summary ofDigital MinimalismBook by Cal Newport

first KEY POINT

Minor tech choices lead to a major loss of autonomy

Facebook started in 2004 as a tool college students could use to look up boyfriends or girlfriends of those they knew. It was a novelty, designed to play the minor role of connecting college students with friends in their lives.The iPhone was designed to play the minor role of playing music files and enabling phone calls. At its unveiling, CEO Steve Jobs hailed it as “the best iPod we’ve ever made,” and touted its ability to make calls as “its killer app.” Andy Grignon, who was part of the team behind the iPhone's creation, described it as essentially an iPod designed to make phone calls.Today, both technologies and every other digital technology radically change our experience of the culture — our social and civil lives. From their rightful places at our lives’ peripheries, they have become the core around which we organize our lives. For example, 1.5 billion people use Facebook every day for at least an hour, and the average iPhone user engages their phone 85 times during a typical day.

These digital technologies crept up on us. We never had the chance to ask ourselves what we wanted from them. We just signed up for them and woke up one morning to find out they had colonized the very essence of our lives — our autonomy.Technology companies are to blame because they designed their products for these exact outcomes so they can gain financially. Tristan Harris, a former Google engineer, said, holding up a smartphone, in his interview with Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes,” “This thing is a slot machine… there’s a whole playbook of techniques that get used by technology companies to get you using the product for as long as possible… because that’s how they make their money.”