One of the best parts about Lunar New Year in Asia is the fireworks and celebration. There’s something very healing about Hong Kong and Shenzhen this time of year, as such busy cities wind down. At a recent talk, someone asked me about “digital detox,” and I realized I’ve been doing that myself, in so many words. Having spent so much time with the internet to write a book, I’m enjoying not spending time with the internet, and instead spending it with family and friends and letting my mind and soul wander elsewhere as my body wanders too.

I don’t like the word “detox,” and I instead prefer the idea of a digital sabbatical: time away from social media and very little time on emails. I’ve been thinking a lot about our attention-based internet and how easy it is to get sucked into messages and apps. I’ve been fascinated by journalist Kashmir Hill’s attempts to block the “Big Five” platforms, and I’m trying my own mini version of that:

I went through the digital equivalent of a juice cleanse. I hope I’m better than most dieters at staying healthy afterward, but I don’t want to be a digital vegan. I want to embrace a lifestyle of “slow Internet,” to be more discriminating about the technology I let into my life and think about the motives of the companies behind it. The tech giants are reshaping the world in good and bad ways; we can take the good and reject the bad.

Scholar Tim Wu, whom I quote in the book, says it eloquently:

We’re in a time where we’re obsessed with or addicted to free stuff—free content, free services…but one thing people have started to realize over the last several years is the reason it’s free obviously, is we are the product. You are being resold, and more precisely, what is being resold is something that is very scarce, which is human attention, some access to your mind. It is hard to get access to people’s mind, and that’s what makes it so valuable.

Being in Hong Kong is a little like that — the city is filled with things clamoring for your attention: ads, cars, flashing lights, buildings, people, buzz buzz buzz. (Maybe that’s why the internet feels so familiar…) I wish you the very best Lunar New Year you can have and a happy, healthy, wholesome Year of the Pig.

Addendum: Check out the Atlantic’s terrific photo roundup from across China.

In just a few weeks, Memes to Movements will hit the bookstores, starting January 8 in the United States. I’m pleased to share that Beacon is making available an audio book, in addition to hardbound and e-book editions, and they’ve just released a preview, as narrated by Los Angeles-based voice and stage actress Erin Bennett.

It’s one of the first chapters I wrote, as part of the initial proposal, looking at the archetypal meme—cats, of course—and what they suggest about memes, politics and society. This comes from Chapter 1: The Revolution of the Cat 🐱 :

You can pre-order Memes to Movements (Beacon Press, Jan 2019) on
Indiebound, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Penguin and local book stores.