The 3Rs and The Pull

RSVP zoom link for our live meeting

Source: You Don't Need a Smartphone by August Lamm

Last week my wife Ruth and I invited readeres to join us for a Communal Digital Fast during Lent. We have had a tremendous response, with many readers enthusiastically looking forward to an intentional commitment of recovering cognitive liberty and restoring our human default.

If you have never participated in a digital fast, the prospect of seven weeks of reduced or removed tech might seem daunting. Know that there are many others, including Ruth and I, who will follow alongside, trying their best to restore what the digital realm has eroded.

In order to offer further support, we will be hosting three live meetings for our paying subscribers over the course of the seven weeks. The meetings will combine presentation and discussion, offering an opportunity to bring to life the focal points of our writing. Paying subscribers to either Pilgrims in the Machine or

School of the Unconformed

will have access to the meetings.

The first meeting “The 3Rs and The Pull” will be hosted by myself and Peter Limberg from the Stoa on March 22nd at 12 PM EST (note that the date has been changed from the 15th to the 22nd).You can RSVP using the Zoom link behind the paywall at the bottom of the post.

If you are a long-time reader, you will be familiar with “The 3Rs of Unmachining: Guideposts for an Age of Technological Upheaval”, which will form the basis of my talk.

Peter Limberg has interviewed hundreds of people on The Stoa, including Paul Kingsnorth in 2021 The Virus and the Machine, Dougald Hine At Work in the Ruins, Katherine Dee The Internet is a Stage, and Noam Chomsky onThe Responsibility of Intellectuals.

Ruth did not know any of this when she met Peter at an in-person Substack gathering at a chic Toronto bar last summer. The only thing she did know about him, was that he too was concerned about digital distraction eating away at our human fabric and that he kept his phone in a box after 6:30 PM. Over deeper conversation and a shared meal in our garden, Ruth and I recognized that Peter was a kindred spirit in the effort to help people navigate daily life in the Machine age.

It no longer feels like we are in a culture war but rather a spiritual one—an “unseen war,” as my Orthodox brothers and sisters call it. For secular-minded readers, an unseen war can be understood as a conflict in which one force seeks to capture attention and pull it away from what is most important—a.k.a., what’s most sacred.

To borrow Émile Durkheim’s secular-friendly notion of the term, the sacred can be understood as that which binds people together, fostering social cohesion through shared reverence. The Pull does the opposite—it creates social fragmentation through shared distraction.

An “attentional martial art” is needed to overcome The Pull, a phenomenon that fosters shared distraction by compulsively drawing people toward the screen—and then into it—ultimately reducing their agency. As a recent inquiry partner told me, The Pull is something that “eats your agency.”

Read the full post here. Peter also just published The Tools for the Pull with detailed, practical guidance on moving to single-purpose devices in order to reduce “the pull”.