Happy New Year everyone!
I’ll be co-hosting a launch party with
for Life Itself’s new manifesto and magazine release, written and curated by Life Itself co-founder .Join us to celebrate the art of the “Second Renaissance.” The event takes place on January 28th at 12 PM Eastern. You can sign up for the Luma event here.
I noticed a difference immediately—a greater sense of peace from day one. It was a spontaneous decision to go on a digital fast: no social media, messengers, or email. My laptop sat on my desk, unopened for two weeks. Camille’s work provides her two weeks off during the holidays, and I wanted to join her, shifting my focus away from the screen.
Exercising simple discipline, I woke up at the same time, worked out twice a day, and did not drink coffee. A new challenge for the year—one I find perversely amusing, given that I am selling coffee. My second-to-last addictive force in life was coffee, and the final boss was the screen. Before the fast, I felt pulled toward the screen, with the itchiness of an addict that robbed me of a fuller sense of agency. After the fast, something shifted: greater peace is here, along with a sense of timeful energy1 that feels, well, more timeless.
The only device I permitted myself to use was my Daylight Computer, the world’s first blue-light-free tablet. It looks like a Kindle but has the refresh rate of an iPad. It’s designed to be non-addictive and has a calming effect, living up to its motto: “having your computers do less so you can do more.” I use it primarily to read the news (Ground.News) and Substacks from my burner account.
I served as the “Philosopher-in-Residence” at Daylight last year and was tasked with writing their manifesto. The spirit of the manifesto was not only about cultivating a non-addictive relationship with technology but also a wise one. At its core, the manifesto emphasized a technological dialectic.
The Dialectic
A dialectic consists of the following:
Thesis: The starting position.
Antithesis: The counter position.
Synthesis: The resolutive position.
The manifesto began with the following dialectic, representing our culture’s active positions on technology:
Techno-optimism
Techno-pessimism
Techno-realism
The optimists want to accelerate technology, the pessimists want to decelerate it, and the realists want to do neither. We referred to the synthesis position as the “third timeline,” arguing that if the optimists or pessimists prevail, the resulting timelines would be inhuman or inhumane. We labeled the optimist timeline the “grey alien timeline” (see the work of biological anthropologist Michael Masters2 for more) and the pessimist timeline the “collapse timeline” (see Ted Kaczynski’s 1995 manifesto).
The third timeline steps outside the time-bound notions of acceleration and deceleration, entering into a different relationship with time itself. This requires a fundamental metaphysical shift beyond the dead-end world that materialism offers. It also embraces the values of both “technology” and “nature,” viewing them not as inherently in conflict, as the optimists and pessimists do, but as complementary and oriented toward wholeness. In essence, being a techno-realist means cultivating a wise relationship with technology.
In the Internet Real Life series I am co-hosting with
, we applied this dialectic, narrowing its scope to the internet:Internet-optimism
Internet-pessimism
Internet-realism
The optimists think (or thought—are there any internet optimists left?) that the internet would bring about a societal utopia, while the pessimists believe that the internet has created a cultural hellscape filled with polarization, mental health issues, and a forever culture war.
The realist position—yet to be fully discovered—is something Dee and I are co-exploring with the participants of the series. Similar to the techno-realist position, the internet-realist asks what a wise relationship with the internet could look like. Here is my presentation that launched the series:
This optimism/pessimism/realism dialectic is the gift that keeps on giving, as I’m now inspired to apply it to the ongoing conversation around AI. I’m currently taking
’s crash course on AI at , and this dialectic aligns well with the discussions surrounding AI:AI-optimism
AI-pessimism
AI-realism
The optimistic belief is that AI will usher in a glorious future, with Sam Altman of OpenAI claiming that AGI could arrive this year and will “massively increase abundance and prosperity.” The pessimistic perspective, on the other hand, focuses on concerns about the “misalignment problem,” runaway AI becoming so powerful that it enslaves or destroys humanity, or elites using AI for greater control than they currently wield.3
Like the techno- and internet-realists, the AI-realist is concerned with cultivating a wise—or at least less foolish—relationship with AI. However, as Bonnitta’s course is showing me, merely identifying as a realist and parroting propositions via wisdom signaling will not make one’s realism embodied.
One must go through a pessimistic phase by feeling the doom scenarios as if they are already true.4 This awakening to the reality of the threat allows one to embody despair, which is necessary to open up the possibility of a hopeful realism, enabling one to act fully in the face of uncertainty to prevent the threat.5
In The Spirit of Hope, Byung-Chul Han makes an excellent distinction between optimism and pessimism, claiming they have more in common than not. Both optimists and pessimists share the same certainty in outcomes: the optimist is certain of a good outcome, and the pessimist of a negative one.
“There is no fundamental difference between optimism and pessimism. One mirrors the other. For the pessimist, time is also closed. Pessimists are locked in “time as a prison.” Pessimists simply reject everything, without striving for renewal or being open towards possible worlds. They are just as stubborn as optimists. Optimists and pessimists are both blind to the possible.” - Byung-Chul Han, The Spirit of Hope
In contrast, hope embraces the uncertainty of the future—one that is open, with an overwhelming sense that good will occur, but without knowing when, how, or even why. When hopeful, one cannot help but be poetic, reach for the whole, and live dangerously. As Friedrich Nietzsche describes, hope is a “tender and graceful audacity where its roar is the wildest and most dangerous.”
Optimism is easy and often confused with being hopeful. Pessimism is hard, but it is a necessary phase. The despair that pessimism induces burns away the deadwood of optimism’s false hope, giving real hope a chance to emerge. Yet, going through a pessimistic rite of passage and sensing into the spirit of hope requires a certain stillness—one that addiction to the screen prevents.
If one wants to be a true realist in anything, one must first overcome “The Pull.”
The Pull
The Pull goes by many names: phone addiction, internet addiction disorder, or digital dependence. The Pull has many digital sources—social media, email, messengers—but shares a common physical source: the screen. Sometimes, a phenomenon is best understood through an image rather than more words and propositions:
The subtle sin of being pulled toward something unnecessary on the screen is not an innocent addiction. It carries a degree of unconsciousness that permeates whatever digital endeavor one engages in. It enslaves both naïve optimists and defeated pessimists to their ersatz certainty, as The Pull cuts them off from the stillness required to freely make a real choice.
I’ll be elaborating more on The Pull, as there can be no realist position available if one cannot resist it.
If you have any questions, insights, feedback, or criticism on this entry or more generally, message me below (I read and respond on Saturdays) …
A good book I read during my digital fast is TIMENERGY: Why You Have No Time or Energy by David J. McKerracher from
. The main premise is that “timenergy” is “energy-with-time,” and “time-with-energy,” forming a foundational human value that is being depleted by our capitalist system. “The Pull,” discussed in this entry, robs us of our timenergy.From the manifesto: “Inspired by the work of biological anthropologist Michael Masters, the numerous reports of extraterrestrial encounters with “grey aliens” are interpreted not as beings from another planet but as evolved versions of humans visiting us from the future. Masters argues that their distinctive features—big eyes, large heads, and small bodies—result from evolutionary trends like increased brain size and bodily “neoteny” (juvenilization), which is influenced by technological augmentation. These changes will be evident in the ongoing trend of integrating computers into our bodies and living in increasingly artificial environments.” Watch this video to learn more about Masters theory.
See the “world-in-chains” scenario.
A proposed practice for this is “enlightened doomsaying,” recommended by philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy. As Dupuy states: “To believe in fate is to prevent it from happening.”
This pessimism, optimism, and realism dialectic maps over to Zac Stein’s notion of pre-tragic, tragic, and post-tragic. From Zac: “Briefly, in the pre-tragic station, we have either not experienced tragedy or have managed to bypass or deny it. The pre-tragic is defined by a superficial sense of clarity and certainty. In the tragic station, we acknowledge and face the tragedy of suffering but often cannot find our way beyond it, so it destroys our capacity to respond to or creativity and clarity are exploded, and all that seems to remain is a debilitating and even degrading uncertainty. In the post-tragic, we have fully faced the tragic and live within it, but are able to transcend and transform it. In the post-tragic, we move beyond the certainty of the superficial and the dogmatic and begin to directly access the deeper certainties of reality’s inherent value. And yet at the same time, we paradoxically hold the mystery. We enter a cloud of unknowning—the spiritual and even religious dignity of our uncertainty—but do not allow ourselves to be inappropriately seduced by facile certainties.”