Digital Life

Discover the best articles, videos, and resources on life in the digital era. Digital tools, screen time, social media, digital communications. Follow along on Refind to get the most relevant new links picked for you.
9 Best Articles in 2021
The New York Times
Stop Trying to Be ProductiveThe New York Times
7 min read · 2020-04-01 · The internet wants you to believe you aren’t doing enough with all that “extra time” you have now. But staying inside and attending to basic needs is plenty.
productivity
mental health
better living
Most highlighted
“I’m trying to be more OK with just being.”
This urge to overachieve, even in times of global crisis, is reflective of America’s always-on work culture.
“this mind-set is the natural endpoint of America’s hustle culture — the idea that every nanosecond of our lives must be commodified and pointed toward profit and self-improvement.”
medium.com
How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist — Mediummedium.com
~16 min read · From 2016 · When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want you to show you where it might do the opposite.
technology
digital life
startups
Fast Company
The 26 best new productivity apps for 2021Fast Company
8 min read · Jul 12th · These great apps will help you organize your digital life, avoid unwanted distractions, and more.
productivity
digital life
apps
Most highlighted
As an answer to all the cruft that Google’s email service has built up over the past 17 years, Simplify Gmail is a revelation.
Instead of making you sign up for newsletters with a dedicated email address, Meco locates the newsletters you’re already getting in Gmail, then lets you transfer them to its own reader app.
anything with ease: Although it’s billed primarily as a private alternative to Google, Neeva is also just a handy way to search through your digital life
Guardian Tech
'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopiaGuardian Tech
20+ min read · From 2017 · The Google, Apple and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks who worry the race…
addiction
fbchange
digital life
The Verge
NFTs, explainedThe Verge
8 min read · Mar 3rd
art
digital life
technology
Most highlighted
A lot of the conversation is about NFTs as an evolution of fine art collecting, only with digital art.
A fool and their money are soon parted, I guess?
Nike has patented a method to verify sneakers’ authenticity using an NFT system, which it calls CryptoKicks.
The Pudding
How Bad Is Your Spotify?The Pudding
2020-12-22 · Our sophisticated A.I. judges your awful taste in music.
music
digital life
spotify
Vox
Dark patterns, the tricks websites use to make you say yes, explainedVox
10 min read · Apr 1st · How design can manipulate and coerce you into doing what websites want.
digital life
visual design
design
Most highlighted
Companies whose revenue relies heavily on user data don’t want to make it easy for those users to refuse to provide it.
“I think the internet has made it easier to industrialize the way in which we persuade and, in turn, manipulate and deceive each other,”
It’s hard to know what’s an actionable deceptive act or practice when there’s no privacy law in the first place.
Ness Labs
From FOMO to JOMO: the joy of missing outNess Labs
6 min read · From 2019 · JOMO—the joy of missing out—is a way to live an intentional life. It’s realising that FOMO is distracting you from your life’s purpose.
attention economy
self
mindfulness
Most highlighted
Associated with a fear of regret, FOMO is the apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which you are absent.
In essence, JOMO is a way to live an intentional life. It’s realising that FOMO is distracting you from your life’s purpose, and that you don’t need more time.
People on their deathbed don’t regret missing these work drinks or not going to that party. They regret not spending enough time with their families, not working hard enough to achieve their life purpose, or not being true to themselves.
The New York Times
What Happens When Our Faces Are Tracked Everywhere We Go?The New York Times
20+ min read · Mar 18th · When a secretive start-up scraped the internet to build a facial-recognition tool, it tested a legal and ethical limit — and blew the future of privacy in America wide open.
technology
digital life
privacy
Most highlighted
The more society-changing aspect of facial recognition in the United States may be how private companies deploy it.  And imagine what you would do with a face-identifying app on your phone: a Shazam for people. You would never forget someone’s name at a party again.
And anonymity could be eradicated in day-to-day life.
The screen filled with a grid of photos of the younger Abrams from around the web, with the source of each identified in tiny type under the photo.
New this week
Online porn is on course to change forever
Mashable
The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls
The Atlantic
How Facebook Could Break Free From the Engagement Trap
WIRED
Take a deep dive
Recently popular
bbntimes.com
How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact Your Daily Life in the 2020sbbntimes.com
5 min read · Nov 16th · Artificial intelligence (AI) powers 5G, blockchain, the internet of things, quantum computing and self-driving cars.
digital life
technology
Most highlighted
Neural Networks are biologically inspired networks that extract abstract features from the data in a hierarchical fashio
Neural Networks are biologically inspired networks that extract abstract features from the data in a hierarchical fashion.
Deep Learning refers to the field of Neural Networks with several hidden layers. Such a Neural Network is often referred to as a Deep Neural Network.
The Atlantic
The Dangerous Experiment on Teen GirlsThe Atlantic
9 min read · Nov 21st · The preponderance of the evidence suggests that social media is causing real damage to adolescents.
social media
mental health
digital life
Most highlighted
When a boy steps away from the console, he does not spend the next few hours worrying about what other players are saying about him. Instagram, in contrast, can loom in a girl’s mind even when the app is not open, driving hours of obsessive thought, worry, and shame.
The most widely cited of these studies, published in 2019, analyzed 355,000 teens across three large data sets from the U.S. and U.K. The authors found only a tiny correlation—no larger than the correlation of bad mental health with self-reports of “eating potatoes.” Facebook cites this research in its defense.  But here’s the problem with these studies: Most lump all screen-based activities together (including those that are harmless, such as watching movies or texting with friends), and most lump boys and girls together.
Guardian Tech
The dawn of tappigraphy: does your smartphone know how you feel before you do?Guardian Tech
8 min read · Nov 7th · Tech companies are seeking to analyse data on the way we tap, scroll, text and call to monitor our mental health
digital life
Most highlighted
First, much work is required to prove that meaningful medical information can be derived. Many of the published academic studies have been very small pilot studies.
The Washington Post
Why Facebook won’t let you control your own news feedThe Washington Post
8 min read · Nov 13th · A new legislative push to regulate social media algorithms — the sophisticated, personalized software that decides which posts you see each time you log in — raises an old question: Why don’t social networks such as Facebook simply let you turn them off?
social media
digital life
Most highlighted
Facebook’s defense of algorithmic rankings stems not only from its business interests, but from a paternalistic conviction, backed by data, that its sophisticated personalization software knows what users want better than the users themselves.
But critics say this view misses something important: the value of giving users more agency over their information diet.
Research we’ve done shows that unranked feeds can lead to integrity issues and other problems,”
Input
How Pinterest utterly ruined photo search on the internetInput
5 min read · Nov 5th · The social media site is the bane of non-users’ lives, hijacking image search results with a pushy sign-up screen. It needs to stop.
digital life
Most highlighted
It’s not that it doesn’t have its purpose; it’s just that it intrudes on the search experience of pretty much everyone who doesn’t want to use it.
The way I learned to search, browse, and find pictures 10 or even five years ago just doesn't work anymore.
“If you’re not paying for it, you are the product.’”
VICE
People Are Buying Digital Clothes Because That’s a Thing NowVICE
4 min read · Nov 4th · They’re like skins in games, except for real people.
digital life
culture
Most highlighted
Digital fashion makes everything traditional fashion does—shirts, dresses, pants, hats, shoes, and accessories—but none of it is tangible. Instead, customers “wear” digital clothing through augmented reality and digitally altered photos.
Digital fashion makes everything traditional fashion does—shirts, dresses, pants, hats, shoes, and accessories—but none of it is tangible. Instead, customers “wear” digital clothing through augmented reality and digitally altered photos.
Ars Technica
Everyone pitching the “metaverse” has a different idea of what it isArs Technica
10 min read · Nov 7th · Will we all live in the metaverse soon? Or is the idea just Second Life redux?
digital life
Washingtonian
The CIA Is Trying to Recruit Gen Z—and Doesn't Care If They're All Over Social MediaWashingtonian
~12 min read · Nov 9th · You’d think a generation of folks raised on making look-at-me posts on social media could never go work at the Agency. You’d be wrong.
digital life
Ars Technica
Securing your digital life, part three: How smartphones make us vulnerableArs Technica
10 min read · Nov 15th · Phone scams, targeted phishing, and... pig butchering? The future is kind of scary.
digital life
Most highlighted
There are, by some estimates, more smart phones on this planet than human beings to use them.
Rolling Stone
How Four NFT Novices Created a Billion-Dollar Ecosystem of Cartoon ApesRolling Stone
~11 min read · Nov 1st · Bored Ape Yacht Club became internet rock stars by making NFTs of grungy simians that aren’t just viral images — they’re tickets to a whole new lifestyle
crypto
digital life
Most highlighted
Think of it as a collaborative art experiment for the cryptosphere
At press time, tokens related to the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem — this includes the traditional apes, but also things called “mutant” apes and the apes’ pets — had generated around $1 billion.
Digital Life

9 Best Articles in 2021

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