Personal & Family Ethics
Stupidity and recommender systems are arguments about what Big Tech should be held liable for. This page is about the half of the problem that courts and legislatures cannot fix: what a person and a household choose to do with the devices already in the room. Adapted from the author's longer Tech Sabbath & Internet Ethics essay.
Own Your Tools: Free and Open-Source Software
Unfree software gives its proprietor control over the user; free software gives the user control over the software. Richard Stallman explains why the four software freedoms belong alongside speech, press, religion, and assembly as freedoms worth defending. A GNU/Linux distribution — Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or Fedora — is free to install on a refurbished machine from FreeGeek or similar, and Linux-kernel systems already underlie most of the internet's servers and the Android phones in most pockets. Using free software, you start to own your tools instead of the other way around; open your browser's developer console, read its network requests, and learn how "the web" is using you while you use it.
Simple Phones Are Smart
A phone with only a text-and-talk plan, paired with a laptop on a fixed daily schedule for email and news, restores an intentional relationship with the internet that a notification-driven "smartphone" is designed to erode. Reclaiming attention this way costs convenience, not capability.
Work Offline, Prefer Wired to Wireless
A wired connection at the primary workspace, used deliberately rather than an always-on wireless one, entrains mindfulness about when and why you are online. Treat computers first as tools for creation — writing, recording, editing, designing — and only secondarily as channels for consumption. The Electronic Frontier Foundation publishes practical guides for managing this relationship online.
Filter What Comes Into the Home
Pornography is, per addiction researcher Gary Wilson's summary of the evidence at Your Brain on Porn, associated with the same compulsive-use patterns seen in other behavioral addictions, and its harms fall disproportionately on people who never consume it, especially children. Community-maintained domain blocklists — such as StevenBlack/hosts or the Ultimate.Hosts.Blacklist — can be applied at a router's DNS settings or a computer's hosts file, and third-party filtered DNS services such as OpenDNS FamilyShield require no local maintenance at all.
A Weekly Digital Sabbath
Power off personal computers, phones, and other devices for twenty-four hours, one day a week. This need not be a religious observance to be a health one: a fixed weekly rest from an "always on" culture is, on the evidence of how compulsive-use disorders work, a plausible and low-cost countermeasure, and it doubles as a small political act against the assumption that constant availability is normal.
Home Office and Family
- One wired connection to a single shared, family computer for projects everyone can use.
- Wi-Fi off at the access point after dinner.
- Phones stay in a basket after dinner; no phones, tablets, or laptops in the bedroom alone.