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In Episode 77 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Cal Newport about his latest book, Digital Minimalism and the act of \u201cchoosing life\u201d in a hyperconnected world.

\u201cThe mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,\u201d writes, transcendentalist author and essayist Henry David Thoreau, in the first chapter of Walden titled, \u201cEconomy.\u201d \u201cBut men labor under a mistake...the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence.\u201d In an effort to uncover those \u201cessential laws\u201d Thoreau went to the woods: \u201cI wished to live deliberately,\u201d he says, \u201cto front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear;\u201d

What is often missed in Thoreau\u2019s reflections from his 2-year excursion into the woodlands of Concord, Massachusetts, is the rigor with which he calculated, measured, and weighed those \u201cessential facts of life.\u201d Philosopher Fr\xe9d\xe9ric Gros calls Thoreau\u2019s \u201cNew Economics,\u201d a theory that builds on the following axiom, which Thoreau establishes early in Walden: \u201cThe cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.\u201d \u201cThe striking thing with Thoreau,\u201d Gros argues, \u201cis not the actual content of the argument. After all, sages in earliest Antiquity had already proclaimed their contempt for possessions\u2026what impresses is the form of the argument. For Thoreau\u2019s obsession with calculation runs deep\u2026he says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose?\u201d

In the century and a half since its publication, Thoreau\u2019s economics \u2013 his methodology for apprehending the cost of a thing by weighing and measuring it against the dearness of life\u2019s value \u2013 has been supplanted by allegiance to growth at all costs. But unlike the \u201cmass of men\u201d about which Thoreau writes in the mid-19th century, today\u2019s society is burdened by more than just the labor of miscalculation. In today\u2019s hyperconnected, surveillance economy, the mass of humanity has lost autonomy over that calculation, ceding authority to the commands of a new technocracy that governs the behavioral forces of our primitive biology through platforms scientifically engineered for addiction, supervision, and control.

Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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