It's just like with smoking, where we started by making it illegal for people under 18. That was the beginning of, "Well, wait a second, if it's so dangerous for them, why am I doing it so much?"

How do you see this playing out in the political realm? Do you think there will be regulations?

I don't know if there's gonna be regulations or not. I'm convinced that within a five-year window, the culture's gonna shift on young people and smartphones. You're gonna look at allowing a 13-year-old to have a smartphone the same way that you would look at allowing your 13-year-old to smoke a cigarette. The data is so stark—and a lot of this is really recent—that it's gonna shift. No responsible parent's going to want to do it… I think that's gonna be a cultural shift that's probably gonna happen, maybe even before regulation is needed.

I'm a skeptic on a lot of privacy legislation, just because I'm a computer scientist who knows it's very, very hard to even get a sensible definition of what privacy means. So, I personally don't see the regulatory arena as being what's gonna save us here. I think what's gonna save us is this idea that we don't need the giant walled garden platforms to attract the value of the internet. We would be fine if Facebook went away. A lot of the problems that we're facing—almost all the problems I write about—are an artifact of trying to consolidate the internet behind the walled gardens of one private company. You go back to the wild, decentralized social internet, and most of the issues that people worry about go away.

"We're not properly valuing attention capital. We're not properly valuing how to get the right return out of human brains."

Just like we went through the AOL phase before people were comfortable with web browsers. The whole pitch of AOL was, "We're easier. It's a walled garden we control. The internet's scary. You have to download a web browser. The web is weird, you want to be on AOL." And then people left, like, "Actually, I'm okay with the internet"—only old people were left on AOL. I think we'll see the same thing with these walled gardens. I don't need a Facebook account in order to meet interesting people, encounter interesting ideas, and express myself using the internet.

Sometimes a sense of morality can get inserted into this. It’s like when people first went gluten-free—when someone said they were gluten-free, you felt like it was kind of an implicit attack on everyone who wasn't gluten-free. I'm curious if you've encountered any resistance of that sort when you're telling people about this digital minimalism plan.

That's like the last five years of my life. I'm like the first gluten-free person, or the first person to do yoga. Like, "You gotta do yoga!" There is a lot defensiveness. I'm seeing a lot of that changing as more and more people accept this.

And the other thing I'm seeing that's effective is this minimalist’s additive message: "How can you make your life better? Here's how to put technology to work in a more intentional way, and you'll get much bigger return." What you're selling is this sort of better life. That's different than focusing on the reductive approach, and saying, "Here's why this thing is bad, and you're stupid to be using it."

Minimalism is much more positive. This is why a big focus of the book is this 30-day declutter process, which is actually a bit unusual for my writing. I don't usually have processes like that. But I thought this was really important, because it was a way for people to actually go through a ritual and come out the other side with a different type of life… This additive of, "I'm rebuilding my life better," as opposed to, "I'm just trying to identify what's bad," does reduce defensiveness.

You can make a career now just by being a micro influencer on Instagram. Those things make me think maybe we’re trending towards more, not less, social media use.

This whole edifice depends on this really arbitrary cultural decision that we're all gonna look at these screens, and feed them demographic data, and look at ads all day. That's what makes it so valuable. And this was a shift. You can go back and trace this. Essentially, Facebook made its shift to mobile [when] its investors were like, "Okay, we want our 100x return. Figure out how we can get that." [Facebook] had to significantly boost their numbers. And that's when they they shifted to mobile: "Let's change this experience from this much more slow-moving, browser-based experience where you come in, you check to see what your friends are up to, but there's no reason you'd check back the same day, because your friends aren't gonna change something on their Facebook profile that day." So they had all these innovations—adding likes, comments, re-Tweets, auto-tagging in photos—so they could create these rich streams of social approval indicators that get delivered in an addictive, intermittent fashion. They created this arbitrary behavior of, "I have to keep tapping this thing throughout the day."