Tech detox movements reinforce rather than challenge late capitalism.

Evidence

Grafton Tanner makes a similar point in “Digital Detox: Big Tech’s Phony Crisis of Conscience,” a short piece on the repentant tech entrepreneurs who have realized just how addictive their technology is. Working via initiatives like Time Well Spent, an advocacy group that aims to curb the design of addictive technology, former Facebook president Sean Parker and ex-Google employees Tristan Harris and James Williams have become fervent opponents of the attention economy. But Tanner is unimpressed: … They fail to attack the attention economy at its roots or challenge the basic building blocks of late capitalism: market fundamentalism, deregulation, and privatization. They reinforce neoliberal ideals, privileging the on-the-move individual whose time needs to be well spent—a neatly consumerist metaphor. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 330

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Milgrom/Bernstein material on how institutions can end up reinforcing the system they nominally critique. — connects to: Liberation from technological domination requires preserving the technological base — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 812; Detoxification techniques are not rediscovered even after centuries without them — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 325; Countercultural non-monetization ideals are converted into justifications for precarious tech labor. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 140
• SEED: Angle: ‘time well spent’ as a consumerist re-branding of the same extraction.