“It was viewed as hostile. Or precious. 'Oh, look at us, trying to have mental health.’” So said one the people I interviewed about Digital Sabbaths for my book, The Distraction Addiction. I’ve been reminded of that lament by some recent critiques of the digital detox movement, most recently Casey Sep’s New Yorker piece, “The Pointlesness of Unplugging.” It joins a growing list of essays— Alexis Madrigal’s "'Camp Grounded,' 'Digital Detox,' and the Age of Techno-Anxiety,” Nathan Jurgenson’s “The Disconnectionists,” Evgeny Morozov’s “The Mindfulness Racket,” most notably— that criticize the concept and practice of digital detoxes, from several different angles.

The Real is Fake

One argument is that digital detoxes construct a false distinction between the digital and the “real,” enacting an outmoded and anachronistic belief that there is a gap between the world online and the world around us. For some, the functional distinction between bits and atoms has collapsed thanks to pervasive computers, smartphones and wearables, and the Internet of Things.

Alternately, you can argue that like the statement “Don’t think about elephants,” a digital detox is self-undermining. The very act of going offline means you’re thinking about being online, and you’re organizing your “real” life around your virtual life (if only by trying to get away from it). Thus your struggles to break free from it only tangle you more deeply in the Web.

Notorious Disconnection

Another line of criticism is that the digital detox movement is an exercise in what you might (playing off David Banks’ great phrase) call “notorious disconnection." People who take digital detoxes are advertising that they're super busy and plugged-in, but unlike the rest of you, are both enlightened enough to recognize that this isn’t good for you, and so indispensable they can step away, preferably to a converted monastery in the Italian countryside, a rustic inn in northwest Scotland, or an eco-friendly resort in Thailand, Columbia, Belize, or Sardinia, and still have a job when they get back.

This turns what should be an exercise in simplicity and modesty into an act of "conspicuous non-consumption" (as Laura Portwood-Stacer put it), and gives it an unpleasant moralistic and elitist gloss. Digital detoxes give everyone the chance to behave like a stereotype of Gwyneth Paltrow: organic, superior, maddeningly happy, decked out in fair trade but beautifully-tailored linen, and infuriating in their smug public perfection. And at Janet Kornblum put it, "Chastising folks for being too connected, too often, is a lot like scolding young women for being too obsessed about their looks."

Get Off My Lawn!

Finally, there’s the argument that this is just cultural froth: digital addiction, or being over-connected, or having the wrong kind of connection, is this year’s Thing To Be Judgmental About. "What sex was for the Puritans,” Sep says, "technology has become for us.” In a world of cultural relativism, we can still be technological absolutists. Not that everyone agrees, of course: as xkcd recently asked about the instinct to take pictures of everything, “why the f*** do you care how someone else enjoys a sunset?”

(In a lighter vein, this sense that digital detoxes are a fad is what inspires parodies like Vooza’s awesome piece about detoxing, the Parks and Recreation episode where Tom Haverford has to spend a week offline, or Modern Family’s "Long Amish Nightmare” episode.)

I’ve talked about some of these issues already; here, I just want to note where I think “The Pointlessness of Unplugging” overstates its case, and what it gets quite right.

What’s New?

Some people who participated in the recent National Day of Unplugging, the essay notes,

submitted self-portraits to Reboot holding explanations of why they chose to unplug: 'to be more connected,' 'to reset,' 'to spend more time with my family,' 'so my eye will stop twitching,' 'to bring back the beauty of life,’ 'to be in the moment’. Not so long ago, those very reasons (except, maybe, for the eye-twitching) would have explained why many took to the devices that they were now unplugging.

Did something happen between “not so long ago” and now? I’d argue that a couple things have happened: smartphones, Facebook, Twitter, mobile social, location-based social media, and the workplace pressure to be always-on.

If you want a good overview of how enmeshed the Internet and mobile devices have become in our lives, check out this overview from Pew Research Internet Project on the “three technology revolutions” of the last decade: the rise of broadband Internet connectivity, mobile computing, and social media.

Or check out their various surveys about Internet and mobile device use. What you find is that in March 2000, when the first dot-com bubble burst, 40% of Americans used the Internet; that percentage has more than doubled, to 87% in January 2014. Today 73% of all Internet users are on social media, and 42% are on multiple platforms, while only 8% of Internet users were on social media in 2005. And today 87% of men and 86% of women have smartphones, up from almost zero in 2005.

So I’d say this isn’t just a function of cultural anxiety or another example of The Olds not getting young people with the fancy gadgets; there really are significant differences in how we interact with technology, how much time we spend interacting, and the expectations we have to be always-on and always-broadcasting.

Contradiction and Authenticity

Another issue  the essay raises is that

Unplugging seems motivated by two contradictory concerns: efficiency and enlightenment. Those who seek efficiency rarely want to change their lives, only to live more productively… The enlightenment crowd, by contrast, abstains from technology in search of authenticity.

Let’s deal with the contradiction first, and then the question of authenticity.

Is there a contradiction between the search for efficiency and enlightenment? Living in Silicon Valley, I would say that there have always been two competing visions of the personal computer: as a productivity tool, and as a tool for enlightenment. You can see this in Ted Nelson’s Machine Dreams, or Michael Green’s Zen and the Art of Macintosh. You can read about how it affected Silicon Valley in John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said and Theodore Roszak’s fabulous and under-appreciated From Satori to Silicon Valley. Or you can watch an old Apple Macintosh ad.

More generally, I think you can see the same tension or dualism play out in America’s love of yoga, which is appreciated in part because it’s seen as both deeply spiritual and awesome exercise. Or in the history of religion and business in America: think of the Prosperity Gospel.

If your tastes run to less ostentatious combinations of church and commerce, look at the Puritans and Quakers in early America. Their piety inspired them to emigrate to an unknown continent rather than compromise on their religious beliefs, but that didn’t stop them from getting really rich. (Their worries about the corrupting effects of wealth inspired some serious philanthropic activity, including founding the universities Sep and I attended.)

And from John Winthrop and William Penn it’s but a short step back to Weber and the whole Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism argument.

So even if unplugging is “motivated by two contradictory concerns,” they’re concerns that have been joined together uneasily for centuries.

Now, regarding unplugging and the search for authenticity.

I went back to the notes from my interviews with digital Sabbatarians, and checked to see how often they used the term “authentic” to describe what they were looking for when they went offline.

The number of times they invoked it?

Zero.

Likewise, I did a search on Twitter this afternoon for occurrences of the words “digital detox authenticity.” What did I get? Three links to the essay ”Into the Real: A Screen Addict’s Quest for Authenticity,”, which is a parody of both Into the Void and the rhetoric or authenticity, and a link to “The Disconnectionists.”*

In other words, I think it’s reasonable to argue— and I admit I’ve not spent days combing blogs and Twitter feeds looking for first-hand accounts of digital detoxing that invokes authenticity— that this is a bit of a straw man. The people who talk most about a link between digital detoxes and authenticity are the people who are critiquing the idea that life offline offers authenticity. People who doing it don’t seem to use the term.

The Problem With "Detox"

However, Sep concludes her piece with something I agree with completely:

If it takes unplugging to learn how better to live plugged in, so be it. But let’s not mistake such experiments in asceticism for a sustainable way of life. For most of us, the modern world is full of gadgets and electronics, and we’d do better to reflect on how we can live there than to pretend we can live elsewhere.

It just so happens that there's a book that make exactly this argument. When I was writing the chapter on the digital sabbath movement, I chose the term “sabbath” rather than “detox” because I thought the term “detox” was problematic. It hadn’t yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary (“a period of time during which a person refrains from using electronic devices such as smartphones or computers, regarded as an opportunity to reduce stress or focus on social interaction in the physical world”), but I thought that the term “digital sabbath” points us in a different, healthier direction than detox. And while it has gained ground (and is certain to become even more popular now that advertising agencies and designers have identified it as A Thing for 2014), I’m still hopeful that we can move past “detox" sooner rather than later.

Lauren Bacon makes an excellent case against the term “detox” in a recent piece:

If we adopt the belief that technology itself is a toxin–that the distraction, overwhelm, lack of focus, and disconnection from other people we experience is a direct result of using tech devices–then it follows that having a healthy mind depends on unplugging as much as possible.

I don’t buy this line of argument. It suggests that there’s no way to use technology to develop mindfulness (ahem, Buddhify and OmmWriter); that technology-mediated experiences are less real than face-to-face ones (or do we all think Skype is tearing families apart?); and a kind of ahistorical back-to-the-land ideal that seems to take it as a given that what we all really need is to put down those newfangled doohickeys and go back to how Things Used to Be….

[T]he fact we call it “detox” in the first place biases the entire argument towards blaming technology, rather than looking within ourselves to discern where distraction comes from. Our inability to find mindfulness in the technology does not mean that mindfulness does not exist there; rather, our lack of awareness of when we are becoming distracted and anxious is at the root of the problem we’re trying to escape through unplugging.

It’s not “technology” that we need to correct: it’s poorly-designed technology; technology that’s made to distract us; and our own tendencies to use it mindlessly that are the enemy.

When I was first working on the book, and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows came out: I read it as soon as it came out, and came away with the feeling that it was great as a diagnosis of our problems, nut not very useful as a guide for how to deal with them. I’m coming to feel the same ways about critiques of digital detoxes. They don’t offer much guidance in constructing an alternative. But nonetheless, they can serve a useful purpose in pointing out the limitations of the “detox” concept, and challenge us to refine and improve our thinking around how we use and live with technology.

* A Twitter search of “authentic” and “offline” yields lots of tweets about the need for people and marketers to be consistent in their online and offline messaging and self-presentation: authenticity, in this usage, doesn’t signify something pure that can exist in only one realm, but is more a synonym for “consistency” and “honesty.”