Gen­er­ate authen­tic action rather than reac­tive respons­es based on dis­tract­ed expe­ri­ence. Restruc­ture the frac­tured infor­ma­tion­al land­scape into a con­tex­tu­al­ly rel­e­vant uni­fied whole.

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Uni­verse’, a part lim­it­ed in time and space. He ex­periences him­self, his thoughts and feel­ings as some­thing sep­a­rat­ed from the rest—a kind of opti­cal delu­sion of his con­scious­ness. This delu­sion is a kind of prison for us, restrict­ing us to our per­son­al desires and to affec­tion for a few per­sons near­est to us. Our task must be to free our­selves from this prison by widen­ing our cir­cle of com­pas­sion to embrace all liv­ing crea­tures and the whole nature in its beau­ty. Nobody is able to achieve this com­plete­ly, but the striv­ing for such achieve­ment is in itself a part of the lib­er­a­tion, and a foun­da­tion for inner secu­ri­ty.” — Albert Ein­stein, 1950

We think of the screen as some­thing that reveals. But screens can just as well be under­stood by what they obfus­cate. There is much infor­ma­tion that is con­cealed for the sake of coher­ence, ease of use, acces­si­bil­i­ty, or for more insid­i­ous pur­pos­es. Those of us who use data-track­ing plat­forms could cer­tain­ly be put off if we were ful­ly informed as to exact­ly what was being done with our data. But we often don’t look beyond what­ev­er infor­ma­tion first meets our attention.

Some research sug­gests that the very first page of search engine results cap­tures 95% of the traf­fic for online search­es.⁴ Is that a sign that the first page con­tains the best pos­si­ble answers to what peo­ple are look­ing for? It seems unlike­ly. Rather, the first page of a search engine has tak­en on an air of author­i­ty. It feels infal­li­ble, as though it can serve as an arbiter of truth and relevance.

Depth adds com­pli­ca­tion, but User Expe­ri­ence (UX) and User Inter­face (UI) design has spent the last years try­ing to erase com­pli­ca­tion. Depth doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly lend itself to the most seam­less user expe­ri­ence. To process depth takes ener­gy and time, resources that we don’t always have in the appro­pri­ate pro­por­tion. How­ev­er, this doesn’t mean we should avoid com­pli­ca­tion. On the con­trary. Com­pli­ca­tion is good. It adds nuance, it cre­ates oppor­tu­ni­ties for new ideas. With­out it, all we can do is con­tin­ue down estab­lished grooves. We can­not real­ly learn from lists of bite-sized insights. Ours is a fran­tic, life-hack­ing cul­ture in which we labor under the mis­ap­pre­hen­sion that opti­miza­tion always means doing some­thing quick­er than before. But when is fast ever fast enough? Going slow can root us to a feel­ing of pres­ence. Rather than adapt all inter­ac­tions to a scarci­ty of time, we must be afford­ed more time to expe­ri­ence inter­ac­tions at their fullest.

Hyper dig­i­tal con­nec­tiv­i­ty is, for bet­ter or worse, here to stay. The trend is even accel­er­at­ing, as the Inter­net of Things extends ever fur­ther. Rather than a full-blood­ed rebel­lion against these tools in search of a return to a myth­i­cal “pur­er” time, we must address the dig­i­tal world on its own terms. It must be built in a way that it serves us, not uses us or sees us only as users. The dig­i­tal domain must not play on our fears and exploit our weak­ness­es. It must not have gate­keep­ers. It must not become a way to reduce our com­plex­i­ties into a sin­gle, algo­rith­mic state. It must not inter­fere with our abil­i­ty to feel present with­in our­selves and our envi­ron­ments. It must reflect the ambi­gu­i­ty of the real world. All these things will help to pre­vent us becom­ing a writhing mass of same­ness caught in an illu­sion of choice. Restor­ing our dig­i­tal auton­o­my will serve to give us access to a wider spec­trum of pos­si­bil­i­ties as gen­er­at­ed not exter­nal­ly, but from within.