My baby is almost 8 months old, and he's obsessed with my phone. First of all, it has a rubbery case on the outside that's absolutely perfect for chewing. Second, music sometimes comes out of it, and music is his favorite.
But most of all, my baby is obsessed with my phone because he sees me obsessing over my phone. Even though I aimlessly scroll less, I find myself conducting much more business on my little pocket computer—work messages or family admin tasks—than I used to, in hopes of squeezing in more while also taking care of him.
The first few times he lunged for the black mirror, my heart squeezed in a little bit of panic. Am I destroying his little brain with the glimpses of flashing lights? Does he think the phone is his sibling? Shouldn't we be cocooned in some kind of Velveteen-Rabbit world of old-timey materials like muslin? Shouldn't I prevent my kid from learning about the existence of screens until they turn eleven?
And then I decided I'm actually really grateful that I can place a grocery order while sitting on the floor with my baby, and I'm pretty happy with my phone habits. I feel for the first time in a long time like the Internet serves me, not the other way around. Smartphones are useful and sometimes fun, and they're part of life, and I'd rather let my kid see me using mine in a way that makes sense for our life.
To be perfectly honest, what's changed is that I mostly stopped using social media around the time Micah was born. There was simply no longer an app that made me feel particularly good while I was using it. Twitter imploded, Instagram won't let us see our actual friends if they don't do Reels, I just don't know what's going on with Threads, I assume that everything on Facebook is generated by an AI, and TikTok is absolutely a no for me, dawg.1
Here's something I do every few months: imagine it's 1992 and you have just learned there is a thing called the Internet. Very, very soon you will have all the world's knowledge, access to all of your friends, tools for being more efficient at your work, an infinite worldwide shopping mall, and several thousand years' worth of videos of other people's cats in your pocket. If the possibilities were all imaginary, what would you dream of doing with all that power and access? Which parts of your life would you hope to expand, and which would you try to contract? What would you think of the responsibility of it all? How would you hope to share it with your friends, your colleagues, your kids?
One thing that's thrown into sharp relief when I think about it this way is that most of what we've come to call "the Internet" isn't really, like, the best of humanity applying our most powerful tools to elegantly solve problems, or joyfully and daringly create art, or generously connect us to each other in more meaningful ways. Most of the bundle of "The Internet" is a series of machines driven almost exclusively by a profit incentive to biohack our attention and sell us things. If it makes us vaguely dissatisfied, slothful, but also jumpy, all the better—for selling us things.
When I think about my imaginary utopian Internet, I appreciate the turn-by-turn driving directions and the Zoom chats with my college or seminary friends. But mostly, I just like reading and writing, and if I was in charge of the Internet in 1992, there is no way I could ever dream that the Information Age would make us (by and large) so much worse at those things.
It’s largely a question of incentives. We’ve set up a system where hardly anyone profits if we all have interesting, cordial conversations, learn edifying things together, then turn our full attention to our families and neighbors with our embodied lives satisfyingly enriched but not encroached upon.
What used to take up all my time on my phone was Instagram, because it seemed the best way to keep up with my family, friends, and writing friends—and because it was a semi-reliable way to share ideas and reach new readers. But once Substack came along, I quickly discovered that I'd been trying to use Instagram as a networked blogging platform, and now here was an actual networked blogging platform WITH. NO. ADS.
There’s no such thing as a utopia, and there’s no such thing as a digital utopia. Substack has plenty to complain about, from weird little quirks to potential serious ethical issues.2 But Substack is also growing a little slice of the Internet pie where the incentives are aligned differently—and they’re doing it so successfully that it can be hard to notice how radical that is. You think you already know what a news feed or email-sender-thingy is, so it’s hard to notice what’s missing:
- ads in inventively obnoxious formats meant to distract you from the thing you actually meant to read
- types of posts designed to engross your attention but render you an ever-more-passive consumer
- autoplays and infinite scrolls
- algorithms that not only require the creators to game the system to get seen, but even hide most of what the consumers want to see
Substack doesn’t have these because it’s actually a place meant for reading and writing. And it’s a place that makes money when readers read and writers write—not from advertisers advertising and consumers consuming.
Often, paying attention to the ecosystems of your life means remembering to notice what’s not there. I think that’s particularly true of the inherently noisy media ecosystems we inhabit.
I want my media, Internet, and frittering-away-time-in-waiting-rooms lives to be mostly filled with reading and writing. I also want to fill them with things that make me feel good and connect me with others. Knowing these priorities, it’s been a pretty organic evolution over the last several months to shift more and more of my Internet-entertainment time from Instagram, Twitter, or even Threads over to the Substack app.
While I do think the alternative incentive model in itself is worth investing some time and money into—if only because it offers us a tiny window onto a different kind of Internet—my point is actually not that we should all spend all our time on Substack. My point is mostly that our questions about time, screens, smartphones, algorithms, fake news, and the Internet sometimes feel more complicated than they actually are. We’re trying to litigate the details and nuances of these things we call “tech” when it would be a lot simpler to ask much bigger and older questions: Where does the money go? Does this help me love my neighbor? How does this make me feel?
I can’t decide what your priorities are; everyone’s media ecosystem can and should be different. Maybe you connect with a teen in your life over TikTok! Maybe time on Threads just fills you up! At certain times in my life I will regularly devote at least twenty minutes per week to meticulously reading every one of a few hundred comments on a Facebook acquaintance’s “Meme Thursday” post. A bunch of people just post memes and then you can look at them in a slightly inconvenient format. It’s not for everyone, but sometimes it’s for me.
Since we are all here using Substack,3 though, here are a few ways I’ve made it work really well for me.
Use the app. I currently subscribe to 46 Substacks, and if they all came to my inbox it would drive me up the wall. However! If you navigate to your account settings, the very first option is to change Newsletter Delivery to “Smart notifications.” That sounds confusing, but in practice I basically get everything I subscribe to in chronological order on the app, and Substack emails me a digest once a week. 46 might sound like a lot, but they aren’t published every day! I get a few every day, and I can catch up on them when time allows.
If you’re thinking about becoming a paying subscriber to a newsletter, go ahead and do it! It’s not always well-publicized that subscribing to a paid Substack locks in the current price forever. When those writers raise prices because of inflation—or even because they’ve added new paid features!—all existing subscribers stay at the same rate.
Engage with writers you love. Another overlooked feature of Substack is that a lot of writers are more accessible here than elsewhere. This space is valuable to us and we want to tend it well. And our people here are our readers, not our “followers” (it turns out, most writers don’t actually want to be influencers!). Talk to us about our actual work, and we’re a lot more likely to be able to talk back.
I’ve been researching, thinking, observing, and writing about our smartphones and our attention since I got my first one in 2014. It only becomes more fascinating and important to me, and somehow the adage keeps gaining meaning instead of losing it: how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.
May your days be spent in
peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey
I vacillate between thinking I wouldn’t enjoy TikTok at all, and wondering if it might make me feel a little too good. I have books to read!
Notably, a small but significant portion of Substack’s writers left because the site platforms (and profits from) Nazi ideologies. This is not a decision I fully agree with, but I also use lots of products from companies I don’t fully agree with. I find Anne Helen Petersen’s arguments here compelling: wherever there are lots of people saying words, eventually Nazi people will follow. It probably makes more sense to stay wherever our words can make the most impact, and use that impact to drown out (or change the policies around) Nazis.
you may be reading this via your email inbox and not particularly aware that you are using Substack, but I am using Substack to send it to you. You can also read lots of other newsletters all in one place through the Substack site or app!
I too have stepped back from all social media by disabling or deleting all my accounts (with my OCD it’s too hard to find a middle ground where I spend a little time there). I’ve really enjoyed spending my time differently, and a fair amount of that time goes to Substack (although I’m still working on giving more time to writing, not just reading). I have noticed something interesting though - I made the switch shortly before moving in with my partner, and I think if I was still single it would’ve been much more difficult to move away from social media. At the end of my days, social media was a way to connect with people, talk about our days, and have discussions about what was happening in the world - all things that are now built in with my partner but that I struggled to consistently find someone to do with before I was partnered. I do think the solution is to build better social infrastructure in our society, and to be more aware of the unmet social needs of single people, but it’s been interesting to ponder how this has unfolded in my life.
You've worded this so thoughtfully, and I resonate with all of it. I love the substack app because it feels like a curated magazine just for me. I also have a Micah, but mine is 6 (and a half, he would correct me).