My Mind is For Sale: The Attention Economy and Necessary Reforms

I don't know what the rhetoric gets you. You could put all the substantive content of the draft into four sentences or so: the rest is mere padding. Even your substantive conclusions are as vague as can be: "Antitrust and privacy regulation that has for so long threatened the Big Tech companies would also be an effective way to decrease the impact these companies have on our everyday lives. "

There is one specific claim in the draft: that life without smartphones and platform "social media" is unsustainable. This is asserted on the basis of one newspaper column, and is provably false. I live a pretty sophisticated technical life. I am constantly engaged with the Net; I do all of my teaching, most of my reading and almost all my writing using computers. Aside from the laptops, I build most of those computers from loose parts with my own hands. I install, configure, operate and maintain all the software in all those boxes, not one byte of which is proprietary. I am right this minute monitoring and administering sixteen servers and almost a dozen endpoint devices, none of which are, or ever will be, smartassphones. My devices are not distracting my attention or lowering my cognitive capacity. On the contrary, they are substantially increasing it. They make it possible for me to lead also a reasonably sophisticated intellectual and cultural life, walk a wide professional beat while running a multinational law practice, and in other ways think faster and perform better than I could ever possibly do with my grey matter alone.

When I was 16, in 1975, I said to my father, "I have two brains now, a carbon brain and a silicon brain, and they behave differently." He was more freaked out by that than by anything else I ever said to him, but it was true. Decades of effort and skill went into shaping the relationship between those two parts of my mind. But what took me all that time can now be created for herself by any 12-year-old girl with a $75 Raspberry Pi and a $100 Chromebook. Or by you.

The idea that this is "abstinence" needs to be reconsidered. I am not abstaining from bad tech, I am using good tech. I am not making a sacrifice; I am maximizing the value of my mental resources. The idea that being "born into" bad circumstances cannot be changed with the help of society is the despot's friend. You can find things to do with computers that you like better than Instagram and Twitter, indeed better than the whole snartassphone, engagement-maximizing platform-centric style of technology.

Perhaps it is obvious to you why my life cannot exist even if I think it does, or why FreedomBox isn't real even though I invented it, or at least why another future isn't possible even if we know how to build it and have scalable working prototypes. A clearer statement of the grounds for your conclusion, in touch with the actual technical details, would be a very great improvement in the draft.