxing over the weekend, or on vacation, you shouldn't feel like each moment away from work is a moment in which you're accumulating deeper communication debt.

These are the knowledge work equivalents of speeding up the craft method of car manufacturing by giving the workers faster shoes.

For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life.

The day the declutter was over, I raced back to Facebook, to my old blogs, to Discord, gleeful and ready to dive back in—and then, after about thirty minutes of aimless browsing, I kind of looked up and thought … why am I doing this? This is … boring? This isn't bringing me any kind of happiness. It took a declutter for me to notice that these technologies aren't actually adding anything to my life.

Humans are naturally biased toward activities that require less energy in the short term, even if it's more harmful in the long term—so we end up texting our sibling instead of calling them on the phone, or liking a picture of a friend's new baby instead of stopping by to visit.

An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too.

there's nothing wrong with connectivity, but if you don't balance it with regular doses of solitude, its benefits will diminish.

What we know at this point," Shakya told NPR, "is that we have evidence that replacing your real-world relationships with social media use is detrimental to your well-being.

The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, . . . was all about: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?" And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.

The title of this book, A World Without Email, turns out to be just an approachable shorthand for the more accurate portrayal of my vision: A World Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow.

Philip Morris just wanted your lungs," Maher concludes. "The App Store wants your soul.

The Hyperactive Hive Mind A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.

When he ran a review of his team's Slack usage, he found that the most popular feature was a plug-in that inserts animated GIFs into the chat conversations.

To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don't cultivate this ability, you're likely to fall behind as technology advances.

The point of providing these details is to emphasize that intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master.* To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, requires that you hone your ability to master hard things. And because these technologies change rapidly, this process of mastering hard things never ends: You must be able to do it quickly, again and again.

This same trend holds for the growing number of fields where technology makes productive remote work possible—consulting, marketing, writing, design, and so on. Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer.

Twitter is crack for media addicts.

As digital technology reduces the need for labor in many industries, the proportion of the rewards returned to those who own the intelligent machines is growing. A venture capitalist in today's economy can fund a company like Instagram, which was eventually sold for a billion dollars, while employing only thirteen people. When else in history could such a small amount of labor be involved in such a large amount of value?

With so little input from labor, the proportion of this wealth that flows back to the machine owners—in this case, the venture investors—is without precedent. It's no wonder that a venture capitalist I interviewed for my last book admitted to me with some concern, "Everyone wants my job.

allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must: Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it's not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.