Casey Johnston first lobotomized her phone in January 2024


"I've barely posted in the last year. I'm too scared of TikTok to even install it anywhere. I don't use Twitter anymore, and have deactivated my account. I admittedly post on Bluesky periodically, but scroll it rarely, and even then it's still mercifully possible to scroll to the end of the algorithmless Bluesky feed.

"I had to let go of being the first person to know about everything, which is neither a personality nor a redeeming character trait, anyway. You'd be surprised how much news you still learn about even if you are actively not trying to. 

"Recently, a college student interviewed me about performance-enhancing drugs, and asked what I thought of people using them. I said, do people use them? Look around in real life —do people use them? Or are there, like, a bunch of viral social media posts made by a few hundred or even thousand people out of several billion who use them? These are not the same thing. Social media is not reality. Reality is reality. 

"As Shoshana Zuboff quoted of an anonymous Silicon Valley marketing director in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:
The internet of things is all push, not pull. Most consumers do not feel a need for these devices. You can say 'exponential' and 'inevitable' as much as you want. The bottom line is that the Valley has decided that this has to be the next big thing so that firms here can grow. 

"After all this, I even (gasp) leave my phone at home sometimes. My honest goal would be to no longer carry it regularly at all, unless I'm going on some expedition out of town or something and need it for navigation."

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