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LIFE HACKING: A CRITICAL HISTORY, 2004–2014

by

Matthew A. Thomas

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy

degree in American Studies in the Graduate College of

The University of Iowa

May 2015

Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Laura Rigal

Copyright by

MATTHEW A. THOMAS

2015

All Rights Reserved

Graduate College The University of Iowa

Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

____________________________

PH.D. THESIS

_________________

This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of

Matthew A. Thomas

has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in American Studies at the May 2015 graduation. Thesis Committee: ____________________________________________ Laura Rigal, Thesis Supervisor ____________________________________________ Lauren Rabinovitz ____________________________________________ John D. Peters ____________________________________________ Kembrew McLeod ____________________________________________ André Brock

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation came together in a slow way. In all the time I was working on it,

I profited from conversations, online and off, with various people: Gideon Addington,

Jessica L. Roberts, Matt Frost, Jathan Sadowski, Trent M. Kays, sava saheli sigh,

Gabriella Coleman, Joseph Reagle, David Golumbia, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Alan Jacobs,

Tim Carmody, Craig Eley, Jonathan Hanson, Audrey Watters, Janet Sternberg, Austin

and Meghan Kleon, and I’m sure many other people whom I’m forgetting right now.

Thanks to the Media Ecology Association whose annual conventions spurred my thinking

on some of these issues and gave me a place to first present some of the ideas that appear

here. Thanks to my fellow American Studies graduate students in the Dissertation

Writing Workshop who read various drafts and weren’t shy about asking me tough

questions. Thanks to my committee, especially my director Laura Rigal, for her

tremendous patience and perspicacious feedback, and to André Brock and John D. Peters

for helping me talk through various ideas. Thanks to Greg Bales for his shrewd edits at

the eleventh hour. Extra special thanks goes out to Jennifer M. Henderson, who helped

jumpstart this project when it was flagging, listened to me talk through it on multiple

occasions, and gave helpful comments on various drafts even when she had better things

to do. I couldn’t have done it without her. And finally, thanks to my family (mom, dad,

stepdad, and brother), whose support for me never wavered even when I sometimes felt

unsteady.

iii

ABSTRACT

This dissertation intervenes in the larger academic and popular discussion of

hacking by looking at life hacking. In essence, life hacking presumes that your life is

amenable to hacks the same way a computer system might be. As both a metaphor and a

practice, life hacking occupies a popular but under-analyzed position in contemporary

American culture. The recent broadening of the computer term “hacking” to encompass

all of life’s activities suggests the degree to which people are increasingly thinking about

everything in computational terms. Life hacking is important to attend to precisely

because it reveals how the rhetoric of hacking and the subjectivity of the hacker have

become normalized. This rhetoric and subject position carry particular valences, valences

that are deeply rooted in Western culture, including especially a way of thinking about

the world that David Golumbia calls “computationalism.” In a computerized world,

hacking becomes the preferred “way of seeing.” But, significantly, it is a way of seeing

that is in line with long traditions in U.S. culture of self-making and technofetishism. In

order to show this, I trace life hacking’s metamorphoses through three critically important

and interlinked realms—life hacking, digital minimalism, and prof hacking—before

concluding by looking briefly at a fourth—pickup artists. This dissertation seeks to

identify how these different instances of life hacking relate to each other, to trace how life

hacking has changed over time, and to explain how life hacking broadly speaking is best

viewed as an episode not only in the larger history of hacking but in the larger history of

American culture.

iv

PUBLIC ABSTRACT

Technology website CNET called 2014 “the year of the hack” and in early 2015

hacking was still everywhere. Barack Obama became the first president to use the word

“hacker” in a State of the Union address, and CitizenFour, a documentary about computer

analyst-cum-hacker Edward Snowden, who leaked classified documents from the

National Security Agency detailing the extent of government surveillance of U.S.

citizens, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. When most people

hear the word “hacking,” they probably think of someone like Snowden, someone who

uses computers to gain unauthorized access to information. But one of the more

interesting developments in recent years is how the term “hacking” has been applied to

more and more stuff having outwardly nothing to do with computers. But how did this

happen? How did hacking go from something related to computers to something now

associated with everything from cooking to education to health to politics to sex? I argue

that the life hacking movement bears the brunt of the responsibility. In order to tell the

story of how, my dissertation brings together the emergent commentary on life hacking

and seeks to deepen and extend it by being the first academic treatment of the cultural

discourse of life hacking, its emergence, politics, and key sites of unfolding.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... vi

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1

CHAPTER 1: UPGRADE YOURSELF ........................................................................... 21

CHAPTER 2: FROM STUFF TO FLUFF ....................................................................... 82

CHAPTER 3: ACADEMIC, HACK THYSELF ............................................................ 148

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 195

BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 211

vi

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: What Lifehacker Looked Liked Circa 2006 ...................................................... 32

Figure 2: Cover of first Lifehacker book .......................................................................... 45

Figure 3: Tim Ferriss wearing the Superman shield on the July 2011 cover of Outside

magazine ................................................................................................................... 67

Figure 4: Foster Huntington’s most important possessions ............................................ 129

Figure 5: Douglas County, GA Google Data Center ...................................................... 143

Figure 6: Netflix’s Life Hacks Collections ..................................................................... 209

1

INTRODUCTION

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name

to make something visible to them. —Friedrich Nietzsche The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.

—Rosa Luxemburg Hacking in the American and Academic Imagination As I write these words in the spring of 2015, hacking is everywhere. Take the movies.

CitizenFour, a documentary by Laura Poitras about computer analyst-cum-hacker

Edward Snowden, who leaked classified documents from the National Security Agency

detailing the extent of government surveillance of U.S. citizens, recently won the

Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The Interview, the movie starring James

Franco and Seth Rogen at the center of the Sony hacking controversy, is streaming on

Netflix.1 Blackhat, a film by Michael Mann featuring—in some critics’ eyes,

improbably—Chris Hemsworth as a brawny hacker, just played in movie theaters

nationwide.2 Then there’s politics. In January, Barack Obama became the first president

to use the word “hacker” in a State of the Union address.3 Last December, CNET, a

1 “Sony Pictures Entertainment Hack,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_Entertainment_hack. 2 On the history and significance of white beefcakes like Hemsworth playing computer hackers, see Martin Kevorkian, Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 3 Northeastern University history professor Benjamin Schmidt tweeted a list of words that had never appeared in a State of the Union address before. “Hacker” was one of them. Benjamin Schmidt (@benmschmidt). “Here’s the complete list of words never to appear in a SOTU before. (Case-sensitive, hence ‘internet’):” 21 Jan 2015, https://twitter.com/benmschmidt/status/557741409705664512/photo/1.

2

technology and consumer electronics website, summarizing the previous twelve months,

called 2014 “the year of the hack.”4

Collectively, I think these examples are suggestive of what might be called a

“new normal” in terms of hacking’s place in popular consciousness. As hacker scholar

Gabriella Coleman writes in her primer on hacking, “Since the early 1980s, the hacker

archetype has also become a staple of our mass media diet. Rarely does a day pass

without an article detailing a massive security breach at the hands of shadowy hackers,

who have ransacked corporate servers to pilfer personal and lucrative data. Alongside

these newspaper headlines, hackers often feature prominently in popular film, magazines,

literature, and TV.”5 Indeed, before Edward Snowden, there was Julian Assange; before

Blackhat, there was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; before the Sony hack, there was the

2014 celebrity photo hack.6 And so on. Hacking has been everywhere in our news media

and popular culture for years, if not decades, and it does not look like it is going away

anytime soon.

In Coleman’s view, however, “Despite this pervasiveness, academic books on the

subject of hacking are scant. To date the most substantive historical accounts have been

penned by journalists, while academics have written a handful of sociological,

anthropological and philosophical books—typically with a media studies orientation.”7

But Coleman might be underplaying the amount of scholarly attention that has been paid

to hacking. In addition to Coleman herself, a number of critics and scholars have written

4 Bridget Carey, “2014: The Year of the Hack,” CNET, 18 Dec 2014, http://www.cnet.com/news/2014-the-year-of-the-hack/. 5 Gabriella Coleman, “Hackers,” Culture Digitally, 6 Oct 2014, http://culturedigitally.org/2014/10/hackers-draft-digitalkeywords/. 6 “2014 Celebrity Photo Hack,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_photo_hack. 7 Coleman, “Hackers.”

3

at length about it: Steven Levy, Sherry Turkle, Andrew Ross, McKenzie Wark, Pekka

Himanen, Tim Jordan, and Douglas Thomas (no relation), just to name a few.8 Coleman

may call the scholarship on it “scant,” but hacking has been the subject of some degree of

academic attention for decades now. In that time, as one might expect, critics and

scholars writing about hacking have sought to differentiate their work, defining hacking

in slightly different ways and drawing different conclusions about it.9 Sometimes,

hacking is amorphous; sometimes, it is specific. There is often a tension in work on

hacking between emphasizing the commonalities hackers share—what Steven Levy calls

“the hacker ethic”—and highlighting differences among them—what Coleman usefully

calls “genres of hacking.”10 To definitively sketch out all these differences would be a

project unto itself, and besides is not what really interests me here. Nor am I interested in

recounting the history of hacking; that has been done well many times already. What is of

interest to me is that, the differing viewpoints among hacker scholars aside, for the most

8 Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984; repr., Penguin, 2001); Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Andrew Ross, “Hacking Away at the Counterculture” in Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York: Verso, 1991): 75–100; McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004), Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic, and the Spirit of the Information Age (New York: Random House, 2001); Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013) and Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (New York: Verso, 2014); Tim Jordan, Hacking: Digital Media and Technological Determinism (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008); and Douglas Thomas, Hacker Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 9 Hacking means different things to different people. In Douglas Thomas’s view, for example, hackers are primarily a youth subculture comprised of white adolescent males; in McKenzie Wark’s view, hackers are a kind of new revolutionary class; in Gabriella Coleman’s view, hackers—“computer aficionados driven by an inquisitive passion for tinkering and learning technical systems, and frequently committed to an ethical version of information freedom” (Coding Freedom, 3)—help illustrate some of the tensions inherent in liberalism. 10 Gabriella Coleman and Alex Golub, “Hacker Practice: Moral Genres and the Cultural Articulation of Liberalism,” Anthropological Theory 8:3 (2008): 255–277.

4

part they conceptualize hacking as computer-centric.11 That is to say, historically the

scholarship on hacking has generally conceived of hackers and hacking as something

mainly having to do with computers. In such a conception, hacking is something

ultimately anchored in certain kinds of technical practices involving computers—e.g.,

gaining entry to a computer system, writing code, or making information accessible. If

popular representations of hackers and hacking have sometimes focused

disproportionately on criminality and scholarly accounts have sought to paint more

nuanced portraits, almost all work on hacking shares a computer-centric view of hacking.

For all the definitional work commentators on hacking do to distinguish their takes, if

you zoom back a little, they all seem to agree with each other about the centrality of

computers to the practice of hacking. In other words, the figure of the hacker and the

practice of hacking have traditionally been defined in relatively narrow ways, and what is

common among these definitions is an agreement that hacking is primarily, if not

exclusively, a thing that involves computers.

There is good reason for this. Historically, hacking has been a computer-centric

thing. The trouble with this narrow definition today, though, is that the terms “hacker”

and “hacking” have, especially in the last ten years, increasingly been applied to activities

having outwardly nothing to do with computers. To his credit, Andrew Ross saw the

signs of this in the early 1990s and argued for a more capacious definition of hacking:

11 While there is a long tradition in discussions of hacking to gesture to broader, non-computer bound forms of hacking, inevitably computer hacking seems to get recentered. See, e.g., Eric S. Raymond, “How To Become A Hacker,” 21 Nov 2014 [2001], http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html: “The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music—actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too—and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers.” This is a good example of how non-computer-based forms of hacking get gestured toward, and then set aside.

5

While only a small number of computer users would categorize themselves as “hackers,” there are defensible reasons for extending the restricted definition of hacking down and across the caste hierarchy of systems analysts, designers, programmers, and operators to include all high-tech workers—no matter how inexpert—who can interrupt, upset, and redirect the smooth flow of structured communications that dictates their position in the social networks of exchange and determines the pace of their work schedules.12

Ross’s point is that perhaps the definition of “hacker” should be expanded to include

basically all high-tech workers. In the intervening years, however, few seem to have

heeded Ross’s call as research on hacker culture has for the most part remained focused

on activities and practices related to computers such as open-source software, political

protest, and criminality. Paradoxically then, as hacking has gotten abstracted, studies of

hacking seem to have gotten more fixed. Indeed, today the term “hacking” is increasingly

applied to a diverse range of activities, industries, and groups. As Coleman notes, “the

range of activity wedded to the term ‘hacking’ has expanded exponentially. Bloggers

share tips about ‘life hacks’ (tricks for managing time or overcoming the challenges of

everyday life); corporations, governments, and NGOs host ‘hackathon’ coding sprints;

and the ‘hacktivist,’ once a marginal political actor, now lies at the center of geopolitical

life.”13 Coleman is far from the only person who has noticed this. Technology consultant

Venkatesh Rao, for instance, in a 2012 post on his personal blog, saw no abatement to the

tendency for the term “hacking” to be applied to things not having to do with computers:

Sometime in the last few years, apparently everybody turned into a hacker. Besides computer hacking, we now have lifehacking (using tricks and short-cuts to improve everyday life), body-hacking (using sensor-driven experimentation to manipulate your body), college-hacking (students who figure out how to get a high GPA without putting in the work) and career-hacking (getting ahead in the workplace without “paying your dues”). The trend shows no sign of letting up. I

12 Ross, 92. 13 Coleman, “Hackers.”

6

suspect we’ll soon see the term applied in every conceivable domain of human activity.14

If, as Coleman suggests, hacking is getting applied to more and more things, and if, as

Rao suggests, everybody has turned into a hacker, that might be because, as Melissa

Gregg and Carl DiSalvo argue, in a high-tech economy hacking has become “today’s

preferred economic identity.”15 The broadening of “hacking” away from computers and to

other activities, and from a subcultural, technical subjectivity to a more mainstream one

in line with the current economic status quo, means it is time to revisit central questions

about hacking: Is the mainstreaming of hacking a sign of how hacking is, or at least can

be, congruent with longstanding U.S. ideologies regarding technological perfectibility? Is

“hacker” still a dissident identity, or is it one that has been, or is getting, co-opted by

corporate interests? And finally, what might the simultaneous demonization of hackers in

politics and the adoption of the term “life hack” by business and lifestyle publications tell

us about our current cultural moment?16

The definition of the “hacker” must be conceived in such a way that it stays open

to how people are actually using the term. It would seem, for instance, that there are more

“life hackers” today than any other type of hacker. In this dissertation I hope to intervene

in the larger academic and popular discussion of hacking by looking at life hacking. If the

term “hacking” now gets applied to an ever-proliferating number of activities, one might

reasonably ask how this happened. How did hacking go from something related to 14 Venkatesh Rao, “Hacking the Non-Disposable Planet,” Ribbonfarm, 18 Apr 2012, http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/04/18/hacking-the-non-disposable-planet/. 15 Melissa Gregg and Carl DiSalvo, “The Trouble with White Hats,” The New Inquiry, 21 Nov 2013, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-trouble-with-white-hats/. See also Lilly Irani, “Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship,” Science, Technology & Human Values, April 8, 2015, http://sth.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/04/28/0162243915578486. 16 Not everyone, of course, likes that the definition of hacking has been broadened. See, for instance, Ashley Feinberg, “Please Stop Calling Everything a ‘Hack,” Gizmodo, 13 May 2014, http://gizmodo.com/please-stop-calling-everything-a-hack-1575505593.

7

computers to something associated with education, health, politics, even sex? I argue that

the “life hacking” movement bears the brunt of the responsibility. In essence, life hacking

presumes that your life is amenable to hacks the same way a computer system might be.

As both a metaphor and a practice, life hacking occupies a popular but underanalyzed

position in contemporary American culture.

Indeed, life hacking is a colonizing discourse that mirrors how computer

technology itself is colonizing more and more facets of the human experience. It is

always looking for new domains to conquer, new spheres of human activity to hack. If

the term hacking is increasingly being applied to everything, one of the places that this

plays out is on life hacking blogs and in related life hacking media. While there are those

who do not like how the meaning of hacking is becoming more amorphous, I maintain

that the very broadening of the term to encompass all of life’s activities suggests the

degree to which people are increasingly thinking about everything in computational

terms. Life hacking is thus important to attend to precisely because it reveals how the

rhetoric of hacking and the subjectivity of the hacker have become normalized. This

rhetoric and subject position carry valences that are deeply rooted in Western culture,

namely a way of thinking about the world that David Golumbia calls

“computationalism,” a “belief in the power of computation” that “underwrites and

reinforces a surprisingly traditionalist conception of human being, society, and

politics.”17 Put differently, in a computerized world, hacking becomes a kind of preferred

17 David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 2.

8

“way of seeing.” But, significantly, it is a way of seeing that increasingly seems in line

with a long tradition in U.S. culture of self-making and technofetishism.18

In the early 1990s, Ross observed that “hacker activities were presented in the

1980s as a romantic countercultural tendency.”19 “The dominant media representation of

the hacker” in the ’80s, he writes, “came to be that of the ‘rebel with a modem.’”20 For

decades, this narrative of hacker as countercultural figure has competed with the narrative

of hacker as criminal.21 Academic work has pushed back against the simplistic “hacker as

criminal” narrative, but in so doing has perhaps sometimes fallen into the trap of

romanticizing hackers and hacking.22 Life hacking, however, suggests hacking can take a

form that is not rebellious in the sense of being either countercultural or criminal, but one

totally in line with the current neoliberal status quo, what Ross referred to as “complicit

with dominant technocratic imperatives or with entrepreneurial-libertarian ideology.”23 In

point of fact, he writes, “hacker culture celebrates high productivity, maverick forms of

creative work energy … qualities that are valorized by the entrepreneurial codes of

18 On self-making in American culture, see, inter alia, Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). On technofetishism in American culture, see, inter alia, Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 19 Ross, 84. For a more in-depth treatment of how computers became associated with countercultural politics, see Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 20 Ross, 84. 21 To get a sense of how powerful the “hacker as criminal” narrative can be, note that six different anti-hacking bills were introduced in Congress after the movie WarGames came out in 1983. Declan McCullagh, “From ‘WarGames’ to Aaron Swartz: How U.S. Anti-Hacking Law Went Astray,” CNET, 13 Mar 2013, http://www.cnet.com/news/from-wargames-to-aaron-swartz-how-u-s-anti-hacking-law-went-astray/. 22 See, for instance, Adrian Chen’s critique of Gabriella Coleman’s work: Adrian Chen, “The Truth About Anonymous’s Activism,” The Nation, November 11, 2014, http://www.thenation.com/article/190369/truth-about-anonymouss-activism. 23 Ross, 84.

9

silicon futurism.”24 Life hacking, I argue, brings this latent spirit existing in hacking into

sharp relief. Instead of being countercultural or criminal, life hacking illustrates how

hacking can take a form compatible with dominant U.S. cultural ideas about

improvement and technology. In other words, as the definition of hacking gets

broadened, as hacking gets co-opted by the mainstream, it also seems to be getting

drained of its countercultural and criminal connotations. Today the life hacking

movement is one of the places where we can see this happening.

Emergent Critiques of Life Hacking Little academic work has been done on hacking’s broadening (though my sense is that is

changing quickly), but the broadening has been noticed. When life hacking first appeared

on the American cultural scene, for instance, it was the subject of articles in the New York

Times, Time, The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal, among other places.25 This

coverage, though, was largely descriptive—essentially, “Hey, look at this new thing.” But

there has been a flurry of critical takes on life hacking in the last couple of years.26 These

24 Ibid., 90. 25 Clive Thompson, “Meet the Life Hackers,” New York Times, 16 Oct 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16guru.html; Jeremy Caplan, “Hacking Toward Happiness,” Time, 21 Jun 2007, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1635844,00.html; “Reprogram Your Life” The Economist, 8 Jun 2006; and Andrew LaVallee, “Lifehacker Draws Visitors With Time-Saving Tech Tips,” Wall Street Journal, 5 Jan 2007, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB116527269925440424. 26 See, for instance, Evgeny Morozov, “Down With Lifehacking!” Slate, 29 July 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/07/lifehacking_is_just_another_way_to_make_us_work_more.single.html and “Making It,” The New Yorker, 13 Jan 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/13/making-it-2; Jen Dziura, “When ‘Life Hacking’ Is Really White Privilege,” Medium, 19 Dec 2013, https://medium.com/get-bullish/when-life-hacking-is-really-white-privilege-a5e5f4e9132f; Nikal Saval, “The Secret History of Life-Hacking,” Pacific Standard, 22 Apr 2014, http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/the-secret-history-of-life-hacking-self-optimization-78748; Rusty Foster, Nalini Abhiraman, Haley Mlotek, Luke Zaleski, and Whitson Gordon, “Life Hacks: Improving Your Own Shit” Adult Mag, 7 July 2014, http://adult-mag.com/lifehacks/; Steven Poole, “Why the Cult of Hard Work Is Counter-Productive,” New Statesman, December 11, 2013, http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/12/right-be-lazy.

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pieces suggest that life hacking as a practice has matured, as its practitioners have

expanded from a small circle of like-minded people online to a more popular cultural

formation about which people now feel the need to ask critical questions. Despite these

popular pieces on life hacking, to the best of my knowledge, there has been no published

in-depth academic work on life hacking. My dissertation is the first.27 It brings together

for the first time some of the emergent commentary on life hacking and seeks to deepen

and extend it by being the first academic treatment of the cultural discourse of life

hacking, its emergence, politics, and key sites of unfolding.

Methodology and Chapter Overview If academic discussions of hacking to date have failed to consider life hacking, popular

discussions of life hacking have failed to consider it academically.28 One of the aims of

this dissertation is to suggest a much wider set of practices and cultural locations than are

typically associated hacking and to take life hacking seriously as subject worthy of

academic inquiry. It aims to trace a history of life hacking from its initial development to

how it has mutated and manifested itself in particular industries. It does so largely by

rhetorically analyzing how life hackers have talked about themselves, presenting a history

of their discourse and with it a record of their preoccupations.

27 It will not be the last. Melissa Gregg, Principal Engineer in User Experience Research at Intel Labs and co-Director of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing, is working on a book tentatively titled Unproductive that deals with life hacking. See Melissa Gregg, “This Productive Life,” Home Cooked Theory, 7 Dec 2014, http://homecookedtheory.com/archives/2014/12/07/this-productive-life/. Additionally, Joseph Reagle, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern and a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, is currently doing research on life hacking. How their work fits into my work and vice versa remains to be seen. 28 Marjorie Garber argues that the difference between journalism (or what I call “popular writing” above) and academic writing is less a matter of style than of objective: “the journalist of ideas attempts to explain and describe them, while the scholar of ideas attempts to think through them, to enter into and advance an ongoing intellectual discussion. Every scholarly move is part of a dialogue.” Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 34.

11

In researching and writing this dissertation, I have often found myself at the nexus

of several different positions: between observer and participant, between academic and

storyteller, and between, on the one hand, vociferous critic of life hacks and, on the other,

eager consumer of them. I started following and reading life hacking blogs more or less

when they first appeared online in early 2005. I gave my first paper on life hacking at an

academic conference in 2007. As life hacking blogs turned into books, I bought and read

them. When Twitter became a thing, I joined and followed prominent life hackers there. I

watched life hacking TV shows. I listened to life hacking podcasts. The arguments that I

present about life hacking thus rest upon a long and in-depth study of the cultural

productions of life hackers. The people I place in the foreground of this project are, in my

estimation, some of the key figures in life hacking’s relatively brief history. They were

chosen because they best illuminated the issues this dissertation seeks to address. All of

them were engaged in a common discussion (or “discourse”) lasting across several years

and in various media. Their “writings” do not fall into any traditional single literary or

professional genre, but span blog posts, books, interviews, articles, tweets, television

appearances, podcasts, and videos. Life hacking is a sprawling topic with multiple

practitioners, commentators, websites, podcasts, and published material. One of my

hopes is that the very diversity of source material I draw on illustrates to some degree the

pervasiveness of life hacking, that its multimedia-ness is evidence of its cultural

diffusion. Because there is a lot of content one might deal with, my project is necessarily

selective. What follows is also accordingly subjective, but as someone who has spent the

better part of a decade immersed in this material, I have tried to make it representative

and fair. My aim is not to take cheap shots at life hacking’s practitioners, some of whom I

12

know or am only one or two people removed from, but to critique life hacking as a

practice. Roughly concurrent with my time following life hacking, this dissertation treats

the period from 2004 to 2014. Though a decade makes for a handy framing device, the

longitudinal nature of this project makes it unusual. That is, part of what makes me a

credible commentator on life hacking, I would argue, is that I have observed, firsthand,

how life hacking has developed over time.29 If I have an unusual method that merits

mentioning, perhaps it is that I have marinated in these materials longer than anyone

probably should, amassing a collection of thousands of sources, which I then probed for

patterns.30

The question of method has long been a vexed one in American studies, and I

draw inspiration from Gene Wise’s 1979 article “Some Elementary Axioms for an

American Culture Studies,” which has deeply informed, to use Adam Golub’s resonant

phrase, my American studies “habit of mind,” particularly Wise’s notion of “dense facts,”

that is, “facts which both reveal deeper meanings inside themselves, and point outward to

other facts, other ideas, other meanings.”31 “In the dense-facts model,” Wise explains,

“that a work of scholarship makes a ‘contribution’ to knowledge is less important than

that it reveals in information meanings that had not been seen before. The dense-facts

model is committed less to the ‘production’ of new information and more to effective

29 On the importance of longitudinal Web studies, as opposed to short-term, “get in and get out” studies, see Nancy K. Baym, “Finding the Quality in Qualitative Research” in Critical Cyberculture Studies, ed. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari (New York: New York University Press, 2006): 79–87. 30 John V. Seidel neatly defines qualitative data analysis as a process of “Noticing, Collecting, and Thinking about interesting things.” John V. Seidel, Qualitative Data Analysis, www.qualisresearch.com (originally published as Qualitative Data Analysis, in The Ethnograph v5.0: A Users Guide, Appendix E, Colorado Springs, CO: Qualis Research, 1998). 31 Gene Wise, “Some Elementary Axioms for an American Culture Studies,” in Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, ed. Jack Salzman, vol. 4 (New York, 1979), 529. Adam Golub, “The American Studies Habit of Mind,” ... and Everyday Life, June 15, 2010, https://andeverydaylife.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/the-american-studies-habit-of-mind/.

13

‘consumption’—that is, to the fuller intellectual digestion of whatever information is at

hand.”32 In my view, life hacking is a kind of dense fact, packed with meanings, and the

goal of this project has been to try to unpack and digest some of them.

I have tried to balance the risk of distorting the sympathies and commitments of

the life hackers whose productions I analyze against the choice to make more general

points about how life hacking as a practice came into the world, developed across time,

and has been discussed. In order to mitigate against such distortions, I have not only

drawn on a variety of materials, but presented them in roughly chronological order,

building each case study on the one before it. At the same time, each of my three case

studies can, I hope, be read as self-contained treatments of the issues raised therein. In

short, I have tried to critically trace life hacking’s development, and to understand and

evaluate the effects of what it means to think like a life hacker. I have tried to make sense

of how life hacking, already an expansion of hacking, has itself expanded further outward

into other cultural locations. I have tried to produce an anatomy of a discursive formation

as well as a history of its emergence and diffusion. This dissertation is an investigation

that establishes how the category of life hacking has been produced and then seeks to

identify the interests served by that production. My aim has been to shed a series of

spotlights on a subject that has hitherto not been very well understood or received

sustained attention. Here I again draw inspiration from Wise, who holds that the

“distinctive American Studies process of inquiry should not be an act of ‘discovering’

datums of information, but a strategic ‘journey’ through concentric fields of

experience.”33 Each of my chapters concerns itself with one of three different “life

32 Wise, 529. 33 Wise, 536.

14

stages” of life hacking, thereby rendering intelligible a little-remarked upon history that

exists mostly as a welter of blog posts and other “ephemeral,” little-critiqued media.

Ultimately, I am telling a story about life hacking’s emergence, growth, and

politics. Here I align myself methodologically with Neil Postman, who, in his essay

“Social Science as Moral Theology,” contends, “there is a measure of self-delusion in the

prevalent belief that psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other moral

theologians are doing something different from storytelling.”34 What Postman is saying is

that scholars in the humanities and social sciences who think, at the end of the day, they

are doing something other than telling stories are kidding themselves. Ultimately,

according to Postman, what all scholarship in the humanities and social sciences is doing

“is weaving narratives about human behavior.”35 Postman, not one to mince words, calls

humanistic and social scientific work storytelling because it suggests “an author has

given a unique interpretation to a set of human events, that he has supported his

interpretation with examples in various forms, and that his interpretation cannot be

proved or disproved but draws its appeal from the power of its language, the depth of its

explanations, the relevance of its examples, and the credibility of its theme.”36 “The less

concern about method,” Postman concludes, “the better. One becomes fastidious about

method only when one has no story to tell.”37 Here, then, is the story I am trying to tell.

Chapter 1, “Upgrade Yourself,” is about the birth of life hacking as a concept

from its coinage in 2004 to the explosion of Gina Trapani’s Lifehacker to Tim Ferriss’s

rise to the position of Silicon Valley’s Übermensch. It ends with Merlin Mann’s 2008

34 Neil Postman, “Social Science as Moral Theology,” in Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology, and Education (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 3. 35 Ibid., 12. 36 Ibid., 13. 37 Ibid., 16.

15

critique of life hacking as an addictive trap. It makes the point that life hacking started

with computer-based tips and tricks and then gradually spread outward to encompass

more and more genres. Go to a website like Lifehacker today, for instance, and you will

find not just computer advice, but all manner of tips. You will find subblogs devoted to

sex tips, financial tips, industrial arts, health tips, and cooking. You will find content

aggregated from other websites and rechristened, by virtue of its new context, as life

hacks. Lifehacker took the notion of computer hacks and applied them to life, and in the

process expanded the notion of hacking beyond computers. Here I emphasize how life

hacking is rooted in preexisting U.S. nationalist discourses of efficiency, productivity,

technology, and work. Do life hacks ennoble people struggling to make do in an

increasingly technologized word, or do they represent the technologization of older ideas

about self-improvement, the power of technology to make things better, and a faith in

progress that have had particular salience in American culture? How does the figure of

the life hacker contribute to constructions of race, class, and gender? Is the life hacker a

genuinely new type of person (or “subject position”) or a new version of an old type of

person spruced up and repackaged for contemporary consumption?

Chapter 2, “From Stuff to Fluff,” is about how a branch of life hacking becomes

preoccupied with a brand of antimaterialism dubbed “digital minimalism.” It is about

how getting rid of all your possessions, made possible by “the cloud,” gets pitched as the

ultimate life hack. Here I argue that digital minimalism’s antimaterialism is not

politically progressive; rather, it is the adoption of a corporate fantasy of a disembodied

digital future that willfully ignores the Internet’s persistent physical realities.

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Chapter 3, “Academic, Hack Thyself,” looks at how life hacking ideas have been

embraced in some corners of academe, in particular by and on the Chronicle of Higher

Education group blog ProfHacker. It and “prof hacking” sites like it are similar to the

first wave of life hacking websites discussed in chapter 1 in that they appeal to people—

in this case, academics—under pressure to develop new “digital literacies.” But “prof

hackers” seem curiously unaware of or uninterested in the critiques leveled at the first

wave of life hacking blogs and materials. Accordingly, their uncritical application of life

hacking to an academic context ultimately seems congruent with the neoliberalization of

the university. Life hacking in academe is inseparable from its emergence in other

domains and the contradictions and politics it carries with it in those places.

Finally, in my conclusion, I try to address the lingering issue of gender—the

“unmarked” aspect of the hacker (although sometimes female) as an online avatar of

masculine identity formation in a postindustrial, economically recessive era—by

sketching out an area of possible future research: pickup artists who have adopted

hacking ideas under the guise of “social engineering” and who thus constitute another

“dark side” of hacking’s broadening. Here I reiterate that the cultural formation of life

hacking draws upon and recapitulates, rather than supersedes, a long tradition of white

masculine self-making in American culture—the nation as founded upon the structural

self-production and self-display of a national “fraternity” of white men.38

Because this dissertation is organized around illustrative examples, it is far from

comprehensive, much less exhaustive, in its coverage. In offering up this selection of

subjects, I have left out many other possibilities. There are scores of life hacking sites,

38 Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

17

and untold number of blog posts, articles, podcasts, etc. I have not talked about. Thus,

there will be plenty of opportunity for future academic work along the lines suggested

here. As my title suggests, this is not intended as an exhaustive history of life hacking; it

is intended as a history, maybe even the first history, and above all a critical, cultural

studies–inflected history informed by those historians and philosophers of technology

who have questioned the costs and consequences of technology.39 I argue that we should

be skeptics about the potential of life hacking to solve our problems. To that end, I

provide a sketch of the rhetoric and practice of life hacking that I hope provokes general,

rather than solely scholarly, discussion. Indeed, because I am precisely interested in how

hacking, particularly in its life hacking incarnation, has become an issue that concerns us

all, I feel like discussion of it should not be limited to those who are hackers or who study

hacking. The overall result, I hope, feels more like a general, critical discussion of life

hacking than an esoteric, exhaustively descriptive one. Approaching life hacking from

such a perspective allows me not only to situate it in relationship to the larger

conversation surrounding hacking, but the larger ongoing conversation surrounding the

role of technology in American life.

American Studies and the Internet If I see this project as intervening in ongoing popular and scholarly conversations about

hacking, I also see it as intervening in an ongoing conversation about the place of

technology in American Studies. That is, this dissertation is a contribution to the debate

39 If, as technology writer Doug Hill notes, American history has been characterized by celebrations of technology, there has also been—from Henry David Thoreau to Lewis Mumford to Theodore Roszak to Neil Postman to Langdon Winner—“a second great American tradition, the tradition of technological ambivalence.” Doug Hill, Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology (Philadelphia: Cellarius Press, 2013), Kindle edition.

18

over the meaning of hacking that aims to open up a space within American Studies to talk

about life hacking from a critical perspective. One of the arguments of this dissertation is

that we are not witnessing something wholly new with life hacking, an aberration that can

be tied solely to early twenty-first-century problems; rather, we are witnessing the

rebubbling to the surface of a logic that is centuries old, and which is being played out

again.

Joel Dinerstein proclaims that “technology is the American theology. For

Americans, it is not the Christian God but technology that structures the American sense

of power and revenge, the nation’s abstract sense of well-being, its arrogant sense of

superiority, and its righteous justification for global dominance.”40 Dinerstein continues,

quoting other scholars: “The United States is in thrall to ‘techno-fundamentalism,’ in

Siva Vaidhyanathan’s apt phrase; to Thomas P. Hughes, ‘a god named technology has

possessed Americans.’ Or, as public policy scholar Edward Wenk Jr. sums it up, ‘we

are … inclined to equate technology with civilization [itself].’”41 After reading these

words, one might presume that technology has long played a central role in American

Studies scholarship, and in some ways it has. Indeed, in one form or another, technology

has been a central theme in American Studies from the earliest days of the field.42 Yet,

despite its widely acknowledged importance, technology as a category increasingly

seems like less of a core subject of the field, ironically—or perhaps distressingly—at

precisely the same time technology, as a result of “the digital,” is taking on a greater

importance in American life. As Carolyn de la Peña explained in 2006:

40 Joel Dinerstein, “Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman,” American Quarterly 58:3 (Sep 2006), 569. 41 Ibid., 569. 42 See, most famously, Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

19

The field of American studies has largely left questions of technology to others, in spite of our early leadership in innovative methods of technological analysis and cultural critique. And while discipline-based inquires into technology have been immensely useful at revealing particular histories and consequences of American technology, they have not been primarily focused on issues of diversity, equity, and justice that are fundamental to our field. Nor have they been written with a particular focus on interdisciplinary connections that embed everyday actions within their larger political and cultural systems.43

According to de la Peña, the locus for technology studies has been “outside of the context

of the American Studies Association,” in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the

Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) and their journal Technology and

Culture.44 “American studies as an organization,” she concludes with a touch of

melancholy, “was once the home for individuals to ask and find answers to critical

questions concerning Americans’ engagements with technologies. Yet, at least for the

past decade, individuals trained in American studies have found STS and SHOT to be

more friendly forums for their work. Prospective graduate students committed to studying

the impact of technology and science on everyday life are more likely to enter sociology

and anthropology PhD programs than American studies.”45 De la Peña’s observations are

important because if Dinerstein is correct in his assessment of the role technology plays

in American life—and I am not alone in thinking he is—it is incumbent upon

Americanists to seriously grapple with it at some level. The field cannot simply abdicate

the study of technology to other disciplines, particularly since, in de la Peña’s estimation,

those outside of American studies who study technology have not, by and large, done the

kind of connective, synthetic work that characterizes American studies at its best, work

that approaches technology, as I have tried to here, with “a particular focus on

43 Carolyn de la Peña, “‘Slow and Low Progress,’ or Why American Studies Should Do Technology,” American Quarterly 58:3 (Sep 2006), 915. 44 Ibid., 919. 45 Ibid., 920.

20

interdisciplinary connections that embed everyday actions within their larger political and

cultural systems.”46

If technology has been historically central to American studies but is now on the

periphery, “the digital” provides American studies scholars with an opportunity to revisit

technology, to do what Lauren Frederica Klein calls “American digital cultural studies,”

i.e., “the application of American studies methods to the structures and objects of the

digital world.”47 There is what Klein calls an “as-yet-uncharted space in American

studies for the variety of forms of scholarship that might engage … digital culture.”48

This dissertation is in some ways an attempt to start to fill that space. Indeed, as Klein

points out, both the traditional and current concerns of American studies have become, at

this point in time, digital: “race has become digital, and so too have gender, labor,

politics, and class.” “The field of American studies,” Klein continues, “if it is to

incorporate an understanding of the transformation of cultural life in the twenty-first

century, must fully engage in the study of the implications of the digital, its structure and

its scope.”49 One of the things that attracted me to American studies in the first place was

the promise of an intellectual space where one could understand technology in a broader

social and historical context. More than anything, it is in that spirit that this dissertation is

written.

46 Ibid., 915. 47 Lauren Frederica Klein, “American Studies after the Internet,” American Quarterly 64:4 (Dec 2012), 865. On “the failure of American studies to engage with new digital tools, formats, and methods,” Klein cites Matthias Oppermann, “The World Wide Web and Digital Culture: New Borders, New Media, New American Studies,” in A Concise Companion to American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010): 334–49. 48 Ibid., 862. 49 Ibid., 869.

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CHAPTER 1: UPGRADE YOURSELF

You know what drives me crazy? There’s all these people talking about how great technology is, and how it saves all this time. But what good is saved time if nobody uses it? It just turns into more busy work, right? You never hear someone say, “Well, with the time I’ve saved by using my word processor, I’m gonna go to a Zen monastery and hang

out.” You never hear that. —Jesse (Ethan Hawke), Before Sunrise (1995)

In American popular discourse over the last decade, the term “hacking” has been applied

to an ever-proliferating number of activities. People now talk about hacking their bodies,

hacking IKEA furniture, even hacking democracy.1 But how did this happen? How did

hacking go from something related—both historically and in the popular imagination—to

computers, to something associated with everything from education to healthcare to

government to sex?2 In this chapter I argue that the “life hacking” movement bears the

brunt of the responsibility. I look at life hacking’s inception, growth, and some of the

critiques leveled against it to make a larger point about hacking as a cultural practice

circa the early twenty first century. More specifically, I trace the history of life hacking

from tech writer Danny O’Brien’s coinage of the term “life hack” in 2003–2004 to web

developer Gina Trapani’s founding of Lifehacker in 2004–2005, to the cult of personality

surrounding self-described life hacker Tim Ferriss, before concluding by looking briefly

1 See, e.g., Tim Carmody, “Hacking Your Body: Lance Armstrong and the Science of Doping,” The Verge, 17 Jan 2013, http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/17/3886424/programming-your-body-lance-armstrong-and-doping-technology; Roman Mars, “Hacking IKEA,” 99% Invisible, 19 Aug 2014, http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hacking-ikea/; John Postill, “Democracy in an Age of Viral Reality: A Media Epidemiography of Spain’s Indignados Movement,” Ethnography 15:1 (2014): 51–69. 2 See, e.g., John Fawcett, “Hacking Your Education: The Next Generation of Students,” Wired, 14 Jun 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/06/hacking-your-education-the-next-generation-of-students/; Fred Trotter and David Uhlman, Hacking Healthcare: A Guide to Standards, Workflows, and Meaningful Use (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2001); Chris Baraniuk, “Civic Hackers: Techies Volunteer to Rescue Government,” New Scientist, 12 Sep 2014, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21829232.000-civic-hackers-techies-volunteer-to-rescue-government.html; Avery Stone, “6 Hacks to Make Your Sex Life Better,” Huffington Post, 28 July 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/28/life-hacks-sex_n_5626902.html.

22

at some of the major critiques of life hacking, most notably Merlin Mann’s, who was

himself a participant in the popularization of life hacking via his blog 43 Folders.

Initially, life hacks took the form of “tech tips,” that is, productivity secrets

bearing some resemblance to traditional computer hacks, those small modifications to

computer software or hardware that allow the modifier to fix some sort of problem they

are having with said software or hardware. As life hacking developed as a cultural

practice, however, it slowly expanded in scope. Go to Lifehacker today, for instance, and

you are likely to find cooking, cleaning, exercise, meditation, writing, and travel tips

alongside tech ones. This, I argue, demonstrates how life hacking is a colonizing

discourse. It is, moreover, a discourse structured by the race, class, and gender hierarchies

of petty bourgeois producerism, a social vision of economic free agents striving to make

something of themselves while interacting with each other via the Internet. To understand

how and why the term hacking is increasingly being applied to “everything,” it is

necessary to confront the life hacking movement and its various cultural productions, for

it is in them that hacking morphed from something geeks do to their computers to

something people are increasingly saying they are doing to their offices, their homes,

their bodies, and so on. Accordingly, this chapter traces the emergence of life hacking out

of the discourses and mythology of hacking in the United States. It offers a critical

cultural history of life hacking discourses across a variety of media genres: newspaper

and magazine articles, blog posts, books, conference proceedings, social media updates,

podcasts, online journalism, and TV shows.

* * *

23

That it behooves one to know how to use computers has, by now, calcified into a banal

truism. Indeed, today it is the people who are not online, who are not glued to their

smartphones, who are not on Facebook who are viewed with skepticism.3 The situation is

by now a familiar one. Read any newspaper, magazine, or current events–type book, in

print or (especially) online, and sooner or later you will come across a passage such as

this trumpeting the ascendency of digital devices:

Today hundreds of millions of people around the world are online, using millions of websites and applications and over a billion e-mail addresses. Computers, cameras, cell phones, PDAs, and a menageries of other devices connect people to each other across the network, and data floods from device to device in an unending torrent, for an infinite variety of uses: e-mail, phone calls, photos, videos, meetings, classes, games, music, and on and on and on.4

As computer technologies become more central to how Americans live, work, and

communicate, not being able to manage them can be anxiety-producing. There is now, as

tech guru and writer Mark Hurst puts it, a new crisis:

The popularity and easy access of bits, thanks to the Internet, have created both an opportunity—for new experiences and tools and services—and a new crisis. People are overloaded by too many bits, everywhere, all the time. I’ve noticed in recent years that most people don’t know how to deal with the constant deluge of bits, and they suffer as a result. Millions of people are living with stress, working less productively, and feeling the effects in their personal lives.5

Hurst is saying that it is no longer enough simply to be able to use computers; one must

be able to use them well. The consequences of not being what Hurst calls “bit literate”

are, for him, difficult to overstate:

The importance of such skills in today’s world cannot be overestimated. Bits are everywhere, and they’re increasing every day; they have changed the world like

3 In 2011, for instance, the United Nations declared Internet access a human right. David Kravets, “U.N. Report Declares Internet Access a Human Right,” WIRED, June 3, 2011, http://www.wired.com/2011/06/internet-a-human-right/. 4 Mark Hurst, Bit Literary: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload (New York: Good Experience Press, 2007), 2. 5 Ibid., 2.

24

no other technology since perhaps the invention of paper. This is no longer the industrial age, the atomic age, or the space age. We are now living in the age of bits. Those who know how to work with bits will master the age; those who don’t will be left further and further behind in every profession and creative pursuit that bits infiltrate.6

The age of bits! Such grandiose rhetoric clues us in to Hurst’s agenda. He is trying to

both describe the present and justify the importance of his book Bit Literacy (2007) and

its “life-saving” advice. But Hurst is far from alone in his understanding of the present

moment and the need for digital literacy. In Networked: The New Social Operating

System (2012), Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman argue that Americans “have become

increasingly networked as individuals, rather than embedded in groups. In the world of

networked individuals, it is the person who is the focus: not the family, not the work unit,

not the neighborhood, and not the social group.”7 The reasons for this, they argue,

drawing on copious amounts of Pew Research Center data, are three interrelated

“revolutions”: the social network revolution, the internet revolution, and the mobile

revolution. Considering the revolutions together, Rainie and Wellman call this new state

of affairs “networked individualism,” which is, at the same time, also a new “social

operating system” because “it describes the ways in which people connect, communicate,

and exchange information.”8 Though Rainie and Wellman use their own terminology, the

overall “revolution” they describe is much like Hurst’s revolution by bits.

Rainie and Wellman hold that networked individualism is not inherently good or

bad; however, they also take an optimistic, even Whiggish, view of it that valorizes new

networks in the old-fashioned language of possessive individualism: “The networked

6 Ibid., 3. 7 Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman, Networked: The New Social Operating System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 6. 8 Ibid., 6–7.

25

operating system gives people new ways to solve problems and meet social needs. It

offers more freedom to individuals than people experienced in the past because now they

have more room to maneuver and more capacity to act on their own.”9 Rainie and

Wellman note—and Hurst also suggests—that one problem with networked

individualism is that it asks a lot of individuals. In previous social configurations, in

times of need one could lean on one’s group; in the new “social operating system” of

“networked individualism,” the onus is on you to tap into the resources of your network.

Rainie and Wellman present a lot of impressive statistics about how Americans are

increasingly online, going so far as to suggest that people who are not online are simply

not interested in the Internet, as opposed to being constrained by issues having to do with

access.10 Indeed, they say questions of access (e.g., the “digital divide”)—long a concern

of Internet research—are no longer very relevant. Rather, “access” has been slowly

replaced by questions of what might be deemed, following Hurst, network literacy.11 In

other words, people are no longer separated by whether they can access the Internet, but

by how good they are at using it to leverage their networks for personal and professional

gain. Network literacy is everything in a networked social operating system. Rainie and

Wellman write: “While (almost) everyone can use the internet, many cannot use it

effectively, lacking what sociologist Eszter Hargittai calls ‘digital skills’ and analyst

Howard Rheingold calls ‘internet literary’ and ‘net smarts.’ It is the new digital divide,

9 Ibid., 9. On possessive individualism, see C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962; repr., Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2011). 10 Rainie and Wellman., 73–75. 11 “Traditionally,” tech writer Clive Thompson explains, “‘literacy’ has primarily meant two things: being able to read and being able to write.” He continues: “Computational power isn’t just changing the old literacies of reading and writing. It’s creating new ones. This includes literacies in video, images, and data sets, forms of information that are becoming newly plastic.” To these we might add “network literacy.” Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (New York: Penguin, 2013), 86–87.

26

where differences in skilled use of the Internet can worsen social inequalities.”12 Eszter

Hargittai calls this the “second level digital divide” that “takes the form of socially

stratified variations in online skills and behaviors.”13 In other words, in an age when

everyone uses computers, what increasingly separates people is how well they are able to

use computers. This, of course, is nearly identical to Hurst’s point: today those unable to

use their digital devices individually, effectively, and efficiently might experience

considerable stress in their personal and professional lives.

Along the same lines, in recent years there has been a noticeable push for people

to “learn to code.” “It’s time for computer programming to be democratized,” writes

Clive Thompson, and well-funded organizations with high-profile backers like Code.org

have sprung up to do just that.14 “Make a free weekly coding lesson your New Year’s

resolution,” writes tech columnist Farhad Manjoo at Slate, plugging the website

Codecademy.15 The choice now couldn’t be starker according to Douglas Rushkoff:

program or be programmed.16 What these “learn to code” advocates are saying is

essentially similar to what Hurst, Rainie and Wellman, and scores of others are saying: if

you want to make it in today’s high-tech economy, it is not enough just to know how to

to use computers, you must be bit/computer/network/code literate at very deep level.

* * *

12 Rainie and Wellman, 76. The reference here is to Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), a book similar to Hurst’s Bit Literacy. 13 Quoted in Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014). 14 Clive Thompson, “Clive Thompson on Coding for the Masses,” Wired 29 Nov 2010, http://www.wired.com/2010/11/st_thompson_wereallcoders/. See http://code.org. 15 Farhad Manjoo, “You Need to Learn How to Program,” Slate, 4 Jan 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/01/learn_to_program_make_a_free_weekly_coding_lesson_your_new_year_s_resolution_.html. See http://www.codecademy.com/. 16 Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age (New York: OR Books, 2010).

27

Lifehacker (2005–) is a website that purports to help its readers become more bit

literate in the Hurst sense or network literate in the Rainie and Wellman sense. It also

openly espouses the “learn to code” agenda. Except, significantly, it does not use the

analogy of literacy; it uses the metaphor of hacking. This difference, as I explore below,

is important, because learning how to read is not the same thing as learning how to hack.

“Welcome to Lifehacker. I’m Gina Trapani.” So begins the very first post on

Lifehacker from January 31, 2005, by Gina Trapani, then a New York–based web

developer.17 It is an invitation. It is personal. It is quite clearly the product of a self-

identified female writer. It is also a canny act of repurposing. You see, in early 2005, the

term “life hack” had just emerged, and as such, was still somewhat in flux. Trapani could

have gone with some other term for the site. That she went with “life” and “hacker”

points to certain receptivity on the part of American culture, now thoroughly

computerized, to a computer metaphor. As Rick Altman has argued, most of us, when we

analyze something, analyze it as presently defined, thus skipping over the messy fact that

our objects of analysis are in fact historical and cultural constructions. “The assumption

of a single stable object of study,” he writes, “hides the very problem that history is

17 Gina Trapani, “Lifehacker Launches,” Lifehacker, 31 Jan 2005, http://lifehacker.com/031643/lifehacker-launches. In a revealing September 11, 2014, talk at the XOXO conference, Trapani explained that when she started Lifehacker, a post-9/11 looming threat of death was very much on her mind, and that Lifehacker grew out of her obsession not to waste time. She writes: “Lifehacker is a Gawker blog I started in late 2004 that was about life hacks—clever tricks to save you time and help you run your life more efficiently. It was about systematizing and shortcutting EVERYTHING—from how you spread the butter on your toast in the morning (use a cheese slicer to get the thinnest pats, they melt faster and most evenly) to what Gmail keys help you process your email the fastest (recommend the Y key to archive and the M key, to mute, M is underrated). Lifehacker was about living your most productive, efficient life—and this is the part that didn’t make it into the site’s tagline—because someday you are going to die.” See Gina Trapani, “My XOXO talk video and transcript,” Scribbling.net, 8 Oct 2014, http://scribbling.net/2014/10/08/my-xoxo-2014-talk-video-and-transcript/.

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designed to study and explain.”18 In other words, we would do well to trace the arrival of

emergent technocultural terms such as “life hacking” before their meanings crystalize.

Like all terms, “life hack” has a history. The story goes like this: in 2003, British

technology journalist Danny O’Brien sat down and made a list of the most productive

people he knew, many of whom were computer geeks of one kind or another. O’Brien

wrote a questionnaire asking his friends to explain how they managed to be so

productive. After they had emailed him their replies, he looked for patterns. He was

hoping his friends shared some common tricks he could learn from.19

It turns out they did. But instead of doing big, easy-to-describe things, O’Brien’s

super-productive friends of 2003 were doing a bunch of little, technical things. Their big

secret was essentially having lots of little secrets. Many, for instance, said they used a

single plain text document to dump everything they needed to remember into—addresses,

to-do lists, birthdays, and so forth—and then they just searched through that file when

they needed a piece of information.20 Others worked out of their email inbox, emailing

themselves reminders of all they had to do and organizing messages using elaborate

folder schemes. Others wrote scripts to automate recurring computer tasks, saving them

time.

O’Brien quickly deduced that the people he surveyed were approaching their

network-era work as a series of engineering problems. Instead of all-encompassing,

18 Rick Altman, “Crisis Historiography,” in Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 15–23. 19 Gina Trapani, “Interview: Father of ‘Life Hacks’ Danny O’Brien,” Lifehacker, 17 Mar 2005, http://lifehacker.com/software/interviews/interview-father-of-life-hacks-danny-obrien-036370.php. See also the interview with O’Brien in Joey Daoud, You 2.0: A Documentary on Life Hacking, 2009, http://www.lifehackingmovie.com. 20 See Giles Turnbull, “Living in Text Files,” Aug 2005, http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2005/08/living_in_text_files.html and Merlin Mann, “ Life Inside One Big Text File,” 43 Folders, 17 Aug 2005, http://www.43folders.com/2005/08/17/life-inside-one-big-text-file.

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overarching work philosophies, they had come up with a number of small, simple,

incremental solutions aimed at reducing the complexities of their work one step at a time,

the cumulative effect of which was purportedly a boost in productivity. O’Brien thought,

perceptively, that his friends’ best time-saving techniques might be compiled and shared

with other people. So he summed up his findings and made them public at the O’Reilly

Emerging Technology Conference in February 2004 in a talk entitled “Life Hacks: Tech

Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks.” Here is how the conference program advertised his

talk:

O’Brien will talk to the most prolific technologists about the secrets of their desktops, their inboxes, and their schedules. The little scripts they run, the habits they’ve adopted, the hacks they perform to get them through their day. Using the array of social software in use at ETech, he’ll collect together the best advice of all of the attendees. There will be take-home material here: downloadables and tips. But there will also be a wider discussion; is there anything we can apply from the way leading technologists bend hardware and software to cope with their needs? Are there any patterns from which mass-market manufacturers can learn? We cope pretty well with information overload. Can we help others do so, too?21

O’Brien called these secrets “life hacks.” “Hacks are often a way of cutting through an

apparently complex system with a really simple, nonobvious fix,” O’Brien later

explained, “And for most people, geeks or not, modern life is just this incredibly complex

problem amenable to no good obvious solution. But we can peck around the edges of it;

we can make little shortcuts. And once you point out that everyone does that, once you

coin the term, it’s really easy to pile a whole lot of shared behaviors into one neat pile.”22

21 Danny O’Brien, “Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks” (O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, CA, 2004), http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4802. 22 O’Brien, Lifehacker interview.

30

Writer Cory Doctorow’s notes from O’Brien’s talk circulated online, but it would fall to

others to, as O’Brien put it, pile up the hacks.23

Roughly a year later, Trapani launched Lifehacker. Dozens of blogs devoted to

life hacks soon followed, and they and Lifehacker became very popular.24 Life hacking

was the subject of articles in the New York Times, Time, The Economist, and the Wall

Street Journal, among other media.25 In 2005, the editors of the New Oxford American

Dictionary selected “lifehack” as a runner-up for the 2005 Word of the Year.26 As Leo

Marx reminds us, “the emergence of a keyword in public discourse—whether a newly

coined word or an old word invested with new meaning—may prove to be an

illuminating historical event. Such keywords often serve as markers, or chronological

signposts, of subtle, virtually unremarked, yet ultimately far-reaching changes in culture

and society.”27 The coinage and circulation of “life hack” was one such signpost. Indeed,

ten years later, Lifehacker is still one of the most popular websites in the United States

according to Quantcast, with around fifteen million visitors a month from the U.S.

alone.28 As Cal Newport, a former MIT PhD student and current Georgetown professor

23 Cory Doctorow’s notes from O’Brien’s talk can still be found at http://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt. 24 Today, the aggregation site Alltop brings together many of the top life hacking sites in one convenient location: http://lifehacks.alltop.com/. 25 Clive Thompson, “Meet the Life Hackers,” New York Times, 16 Oct 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16guru.html; Jeremy Caplan, “Hacking Toward Happiness,” Time, 21 Jun 2007, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1635844,00.html; “Reprogram Your Life” The Economist, 8 Jun 2006; and Andrew LaVallee, “Lifehacker Draws Visitors With Time-Saving Tech Tips,” Wall Street Journal, 5 Jan 2007, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB116527269925440424. 26 Mathew Honan, “Podcast is 2005 Word of the Year,” PC World, 6 Dec 2005, http://www.macworld.com/article/1048271/podcastword.html. 27 Leo Marx, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept,” Technology and Culture 51.3 (2010): 562–563. 28 See https://www.quantcast.com/lifehacker.com. Quantcast breaks down traffic in different ways. They also provide demographic information about a website’s visitors. As of May 5, 2015, Quantcast says Lifehacker’s visitors are 70 percent male, mostly between the ages of 25 and 34, and 75 percent white. The fifteen million figure quoted above is me generalizing about Lifehacker’s visitors based on multiple Quantcast checks over the 2014–2015 academic year.

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who runs his own life hacking blog aimed at college students called Study Hacks,29

explained in 2007 using the then-available metrics: “Lifehacker.com is one of the top 10

blogs on the Internet, as measured by Technorati. Two other life hacker blogs,

Lifehack.org and 43 Folders, rank solidly in the top 100. The only topics with a greater

presence on this rarefied list are political commentary and technology.” “To put this

ranking in perspective,” Newport continues, providing context, “a spot in the top 100

indicates monthly traffic numbers in the seven-digit range. Lifehacker.com’s traffic, for

example, has grown to over 10 million visitors a month—ten times the number people

who subscribe to The New Yorker.”30 In short, life hacking blogs were almost instantly,

and still are, hugely popular. Nothing communicates this better, perhaps, than the fact

that, in a telling linkage to that other perennially-popular topic on the Internet, life hacks

are sometimes referred to as “productivity porn.”31

29 See http://www.calnewport.com/blog/. 30 Cal Newport, “Lifehacker 2.0” Flak Magazine, 13 Aug 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20071120112419/http://www.flakmag.com/features/lifehacker.html. 31 Vivek Haldar, “Avoid the Trap of ‘Productivity Porn,” Lifehacker, 6 Aug 2012, http://lifehacker.com/5932142/avoid-the-trap-of-productivity-porn.

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Figure 1: What Lifehacker Looked Liked Circa 2006

On one level, the craving for digital tips and tricks is understandable against the

backdrop of economic and political shifts in the United States over the last decade. The

explosion in popularity of life hacking websites was, after all, roughly concurrent with

the “Great Recession.” From this perspective, a combination of economic changes and

technological pressure resulted in a widespread wish to master new tools and a

consequent turn to life hacking blogs that promised to relieve insecurity without

demanding wholesale reinvention. One way to view life hacking, then, is as a kind of

twenty first-century self-help literature. Self-help literature is, of course, a longstanding

part of American culture, and life hacking in a sense represents its “technologization.”

Self-help literature’s roots in American culture go at least as far back as Benjamin

Franklin, whose proverbs in “Way to Wealth” (1758) sound suspiciously like many of the

33

maxims of today’s life hackers.32 Half a century ago, cultural critic Dwight McDonald

speculated that Americans are somehow uniquely drawn to self-help literature:

There has always been something in the American soul that responds to the how-to book. We are an active, ingenious, pragmatic race, concerned with production rather than enjoyment, with practicality rather than contemplation, with efficiency rather than understanding, and with information rather than wisdom. Our frontier past and our industrialized present both incline us toward a preoccupation with technique, with know-how rather than know-why.33

There is a lot one might say about this passage, but McDonald’s evocation of “the

frontier” here is particularly telling, for the idea that the frontier is responsible for the

supposed pragmatic nature of Americans recalls Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893

“Frontier Thesis,” wherein Turner argues that “From the conditions of frontier life came

intellectual traits of profound importance” such as “coarseness and strength combined

with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find

expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to

effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism … these are

traits of the frontier.”34 The physical frontier now gone, these traits nevertheless remain at

the heart of the “American character,” the thinking goes, and find expression in other

arenas, among them the proverbial Wild West that is the Internet. In other words, the

close of the geographical frontier, cultural critic Morris Berman writes, left “a

32 Interestingly, Benjamin Franklin has been embraced by the life hacking community as a sort of proto-life hacker. Life hacker-types, for instance, frequently point to versions Franklin’s daily schedule with reverence. See, for instance, James Keirstead, “Benjamin Franklin: The Grandfather of Personal Productivity?” Academic Productivity, 28 Aug 2009, http://www.academicproductivity. com/2009/benjamin-franklin-the-grandfather-of-personal-productivity/ and Buzz Andersen, “Benjamin Franklin’s Daily Schedule,” http://log.scifihifi.com/post/161617118/benjamin-franklins-daily-schedule-via-nick, to say nothing of posts about his famous precepts: e.g., Gina Trapani, “Benjamin Franklin’s 13 Personal Goals,” Lifehacker, 25 Feb 2006, http://lifehacker.com/156858/benjamin-franklins-13-personal-goals. 33 Dwight McDonald, “Howtoism,” The New Yorker, 22 May 1954: 85. 34 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893),” in The American Studies Anthology, ed. Richard P. Horwitz (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001), 94.

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psychological vacuum that got quickly filed by the technological frontier.”35 Today, what

McDonald refers to as “preoccupation with technique” takes one form in life hacking.

If O’Brien coined the term and initially fixed the metaphor, Trapani is the person

who really helped popularize it. In her inaugural Lifehacker post, she defines her terms,

giving hacking a new spin so as to differentiate it from the fuddy-duddy self-help

manuals of the past: “Online encyclopedia Wikipedia defines hacker as a computer expert

with detailed knowledge of ‘cleverly circumventing limits.’ Famous hacker Richard

Stallman says, ‘hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of

playful cleverness.’”36 From the start, Lifehacker abstracted hacking out to its essence,

and in the process broadened it beyond computers into a myth, a kind of practice, and an

identity. Even in this initial rhetorical move, life hacking is less something one does on a

computer than an approach, an attitude, a way of doing and of knowing, both a praxis and

an epistemology. As a result, the array of tips and tricks that might be called life hacks

makes pinpointing a truly representative life hack not only difficult, but almost beside the

point. Instead, it is better to think of life hacking as an assemblage of practices and habits

of mind.

In his 2008 book on hacking, however, sociologist Tim Jordan bristles at such

imprecision. For him, hacking is something specific, not some fuzzy approach to the

world. “Hackers of all sorts,” he writes, “talk lovingly of the hack, often imbuing it with

35 Morris Berman, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 74. For more on the rhetoric of frontier and how it made the jump to cyberspace, see Virginia Eubanks, “The Mythography of the ‘New’ Frontier,” MIT Communications Forum, December 19, 1999, http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/eubanks.html. Eubanks writes: “We don't have to look far to see the internet conceptualized as the ‘new frontier.’ Examples abound: the Electronic Frontier Foundation and its ‘Pioneer Awards;’ books like High Noon on the Electronic Frontier and Civilizing Cyberspace; high tech corporations like Frontier-Global-Center; the Wild, Wild Web; John Perry Barlow’s ‘homestead on the web.’” 36 Trapani, “Lifehacker Launches.”

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mystical properties … This leads to an extension in which the hack has been so lovingly

polished that it is at times hard to see how a hack is distinct from any creative action.

Understood this way, the hack need not be about computers and computer networks.”37

To Jordan, “this kind of abstraction relates to everything and nothing.”38 But although

Jordan is leery of abstractions of hacking that reduce it to “a miasma covering all social

life,” it was in fact life hacking’s character as an imprecise miasma of computer

“literacy” techniques that enabled its proliferation as a concept and practice.39

Whereas Jordan wants to define a hack as “a material practice that produces a

difference or something new in a computer, network and/or communications

technology,” Lifehacker from the start insists on using a broader definition of the term,

associated more with the spirit rather than the letter of hacking, even if, in the end, this

spirit seems to have been largely the spirit of what Dan Schiller calls “digital

capitalism.”40

Although the term “life hacks” suggests making a difference in relationship to

everyday things like sleeping, eating, cleaning, and driving to work, it should be noted

that O’Brien’s original formulation was much more about how people got work done

using computers, a definition rooted in the more narrow definition of hacker as

programmer, the geek whose life is wrapped up in his devices. By now it is a cliché to

say that computer geeks’ identities are tied up with their computers. As Mark Dery,

giving voice to the popular stereotype, writes, “The paradigmatic computer obsessive is

37 Tim Jordan, Hacking: Digital Media and Technological Determinism (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), 5. 38 Ibid., 7. 39 Ibid., 9. 40 Ibid,, 10. Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

36

the hacker, an archetype fixed in the popular imagination as a grungy teenager married to

his terminal, sustained by caffeinated cola, junk food, and above all, an almost symbiotic

relationship with his computer.”41

But if computer work could be made more productive by a series of small “hacks”

in O’Brien’s formulation, why not life in general? “A ‘hack,’” as Lifehacker’s old

Frequently Asked Questions page explains, emphasizing the generalizability of the term,

“is a clever shortcut or a lesser-known, faster way to get something done. A hacker

believes that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is a hacker’s

duty to share her expertise—so we will.” “The ‘life’ part,” the FAQ continues, “comes in

because while the hacks you’ll find here will focus mostly on technology—like how to

automatically back up your hard drive, they’ll also extend to things like how to re-

purpose a shoe-holder to organize your gadgets or build an air conditioner for under 30

bucks.”42 Or, to quote hacker scholar Pekka Himanen, “After the working life has been

optimized to its fullest, the requirement of optimality is extended to all of one’s other

activities, too.”43 Hacking, of course, is still most commonly associated with computers,

but as Paul Buchheit, the creator and lead developer of Gmail, argues: “Hacking isn’t

limited to computers though. Wherever there are systems, there is the potential for

hacking, and there are systems everywhere. Our entire reality is systems of systems, all

the way down. This includes human relations … health … sports … and finance.”44 In

sum, contra Jordan but in line with Himanen and Buchheit, Gina Trapani’s “spirit” of the 41 Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 219. 42 “Lifehacker Frequently Asked Questions,” Lifehacker, 21 Jan 2005, http://lifehacker.com/028869/lifehacker-frequently-asked-questions. 43 Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic, and the Spirit of the Information Age (New York: Random House, 2001), 26. 44 Paul Buchheit, “Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. ‘Hacking,’” 13 Oct 2009, http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/10/applied-philosophy-aka-hacking.html.

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life hacker is embedded in a much wider application of hacking that includes both work

and “life.”

The second thing Trapani accomplishes in her inaugural post of 2005 is to present

hacking as something vaguely rebellious. Hacking emerges as a practice for people who

like to push boundaries, people who chafe at limits and rules and impositions and the way

things are, but who do so “in a spirit of playful cleverness,” which is the old hacker-as-

rebel archetype updated and made more palatable. It subtly recalls the mode of address

used in Apple’s famous “Think Different” ad that hails would-be Macintosh users as

rebels.45 As Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter argue in Nation of Rebels: Why

Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, this mode of address, ostensibly pitched as

transgressive, is in many ways the ultimate in conformity. Rebelling against American

society has been one of the most powerful forces driving American social and national

identity for the last half century, if not longer.46 Trapani’s pitch, insofar as she is trying to

make hacking seem cool, is thus a kind of established marketing-speak.

Hackers, it should be noted, have long been presented and thought of themselves

in grandiose terms. As Steven Levy writes in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer

Revolution, the definitive history of the early hacking movement, “Beneath their often

unimposing exteriors, they were adventurers, visionaries, risk-takers, artists … and the

45 Apple is one of the most successful purveyors of countercultural cool of the last three decades. Here’s text of the “Think Different” ad, written by Steve Jobs: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” See “Think different,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Different. 46 Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (New York: Harper Business, 2004). See also Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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ones who most clearly saw why the computer was a truly revolutionary tool.”47 Part of

this surely has to do with the fact that hackers want to see themselves this way. Self-

mythologizing is part of any group identity. Levy notes that from the very beginning

hackers “unilaterally endowed themselves with the heroic attributes of Icelandic

legend.”48 Trapani’s innovation was to pitch this as a feeling of power and pleasure other

people could have provided they read and applied Lifehacker’s advice. In the second

paragraph of Lifehacker’s inaugural post, Trapani links this rebellious limit-pushing with

technology, and then with an ideology of productivity: “That’s what Lifehacker’s about:

the endless possibilities of technology and how it can improve our lives. Lifehacker

points out software, sites, tips and tricks that help you get things done, plain and

simple.”49

Thus the first post on Lifehacker might be summarized as follows: Hacking is a

simple idea that can be applied to all sorts of things, hackers are “cool,” technology is

good, and we are going to save time and money and “get things done.”50 Trapani’s post

concludes in the friendly, if weirdly ventriloquized and supplicant, manner in which it

began: “It is my pleasure to serve you. Let the adventures in productivity begin.”

* * *

For many, the word “hacker” still conjures up images of computer criminals. It is

significant that the two real-life hackers most likely to be household names as of this

47 Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1984; reprint, New York: Penguin, 2001), 7. 48 Levy, 24. 49 Trapani, “Lifehacker Launches.” 50 The recurrence of the phrases “get things done” and “getting things done” in life hacking’s rhetoric should, I argue, be read as allusions, albeit it perhaps unconscious ones at times, to David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, a sort of life hacking urtext from which, among other things, Merlin Mann derived the name of his blog 43 Folders. David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (New York: Penguin, 2001).

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writing—Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame and Edward Snowden of leaked NSA

documents fame—are depicted in the media as outlaws. As defined by Hollywood and

the news media, a hacker is a person who uses a computer to illegally gain access to and

tamper with a computer system.

The verb “hack” has similar negative connotations. Rupert Murdoch’s News of the

World newspaper is said to have hacked people’s voicemails.51 When nude pictures of a

celebrity surface on the Internet, their phone or iCloud account is said to have been

hacked. When someone gains access to your email without your permission, or takes over

your Facebook account, you say, “I’ve been hacked.” In this case, “hack” seems to have

become synonymous with computer breach. It is, moreover, something one does to you,

rather than something one does. It is passive rather than active. People get hacked; they

do not hack themselves. Because then you would be a hacker, and thus a criminal, and

criminals are bad. Or so the rather facile thinking goes.

Given the negative connotations “hacker” and “hacking” have, does the more

benign and would-be empowering term “life hacking” nevertheless still have a whiff of

criminality about it? That is, how can hacking be so closely associated with illegality and

describe a set of practices one does to be more productive? Are not the two in conflict? A

way out of this tension comes in the form of an idea from cultural anthropologist and

hacker scholar Gabriella Coleman, who suggests “thinking about hacking in terms of

genres or genealogies of hacking.”52 From this point of view, life hacking is a merely one

manifestation of “the hacker ethic.” As Coleman puts it, “the hacker ethic may accurately

51 See “News International phone hacking scandal,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacking_scandal. 52 Gabriella Coleman, “Hacking as Political Protest,” At a Glance: News from the NYU Steinhardt Community, 3 Feb 2011, http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/dbw1/ataglance/2011/02/gabriella_coleman_on_hacking_a.html.

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reference a general set of moral commitments … [but] the actual articulation of this ethos

… has taken on multiple, though coherent forms.”53 Steven Levy was the first to identify

what he called “the Hacker Ethic,” “a common element, a common philosophy which

seemed tied to the elegantly flowing logic of the computer itself. It was a philosophy of

sharing, openness, decentralization, and getting your hands on machines at any cost—to

improve the machines, and to improve the world. This Hacker Ethic is their gift to us:

something with value even to those of us with no interest at all in computers.”54 In other

words, while different kinds of hackers may share broad sympathies, it is best to think of

hacking as having many different expressions.

* * *

Though the conflation between computer work and life exists from the start in O’Brien’s

formulation of the term “life hacks,” Lifehacker amplifies the fusion by making the vast

majority of its initial tips and tricks computer-centric. To many, at first blush at least, the

term “life hacking” thus might seem like a bit of a misnomer. Someone following the tips

and tricks proffered by Lifehacker in its early days would not actually be hacking life

itself in some grandiose, godlike manner, but be engaged in fairly ordinary, even boring,

computing activities such as managing email, organizing files, and automating repetitive

tasks via scripts. But the geeks and wannabe geeks Lifehacker is hailing see the hacking

of their computers as a way of hacking their lives. To them, the two are not separate. Put

differently, their lives have become so computerized that hacking their computers

becomes a way of hacking their lives. As I discussed at the beginning of this chapter,

53 Gabriella Coleman and Alex Golub, “Hacker Practice: Moral Genres and the Cultural Articulation of Liberalism,” Anthropological Theory 8.255 (2008), 257. 54 Levy, 7.

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though, this symbolic relationship increasingly characterizes non-geeks as well. The

online impinges on the offline. A hack that takes place on a computer can have real-world

manifestations.

Nathan Jurgenson has called the idea that there is even such a thing as an online

and offline separate from one another “digital dualism.” He proposes “an alternative view

that states that our reality is both technological and organic, both digital and physical, all

at once. We are not crossing in and out of separate digital and physical realities, à la The

Matrix, but instead live in one reality, one that is augmented by atoms and bits. And our

selves are not separated across these two spheres as some dualistic ‘first’ and ‘second’

self, but is instead an augmented self.”55 Jurgenson’s point is that we should not think of

the online and the offline as separate. This, of course, has been the (implicit) perspective

of life hackers from the beginning and is, furthermore, consistent with the worldview

advanced by people like Hurst, Rainie and Wellman, and others.

And yet, a remnant of digital dualism remains in life hacking, at least in O’Brien’s

initial formulation and Trapani’s uptake of it, where life hacks are pitched as things one

can do online to create a better offline. As much as life and computer work seem to be

tied together in hacker culture, in Lifehacker’s early rhetoric, life is often set apart as

something computers can be put in the service of (as opposed to being an end in

themselves), and as such, computers remain both separate from but embedded in

“outside” life: “The most precious thing anyone has in this life is time. Spend more time

doing things and less time fiddling with your computer,” writes Trapani, in an argument

55 Nathan Jurgenson, “Digital Dualism vs. Augmented Reality,” Cyborgology, 24 Feb 2011, http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/.

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for the value of life hacks.56 This is pretty standard technological thinking. From such a

perspective, any technology, be it a stick or the latest computer, is simply a tool that

exists to help human beings do things. What is curious is that Trapani would fall back on

this sort of rhetoric at a time when life in “the real world” has become so computerized

that it would almost seem unnecessary to mention. But Trapani, perhaps unknowingly,

recycled the rhetoric of early computer marketing when she introduced the life hack

through its function as a “tool” to aid and simplify one’s life. “Thousands of web sites,

software apps, and gadgets promise to make your life easier” and “I’m simply obsessed

with the ways that computers can help humans get things done,” she tell us, as if it was

substantively different from what computer advertisements had already been saying for

decades.57

But ultimately Lifehacker’s tips become increasingly about themselves, i.e.,

hacking for hacking’s sake, losing the reference they had at the beginning to hacking in

the service of “real life.” That was merely the rhetorical move needed to get people’s

attention. After all, who isn’t interested in timesaving tips? Essentially, Trapani trades on

people’s preexisting “digital dualist” assumptions. The second step was a push back

against this digital dualism with the new suggestion that computer work and life overlap

to such an extent that they cannot be parsed without rendering each incomplete. This is,

classically, the perspective of the hacker in a symbiotic relationship with his computer, as

well as Jurgenson’s perspective. The third step, finally, is not just to think about the

online and the offline overlapping, or being mutually implicated, but to think of a

computerized existence as a new sort of life. This reinscribes the binary Jurgenson

56 Gina Trapani, Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better (Indianapolis: Wiley, 2008), xxvi. 57 Trapani, Upgrade Your Life, xxv and xxvi.

43

identified, but flips it on its head. Computers and life are once again separate, but now

life is in the service of computers, not the other way around. The shift is one from “hack

to live” to “live to hack.” This is the final step, and one for which critics of “digital

dualism” are perhaps unwitting apologists. Eventually, though, people started asking,

what are all these hacks in the service of? And when the answer became, seemingly, in

the service of more hacks, of going deeper into the world of the computer, a critique of

life hacking started to emerge.

* * *

Who is Lifehacker’s audience? At one level, Lifehacker has been clearly pitched at a

particular kind of professional: people who are glued to their computers. Where this gets

tricky, though, is that increasingly “everyone” is glued to their computers.58 As more and

more everyday life and work tasks (banking, shopping, communicating, leisure, etc.)

become thoroughly computerized, more and more of daily life and work becomes

computer-centric. So at one level, Lifehacker’s tips are pitched at “everybody,” because

“everybody” in the U.S. uses a computer. But this is not quite right. It might be better to

say that Lifehacker’s target demographic is “power users.” These are not people who

simply use computers, or people whose lives are enmeshed with computers (since now,

even if you have never even used a computer before, your life is enmeshed with

computers), but people who approach computers with more of a hobbyist’s mindset,

58 Even people who you might not think use computers use computers. Consider: 75% of homeless youth use at least one social network. Alexis C. Madrigal, “Survey: 75% of Homeless Youth Use at Least One Social Network,” The Atlantic, Aug 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2012/08/survey-75-of-homeless-youth-use-at-least-one-social-network/261817/. “We should,” Slavoj Žižek reminds us, “bear in mind the lesson of cyberpunk: how digitalization, virtual reality, biogenetics, and so on, can fully coexist with slum poverty.” The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 409.

44

people who do not do things the “default way” but push their computers to the limit.59

These people could be from any field; however, one finds many of Lifehacker’s initial

tips aimed at programmers, web designers, graphic designers, bloggers, and so forth—

people who can benefit the most, because of the kind of the work that they do, from

having a computational edge. This distinction seemingly amounts to, I realize, one

between people who merely use computers and people who really use computers, but it

might be helpful to think of computer use as a spectrum, with normal or “ordinary” use

on one end and extreme or “power” use on the other; Lifehacker initially addressed the

latter.

Trapani hails “power users” explicitly at the beginning of her three Lifehacker

books (2006’s Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day, 2008’s Upgrade

Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better, and, with Adam

Pash, 2011’s Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better),

compendiums of the site’s most useful and popular tips during its first few years.60

59 Wikipedia’s entry for “power user” is a good starting point here: “Power user,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_user. 60 Gina Trapani, Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day (Indianapolis, IN: Wiley, 2007); Gina Trapani, Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better (Indianapolis, IN: Wiley, 2008); Gina Trapani and Adam Pash, Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better (Indianapolis, IN: Wiley, 2011).

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Figure 2: Cover of first Lifehacker book

In 2006’s Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day, Trapani writes that life

hacking is for anyone who is “over-wired” and “overwhelmed,” specifically “seasoned

Web surfers, knowledge workers, freelancers, early adopters, aspiring and accomplished

geeks, programmers, tweakers, modders, and do-it-yourselfers.” This list makes it seem

like Lifehacker’s tips are aimed at people who are already experts—that Lifehacker is an

insiders’ site where experts talk to experts—but that is not what is going on here. In a

telling interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2007, Trapani explained that Lifehacker

was originally intended to be for the “aspiring geek.”61 Elsewhere in the article it notes

that hardcore geeks are often contemptuous of the advice doled out on Lifehacker

because they feel it is too rudimentary. These two facts help reconcile the tension I

61 Andrew LaVallee, “Lifehacker Draws Visitors With Time-Saving Tech Tips,” Wall Street Journal, 5 Jan 2007.

46

foregrounded above between mere computer users and power computer users in an era

when “everyone” is a computer user. Namely, there is a dual address. That is, the site

flatters its readers by presenting itself as a place for experts (i.e., “this is a place where

geeks hang out”), when in reality it is more of a how-to site for aspiring experts. Thus, on

the ordinary-to-power user spectrum, Lifehacker is actually pitched at people more in the

middle, people who want to be, or who would like to think of themselves as, power users.

In fact, a structuring feature of Lifehacker’s mission is to help what might be called the

“hack-curious” transform from ordinary to power user. While Lifehacker claims its target

audience is people who do certain types of computer work, or people who are

predisposed to hacking for whatever reason, the site is in fact targeting people in multiple

fields who have a curiosity about computers and fear being outpaced or “obsolesced.” It

is not aimed at hackers so much as it is, one tip at a time, aiming to turn everybody into a

hacker of a new, more generalized kind. Hacking is offered up as the solution to the

overarching anxiety provoked by the networked age, and anyone with a modicum of tech

savvy is invited to try it.

* * *

Technology blogger Jason Calacanis describes Gina Trapani this way: “She’s a power

user, so the problems she faces, normal users face 30 to 90 days later.”62 It is not clear

how Calacanis came up with the “30 to 90s days later” figure, but his basic point—that

Trapani’s problems, and her solutions to those problems, are rapidly becoming the

problems and solutions of “normal” people—is deeply rooted in hacker mythology. That

is to say, the idea that computer geeks are simply ahead of everyone else is not something

62 Ibid.

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Calacanis came up with—it is an idea that has a history. As programmer Ellen Ullman

writes about her time as a programmer in her book Close to the Machine: Technophilia

and Its Discontents (1997),

We wander from job to job, and now it’s hard for anyone to stay put anymore. Our job commitments are contractual, contingent, impermanent, and this model of insecure life is spreading outward from us. … We programmers are the world’s canaries. We spend our time in front of monitors; now look up at any office building, look into living-room windows at night: so many people sitting alone in front of monitors. We lead machine-centered lives; now everyone’s life is full of automated tellers, portable phones, pagers, keyboards, mice. We live in a contest of the fittest, where the most knowledgeable and skillful win and the rest are discarded; and this is the working life that waits for everyone. … Where we go the world is following.63

Here Ullman casts the computer programmer of the late 1990s as the worker of the

future. “This is the working life that waits for everyone,” she writes gloomily.

Interestingly, the “canaries in the coal mine” metaphor Ullman uses continues to have a

particular resonance among life hackers. For instance, in an interview with Wired

magazine in 2006, Merlin Mann, in a full transcript of his answers posted on his blog

43 Folders, puts it this way:

Geeks are the canaries in the coalmine for the problems that will eventually affect most “normal” people. For example, geeks had spam before most normal people had ever even heard of AOL. Additionally, the problems of overload and attention deficit that seem to be spreading so rapidly these days have been staples in the geek world since time immemorial. 64

Whereas Ullman uses the canary in the coal mine metaphor to paint a bleak portrait of

freelance, computer-based work, Mann uses it more positively, more or less ignoring that

the phrase refers to the caged birds miners used to carry down into tunnels with them as

early warning devices (if dangerous gases such as methane or carbon monoxide were

63 Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), 146. 64 Merlin, Mann, “WIRED interview: extended 12-inch version,” 43 Folders, 13 July 2005 http://www.43folders.com/2005/07/13/wired-interview-extended-12-inch-version/.

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present underground, the gases would kill the bird before the miners, signaling to them it

was time to exit). Ullman uses the metaphor slyly. One does not want to be a canary in a

coal mine. But Mann uses it more as a badge of honor, as a kind of synonym for being

“ahead of the curve,” twisting it into an aspirational identity. He seems to be saying that

because “geeks” are having to deal with problems brought about by computer technology

before non-geeks, they are an indicator of where we all are going (never mind that they

may be dying from the proverbial gases).

Similarly, in a 2006 In These Times article in which she references Mann, Jessica

Clark writes,

In many ways, “geeks” are the canaries in the New Economy’s coalmine. Programmers and knowledge workers often operate as free agents in the digital economy—self-employed or contract workers with little job security and a constant need to reinvent themselves for new employers. Working at home or remotely, they are overwhelmed by a barrage of e-mails and media inputs, lack the structure and community provided by conventional offices, and must erect or erase hard boundaries between their personal and professional lives. Such a vacuum of external supports and structures means that such workers must find new systems for setting goals, defining next steps, and managing the “project” of life.65

Like Ullman, Clark is critiquing the unfriendliness of the digital economy. This notion of

geeks as the vanguard of the New Economy does have some truth to it, but it is also a

self-serving rhetoric. Would-be life hackers flatter themselves by thinking of themselves

as storming the beachhead of the New Economy, not asphyxiating on the gases in its

mines. The former is a seductive, romantic image that pairs nicely with the image of

hacker as rebel. Join us, it says, for not only are we limit-pushing mavericks, we are the

future. This is in line with the idea that people need “twenty first-century skills” if they

hope to remain employable, and brings us right back to the points made by Hurst, Rainie 65 Jessica Clark, “Dear Postindustrial Capitalism,” In These Times, March 24, 2006, http://inthesetimes.com/article/2517/dear_postindustrial_capitalism.

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and Wellman, and others about “digital literacy” and “programming”—transmogrified

here into “hacking”—being more important than mere access.

* * *

The first two Lifehacker books are chock-full of almost exclusively tech tips drawn from

the site.66 The subtitle of the first (2007) is “88 tech tricks to turbocharge your day.” The

subtitle of the second (2008) trades on the known name of the website and mentions

work: “The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better.” The tips in both,

however, are similar; the second simply expands the number of hacks to 115. Trapani

dedicates the first book to her dad. She dedicates the second to her partner Terra, her

“favorite reason to finish work faster.” The idea behind all the tips is that they will save

you time.

The first book is divided into ten chapters, the second into eleven. In both, each

chapter is organized around a different principle—“Free Up Mental RAM,” “Firewall

Your Attention,” and “Automate Repetitive Tasks” are the first three chapters of the first

book—with a number of representative hacks given as examples. Each hack has a

difficulty level, computing platform, and cost listed before it. The emphasis, following

“the hacker ethic,” is largely on cross-platform advice and free software.

As many commenters have noted, the fantasy that technology will save us time by

freeing us from work is an old one in American culture. Mother Jones’s Dave Gilson

offers up the following popular examples. In Looking Backward (1888), Edward

Bellamy’s fin de siècle protagonist wakes up in the year 2000 where, thanks in part to

advances in technology, everyone is able to retire at age forty-five. In the oft-referenced

66 Companion website for the Lifehacker books: http://lifehackerbook.com.

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“Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930), economist John Maynard Keynes

predicted that technological improvements would soon bring about a fifteen-hour

workweek.67 In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel Player Piano, machines do most of the

work, leaving everyone except those who fix the machines with time to loaf. And in the

early-1960s animated sitcom The Jetsons, patriarch George Jetson, surrounded by

machines, works only nine hours a week.68

What is so interesting about this long history of predictions is how off they are in

their confidence of the amount of leisure enabled by industrial or postindustrial

technologies. For all their technology, Americans today work as much as anyone in the

industrialized world, if not more.69 Technology historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan was, in

her book More Work for Mother, among the first to examine how technologies billed as

labor-saving often end up as anything but, particularly with regard to the gendered

division of labor.70 The predictions people had in the past that we would all be working

fewer hours in the future must be understood contextually, because, as Benjamin Kline

Hunnicutt explains in Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream, from the early

nineteenth century until the early twentieth, the labor movement’s efforts at reducing

67 See John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” 1930, http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf. 68 Dave Gilson, “George Jetson’s 9-Hour Workweek,” Mother Jones, June 2011, http://www.motherjones.com/slideshows/2011/06/george-jetsons-9-hour-workweek/karl-marx-proletarian-revolution. Significantly, Gilson concludes his list of examples with Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. 69 See, for instance, Bryce Covert, “Taking a Vacation May Actually Save Your Career,” New Republic, June 23, 2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118285/workaholism-america-hurting-economy. It should be noted that some dispute the “Americans are working more than ever” statistics. See, for example, Derek Thompson, “The Myth That Americans Are Busier Than Ever,” The Atlantic, May 21, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-myth-that-americans-are-busier-than-ever/371350/. But even Thompson admits that Americans feel busier than ever. 70 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

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working hours were actually fairly successful.71 And yet, despite the success, for

instance, of the eight-hour day movement, “Since the mid-1970s,” Kline notes,

Americans “have been working longer and longer each year, about half a percentage

point more from year to year—the exact reverse of what happened during the nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries.” Ian Bogost has suggested that Americans might be

working more because the very technology that is supposed to be making their lives

easier has become a site of work onto itself. Take email, for example. Bogost writes:

It’s easy to see email as unwelcome obligations, but too rarely do we take that obligation to its logical if obvious conclusion: those obligations are increasingly akin to another job—or better, many other jobs. For those of us lucky enough to be employed, we’re really hyperemployed—committed to our usual jobs and many other jobs as well. It goes without saying that we’re not being paid for all these jobs, but pay is almost beside the point, because the real cost of hyperemployment is time. We are doing all those things others aren’t doing instead of all the things we are competent at doing. And if we fail to do them, whether through active resistance or simple overwhelm, we alone suffer for it: the schedules don’t get made, the paperwork doesn’t get mailed, the proposals don’t get printed, and on and on.72

Where Bogost uses the term “hyperemployed,” sociologist and cultural critic Micki

McGee argues Americans have become increasingly “belabored”—i.e., urged to work

continuously on improving themselves so as to remain appealing in an ever more

competitive labor market. McGee argues that “changing economic circumstances—

declining real wages and increased uncertainty about employment stability and

opportunities—created a context in which constant self-improvement is suggested as the

only reliable insurance against economic insecurity.”73 And at a time when “digital

71 Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013). 72 Ian Bogost, “Hyperemployment, or the Exhausting Work of the Technology User,” The Atlantic 8 Nov 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/hyperemployment-or-the-exhausting-work-of-the-technology-user/281149/. 73 Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press

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literacy” and “learning to code” are presented as the keys to the kingdom, self-

improvement invariably takes on a technical dimension.

But Lifehacker does not see the tips its proffers the way Bogost or McGee might,

i.e., as adding to, not subtracting from, one’s work. Indeed, the tips have never stopped

coming, dozens a day, every day, for the last ten plus years. Here the blog form itself

amplifies what might be called the compulsive consumption of life hacks. Although life

hacking is a multimedia phenomenon, it was blogs that originally provided the

environment in which life hacking was able to grow. Blogs were the media that took

O’Brien’s relatively obscure conference talk comments and fashioned a practice and

identity from them. The blog form itself encourages the compulsive consumption of life

hacks: specifically, the reverse chronological posting structure nearly all blogs, including

Lifehacker, use. Blogs privilege new information. Reverse chronological posting order

forces bloggers to constantly update. This structure also structures expectations. As Meg

Hourihan notes: “the newest information at the top (coupled with its time stamps and

sense of immediacy) sets the expectation of updates, an expectation reinforced by our

return visits to see if there’s something new. Weblogs demonstrate that time is important

by the very nature in which they present their information. As weblog readers, we

respond with frequent visits, and we are rewarded with fresh content.”74 A blog that stops

posting, like a shark that stops swimming, dies. A site like Lifehacker, moreover, depends

on advertising revenue. How much advertising revenue it generates depends on how

much traffic it drives. The main way to drive traffic is to post new information multiple

2005), 13. 74 Meg Hourihan, “What We’re Doing When We Blog,” O’Reilly Web Devcenter, 13 Jun 2002, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/06/13/megnut.html.

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times a day and stick new content at the top of the page to make it easy for readers to find

it.75

* * *

Trapani was Lifehacker’s editor-in-chief from its inception until 2009.76 The site has

continued to flourish since by colonizing more and more domains. Initially, Lifehacker

the website mostly offered up the sort computer-centric tips found in the Lifehacker

books. It did this in two ways. First, and most obviously, it offered up tips having to do

with recognizable technologies: computers, email, smart phones, and so forth. Second,

and in some ways more interestingly, it took pre–computer age tips and gave them a

computer-age twist, either by simply presenting them as hacks or by technologizing them.

Indeed, one of the most interesting things about Lifehacker today is how it takes tips from

the domain of the feminine (cooking and household tips, for example, the sort of stuff

Martha Stewart has built her career on) and recontextualizes them as hacks, in the process

imbuing them with a kind of male geek entrepreneurialism embodied by someone like

Tim Ferriss (whose career I examine in detail below).77

What Lifehacker ultimately produces is something different from Internet literacy

tips for an eager audience wanting to learn how to better cope in an increasingly

75 Lifehacker’s information-sheet for advertisers, for instance, boasts that the site is “Updated over 24 times per weekday.” See http://advertising.gawker.com/titles/lifehacker/. 76 Gina Trapani, “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish,” Lifehacker, 16 Jan 2009, http://lifehacker.com/5132674/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish. 77 As Twitter user @marrowing put it in a perceptive October 2012 series of tweets: “Is ‘lifehacking’ a way for adult male nerds to acquire basic life skills from each other in a nurturing environment without being ridiculed or is the treatment of domestic competencies as analogous to technological issues a way of de-feminising them as skills? Lifehacking as modern nerd culture’s Mrs. Beeton but with more chrome finish and fewer questionable poultice recipes.” See https://twitter.com/marrowing/status/260017308406267904, https://twitter.com/marrowing/status/260018195518337025, and https://twitter.com/marrowing/status/260019402072809472. On the scientific management of household work, see Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women, 2nd ed. (New York: Anchor Books/Random House, 2005).

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networked age. As a blog, it has to put up a certain number of posts every day in order to

keep readers coming back and advertisers happy. The tips that were initially focused on

how to do things with computers got broader, compounding the idea that life hacking was

a mindset applicable to other spheres of activity. In so doing, the site called attention to

the neverending-ness of the life hacking project. Some people took notice.

In 2007, Wired, which had previously celebrated Gina Trapani, ran a satirical

piece about life hacking that captured how life hacks, then only a few years old, were

becoming a way of avoiding real, actual work:

Using life hacking tips, you can compress the activities of your daily life into less time, freeing up untold hours to spend reading life-hacking blogs, which in turn will allow you to compress your activities further, freeing up more time to read about life hacking, and so forth. Eventually, and with proper dedication, your life will be condensed into a productivity singularity, an activity so dense that fun cannot escape.78

Were life hackers hacking their lives just so they could read life hacking blogs? There is

an interesting parallel here to self-help books, further linking life hacking to petty

bourgeois producerism. Former self-help book editor Steve Salerno notes that “the most

likely customer for a [self-help] book on any given topic was someone who had bought a

similar book within the preceding eighteen months.” That is, the person most likely to

purchase, say, a diet book is someone who has bought a diet book in the last year and a

half. The irony of “the eighteen-month rule” for this genre, Salerno explains, is this: “If

what we sold worked, one would expect lives to improve. One would not expect people

to need further help from us—at least not in that same problem area, and certainly not

78 Wired’s 2006 profile of Trapani: Brian Lam, “Real Simple,” Wired, June 2006, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/gina.html. Wired’s satire of life hacking: Lore Sjöberg, “Condense Your Day With the Life-Hacking FAQK,” Wired, 22 Aug 2007, http://archive.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/alttext/2007/08/alttext_0822.

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time and time again.”79 Similarly, if what Lifehacker sold worked, one would expect

people not to need so much further help from Lifehacker. But that is not how it works.

What’s more, on Lifehacker the addictive loop is sped up: instead of buying a new self-

help book every eighteen months, there are eighteen new life hacks for you every day.

Just keeping up with all the life hacks becomes a job unto itself. And what should one do

if one does manage to eke out some free time thanks to some life hacks? “Why,” the site

seems to whisper, “use the time freed up by life hacks to master even more life hacks.” It

is an endless loop. Old, often feminine work is invested with the male grandeur of

hacking; new work—high-tech, cutting-edge—is endlessly devised.

* * *

In the opening of the late 2008 pilot episode of Trial by Fire—a show the History

Channel ultimately decided not to pick up—Tim Ferriss introduces himself: “My name’s

Tim Ferriss. I’m known as a life hacker. What should take years to master, I tackle in a

matter of days.… What’s my secret? To deconstruct, streamline, and remap any

challenge.”80 Over the course of the episode, Ferriss passably learns yabusame, or

Japanese horseback archery—something that normally takes decades—in less than a

week. He is able to do this, he tells us—never mind that he is an (ex-)athlete being

trained by some of the best yabusame coaches and riders in the world—because he, and

he alone, has figured out how to “hack” the process of learning the two-thousand-year-

old sport. Early in the episode, Ferriss says he is only the fourth foreigner or non-

Japanese person to learn yabusame, but he is the first person, the implication seems to be,

79 Steve Salerno, Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (Crown Publishing Group, 2005). 80 “Pilot,” Trial by Fire, History Channel, 4 Dec 2008.

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to try to hack it. Ferriss’s use of the term life hacker in this instance indicates not only

how much the term, coined in 2004, had caught on—by 2008 someone on a History

Channel TV show could casually self-identify as a life hacker—but also how it had been

broadened beyond mundane work and everyday tasks into extreme sports.

For Ferriss, “to hack” means breaking something down into its component parts,

figuring out which of those parts can be improved, improving them, and then putting

everything back together again. It means approaching things the way an engineer might.

Hacking in this instance is a way of thinking about things that holds that anything can be

broken down and analyzed and made more efficient. In the yabusame episode, Ferriss

also talks about things in computer terms (including “hyperclocking” his nervous system

“hardware” the way one might overclock a computer’s CPU) but at the root of his

approach is a notion of self-mastery that has deep roots in American culture; here it is just

given a computational sheen.

This mindset imagines itself, and is taken up by others, as mere technocratic skill,

ideologically neutral. Virginia Heffernan provides an example of this in an aside on life

hacking in a piece about the similarities between “foodies” and “techies” when she

writes, “Hacking ordinary life requires special ingenuity. Generation Y sites like

Lifehacker (‘Don’t live to geek; geek to live’) suggests a big upside in forgoing class-

laden value systems and seeing life’s problems, instead, as a series of morally neutral

codes to be cracked.” Heffernan continues, approvingly: “Lifehacker’s techie ideology is

a great antidote to all kinds of 20th-century pieties, relics of analog culture, that can keep

all of us in psychic ruts.”81 This “everything is a code to be cracked” sort of thinking is

81 Virginia Heffernan, “Foodies vs. Techies,” New York Times, 15 May 2011, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/foodies-vs-techies/.

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traceable at least as far back as René Descartes, who promoted the idea of scientific

reductionism, the assumption that an understanding of any system can be achieved by

investigating the properties of its isolated parts.82 This, likewise, is a fundamental idea

behind computer programming, and by extension computer hacking and life hacking. Put

simply, computers run on recipes or algorithms. As Alan W. Biermann explains,

“Computer science is the study of recipes and ways to carry them out. A recipe is a

procedure or method for doing something. The science studies kinds of recipes, the

properties of recipes, languages for writing them down, methods for creating them, and

the construction of machines that will carry them out. Of course, computer scientists want

to distinguish themselves from chefs, so they have their own name for recipes—they call

them algorithms.”83 Life hacks, too, are a kind of recipe.

Even the simplest real life activities are, when put in such a way that a computer

can understand them, made up of dozens, even hundreds, of steps.84 But translating a

process into a recipe a computer will understand means breaking it down into steps so

minute and explicit that, ultimately, it ceases to look like the process as seen from a

human-level, gestalt view. Journalist and technology writer Doug Hill, drawing on

philosopher of technology Don Idhe, explains: “when a device amplifies human

experience in one way, it inevitably reduces it in other ways.” Hill uses the example of a

microscope: “Looking through a microscope allows us to see microorganisms, but while

looking at them we can no longer see the table we’re sitting at, or the room we’re sitting

82 Michael Huesemann and Joyce Huesemann, Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us or the Environment (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2011), 12. 83 Alan W. Biermann, Great Ideas in Computer Science: A Gentle Introduction, 2d ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), xxii. 84 A good example of this can be found in the May 31, 2011 Radiolab episode “Talking to Machines.” See http://www.radiolab.org/story/137407-talking-to-machines/.

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in. Ihde concluded that technology’s powers of amplification tend to be noticed while its

reductions tend to be ignored. That’s as true with technology in general as it is with

specific instruments, I think. We celebrate the power technology bestows without

adequately addressing its costs.”85 I would argue that a similar thing takes place when we

break something down into its component parts: we lose site of the whole. Atomism

replaces holism. When Ferris breaks down or “hacks” yabusame, the show becomes

about the mechanics of shooting a bow from atop a galloping horse; yabusame’s status as

a cultural practice—its history, meaning, significance, etc.—is zoomed past in favor of a

more narrow algorithmic perspective.

The difficultly of critiquing algorithmic recipes outright is that there is something

deeply attractive and perhaps even “human” about breaking things down into their

component parts and trying to suss out what is going on with them. To hack is, perhaps,

human. Take, for instance, Kurt Vonnegut’s aforementioned Player Piano, a novel about

what happens to a society that becomes obsessed with labor-saving devices. In it,

engineers invent machines that render most people’s jobs superfluous. It is a quietly

savage critique of the engineering mindset adopted by Ferriss. And yet, by the novel’s

end, even Vonnegut seems to concede that the human impulse to engineer is

irrepressible.86

Perhaps it is more relevant to focus on how “naturalizing” the engineer results in

systems of social domination by engineers. As Samuel C. Florman writes in The

Existential Pleasures of Engineering, “the elementary pleasure of solving technical

problems and successful complete constructive projects” is one that’s “as old as the

85 Hill. 86 Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (New York: Laurel, 1952).

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human race. … What is new about engineers as they started to develop as a profession

was the delight they took in thinking of themselves as saviors of mankind.”87 In other

words, the engineering mentality may to some degree be a natural one, but it has, like

many natural human impulses, a tendency to become domineering.88 The popularity of

life hacking is one testament to engineering’s current dominance.

* * *

Ferriss made a name for himself midway through the first life hacking wave with the

2007 book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

(still on the New York Times bestseller list in 2014), wherein he detailed how to

simplify, automate, and outsource your life so that, ultimately, one need only to spend

four hours or so a week working to make money and the rest of the time enjoying

leisure.89 The book is fully embedded in the ideology that technology is labor saving. On

the surface, Ferriss cuts a dashing figure: a world champion kick boxer, tango world-

record holder, world traveler, all-around adventurer—he is a sort of life-hacking-world

Indiana Jones. From 2007 on, Ferriss’s blog has documented and detailed his various

87 Samuel C. Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York: St. Martin’s, 1976), 6. 88 The polysemic figure of the engineer, so central to many of today’s dominant narratives, is fascinating. The engineer is the twenty-first century’s ultimate good guy in Henry Petroski’s The Essential Engineer, able to solve everything from broken appliances to global warming. At the same time, the engineer is the ultimate bad guy, the cause of global warming in the first place, not to mention significantly overrepresented among terrorists. See David Berreby, “Engineering Terror,” New York Times, 10 Sep 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html. On the role of engineers in American culture more generally, see Cecelia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987) and David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 89 Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (New York: Crown, 2007). Ferris pioneered the sort of personal outsourcing (or, in Ferriss’s words, “geo-arbitrage”) now the rage among certain white collar professionals, including two “tenured, highly productive rising stars at Columbia University” as detailed by Catherine Rampell, “Outsource Your Way to Success,” New York Times, 5 Nov 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/magazine/outsource-your-way-to-success.html.

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exploits and included anecdotes and information that function as complements to his

books and other projects. He is clearly trying to brand himself, and, while there is a whiff

of nineteenth-century snake oil salesman about him—the details of his biography are

fuzzy and might not quite stand up upon closer inspection90—there is also something

incredibly seductive about his storyline. No one illustrates my ambivalence toward life

hacking better than Tim Ferris. I read everything he writes, I watch his TV shows and

videos, I listen to his podcasts, and part of me thinks, “What a con man,” while another

part of me thinks, “I need to do this.”

Certainly, Ferriss has his fair share of both fans and critics (and maybe even his

fair share of fan-critics like me), but on balance, it seems safe to assume he has more

fans. In addition to The 4-Hour Workweek, Ferriss has published The 4-Hour Body

(2010) and The 4-Hour Chef (2012), all of which were bestsellers.91 In all three of his

books, Ferriss applies the microengineering logic of life hacking first to work, then to

one’s body, and then finally to one’s diet. 4-Hour Chef’s ambitions, however, are

ultimately much broader than cooking. Ferris wants it to be a manual on how to learn

how to learn. The book’s subtitle is The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning

Anything, and Living the Good Life. Cooking, in other words, is merely a means for

Ferriss to teach readers a hack-centric way of approaching everything, not the ultimate

subject of the book. “The 4-Hour Chef (4HC) isn’t a cookbook, per se, though it might

look like one,” he writes at the open. “Just as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

90 On p. 13 of The Four-Hour Workweek, Ferriss identifies himself as, for example, a “No-holds-barred cage fighter,” the “First American in history to hold a Guinness world record in tango,” “Glycemic Index researcher,” a “MTV break-dancer in Taiwan,” a “Shark diver,” and a “motorcycle racer.” 91 Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman (New York: Crown Archetype, 2010); Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

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isn’t about changing oil, this book isn’t quite what it appears.”92 “Whether you want to

learn how to speak a new language in three months, how to shoot a three-pointer in one

weekend, or how to memorize a deck of cards in less than a minute, the true ‘recipe’ of

this book is exactly that: a process for acquiring any skill,” he explains, and indeed this

“cookbook” includes digressions on learning Japanese, building a debris hut, doing air

squats, and buying guns.

Ferriss’s particular brand of genius has been his ability to geekify masculine

culture and masculinize geek culture. Ferriss is all about adventure, sports, weight lifting,

fighting, being a skilled lover (he exists on the periphery of the “pickup artist”

community, which I shall touch on briefly in my conclusion, and there is The 4-Hour

Body’s not one but two “15-Minute Female Orgasm” chapters). But Ferriss is also about

making all of these pursuits scientific, about approaching them as an engineer might,

about, essentially, hacking them. Like the posts on Lifehacker, Ferriss’s approach

gradually gets applied to more and more aspects of life. Here again is another example of

how hacking as a practice colonizes noncomputer domains. Here, too, recall Himanen’s

and Buchheit’s quotes above. After you have hacked work, you can hack your body, hack

sex, hack your cooking, hack hunting, nay hack everything.

Ferriss neatly illustrates how, in the postrecession information economy,

increasingly “everything” is understood in terms of the “engineering” ethos of hacking.

Ferriss, moreover, is an attractive package of white, self-realized masculinity that can

spread hacking like a virus from domain to domain, niche to niche, boardroom to

92 Ferriss, 4-Hour Chef, 6.

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bedroom without setting off too many red flags.93 In addition to his blog, books, and

podcast, he has made two brief forays into television: the aforementioned Trial by Fire

for the History Channel in 2008, and the short-lived The Tim Ferriss Experiment in 2013

on HLN, wherein viewers got to watch Ferriss apply the hacking ethos to different

challenges.94

The New Yorker’s revealing September 2011 profile of Tim Ferriss opens at a

party Ferris threw almost a year after the publication of his 2010 book The 4-Hour Body:

An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman.95

Ferriss’s stated reason for throwing the party was to bring together all the various people

in his life who had followed his advice and were doing cool stuff. Rebecca Mead, the

author of the piece, subtly mocks the whole enterprise. She situates Ferriss as part of long

line of American self-help gurus with a mini history. During the Great Depression,

Napoleon Hill’s The Law of Success (1928) and Think and Grow Rich (1937) made him

the personal success guru du jour. In the 1950s, Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of

Positive Thinking (1952) was a bestseller. In the 1970s, it was Werner Erhard. In the

1980s and ’90s, it was Stephen Covey with this book The Seven Habits of Highly

93 “At the turn of the nineteenth century,” explains Michael Kimmel, “American manhood was rooted in landownership (the Genteel Patriarch) or in the self-possession of the independent artisan, shopkeeper, or farmer (the Heroic Artisan). In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, though, the Industrial Revolution had a critical effect on those earlier definitions. American men began to link their sense of themselves as men to their position in the volatile marketplace, to their economic success—a far less stable yet far more exciting and potentially rewarding peg upon which to hang one’s identity. The Self-Made Man of American mythology was born anxious and insecure uncoupled from the more stable anchors of landownership or workplace autonomy. Now manhood had to be proved. This ‘self-maker, self-improving, is always a construction in process,’ writes … Garry Wills. ‘He must ever be tinkering, improving, adjusting; starting over, fearful his product will get out of date, or rot in the storehouse.’” Kimmel’s description of the nineteenth century man perpetually on the make describes the twenty-first century Tim Ferriss to a tee. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 9. 94 As of late April 2015, all thirteen episodes of The Tim Ferriss Experiment are available to purchase on Apple’s iTunes Store. 95 Rebecca Mead, “Better, Faster, Stronger,” The New Yorker, September 5, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/05/better-faster-stronger.

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Effective People (1989). Today, Ferriss might be America’s go-to self-help guru. “Every

generation gets the self-help guru that it deserves,” Mead writes wryly. She zeros in on

Ferriss’s geekified-masculinity appeal:

He prescribes a kind of hyperkinetic entrepreneurialism of the body and soul, with every man his own life coach, angel investor, Web master, personal trainer, and pharmaceutical test subject. One’s body can become one’s own laboratory: with “a few tweaks,” Ferriss suggests, its performance can be maximally enhanced—just as in the movie Limitless, but without the nasty withdrawal symptoms. His books seem to have a particular resonance for Wired-reading, Clif Bar-eating men—those whose desire to improve their abdominal definition may not be so great that they will subscribe to Men’s Health but who find in Ferriss the promise of heightened braininess complemented by an enviable degree of brawniness.

Mead is not shy about deriding Ferriss, noting, for instance, “Ferriss’s more technical

passages sound like an Onion satire of a TED talk” and “in his more demotic moments he

sounds like a staff writer for Maxim.” And, she concludes, “Critics have compared him to

P. T. Barnum.” But she lets Ferriss defend himself too. Mead quotes him as saying: “It’s

extremely easy to mix my words so that it sounds more like a message from P. T.

Barnum than from a Thoreau or a Seneca, with whom I identify much more.” Mead does

note that there is something unique about Ferriss’s advice: “Ferriss’s aesthetic is a

pointed rejection of the culture of constant BlackBerrying, corporate jockeying, and

office all-nighters that is celebrated in most business-advice books, and in films such as

The Social Network.” But Mead gives one of Ferriss’s friends, Kane Ng, the last word:

“Tim is a total fraud, you know.”

Mead points out that “Ferriss’s advocacy of liberation from the workplace has had

a wide appeal, especially among younger people to whom the workplace may be

unattainable in the first place, given the unemployment rate.” In other words, she implies,

Ferriss offers a model of postemployment. If young people do not like or cannot get

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traditional jobs, Ferriss presents them with an almost-too-good-to-be-true alternative: you

can barely work at all by simply working for (and on) yourself. Hack your life so you do

not have to work as much, so you can spend all your time further hacking your life, so

you can work even less and hack even more. This is the “productivity singularity” that

Wired joked about made real. The reality of such a scenario, as one might guess, is that

one ends up working even more, only the work has become the hacking of your life. Put

differently, the ostensible means of being exiled from or escaping work becomes the

work itself.

The clever thing Ferriss did was to find a niche, a demographic that believes in

the longstanding American hope that one can use technology to escape work. It is a niche

more specific than Lifehacker’s imagined audience of techies and would-be techies,

which is increasingly “everyone” in a computerized economy.96 Mead writes that

Ferriss’s work “speaks to the peculiar obsessions and insecurities of the young American

male.” His biography, recounted by Mead and by Ferriss himself in various other

interviews, works to make him “one of the guys” but also special: middle-class

upbringing in the Hamptons, high school wresting, Chinese kickboxing national

championship, time spent in Japan, weight lifting, friendships with famous people, and so

forth. Ferriss seems to actively try to cultivate a mystique. Mead mentions, for instance,

that when she visited his apartment, “a pair of swimming trunks stained with shark blood

was hanging out of a laundry basket—Ferriss recently had been tagging tiger sharks at a

marine-biology lab in Florida ‘for fun.’” So he swims with sharks and, Mead tells us, his

96 On episode 51 of his podcast The Tim Ferriss Show, Ferriss states outright that his target audience is 25–35 year old males living in New York and Silicon Valley. Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show, Ep 51: “Tim Answers 10 More Popular Questions from Listeners,” 23 Dec 2014, http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast/.

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bookshelves contain “manga comic books in several languages.” He is part action hero,

part comic book nerd. Mead goes on to describe Ferriss’s apartment as being littered with

exercise equipment, sneakers, suits of armor, and photos of naked women. But lest one

get the impression that he is a character wholly straight out of Maxim magazine, Mead

reminds us that Ferriss also regularly addresses classes at Princeton, his alma mater.

Lurking behind Ferriss’s charming contradictions are some rather questionable,

unexamined ideas, ideas that are at the heart of the life hacking project more generally.

There is, for instance, his outsourcing of work to people in poor countries.97 Mead writes

that “Ferriss professes to be untroubled that his own freedom … is bought by transferring

drudgery to the inboxes of less fortunate individuals in the developing world.” Ferriss

does seem pretty unconcerned. Mead quotes him as saying: “There are people I have

outsourced to in India who now outsource portions of their work to the Philippines. It’s

the efficient use of capital, and if you want the rewards of a free market, if you want to

enjoy the rewards of the capitalist system, these are the rules by which you play.” Mead

tells us that one of the tech startups Ferriss has invested in “outsources transcription and

other internet-based work to refugee camps and other impoverished communities.” In a

very real way, Ferriss’s empire, such as it is, is built on the semi-slave labor of brown

people from around the world, who are, thanks to technology, out of sight and out of

mind.

97 For a detailed critique of Ferriss’s outsourcing philosophy, see Jana Costas and Christopher Grey, “Outsourcing Your Life: Exploitation and Exploration in ‘The 4-Hour Workweek,’” in Managing “Human Resources” by Exploiting and Exploring People’s Potentials, Research in the Sociology of Organizations 37 (Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2012): 221–47. Costa and Grey argue that “the escape fantasy Ferriss offers builds upon the separation of exploitation and exploration, whereby the overworked corporate self, freed from the chores of work and life can enjoy the fruit of exploration, namely fun, play, and creative enjoyment,” but ultimately that this is “a highly individualist response to the individualizing demands of the contemporary workplace.”

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Ferriss’s problematic outsourcing politics are complicated by his otherwise

liberal, utopian Silicon Valley ones. In this way, he embodies, perhaps more than any

other single human being, what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron memorably

dubbed “the Californian Ideology.”98 Mead, for instance, notes that “Ferriss is a generous

donor to certain nonprofits: a portion of the proceeds from The 4-Hour Body go to St.

Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and he is on the advisory board of donorschoose.org,

an online charity targeting classrooms in need.” But his are not an intense progressive

politics. As Jana Costas and Christopher Grey argue, “Ferriss has no … interest in social

change or political movements,” indeed, “the money-making schemes he suggests

actually require that the world remain fundamentally the same.”99

In a January 2011 blog post called “Against Greatness: Tim Ferriss and the

Ideology of Achievement,” David Z. Morris offered a measured critique of Ferriss. He

opens by admitting he has found some of Ferriss’s advice useful (as I have); nevertheless,

he also found himself “questioning the whole premise of his project.” “Should we,”

Morris asks, “as the tagline for [Ferriss’s] new book puts it, be interested in ‘becoming

superhuman’?”

98 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6.1 (1996): 44–72. Online at http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the-californian-ideology-2/. 99 Costas and Grey, 241.

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Figure 3: Tim Ferriss wearing the Superman shield on the July 2011 cover of Outside magazine

Morris identifies “Achievement, excellence, and overcoming” as “the foundations

of Ferriss’ empire.” Morris wonders if in all this focus on being better and getting more,

something important might be getting lost. He writes:

Though Ferriss clearly has a (narrow) creative streak, and a hunger for new experiences, what he doesn’t seem to have much of is capacity for or interest in reflection, either on himself or on society. Most obviously, he has no apparent use for art or culture. More subtly, his entire approach to life—scheduled and strategized to the nth degree—leaves no room for real leisure, aimless laziness, even boredom, all of which actually leave the space for new things to emerge.

I am not sure about Morris’s point about leisure—I suspect Ferriss, like Trapani, would

say he wants to help people become more efficient so they can have more leisure—but it

is both a showy leisure (Ferriss wants you to know how much he enjoys things) and an

instrumentalized one (leisure as a way of being more productive).

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In a way, Tim Ferriss’s second attempt at TV, 2013’s short-lived The Tim Ferriss

Experiment, was a kind of dystopia about how awful life would be if all the aspirations of

life hackers actually came to pass and it was reduced to a series of pointless, self-

aggrandizing hacking exercises designed to test one’s ability to master them. But what

Ferriss was aiming for with it, other than showing off and asserting his particular brand of

masculinized geekiness, is something more akin to inspiration (a “If I can do it, you can

do it” sort of thing). The title sequence of The Tim Ferriss Experiment purports to tell

you what the show is about. It features Ferriss’s narration over shots of people, including

Ferriss himself, performing various athletic moves, over which mathematical equations

and digital graphics are superimposed that lend a techy, ESPN-meets-A Beautiful Mind-

meets-Enemy of the State vibe to the thing.100 Ferriss says things like “I’ll show you how

to make the impossible possible by bending the rules.” The obsession Ferriss and others

in his orbit have with rule breaking has been critiqued—I think correctly—as an

expression of white male privilege.101 He explains that he is going to “deconstruct,

decode, and demystify some of the world’s toughest challenges in record time” (i.e.,

hack), and he reassures viewers, “If I can do it, so can you.” The show itself, however,

mostly fails to deliver on these promises. Viewers do not so much learn how to “make the

impossible possible” or to “deconstruct, decode, and demystify some of the world’s

toughest challenges in record time” so much as they simply watch Ferriss go through a

repeated sequence, as follows.

100 The introduction to Tim Ferriss’s podcast—electronic dance music, Ferriss (or someone who sounds like him) intoning the words “optimal minimal,” sounds clips from The Bourne Identity (2002) and Casino Royale (2006), Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator saying he’s a “cybernetic organism”—imparts a similar vibe. 101 See Jen Dziura, “When ‘Life Hacking’ Is Really White Privilege,” Medium, 19 Dec 2013, https://medium.com/get-bullish/when-life-hacking-is-really-white-privilege-a5e5f4e9132f.

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First, with every show, Ferriss begins by facing a contrived challenge. (In the first

episode, he learns how to play the drums on stage with a rock band in less than a week. In

the second, he learns how to race a rally car in a few short days. In the third, he learns

how to speak Tagalog [Pilipino] in four days well enough to participate in a television

interview.) Second, he expresses doubt about whether he will be able to complete the

challenge in the time he has given himself. Here, Ferriss appears nervous. Part of this is

because of the time limits he has set for himself, and part of it is that he is doing things

that do not necessarily come natural to him. In the first episode, for instance, he admits to

not being particularly musical, and in the second he admits to being a bad driver. This

self-disclosure serves to both humanize him and lower expectations. He does not come

off as the cocksure jerk his critics sometimes make him out to be, and he gives viewers

the impression that he could fail. Third, he takes a deep breath and analyzes the challenge

in front of him and comes up with what is essentially a study plan, but it is presented to

viewers using the “accelerated learning” jargon carried over from Ferriss’s blog and

books, with the result that these plans are made to seem more novel than they actually

are. Essentially, he is just simplifying the task and drilling himself. The “augmented

reality” aesthetic of the title sequence is carried over to the show itself to gussy up what

is basically a guy cramming for a test. Studying has never looked so exciting. Fourth, the

day of the challenge arrives and Ferriss again expresses nervousness, but now he follows

it with a sort of resigned shrug of the shoulders. Practice is over. He has done all he can

do. It is time for the challenge. Let the chips fall where they may. Fifth, Ferriss does the

challenge and seems to do all right. Not great, but all right. He never seems down about

his performance though. The experience has been a learning one. One is left with the

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impression that had he had more time to practice, he would not have made any mistakes,

or if he were to continue practicing, he would be one of the world’s best drummers/rally

car racers/Tagalog speakers/etc.

That is the formula. But for viewers the useable lessons are few. The show is more

about watching Ferriss go through the above process than it is about technical takeaways.

Even Ferriss’s fabled “accelerated learning” techniques are only occasionally mentioned,

and they are never fully explained. Instead, calculations and graphs are flashed on the

screen and referenced again maybe once, if at all. Ultimately, viewers do not really learn

how to do the challenges Ferriss subjects himself to. Instead, they learn something else:

that reason can subjugate emotion, that systematizing is sexy, and that anything can be

hacked. The show does not really teach any specific hacking techniques. Without

intending to, what Ferriss manages to accomplish is to inadvertently display the

hollowness of the “you can hack anything” ethos in a culture where the pressure to

reverse engineer everything has metastasized at the level of the self.

A kind of self-colonizing ethos is manifested in Ferriss’s “experiments.” “You” can

learn how to play the drums in a rock band in less than a week, learn a language in a few

days, learn how to drive a rally car, learn how to do parkour, etc.—all boyish fantasies

made real through the magic of life hacking. The work and results Ferriss puts in and gets

out of these experiments are real—albeit selected, presented, and edited as all

documentary/reality television is. Even when the show presents an absurd situation (you

have three days to learn how to play the drums before you have to go on stage with a rock

band!), it displaces the absurdity onto an objective situation: Ferriss actually learning

how to play drums. His struggles and solutions thus seem logical, calculated, and

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possible, rather than performed. This tension between absurd situation and logical

struggle is itself symptomatic of the postrecession economic predicament. Instead of

staying at the level of absurdity and simply dismissing the need to ever be able to learn

how to do something one has no familiarity with in less than a week, the show compels

the audience that follows its line to realize and accept that even the most absurd

requirement or request is a situation to be embraced for the useful skills evoked or forced

into “bloom” as “everyone” is forced to be an entrepreneurs of themselves. That this is

Ferriss’s show and, really, his “brand,” serves to call further attention to the tension. In

other words, Ferriss’s “job” is to model for people how to be entrepreneurs of the self via

life hacking. In the process, he displays the cruelty as well as the absurdity of a “hacked”

subjectivity in which everything is fair game in the hunt for new scenes of competition in

the service of self-making and its microengineering seductions.

* * *

If Ferriss presents himself as a fully self-actualized hacker, he is the exception to the rule,

for life hacking is pitched as a slow, one-step-at-a-time thing. Indeed, one of the defining

aspects of hacks, and life hacks in particular, is their incrementalness. This was explicit in

O’Brien’s initial definition of the term in 2003–2004 and in Trapani’s explanations as

well. In 2007, Trapani wrote, “Every day, you have dozens of opportunities to get work

done faster, smarter, and more efficiently—with the right shortcuts. Contrary to what

some ‘gurus’ will tell you, there’s no single, life-changing secret to working less and

living more. The reality is that small changes practiced over time yield big results.”102

Again, we see Trapani turning the masculinist ethos of hacking into a postfeminist

102Trapani, Upgrade Your Life, xxv.

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playing field available to everyone. Life hacking, unlike the overarching systems some

self-help gurus demand one adopt, does not require a monumental, self-dominating effort

of masculinist will. Instead it says, “Here are a few simple tips you can use. And what is

great about them is that even though they are small, they have the power to make big

differences.” If Ferriss’s hacking is an entire lifestyle, Trapani’s version is something that

does not outwardly ask a lot of you.

Such tips are no doubt doubly appealing at a time when the problems we face,

both personal and collective, are increasingly complex and seem insurmountable without

some kind of technoscientific heroism. This is what Danny O’Brien was referring to

when he said in 2005 that “modern life is just this incredibly complex problem amenable

to no good obvious solution. But we can peck around the edges of it; we can make little

shortcuts.”103 In other words, embracing life hacking is at once a retreat from the

admittedly overwhelming complexities of contemporary existence and a new way to

profit from them along older, industrial lines by remaking yourself. In this respect, the

technotherapy of life hacking might be seen as a response to terrorism, global warming,

unemployment, even confusion over gender roles. It is as if a significant section of the

public, having given up on coming to terms with the reality they are living in, have

instead decided they might at least be able to “hack it.” Here, interestingly, “hack it”

resonates with endurance—as in the idiom “I can hack it,” meaning “I can tough it out.”

Life hacking bafflingly presupposes that large-scale problems require small-scale

solutions. They are like a series of tiny shrugs. “Hey,” the life hackers seem to be saying,

“it’s the best we can do given the circumstances.”

103 O’Brien, Lifehacker interview.

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Here, then, is where the incremental intervention of hacking as life hacking is

important. As Trapani writes, “Contrary to the popular misuse of the term to denote a

computer criminal, a hacker is someone who solves a problem in a clever or nonobvious

way. A life hack is a workaround or shortcut that overcomes the everyday difficulties of

the modern worker. A lifehacker use clever tech tricks to get her work done.”104

Trapani’s understanding of hacks is consistent with how other people who have written

about hacks understand them. Gabriella Coleman, for instance, echoes Trapani when she

explains that a hack “is a clever technical solution arrived through a non-obvious

means.”105

This partially explains why it is so difficult to define life hacking snappily. A life

hack could be almost anything. As Trapani notes in a 2008 interview, “Life hacking is

really hard to define. The definition has changed over time, and it covers a kind of broad

subject area. In short, it’s a sort of clever shortcut, or way to get something done, or

systematic way to get something done in your life, whether that’s on your computer (it’s

often on your computer) or just doing your laundry or folding your socks. It is a little bit

of extra clever know-how.”106

However, this vagueness means that life hacking is more than a corpus of advice

you can dip into whenever it pleases you; rather, it asks would-be life hackers to adopt a

perspective that, once in place, can quickly become totalizing. While the hacks

themselves are incremental, the mental leap one must make about life hacks’ value is

more encompassing: they can and do embrace anything, everything, and everyone. In

104 Trapani, Upgrade Your Life, xxviii. 105 Gabriella Coleman, “The Anthropology of Hackers,” The Atlantic, Sep 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2010/09/the-anthropology-of-hackers/63308/. 106Trapani, You 2.0 interview.

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practice, it is never just a tip here and there, but about embracing a view of the world as a

whole as amendable to hacks the same way a computer might be. Which is a bigger shift,

I would argue, than Trapani and others let on. Ferriss’s example, by contrast, even while

parodying its own totalitarian power lust, lets us in on the secret.

* * *

On September 3, 2008, Merlin Mann posted an essay on his personal blog called

“Better.” It was a mea culpa from a writer whose pursuit of page views had led him

astray. In it, Mann expressed frustration with the superficiality of life hacking sites,

calling them “a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness [and] make believe insight.”

“All I know right now is that I want to do all of it better,” he wrote. “Everything better.

Better, better.”107

A few days later on his blog 43 Folders, Mann apologized to the world for the

role he played in popularizing “life hacks”: “I wish to apologize and formally atone for

any role 43 Folders or I have had in popularizing ‘hack’ as the preferred nomenclature for

unmedicated knowledge workers dicking around with the ‘productivity system’ all day.

43 Folders regrets the error.”108

The post marked not only the four-year anniversary of Mann’s popular blog

43 Folders, which Mann described until that point as his “site about personal

productivity, life hacks, and simple ways to make your life a little better,” but a change in

direction as well. Mann seems to have grown weary of the whole idea of life hacks, and

the post is an expression of his desire to distance himself from what he increasingly

seems to see as the province of outright hucksters: “the popularity of small blogs like 43 107 Merlin Mann, “BETTER.” merlinmann.com, 3 Sep 2008, http://www.merlinmann.com/better/. 108 Merlin Mann, “Four Years,” 43 Folders, 8 Sep 2008, http://www.43folders.com/2008/09/08/four-years.

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Folders contributed to the arrival of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers,

speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web’s glistening riverbed for easy

gold.” Indeed, in the wake of 43 Folders, Mann wryly observes, “‘productivity blogs’ of

unbelievably varying quality shot up like hothouse kudzu—many baldly hoping to

capitalize on the low-cost, high-return business of theoretically useful self-help

publishing—mostly without affecting even the vaguest patina of wanting to help another

human being solve a real-world problem. Some of these folks continue to make a living

(and draw a considerable crowd) by producing material that I personally find

transparently dumb and useless.”

Mann’s candidness eventually gives way to a succinct expression of his crisis of

faith: “I started to wonder where the hell all of this stuff was heading. And, more

importantly, I wondered whom any of this stuff might actually be helping.” Mann goes

on to take a not-so-sutble dig at Tim Ferriss with a line that recalls Allen Ginsberg’s “I

saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” opening to “Howl”:

One particularly gifted arrival on the productivity and self-help scene authored some of the most profoundly useful advice I’d ever heard about attention management—but, then followed it up by showing how those extra cycles could be used to game the system so efficiently that you can sit in a hammock for 164 hours a week while people in India write birthday cards to your friends. That one became a runaway bestseller and, perhaps unintentionally, formed the new template for how to market productivity as an extreme lifestyle. I also have to imagine that it singlehandedly revived our nation’s sagging hammock industry.

To Mann, Ferriss represents everything that was wrong with what life hacking had

become: advice for advice’s sake, growing ever more flashy and totalizing so as to stand

out in a burgeoning marketplace of tips and tricks.

In a follow-up post on September 10, 2008, Mann explained that he was “done

with ‘productivity’ as a personal fetish or hobby” once and for all. From here on out, he

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wrote, “I want to help you identify and remove any obstacle that keeps you from making

things that you love. And then I want to help you figure out how to make those things

even better. That’s pretty much it.”109

Mann’s posts represent a rather stunning change of direction, for Mann was being

modest when he apologized for the role he played in helping popularize life hacking; his

was a starring role. After Trapani, Mann arguably did more than any other single person

to popularize the idea of “life hacks.”110 Thus, his argument that one of the problems with

life hacks is that when people become obsessed with them they ironically tend to get in

the way of work instead of making one more productive carried some weight. The

solution to the paired problems of life and work in the twenty-first century had, in other

words, become a problem in itself. In Mann’s view, life hacking enthusiasts do not so

much work as they, to use his language, “dick around” with their productivity systems all

day. Their real work has been displaced by work on coming up with hacks that will

theoretically allow them to be more productive, but because they spend all their time

working on these hacks, they never actually make or create anything, which is what

Mann is newly concerned with. Mann seizes on an irony that characterizes the first wave

of life hacking blogs. It is akin to what Roland Barthes presciently called “program

compulsion” in 1977:

Being incessantly short of time (or you imagine yourself to be), caught up in deadlines and delays, you persist in supposing that you are going to get out of it by putting what you have to do in order. You make programs, draw up plans,

109 See Merlin Mann, “43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work,” 43 Folders, 10 Sep 2008, http://www.43folders.com/2008/09/10/time-attention-creative-work. 110 Cal Newport, for instance, credits Mann with ushering in “The Age of Productivity” denoted by life hacking blogs. “Mann paved the way to a powerful ecosystem of blogs that focused on how to become more efficient,” he writes. Newport sees Mann’s 2008 about-face as marking a shift from small-scale productivity advice to more all-embracing work philosophies. See Cal Newport, “Welcome to the Post-Productivity World,” Study Hacks, November 5, 2011, http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/11/05/welcome-to-the-post-productivity-world/.

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calendars, new deadlines. On your desk and in your files, how many lists of articles, book, seminars, courses to teach, telephone calls to make. As a matter of fact, you never consult these little slips of paper, given the fact that an anguished conscience has provided you with an excellent memory of all your obligations. But it is irrepressible: you extend the time you lack by the very registration of that lack. Let us call this program compulsion (whose hypomaniacal character one readily divines); states and collectivities, apparently, are not exempt from it: how much time wasted in drawing up programs?111

Barthes’s point is that human beings have a tendency to substitute endless planning for

actual work, and that this planning can be compulsive. Similarly, the idea that hacking

could be compulsive was one that Levy, linking addiction and control, identified

early on:

Hacking was a pursuit so satisfying that you could make a life out of it. While a computer is very complex, it is not nearly as complex as the various comings and goings and interrelationships of the human zoo; but, unlike formal or informal study of the social sciences, hacking gave you not only an understanding of the system but an addictive control as well, along with the illusion that total control was just a few features away. Naturally, you go about building those aspects of the system that seem most necessary to work within the system in the proper way. Just as naturally, working in this improved system lets you know of more things that need to be done.112

By 2013, people were starting to echo Mann’s, Barthes’s, and Levy’s critiques. In a 2013

Slate piece on about life hacking, for instance, Evgeny Morozov writes:

As “lifehacking” becomes an industry with its own blogs and book-length guides, a good chunk of the freed-up time often goes to fix, upgrade, or replace the very tools and programs that make lifehacking possible. Is there anything more self-defeating than using technology to free up your time—so that you can learn how to do an even better job at it?113

Likewise, Chris Osterndorf notes in 2014 that life hacks’ “sneakily time-consuming

111 Roland Barthes, A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 424. 112 Levy, 73. 113 Evgeny Morozov, “Down with Lifehacking!” Slate, 29 Jul 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/07/lifehacking_is_just_another_way_to_make_us_work_more.single.html.

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nature, which chips away at the foundation they were built upon to begin with.”114 He

continues:

Life hack links are clickbait of the most potent kind. The system that they operate within is like most any other highly functioning system: It’s about making money. Obviously, for those who have found fulfillment through the world of DIY and life hacks, this isn’t an issue. But it’s important to be aware that in the end, this system doesn’t operate based on improving your life—it operates based on keeping you coming back for more. Because there’s always something that you could be doing better or faster.

Finally, here’s Steven Poole:

The paradox of the autodidactic productivity industry of GTD, Lifehacker and the endless reviews of obscure mind-mapping or task-management apps is that it is all too easy to spend one’s time researching how to acquire the perfect set of productivity tools and strategies without ever actually settling down to do something. In this way, the obsessive dream of productivity becomes a perfectly effective defence against its own realisation.115

All of these people are saying something similar: at a certain point, even as it is spreading

to more domains, life hacking becomes about itself. To its credit, Lifehacker has not

ignored some of this criticism, rebutting some of it, while admitting there may be a kernel

of truth to other parts of it. In response to Morozov, for instance, Lifehacker published a

post called “In Defense of Life Hacking.”116 In it, they concede that Morozoz has a point,

but that if life hacking has become an end unto itself, it is not life hacking’s fault, it is the

individual life hacker’s fault: “Just because some people waste more time than they save,

or that they waste all their time hacking and spend none on leisure, doesn’t make life

hacking inherently bad—it just means that person is doing it wrong.” This defense

reveals Lifehacker’s deeply individualist bias. Five years after Mann’s critique, the

114 Chris Osterndorf, “The Internet’s DIY Oasis Is a Mirage,” The Kernel, 7 Sep 2014, http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/staff-editorials/10193/stop-diy-life-hacks/ 115 Steven Poole, “Why the Cult of Hard Work Is Counter-Productive,” New Statesman, December 11, 2013, http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/12/right-be-lazy. 116 Whitson Gordon, “In Defense of Life Hacking,” Lifehacker, 6 Aug 2013, http://lifehacker.com/in-defense-of-life-hacking-1041245898.

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editors were still unable to face up to their role in playing to people’s fear of

obsolescence and pushing an endless series of tips and tricks on them. Nor, for that

matter, did Lifehacker acknowledge the various structural conditions that make the

consumption of such tips and tricks both a kind of vocational necessity and psychological

relief in the current postrecession economic moment. How do you manage yourself in an

increasingly networked world? What Lifehacker suggests is that you become a hacker.

You start thinking like a computer programmer and start breaking things down and

microengineering your life. But if the success trajectory of Lifehacker is any indication,

self-engineering can become, circularly, all encompassing and ultimately

“counterproductive,” or something worse: a kind of productivity implosion. The blogs

and materials analyzed in the next chapter arose in the wake of Mann’s critique and

suggest an effort to sidestep the tensions he laid out. Instead of committing oneself to an

endless series of tips, one should instead divest themselves of nearly all of their

possessions thereby making their life more “virtual” and therefore more receptive to

hacks. The “hacker ethos” morphs into “digital minimalism.”

A craving for advice on how to use computers better is understandable against the

background of the increasingly technologized and increasingly unstable economy that

followed the economic crash of 2008 in the U.S., where the pressure to use digital

technologies combined with a “feeling” that everyone was more or less “on their own.”

One result amid a more entrepreneurial cultural context was advice blogs and their

affiliated productions, which promised to relieve insecurity without demanding one

subscribe to a whole new belief system. Indeed, the belief system—faith in self-reliance,

limitless improvement, the power of technology to produce leisure time, the wisdom of

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rationalization, etc.—was already there, deep in the bones of American culture itself. Life

hacking just tapped into it and “rebooted” it.

“We live in the age of life-hacking,” Nikil Saval proclaimed in 2014.117 He

writes: “The idea started out as a somewhat earnest response to the problem of

fragmented attention and overwork—an attempt to reclaim some leisure time and

autonomy from the demands of boundaryless labor. But it has since become just another

hectoring paradigm of self-improvement.” Saval views life hacking as an updated version

of Taylorism.118 But unlike Taylorism, and due in part to people like Gina Trapani and

Tim Ferriss, life hacking accrued hip connotations allied with aesthetics of creativity.119

As Saval puts it, “There’s no manager stop-watching you, or forcing you to work in

particular ways; you’re ostensibly choosing, of your own will, to make your life better.

The way true believers like Ferriss so thoroughly master-plan their lives has a gonzo

attractiveness to it. What’s more, ‘hacking’ sounds much better than ‘management.’” Life

hacking, in other words, is a kind of self-Taylorism. Digital capitalism has not freed

workers from bosses so much as it has entailed the gradual internalization of management

on the part of workers themselves.

If Saval is right that we live in an age of life hacking, and I think he is, then it is

high time we cast a critical eye on it. Although it may seem trivial—just a bunch of

bloggers swapping tips—it is in fact crucial in terms of understanding hacking today

117 Nikil Saval, “The Secret History of Life-Hacking,” Pacific Standard, 22 Apr 2014, http://www.psmag.com/navigation/business-economics/the-secret-history-of-life-hacking-self-optimization-78748/. 118 The best one-volume treatment of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his ideas I know of is Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 1997). On the Taylorism’s impact on American culture in the late nineteen and early twentieth century, see Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 119 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

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more broadly. As Tim Jordan argues, “Hacking is a crucial component of twenty-first-

century society for a number of reasons.” Among them: “Hackers are intimately involved

in making some of the fundamental technologies of our time. Hackers are inventing and

testing new political, military and criminal forms. Hacking is being drawn out further and

further into cultural realms, allowing the signifiers of hacking to be attached to things that

are not hacks.”120

One of the places this “redrawing” plays out is life hacking, for it is there that

hacking first moved into the cultural realm in a major way. As such, as I have tried to

show, life hacking is also fundamentally a colonizing discourse. It bespeaks a need to

apply the logic of the computer to all human activity. Because it is colonizing, it is also

rapacious, never satisfied. Once it has colonized one domain, it looks for another to take

over. The colonizing and compulsive aspects of life hacking are related. It looks out and

cannot help but loop back on itself. Moreover, its microengineering insistence on

breaking everything down into pieces means it cannot think of or critique larger wholes.

It is to this idea—i.e., that life hacking is blind to larger structures—that I turn to in more

detail in the next two chapters.

120 Jordan, 141.

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CHAPTER 2: FROM STUFF TO FLUFF

Minimalism is not a style, it is an attitude, a way of being. —Massimo Vignelli1

I love clutter. I think being totally minimal shows a lack of history and soul, and I find it sort of pitiful. I think it’s wonderful to have stuff and live with memories and

things you enjoy. —Iris Apfel2

The Problem of Stuff and the War Against It George Carlin’s 1981 comedy album A Place for My Stuff contains a bit wherein Carlin

pokes fun of Americans’ tendency to acquire more material possessions then they know

what to do with. Reproduced in extended form in his 1997 book Brain Droppings, the

monologue begins by noting that Americans, quite simply, have lots of stuff—on their

persons, in their cars, and in their houses. Especially in their houses.3 “That’s all your

house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a

house. You could just walk around all the time,” Carlin says, and, in so doing, asks us to

consider whether the American house as home has been superseded by the house as

storage unit. “So when you get right down to it,” Carlin continues, “your house is nothing

more than a place to keep your stuff … while you go out and get … more stuff. ’Cause

that’s what this country is all about. Tryin’ to get more stuff. Stuff you don’t want, stuff

you don’t need, stuff that’s poorly made, stuff that’s overpriced. Even stuff you can’t

afford! Gotta keep on gettin’ more stuff. Otherwise, someone else might wind up with

1 Quoted in Peter B Lloyd, Vignelli Transit Maps (Rochester, NY: Rochester Institute of Technology Press, 2012), 16. 2 Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “Iris Apfel Doesn’t Do Normcore,” New York Times, April 9, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/magazine/iris-apfel-doesnt-do-normcore.html. 3 George Carlin, Brain Droppings (New York: Hyperion, 1997), 36–42.

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more stuff. Can’t let that happen. Gotta have the most stuff.” Carlin pushes his point to its

logical conclusion, squeezing as much absurdity and humor from it as he can. “So you

got a houseful of stuff. And, even though you might like your house, you gotta move.

Gotta get a bigger house. Why? Too much stuff! And that means you gotta move all your

stuff. Or maybe, put some of your stuff in storage. Storage! Imagine that. There’s a whole

industry based on keepin’ an eye on other people’s stuff.”4

Carlin ends his routine, however, by acknowledging that eventually a time comes

when you get “pretty fed up with your stuff and all the problems it creates. And so about

a week later, you clean out the closet, the attic, the basement, the garage, the storage

locker, and all the other place you keep your stuff, and you get things down to

manageable proportions. Just the right amount of stuff to lead a simple and

uncomplicated life. And that’s when the phone rings. It’s a lawyer. It seems your aunt has

died … and left you all her stuff.” This final twist calls attention to how the problem of

stuff is a cultural, not just individual, one. Even if you personally have got your stuff

under control, or even if you don’t have any at all, other people’s stuff impinges on you.

To deal with stuff, to be affected by its pressures and its imperatives, you don’t even need

stuff—you only have to live and/or work in the United States.

4 Carlin is on firm ground here. A New York Times article (Graham Hill, “Living With Less. A Lot Less,” New York Times, 10 Mar 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/living-with-less-a-lot-less.html), which I say more about below, notes that the “The average size of a new American home in 1950 was 983 square feet; by 2011, the average new home was 2,480 square feet. And those figures don’t provide a full picture. In 1950, an average of 3.37 people lived in each American home; in 2011, that number had shrunk to 2.6 people. This means that we take up more than three times the amount of space per capita than we did 60 years ago.” Part of the reason for this, no doubt, is all our stuff. Carlin’s comment about the storage industry, moreover, was prophetic. As Jon Mooallem explains, “the United States now has 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space. (The Self Storage Association notes that, with more than seven square feet for every man, woman and child, it’s now ‘physically possible that every American could stand—all at the same time—under the total canopy of self-storage roofing.’)” Moreover, “one out of every 10 households in the country rents a unit.” See Jon Mooallem, “The Self-Storage Self,” New York Times, 6 Sep 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06self-storage-t.html. Moreover, reality TV shows like Storage Wars and its various spin-offs and copycats suggest that self-storage has become so mainstream it has become just another physical location for entertainment, like the home or the workplace.

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Carlin’s routine—in line with the anticonsumerist and environmentalist ethos of

its time—is as relevant in an era of shows like A&E’s Hoarders (2009–2013) and calls

for “austerity” as ever, perhaps even more relevant. Critiquing stuff is back in vogue.5

One of the reasons for this, surely, is that Americans today have a lot more stuff than

they did in 1981. As journalist Jon Mooallem explains, “Between 1970 and 2008, real

disposable personal income per capita doubled, and by 2008 we were spending nearly all

of it—all but 2.7 percent—each year. Meanwhile, the price of much of what we were

buying plunged. Even by the early ’90s, American families had, on average, twice as

many possessions as they did 25 years earlier. By 2005, according to the Boston College

sociologist Juliet B. Schor, the average consumer purchased one new piece of clothing

every five and a half days” (emphasis mine).6 Consider: between 1998 and 2005, the

number of vacuum cleaners coming into the U.S. every year more than doubled. And the

number of toasters, ovens, and coffeemakers tripled. One wonders, not entirely

facetiously, where Americans found the counter space for everything. But, then,

American homes have been increasing in size in order to keep up, and many Americans

have—in some cases quite literally if a show like Hoarders is any indication—been

buried alive by inexpensive consumer goods. Mooallem mentions a 2006 UCLA study

that “found middle-class families in Los Angeles ‘battling a nearly universal

overaccumulation of goods.’ Garages were clogged. Toys and outdoor furniture collected

in the corners of backyards. ‘The home-goods storage crisis has reached almost epic

5 Time magazine, for instance, recently named Marie Kondo, Japanese decluttering guru and author of the bestselling (with sales in the millions) book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (New York: Ten Speed Press, 2014) one of its “100 Most Influential People.” See Jamie Lee Curtis, “Marie Kondo: The World’s 100 Most Influential People,” Time, April 16, 2015, http://time.com/3822899/marie-kondo-2015-time-100/. 6 Mooallem, “Self-Storage Self.”

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proportions.’” Another source speculates that 30 percent of Americans cannot park their

car(s) in their garage because it is being used to store their stuff.7 That’s nearly a third of

all Americans. However, there seems to be some evidence, especially in the techno-

cultural system of life hacking, that Americans are heeding Carlin’s call to rethink their

consumption. It seems there is a growing backlash to stuff. There are several explanations

for why this is so.

The first and simplest explanation—and in some ways most heartening—is that

Americans have become more critical of how and what they consume, purchase, and

store. Jack Reacher, the protagonist of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels (1997–), is one

kind of cultural evidence. For instance, when asked by Playboy why he thinks his books

have struck such a chord with readers in recent years, Child responds:

One of the things that fascinate people about Reacher is that he has no possessions. Apart from a passport and an ATM card, the only thing he owns is a folding toothbrush, and that has become a legendary talking point among readers. But I think there’s more to it. Since the financial crisis hit, people are realizing you don’t own things; things own you. You might enjoy the stuff you’ve accumulated, but you don’t enjoy the debt. People are beginning to have an uneasy relationship with possessions. They would like to walk away from the things weighing them down. That is how Reacher lives. The financial crisis hit in 2008, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that was the first year of Reacher’s megapopularity. For the first time I had four number one best-sellers—both hardcover and paperback—in the U.S. and the U.K.8

What Child is saying here is that Reacher is a “hero for our times” because he isn’t

encumbered by stuff like the Americans skewered by Carlin. Reacher is emblematic: in

the era of stuff, not having stuff has become heroic. 7 Gus Gougas, “Garage Organization - Americans Lead the World in Accumulation of Stuff,” 13 April 2009, http://EzineArticles.com/2216837. 8 Steve Oney, “Playboy Interview: Lee Child,” Playboy, 24 Sep 2012, http://www.playboy.com/playground/view/playboy-interview-lee-child. Reacher is the hard-boiled, lone-wolf protagonist in a series of popular books by Child. The first, Killing Floor, was published in 1997. The nineteenth, Personal, was published in 2014. For more, see “Jack Reacher,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Reacher. In 2012, Tom Cruise played Jack Reacher in the movie Jack Reacher.

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However, critiquing stuff is not, strictly speaking, a new trend. In fact, it is

ancient. As Katy Waldman puts it in a Slate reflection on “minimalism,” “As a

movement, minimalism has roots in the spiritual asceticism of Zen, Jain, and early

Christian philosophies, in Gandhi and John the Baptist, as well as in Greek Epicureanism,

which promoted a doctrine of simple living. It’s been practiced by luminaries from

Tolstoy to Henry David Thoreau to Gary Snyder. In 1936, the American scholar Richard

Gregg coined the term ‘voluntary simplicity’ to describe a lifestyle purged of the

inessential.”9 Moreover, in the U.S., as Thaddeus Russell explains, antimaterialism was a

dominant ethos from the late eighteenth until the end of the nineteenth century. Until that

point, Russell argues, most Americans thought that “materialism was evil, thrift was

virtuous, and the pursuit of pleasure was dangerous at best.”10 What is new today,

however, and what makes “the economy” an insufficient explanation for the twenty-first-

century war on stuff, is how “antimaterialism” is now inseparable from “virtualism”—or

what Matthew Crawford calls “a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of

material reality and glide about in a pure information economy.”11 In other words, in a

globalized, information economy, the backlash against stuff coincides with digital

systems that are advertised and advertise themselves as finally solving the problem of

stuff for us. Since at least the 1990s, for example, people have been saying that “atoms”

are being replaced by “bits.” In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte famously argued we are

9 Katy Waldman, “Is Minimalism Really Sustainable?” Slate, 27 March 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/03/graham_hill_essay_in_the_new_york_times_is_minimalism_really_sustainable.html. 10 Thaddeus Russell, A Renegade History of the United States (New York: Free Press, 2010), 208. Henry David Thoreau’s oft-quoted “Simplify, simplify, simplify!” from Walden also comes to mind here. Richard M. Huber does a good job tracing the vexed relationship of materialism to success in American life in his magisterial The American Idea of Success (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971). Short version: Americans have gotten more materialistic over the years, but there’s an antimaterialism at the heart of the American character too. 11 Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (New York: Penguin, 2009), 3.

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transitioning from a world in which we manipulate atoms to one in which we manipulate

bits of data.12 In Negroponte’s view, this is a good thing, for a world of bits presents us

with a number of attractive possibilities, from the weakening of the nation state to the

ability to remix cultural productions.

Also in 1995, in War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on

Reality, Mark Slouka offered a dissenting point of view but nevertheless agreed with

Negroponte’s notion that at the heart of the computer revolution is the desire to see atoms

get replaced by bits. The difference? Negroponte was for it; Slouka was horrified by it.

Slouka’s book is useful for understanding how the “bits over atoms” succession is at the

heart of the mythos of the computer, the goal of which seems to be, Slouka writes,

“turning life itself into computer code, of transforming the experience of living in the

physical world—every sensation, every detail—into a product for our consumption.”13

But Slouka’s warnings went largely unheeded while Negroponte’s “bits are

replacing atoms” idea was enthusiastically embraced. Negroponte’s book is still cited all

the time, while Slouka’s book has been largely forgotten. Residue of this remains as

consumers in the U.S. are regularly told, usually by companies with a vested interest in

saying so, that one day soon Americans will stop owning things like books, CDs, and

movies.14 Everything will be up in “the cloud,” a metaphor for the “place,” as Nicholas

Carr astutely discerned, where more and more “people” increasingly “live”:

We are coming to live inside the World Wide Computer. It’s becoming the default forum for many of our commercial and personal relationships, the medium

12 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). 13 Mark Slouka, War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 7. 14 And it’s happening. Revenue generated by streaming music in 2014 overtook that from CD sales for the first time. Joan E. Solsman, “Streaming Music Drowns out CD Sales in US for the First Time,” CNET, March 19, 2015, http://www.cnet.com/news/streaming-music-drowns-out-us-cd-sales-for-the-first-time/.

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of choice for storing and exchanging information in all its forms, the preferred means of entertaining, informing, and expressing ourselves. The number of hours we spend online every week has been rising steadily for years, and as we’ve switched from dial-up to broadband connections our reliance on the Web has expanded greatly. For growing numbers of us, in fact, the virtual is becoming as real as the physical.15

In Carlin’s 1981 formulation of the problem of stuff, there was no “virtual” world at once

easing and complicating the problem with stuff. There was no “cloud” to store it in.

Today, in fact, another war on stuff has planted itself deep within computer life as

digitalization seems to offer one the opportunity to do something previously unthinkable;

namely, the ability to pare down one’s physical possessions while still, digitally, having it

all. This new asceticism of streamlining is what I call, following other online

commentators, “digital minimalism.” The last half-decade has seen a surprising number

of blogs devoted to this idea. Often lumped together as blogs devoted to the idea of

“minimalism,” the term “digital minimalism” is actually more precise. I use this phrase to

call attention to how digital technologies now thrive on a conjunction of universal

virtualism and a rejection of material goods (stuff) as excess and detritus in an era that

valorizes “flexibility.”16

Get on the Boat!: Having Nothing Is the Ultimate Life Hack This chapter analyzes blogs that began to flourish after the first wave of life hacking

blogs discussed in chapter 1. Though they do not all use the phrase “life hacking,” they

are, in fact, as much “life hacking” blogs as Lifehacker, just in a different way. A recent

15 Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 124. 16 On the rhetoric of “flexibility,” see John Patrick Leary, “Keywords for the Age of Austerity 16: Flexibility,” March 17, 2015, http://jpleary.tumblr.com/post/113925136153/keywords-for-the-age-of-austerity-16-flexibility.

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story from Wired introduces minimalism as the ultimate life hack by way of a boat.

Under the heading “The New Hackers: The Brains Behind Tomorrow’s Tech,” Wired

magazine ran a story in 2013 about a man named James Hamilton.17 Hamilton is not what

you would call a household name, but a lot of households are familiar with his work.

Hamilton, the article explains, is “the Distinguished Engineer who oversees the

increasingly complex design of the data-center empire that drives Amazon Web Services,

or AWS—the nothing-less-than-revolutionary collection of online services that provide

computing power to companies across the globe, including names such as Netflix,

Pinterest, and Dropbox.” Essentially, he is the man in charge of Amazon’s cloud

computing operation, an operation that underpins many of the Internet’s most popular

services. But here is what Wired most loves about Hamilton: he lives on a boat. “About

four years ago, James and Jennifer Hamilton sold their house and their car and most of

their worldly possessions, and they moved onto the Dirona [the name of their boat]. Now,

when he’s berthed in Seattle, Hamilton bikes to Amazon headquarters, does his shopping

via Amazon Prime, and picks up his mail at the local UPS store. But he’s untethered.

Sometimes, he takes the boat to Hawaii—and works from there.” This, in and of itself, is

not especially interesting. Lots of people live on boats. But what is important is the

significance Wired attaches to it. As a champion of digital capitalism, Wired sees this as a

sign of Hamilton’s commitment to the digital life, which is viewed as the bit successor to

the physical life of atoms. The key line from the piece is this: “In short, he hacked his

life. He rethought it and turned it into something new. He’s the sort of person who’s

willing to hack anything, and that’s why Amazon wants him.” In other words, getting rid

17 Robert McMillan, “Why Amazon Hired a Car Mechanic to Run Its Cloud Empire,” Wired, Feb 2013, http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/james-hamilton-amazon/all/1.

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of all your stuff and moving on to a boat is a life hack that justifies and proves your

commitment to digital streamlining: of digital capitalism in the cloud.

Such a conception of hacking will likely strike some as too expansive. Recall

from chapter 1 that in Tim Jordan’s view, “by re-interpreting a hack beyond computers

and existing hacker communities,” commentators “have overgeneralized the nature of the

hack and in so doing have trivialized it.”18 For Jordan, hacking is “a material practice that

produces a difference or something new in a computer, network and/or communications

technology.”19 Yet what this dissertation is concerned with is how the meaning of

hacking has been broadened. So rather than dismiss this looser use of the term “hacking,”

this chapter asks, what are the implications of thinking about getting rid of one’s stuff as

a version of hacking? Hamilton is just one example of an emergent Silicon Valley type:

the digital minimalist, a person who pares his (or her, though usually his) stuff down to

the marrow and lives in “the cloud,” even if, as in Hamilton’s case, he happens to live,

physically speaking, on a boat.

Digital Minimalism A fascinating trend is consuming Silicon Valley and beginning to eat away at the rest of

the world: the radical simplification of everything. —Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, a company that lets users and businesses share content in “the cloud”20

Hamilton represents a new generation of tech-savvy people looking to hack their lives by

getting rid of nearly all their material or atom-laden stuff. What follows are the stories of

18 Tim Jordan, Hacking: Digital Media and Technological Determinism (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), 9. 19 Ibid., 10. 20 Aaron Levie, “The Simplicity Thesis,” Fast Company, 2 May 2012, http://www.fastcompany.com/1835983/simplicity-thesis.

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a few of them: Kelly Sutton, Dave Bruno, Leo Babauta, Andrew Hyde, “the Minimalists”

Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, and Foster Huntington. Together, they

constitute a kind of second wave life hacking movement, a campaign to carve out a new

subject position that looks to digital technologies for help reconciling the American

commandment to consume with the opposing American commandant to live simply so as

to be congruent with both the dictates of digital consumer capitalism and the older

American tradition of advancement via self-denial—what Benjamin Franklin called

“rising in the world,” or at least staying afloat.21 This movement encourages people to

reduce the amount of stuff in their lives while at the same time promising them a life free

of deprivation. In a 2010 blog post deeply suspicious of digital minimalism’s promises,

Google developer Vivek Haldar puts it this way:

There is a wave sweeping through the Internet cognoscenti—minimalism. The juggernaut of technology has brought us to a place where our minds are forced to march to the un-human rhythms of the global machine, our brains sizzling with pellets and factoids, with nary a clean break for a clear thought. The answer to this, the minimalist pundits claim, is to retreat. Retreat from technology, and retreat from things. It’s asceticism, a bit of a sanyaas. I like to separate the recent cry for minimalism into two related strands—intellectual, and physical. They’re manifestations of each other. The intellectual strand calls for minimizing distractions, single-tasking, cutting out aimless surfing and a Zen attitude. The physical strand advocates paring down to the essentials, down-sizing your abode, and living out of a backpack. Less is more. The zenith of both these strands is a calm geek, sitting in a bare room with a desk upon which sits only a MacBook Air, his backpack of possessions on one side, the broadband internet cable available but unplugged, fingers ready to type into the empty white screen of a minimalist editor.22

Haldar’s connection of and distinction between intellectual and physical minimalism is

crucial and this chapter focuses more on what Haldar calls the physical strand, those

21 Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 1986). For how Franklin has been taken up in American culture, see Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin, 2004). 22 Vivek Haldar, “Minimalism Is Not a Viable Intellectual Strategy,” 30 Dec 2010, http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/2525332092/minimalism-is-not-a-viable-intellectual-strategy.

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people who, happily dependent on digital technologies, advocate getting rid of physical

stuff not so much in order to clear their minds, but to more fully inhabit a more virtual

life space and time. Some digital minimalists, such as Graham Hill, advocate moving into

tiny houses or apartments in cities like New York and San Francisco—two tech hubs, not

coincidentally—where the number of nano-dwellings are increasing.23 But for others,

even a tiny house or apartment is extravagant, and minimalists such as Kelly Sutton and

Foster Huntington advocate a sort of digitally-attenuated vagrancy that increasingly

characterizes the lifestyle of many of the world’s residents.24 Indeed, as a 2013 U.N.

study showed, today more people have cell phones than toilets.25 It is, in light of such

global inequalities that Slavoj Žižek urges us to “bear in mind the lesson of cyberpunk:

how digitalization, virtual reality, biogenetics, and so on, can fully coexist with slum

poverty.”26 Or, to quote the oft-cited William Gibson line, “The future is already here—

it’s just not evenly distributed.”27

The democratization of digital devices has obscured the growth of income

inequality. As Robert Kuttner writes, “The cheaper laptop, plasma TV, and GPS screen in

your car make it appear statistically that living standards are not falling as much as they

are. The emblem of the new economy might be a 35-year-old, listening to an iPod, living

in a house much smaller than the one he grew up in.”28

23 Alec Wilkinson, “Let’s Get Small: The Rise of the Tiny House Movement,” The New Yorker, 25 Jul 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/07/25/lets-get-small. 24 Betsy Isaacson, “Homeless Millennials Are Transforming Hobo Culture,” Newsweek, April 19, 2015, http://www.newsweek.com/2015/05/01/homeless-millennials-are-transforming-hobo-culture-323151.html. 25 Yue Wang, “More People Have Cellphones than Toilets, U.N. Study Shows,” Time, 25 Mar 2013, http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/03/25/more-people-have-cell-phones-than-toilets-u-n-study-shows/. 26 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 409. 27 This quote is usually attributed to Gibson, though it’s not clear where he first said it. See http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/. 28 Robert Kuttner, “The Tchotchke Economy,” The American Prospect, 3 April 2006, http://prospect.org/article/tchotchke-economy.

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In an era of proliferating digital devices, downsizing does make a certain kind of

sense as a response to the Great Recession. And indeed, since 2008, many Americans,

especially young people, seem to have decided they do not want things. The Atlantic frets

about young people who buy smart phones but not cars, and rechristens Millennials who

are reluctant to buy big-ticket items such as cars or homes, onetime symbols of

adulthood, members of “the cheapest generation.”29 In Fast Company, using fairly

grandiose evolutionary rhetoric, Josh Allan Dykstra sees young people’s reluctance to

buy stuff as evidence of a much larger trend:

Humanity is experiencing an evolution in consciousness. We are starting to think differently about what it means to “own” something. This is why a similar ambivalence towards ownership is emerging in all sorts of areas, from car-buying to music listening to entertainment consumption. Though technology facilitates this evolution and new generations champion it, the big push behind it all is that our thinking is changing.30

While I am not sure about “our” thinking, the model and meaning of ownership is clearly

changing.31 Digital minimalists are riding the antistuff wave that, as life hackers of a

certain kind, they are also advocating as a new (yet old and familiar) set of approaches to

both capitalism and a consumer style lived both in and outside of digital devices.

This chapter assembles, analyzes, and critiques the various textual and visual

productions of digital minimalists Kelly Sutton, Dave Bruno, Leo Babauta, Andrew

Hyde, Joshua Fields Millburn, Ryan Nicodemus, and Foster Huntington as a new cultural

formation of mostly young white men confronting (whether they know it or not) new

29 See Jordan Weissmann, “Why Are Young People Ditching Cars for Smartphones?” The Atlantic, Aug 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2012/08/why-are-young-people-ditching-cars-for-smartphones/260801/ and Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissmann, “The Cheapest Generation: Why Millennials Aren’t Buying Cars or Houses, and What That Means for the Economy,” The Atlantic, Sep 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2012/09/the-cheapest-generation/309060/. 30 Josh Allan Dykstra, “Why Millennials Don’t Want To Buy Stuff,” Fast Company, 13 Jul 2012, http://www.fastcompany.com/1842581/why-millennials-dont-want-buy-stuff. 31 Rich Radka, “Changing Models Of Ownership: Part I,” Shareable, 8 Feb 2011, http://www.shareable.net/blog/changing-models-of-ownership-part-i.

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sites and new kinds of socioeconomic anxiety since the Great Recession. Their response

amounts to the invention of an anticonsumption consumer style riven with contradictions,

pressure, worry, and the wish to flee, as well as to conform. Digital minimalism circulates

by way of these figures’ exemplary do-it-yourself minimalist blogs, but also beyond these

blogs in the worlds of books, print journalism, radio, and television. As with the life

hackers Gina Trapani and Tim Ferriss discussed in the first chapter, the multimedia

nature of digital minimalism foregrounds it as the invention of aspiring authors, a

longstanding style of white masculine self-production through media in American

culture, the first nation to write itself into being. They are good examples of what The

Economist calls, beautifully, “authorpreneurs.”32 They are writers who use life hacking in

its digital minimalism incarnation to become celebrities of sorts, and then suggest that

others can follow in their footsteps by mastering their desire for things and living life in

“the cloud.” By way of conclusion, I turn to some of the critiques that have been leveled

against this brand of minimalism, and then finally to my own critique of digital

minimalism as a discursive and aesthetic cultural site that is inseparable from the

practices of life hacking because of its blindness to structural issues.

Kelly Sutton: Itemize and Eliminate

Knowing what you’ve got, knowing what you need, knowing what you can live without—that’s inventory control.—Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Wheeler in

Revolutionary Road (2008)

32 “Authorpreneurship,” The Economist, February 12, 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/business/21643124-succeed-these-days-authors-must-be-more-businesslike-ever-authorpreneurship.

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In September 2009, Kelly Sutton, then a 22-year-old college student at Loyola

Marymount University, started a new blog. Just three years earlier, at the ripe old age of

nineteen, he had started the successful HackCollege, a blog that takes the “work smarter,

not harder” ethos of life hacking and applies it to college life.33 HackCollege got Sutton

noticed by Joey Doud, then a Florida State University film student, who included him in

his senior thesis film You 2.0: A Documentary on Life Hacking alongside older, more

established life-hacking figures like Danny O’Brien, Gina Trapani, Merlin Mann, and

Tim Ferriss.34 The film cemented Sutton’s association with life hacking. Sutton’s new

blog, however, would be less a series of “tips and tricks” posts à la Lifehacker than the

articulation and charting of an overreaching philosophy: digital minimalism. He called

his new site, seemingly without irony, Cult of Less.

His first post, dated September 9, 2009, is called “Is it possible to own

nothing?”35 One might assume such a question is meant to be rhetorical, a sort of

philosophical thought experiment, but Sutton was at least half serious about it. “Well,

maybe not nothing,” he writes. “Nothing is a little extreme. But is it possible to own close

to the nothing? I hope to have the answer to that question soon.” Inspired by Tim

Ferriss’s 2007 book The 4-Hour Workweek, Sutton tells us he has “decided to try to see if

I can rid my life of most of the clutter. The goal? Condense my life into 2 bags and 2

boxes.” Two bags and two boxes. That’s it. Not nothing, no, but close to it. “How will I

do this?” Sutton asks. “It seems simple to just say: get rid of everything.” However, he

33 http://www.hackcollege.com. 34 Joey Daoud, You 2.0: A Documentary on Life Hacking, 2009, http://www.lifehackingmovie.com. 35 Kelly Sutton, “Is It Possible to Own Nothing?” Cult of Less, 8 Sep 2009, http://cultofless.tumblr.com/post/182833987/is-it-possible-to-own-nothing

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decides, it can’t be that simple. A calculus of the ledger in reverse must intervene.36

Sutton continues, “To realize how much junk I own, I have put myself through the misery

of documenting every single possession of mine, no matter how insignificant. This gives

me a solid metric to measure my progress against.” In other words, the first step to

divesting oneself of one’s things is making an inventory of one’s things, a step akin to

Alcoholics Anonymous’s “the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one.”

That is, the digital minimalist must admit to being powerless over stuff, that their lives

have become, if not wholly unmanageable, at least overly chaotic, and then, as a way of

wresting back control, make a list of all their possessions as the first step in purging

themselves of them. The goal of digital minimalism seems to involve admitting your lack

of control over consumerism as a way of molding yourself to the present cultural

moment. For Sutton, getting rid of all his stuff is a way of making himself more flexible

in the broadest possible sense, able to pack up and, as it were, “light out for the Territory

ahead of the rest,” in Mark Twain’s memorable phrase from the end of The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn.37 “The 2 bags and 2 boxes principle will hopefully allow me to live

anywhere and move instantly. This is the Cult of Less,” Sutton writes—suggesting both a

faithless faith (cultlessness) and a new faith in fewer “things.”

The phrase “Cult of Less” links to a page that contains a list of everything Sutton

owns.38 This, not the blog, will be the site where he tracks his personal divestitures.

Sutton is aware that in the U.S., where, as Harvard Business Review writer Umair Haque

36 On the role of list making in American history, specifically in the work of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, see Robert E. Belknap, The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). Lists are appealing, Belknap argues, because they “momentarily allowing us to order our surrounding world, verbally or symbolically putting everything into a sequence and an arrangement we desire, if only for an instant” (xii). 37 Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884; repr., New York: Penguin, 1985), 321. 38 Kelly Sutton, “Everything Kelly Sutton Owns,” Cult of Less, http://cultofless.com/items.

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put it in 2001, the good life has “been vacantly reduced to the frenzied sport of buying

‘consumer goods’—more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now,” some people will think what he

is proposing is extreme, even crazy.39 Sutton cagily anticipates such reactions and seeks

to neutralize them by pitching digital minimalism as freeing. “While I don’t consider

myself to be some sort of ascetic or societal recluse, I’ve found that more stuff equates to

more stress,” he writes. So, in other words, he’s not a weirdo, just a guy trying to reduce

his stress levels, nothing strange about that. Sutton also presents his paring down as

public service—something others might want to do too. “I hope other people will also try

it out for themselves. All of the systems I’m developing to help me empty my life of

possessions have the potential of many users using the system in mind,” he tells us. He is

thus not just documenting something for others to read, but modeling something in the

old-fashioned genre of self-help for others to emulate. This system modeling, however,

carries with it a narrative of struggle and a core contraction.

In the very next sentence, Sutton writes, “This system was built with two

purposes in mind: (1) to offload everything and (2) to document the triumphs and

failures. As a reader, you will have the chance to purchase or receive (for almost free)

most of my stuff.” So, in one breath, readers are invited to copy him, but in the next

they’re given a chance to buy (or take) his extraneous possessions from him in order to

help him pare down. The irony seems lost on Sutton, which points to one of digital

minimalism’s many blindspots. Namely, everyone’s stuff has to go somewhere.

39 Umair Haque, “Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything?” Harvard Business Review, 12 May 2011, http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/05/is_a_well_lived_live_worth_anything.html. Lizabeth Cohen says we are all now “citizen consumers.” Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (Vintage Books, 2003).

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In Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us or the Environment (2011),

Michael Huesemann and Joyce Huesemann argue that thinking that we can push things

we don’t want or don’t want deal with out of sight and imagining they will magically

disappear (like the weekly garbage), is symptomatic of technological thinking in general,

which tends to be non-ecological in the most basic sense.40 They quote Jeremy Rifkin:

“Each technology always creates a temporary island of order at the expense of greater

disorder in the surroundings.” In Sutton’s case, while it may be good for him to get rid of

all his stuff, all that stuff has to go somewhere. It’s great if it’s going to people—his blog

readers—who can use it, but it’s worth thinking about how the minimalist lifestyle Sutton

is trying to create for himself is, from his very first post, partly about offloading things

onto others just like Tim Ferriss’s brand of life hacking that emphasizes outsourcing

drudgery so one can lead of life of leisure.

In his second post, dated September 14, 2009, Sutton further explains his personal

inventory technique.41 He has sorted his stuff into three categories: keep, sell, or ship.

The first two categories are relatively self-explanatory. “The things I’m keeping are not

for sale. The things I’m selling still have some sort of value to the world, or I think that it

makes sense to sell them,” Sutton explains. The third category, “to ship,” is more

interesting. “The things selected to ship are things that I either despise, things I am

embarrassed to own or things have little value (to me). Everything I own is in working

condition, so this is definitely the ‘another man’s trash is…’ section. These things are

more valuable for someone else to own and use in their life than they are for me to have

40 Michael Huesemann and Joyce Huesemann, Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us or the Environment (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2011). Chapter 2 in particular. 41 Kelly Sutton, “Here We Go…” Cult of Less, 14 Sep 2009, http://cultofless.tumblr.com/post/187688510/here-we-go.

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them.” Here again we see Sutton’s enthusiasm for pawning his stuff off on others with

little thought about its larger implications. He seems to be trying to get rid of his stuff no

matter its origin, destination, use, or meaning. These are things he will ship to you just to

be rid of them.

He then, somewhat peevishly, warns readers not to try to bargain him down on

shipping costs: “While you may see many things listed at a price of $0, everything has an

eyeballed shipping. I am not going to lengths of computing the shipping down to the last

penny via a FedEx/UPS/USPS API. I also slightly value my time and must drink beer

occasionally. If you don’t think the shipping cost is justified, don’t buy it. I won’t budge

on shipping rates. It’s a waste of my time and yours to haggle. Hack: you can always

rationalize the shipping as shipping and handling. And by handling I mean beer handling,

specifically by me.” Sutton’s use of “hack” here suggests how protean a metaphor “hack”

has become, and also how it can be weaponized by those who have the leisure and

freedom to divest against those who do not. Frankly, Sutton is being a jerk by asking

readers to “hack” their perspective.

Sutton explains that he doesn’t want to use sites like Freecycle and Craigslist to

get rid of his stuff because that would take too much time and effort on his part. The kind

of people who look for stuff on Freecycle and Craigslist are probably different from the

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kind of people likely to stumble upon Sutton’s site and vie for his unwanted belongings.42

“There are a few reasons for doing the site,” Sutton explains. “Mostly, I wanted a

coherent space to catalog and transact. Automating the system takes out some of the

overhead that I might experience with another site. I can be delivered the exact

information that I want.” “Also, I wanted control over the look,” he adds. With this final

comment, Sutton communicates a crux of digital minimalism: digital minimalists want to

give up everything but control, and among the ways they perform that control is by

documenting, systematizing, automating, and transacting things on their terms. This

control, however, as I argue below, is at least partially illusory. Digital minimalists

imagine they are making themselves free by putting themselves in control, but in fact,

they are further subjecting themselves to the rule of the computer and the fantasy of the

42 There are a surprising number of sites on the web devoted to, or in practice mostly about, getting rid of one’s stuff. eBay, one of the most successful sites in Internet history, comes to mind. People have been using the Internet to get rid of all their stuff for a long time. In 2000, for instance, Iowa City artist and University of Iowa MFA student John Freyer, then single, in his 20s, and flush with dot com money, invited fifty people to his house for what he calls an “Inventory Party.” They helped him sort through his things and list them on eBay. He inevitably wrote a book about the project called All My Life for Sale (2002). The website for the book describes it as follows: “Fed up with his inability to quell the constant flow of objects into his apartment and determined to be able to fit his life into the trunk of his car, one day John Freyer decided to sell everything he owned on the Internet. He invited his friends over to tag his possessions and systematically put them up for sale on eBay. An opened box of taco shells, half a bottle of mouthwash, almost all of his clothes, his favorite records, his sideburns (in a plastic bag), his family’s Christmas presents (not yet given), furniture: John didn’t let sentiment or utility stand in his way. Soon his belongings were sold all over the world, with a bag of Porky’s BBQ Pork Skins making its way to Japan, and a chair ending up in the Museum of Modern Art. With almost all the objects in his life now gone, he started the second phase of his journey: to visit his onetime possessions in their new homes.” Like Sutton, Freyer was getting rid of a lot of junk. And like Sutton, Freyer saw his project in grandiose terms: “All My Life for Sale is the extraordinary record of this project—part autobiography, part travelogue, and part cultural commentary, it offers a meditation on what the objects we surround ourselves with actually mean to us, and what happens when we set them free. For Freyer, what started out as a simple, if unorthodox, way to increase his mobility resulted in a series of unexpected revelations about the way he lived his life. In the end, what emerged from his project was a particular understanding of the attachments we all form to the things, the people, and the places that make up our world.” See http://www.allmylifeforsale.com for more. Like Sutton, Freyer attracted his fair share of media attention. See, e.g., Michael De Groote, “Extreme downsizing: Lessons from selling everything you own,” Deseret News, 19 Feb 2013, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865573448/Extreme-downsizing-Lessons-from-selling-everything-you-own.html for a relatively recent piece. (Over ten years later the project is still being written about.) Unlike Sutton, however, Freyer’s project was pitched a more of a temporary experiment in living than manifesto for digital minimalism. Indeed, Freyer got married, had children, and “eventually filled a home with clothes, furniture and all the toys and things that go with typical family life.”

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techno-fix. In a third post dated September 17, 2009, Sutton announces a new feature on

the site: the “Most Recent Item Listed” feature, a link to the latest item to come into

Sutton’s possession. “No matter how much stuff I get rid of, there will always be an

influx of items,” he writes with a touch of ruefulness.43

But happily in a second post that same day (the fourth overall), Sutton notes that

these things are already selling.44 People are out there reading his website and helping

him unburden himself. The first things that sold were:

• a book called Building Scalable Web Sites • a webbed belt with the words “Chastity Belt” printed on it. “I thought I was so

clever,” Sutton explains.45 • a T-shirt that says “I Make Emo Girls Cry” given to Sutton by an old girlfriend. A book about websites and two cheap, novelty articles of clothing. If you are thinking

that all of this sounds pretty juvenile, remember that Sutton was a college student at the

time. He has stuff, but it is not very good stuff—yet. In the fifth post on September 25,

Sutton writes that while “the Cult of Less project is beginning to heat up … things

haven’t been leaving my possession as quickly as I would have liked.” At this point, his

blog and site have only been around for sixteen days so one has to wonder what the rush

is. Sutton comes across now as a man possessed with getting rid of his possessions. “The

goal at the end of the day is to rid myself of everything. Anything that is blocking that

goal must go, including price,” he writes. “To solve this problem,“ he explains, “I’ve

built in some functionality that will automatically decrease the price of everything in the

system by 10% every two weeks.”

43 Kelly Sutton, “Most Recent Item Listed,” Cult of Less, 17 Sep 2009, http://cultofless.tumblr.com/post/189981121/new-feature-most-recent-item-listed-so-i-put. 44 Kelly Sutton, “It’s Beginning…” Cult of Less, 17 Sep 2009, http://cultofless.tumblr.com/post/190646537/its-beginning. 45 Kelly Sutton, “Chastity Belt,” Cult of Less, http://cultofless.com/items/44.

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Sutton’s impatience seems short-lived, however, as his posts trickle to a crawl and

eventually stop entirely. There are couple of posts in October of 2009, one to tell readers

that he is shipping out some stuff, and then another telling readers he plans to move to

New York City after college and is looking to sell his car. But the list of everything he

owns is still being updated as things go out and, less frequently, come in.

Then, in August of 2010, nearly a year after he began the project, an interesting

thing happens: the Cult of Less becomes the subject of fervent media attention. In a post

dated August 18, 2010, Sutton recounts the surge. Somehow, in the twelve months since

Sutton’s last post, a number of Internet and television journalists found his site and

decided to write about it as evidence of some sort of shift in the zeitgeist. First came a

BBC story about people who are living out of hard drives, the twenty-first-century

equivalent of living out of a suitcase, apparently.46 The BBC article begins by positing

that the virtualization of media (from photos to music to movies to books) has

transmogrified into something more expansive. “Many have begun trading in CD, DVD,

and book collections for digital music, movies, and e-books. But this trend in digital

technology is now influencing some to get rid of nearly all of their physical

possessions—from photographs to furniture to homes altogether.” “Let’s face it,” the

article begins, as if what follows is inevitable (an assumptive stance Michael Sacasas has

dubbed “the Borg Complex”), “digital files, applications and web services are replacing

46 Matthew Danzico, “Cult of less: Living out of a hard drive,” BBC, 16 August 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10928032.

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the need for many of the physical goods that pepper our homes, crowd our desks and fill

our closets.”47

The article then introduces our own Kelly Sutton. He has changed since we last

met him. He has graduated from college and is now living in New York City. He is

described as “a spiky-haired 22-year-old software engineer with thick-rimmed glasses

and an empty apartment in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood—a hotbed for New

York’s young, early adopters of new technology.” The article notes that CultofLess.com

helped Sutton sell or give away almost everything he owned “apart from his laptop, an

iPad, an Amazon Kindle, two external hard drives, a ‘few’ articles of clothing and bed

sheets for a mattress that was left in his newly rented apartment.” It hones in on the

digital devices he kept because those are the devices that allow him to live the lifestyle of

a digital minimalist. The computer is his life. It is what he uses for work and play along

with his other digital devices. Indeed, the entry for his computer on the list of everything

he owns reads “This is my MacBook Pro. I could never live without it.” The computer

remains the number one item on his list. It is his most-important possession because it is

the one that allows him to be rid of all the others and live, as it were, in the cloud.48

The BBC article uses the word “minimalist”—though not the term “digital

minimalist”—to explain: “This 21st Century minimalist says he got rid of much of his

47 Michael Sacasas, “The Borg Complex,” The Frailest Thing, 18 June 2012, http://thefrailestthing.com/2012/06/18/the-borg-complex/. The name comes from, as Sacasas explains, Star Trek: “The implicit tone of those with a Borg Complex can be summed up by the line, ‘Resistance is futile.’ That line has entered our pop-cultural lexicon through the Star Trek franchise. I won’t pretend to be an expert on Borg lore; I’ll only note that the Borg always announced some variation of the following to their victims: ‘We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile.’” Sacasas observes that ‘resistance is futile’ rhetoric is endemic in contemporary discussions of technology. He writes, “The spirit of the Borg lives in writers and pundits who take it upon themselves to prod on all of those they deem to be deliberately slow on the technological uptake. These self-appointed evangelists of technological assimilation would have us all abandon any critique of technology and simply adapt to the demands of technological society.” 48 Kelly Sutton, “Macbook Pro,” Cult of Less, http://cultofless.com/items/1.

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clutter because he felt the ever-increasing number of available digital goods have

provided adequate replacements for his former physical possessions.” The digital, in

other words, is a substitute for the physical. Borg-style, this is not even questioned.

Instead, Sutton is represented as emblematic of a larger cultural shift. The article quotes

him as saying, “I think cutting down on physical commodities in general might be a trend

of my generation—cutting down on physical commodities that can be replaced by digital

counterparts will be a fact.” The article continues:

The tech-savvy Los Angeles “transplant” credits his external hard drives and online services like iTunes, Hulu, Flickr, Facebook, Skype and Google Maps for allowing him to lead a minimalist life. “I think the shift to all digital formats in all methods and forms of media consumption is inevitable and coming very quickly,” said Mr. Sutton.

Note how Sutton and his admirers go from a questionable “what can be done, should be

done” attitude to the even more problematic assumption that “what can be done, will be

done.” The article mentions some statistics about the explosion of ebooks and the

declining sales of CDs. Common sense seems to dictate that “physical” media is being

threatened by “digital” media, but a core question is never raised: is such a thing

desirable? Are the digital versions of things really worthy substitutes for physical

versions? Or are they merely changes for the sake of change? Who benefits from these

changes and who loses? The other young minimalists the article quotes do not seem

interested in these questions either. There is Chris Yurista, a twenty seven-year-old

Washington D.C. DJ who lives a life of “virtual homelessness.” “The internet has

replaced my need for an address,” he explains, as if that is the most normal thing in the

world. In Yurista’s view, a digital life is one that is free from worry. The article reports

that “Mr. Yurista feels by digitizing his life, he no longer has to worry about dusting,

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organizing and cleaning his possessions. And he says his new intangible goods can

continue to live on indefinitely with little maintenance.” While most people would

probably take the false rigors of dusting over the actual hardship of homelessness, Yurista

sees dusting—or more accurately all that dusting represents—as overwhelming at a time

when he can just hop onto his computer and be free.

Later the article quotes Anders Sandberg, a research fellow at the Future of

Humanity Institute at Oxford University, as saying one day “we could be living on hard

drives along with our digital possessions in the not too distant future, which would allow

us to shed the trouble of owning a body.” Sandberg’s thinking is far from new. In fact, it

is right in line with the decades-old geek dream of using technology to transcend the

body. What is new is the link between the posthuman sci-fi fantasy of downloading

consciousness and the aesthetics and style economics of digital minimalism.49 The BBC

article ends with this: “When asked, Mr Yurista says mind uploading sounds like a very

hard concept to grasp but admits getting rid of one’s body and living inside a computer

‘truly sounds like the ultimate form of minimalism.’” One imagines Sutton might feel the

same way.

The BBC article led to more media attention for Sutton if you can believe it. In

2010, Boing Boing profiled him.50 The first Boing Boing post, dated August 16, 2010,

merely provided a link to Sutton’s website and to the aforementioned Matthew Danzico

49 See Joel Dinerstein, “Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman,” American Quarterly 58:3 (September 2006): 569–95; David F. Noble’s The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1997); Donna Haraway’s “The Cyborg Manifesto,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (New York: Routledge, 1990): 149–181. 50 Boing Boing is a hugely popular, technology-obsessed group blog that counts as one of its editors Cory Doctorow, whose notes on the 2004 talk in which Danny O’Brien coined the term “life hacks” inspired Merlin Mann to start the blog 43 Folders, which in turn inspired Gina Trapani to start Lifehacker. That is to say, Boing Boing marks a site of continuity between the first wave of life hacking and the second, digital minimalist wave.

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BBC article.51 The next day, noting that “readers had a lot to say regarding yesterday’s

post,” Boing Boing editor Mark Frauenfelder posted a follow-up titled “The nitty-gritty of

whittling down your possessions”.52 “I asked [Sutton] to write about his lifestyle and

here’s what he wrote. It’s fascinating,” Frauenfelder enthuses. Frauenfelder then reprints

an email in which Sutton shares “a few things I learned” from his year-long experiment

with digital minimalism. This post, more than anything on his own site, is the most

comprehensive statement of Sutton’s philosophy. He begins by noting that the primary

benefit of digital minimalism is, as he sees it, freedom:

The greatest thing gained from Cult of Less has been an unprecedented amount of physical freedom. This is obvious to those that have read Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek. Ferriss takes owning nothing to an extreme and comes across as brackish in his suggestions, but there is an important point to take away from the book and accompanying blog. A willingness to drop your stationary physical possessions and move is the greatest freedom I have found in this project.53

Not only does Sutton emphasize freedom in the sense of being agile or adaptive in an

economy that increasingly demands such traits, but Sutton’s evocation of Ferriss

positions him as Ferriss’s heir in a digital minimalist genealogy that links it to life

hacking’s traceable intellectual history: O’Brien to Mann to Trapani to Ferris to Sutton

and other digital minimalists. Together these “microcelebrity” life hackers constitute a

51 Marc Frauenfelder, “Article about extreme lifestyle-minimalists,” Boing Boing, 16 Aug 2010, http://boingboing.net/2010/08/16/article-about-extrem.html. On August 18th, the blog Unclutterer—“the website for home and office organization”—picked up the BBC article as well: Erin Doland, “Trend spotting: Tech-savvy minimalism,” Unclutterer, 18 Aug 2010, http://unclutterer.com/2010/08/18/trend-spotting-tech-savvy-minimalism/. 52 Marc Frauenfelder, “ The nitty-gritty of whittling down your possessions,” Boing Boing, 17 Aug 2010, http://boingboing.net/2010/08/17/the-nitty-gritty-of.html. 53 Ibid.

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kind of self-created discursive constellation around the practice and ideology of life

hacking in different forms.54

Sutton concedes that “this lifestyle is not for everyone.” It helps, for instance, if

you live in a big city. As he explains, “Owning less is easier in urban environments with

efficient public transportation; in New York, it’s mandated by the higher rent prices.

Living in Los Angeles without a car is a difficult undertaking.” Noting that his BBC

profile was subtitled “Living out of a hard drive,” Sutton explains, “I do this with more

than my media; my chosen profession also gives me an unlimited amount of mobility.

The software I write on the beach in Venice, California, operates the same as code

written in blip.tv’s SoHo office. It’s a shame not all professions have such freedom.”

Again, freedom is synonymous with mobility, and mobility is synonymous with

economic mobility, especially economic mobility within a dematerialized work-life.

Sutton laments the fact that not everyone’s line of work affords them the ability to code

on the beach. This lament is less an open acknowledgement of privilege than a kind of

“humble brag.”55 It is as if Sutton is saying, rather unenthusiastically, “It’s too bad not

everyone can win the lottery.” But Sutton assures us his life is great (a good deal of

digital minimalism seems to be about putting on a happy face about radically “reduced”

conditions): “Personally, I experience very few downsides with my current situation,” he

states robotically.

54 On Web 2.0 “microcelebrities,” see Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). In many ways, though, I prefer the term “authorpreneurs,” because it calls attention to how these people are writing themselves into being. 55 Henry Alford, “If I Do Humblebrag So Myself,” New York Times, November 30, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/fashion/bah-humblebrag-the-unfortunate-rise-of-false-humility.html.

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The whole Cult of Less project, he writes elsewhere, has been a learning

experience. First, it taught him that many of the things he owns are not worth as much as

he originally paid for them:

Another unintended philosophical nugget of the project was to understand that many things are worth less monetarily than you think. Some of your possessions might even have a negative value. (Old computer monitors, for example, cost money to throw out in some regions of the U.S. They have a -$25 value.)

Curiously, Sutton makes no mention of other kinds of value—sentimental value, for

instance. His view represents the radically instrumental view of stuff typical of digital

minimalism. Moreover, the project has changed his shopping habits. He buys fewer but

“nicer” things in a nod to class and consumer cultural capital. “Now,” Sutton explains,

“every purchase I make comes with a second-guess: Do I really need this? Like really,

really need this? In the past year, ‘impulse buy’ has left my vocabulary. I found myself

buying fewer things, but also nicer things.” This, in turn, has altered his relationship with

the stuff he already has:

On the whole, it’s led me to cherish my few purchases more. Every possession also requires a certain amount of upkeep, and I find myself with more time and less possessional guilt. Every thing owned begs to be used constantly; every second not utilized comes a shred of buyer’s remorse. Everything I own I use at least once per month, save for my winter clothes.

Sutton concludes his note to Boing Boing by saying that his Cult of Less project will be

ongoing despite the doubts of various commentators:

The Cult of Less project is not something that I can ever stop cold turkey. Throughout the coming years, I will be adding new possessions to my list occasionally. Embarking on the project has characteristically changed how I view owning things. Sure, buying less is probably environmentally friendlier. Sure, my friends think I’m (really) weird. Sure, there might be things that could make my life a bit easier occasionally. But now everything thing I own serves a purpose and holds a certain beauty in its role. The idea is utilitarian and far-fetched, but it’s a small price to pay for being happy.

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The line “Sure, buying less is probably environmentally friendlier” suggests Sutton is

aware that there are environmental reasons for being a minimalist but that is not why he

is doing it. In fact, for Sutton, it is almost the opposite: being a minimalist for

environmental reasons would mean having to think about the world of stuff and its

persistence. But Sutton does not want to think about stuff at all. He is getting rid of his

stuff, he repeatedly tells us, because it makes him “happy.” For Sutton, happiness means

being flexible, mobile, and in control. As such, Sutton’s digital minimalism has the flavor

of a familiar Weberian puritanism (to be in the world but not of it) in how it brackets off

the pleasures of physical things in favor of their dematerialized digital capitalist value.

It is puritanical flavor that connects digital minimalism to the long history of

antimaterialism in Protestant middle-class American culture—from Plymouth Plantation

to iconoclasts like Thoreau to military self-sacrifice from the Civil War to Normandy

Beach. On the legacy of Puritanism in U.S. culture, Richard Huber writes, “The

absorption in a goal of striving-becoming rather than sensuous-being led to a tight

suppression rather than joyful expression of the senses. The result was a restraint on deep

feelings, an inhibition of passion, a fear of ecstasy.”56 Sutton’s happiness is like this. He

tells us everything is great but he doesn’t seem to be having any fun. As Huber puts it:

“What we are emphasizing are the denial of feelings and the consequent release of

emotions for productivity. To be aesthetically overwhelmed by beautiful paintings and

music, gourmet food, and perfume, to give way to emotions aroused by caressings of the

flesh, means that the environment is acting on you rather than you on the environment. It

means the external stimuli, aesthetic and sensual, are in control of your feelings.

56 Huber, 110.

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Aesthetes do no generally make good ascetics.”57 Hard work is a way of harnessing

desire. The denial of the material world and its many pleasures, or luxuries as the

Puritans might say, is a way of keeping one’s self focused on the job at hand. And

because work today takes place on the computer, everything that either isn’t a computer

or isn’t absolutely essential to survival can be eliminated.

As banal as his passionless and cult-less “system” may seem, the media’s

fascination with Sutton and his lifestyle nevertheless continued, sometimes somewhat

skeptically, but minus any sustained critique. In addition to the aforementioned BBC

News article and two Boing Boing posts about Sutton, the Sydney Morning Herald

profiled Sutton around this same time, indicating the degree to which Sutton’s ideas

constituted an international attention-getting digital practice.58 It also indicates the speed

and reach of digital news reports on digital minimalism. The Sydney Morning Herald

article “Cult of Less: Digital Minimalists on the Rise” repeats many of the observations

of the first two articles.59

Asher Moses, author of the Herald profile, takes Sutton to be evidence of a

broader trend. “He is,” Moses writes matter-of-factly, “part of a new lifestyle trend that

has seen tech-savvy youngsters ditch their CDs, DVDs, books and photos for digital

versions, and eliminate all trinkets and furniture they don’t need.” Sutton is quoted as

evidence: “All of my music is 100 per cent digital, I don’t have any CDs (I just have an

57 Ibid. 58 Here it is perhaps worth noting that the first of the four (as of this writing) international editions of Lifehacker was Lifehacker Australia. Gina Trapani, “Lifehacker AU Goes Live!,” Lifehacker Australia, August 28, 2007, http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2007/08/lifehacker_au_goes_live/. The other three are Lifehacker Japan (http://www.lifehacker.jp/), Lifehacker India (http://www.lifehacker.co.in/), and Lifehacker UK (http://www.lifehacker.co.uk/). In other words, life hacking is increasingly an international phenomenon, and we shouldn’t be surprised an Australian newspaper was interested in Sutton. 59 Asher Moses, “Cult of Less: Digital Minimalists on the Rise,” Sydney Morning Herald, 18 Aug 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/cult-of-less-digital-minimalists-on-the-rise-20100818-129er.html.

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iTunes library), I don’t have any DVDs (I just rent movies on occasion from iTunes or

stream them using Netflix) and I own a Kindle so now I can just read whatever book I

want on the device.” As virtual consumer goods replace physical ones, materials that

couldn’t be digitalized were jettisoned: “I sold my car, my bike, a bunch of clothing, a

few knick knacks and trinkets that I wasn’t using and that were just sitting in a box, some

film equipment,” Sutton says.

He has, finally, we learn, reached his goal of itemizing every thing he owns and

eliminating everything he no longer wants. His possessions all fit into two small boxes

and two small suitcases. He again emphasizes how happy and free he feels. “The less you

own, the less you have weighing you down and the less that’s stressing you, so I couldn’t

be happier and more mobile now.”

“It’s nice to know,” he writes in his August 18th blog post, “that everything I own

is currently sitting in my closet and on a few shelves in my room. Not in public storage.

Not at my parents’ house.” This last reference is a reminder that in many ways Sutton is

still a kid in classic youth culture mode and freeing himself from his parents, though

presenting it as a novel and radical move through the lens of digital minimalism.

Furthermore, his minimalism is enabled by a job that doesn’t require much, if any, face-

to-face contact; he doesn’t have to worry about transportation, work clothes, and any of

the many physical things having a socially-engaged, brick-and-mortar job entails. He

doesn’t have kids who need things or who pester him to buy them “stuff.” His social

circle—never mentioned in the interviews—is presumably made up of other digital

minimalists, for whom things like physical gifts are clutter. There is something boring, at

least as presented, about this stripped-down life. Sutton keeps assuring us that being less

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tied to stuff allows him to have more experiences, but he never talks about them. The first

thing on his list of stuff, you will recall, is his MacBook Pro. Next to a picture of it and

above a red “Not for sale!” sign is “This is my MacBook Pro. I could never live without

it.” It is, quite literally, the most important thing in his life, which makes sense if you

look at the rest of his list, full of puerile and inexpensive things of poor quality. One

would be hard-pressed to describe any of his stuff, other than his digital gadgets, as

“well-made” or “well-designed” or “classic” or “essential” and thus worth keeping.

Indeed, what matters most it seems is the system itself. His things are the kind of things

one sheds when moving from adolescence to adulthood. But Sutton and his interlocutors

have elevated his personal albeit prosaic divestitures to the level of a generational shift,

and garnered a fair share of attention in the process, from bloggers to BBC journalists.

The shift from atoms to bits, Sutton suggests, Borg complex-style, is inevitable. Lots of

people get rid of stuff but not everyone feels compelled to make a website and give

interviews about it. Some people might even feel embarrassed. Not Sutton. He’s willing

to preach the gospel of digital minimalism as a new form of independence online.

Digital Minimalism Is for Rich People The possessors of the “material” distinctions of life … rush to worship those who possess

the immaterial distinctions. —Walter Bagehot

A few weeks after the Sydney Morning Herald interview, CNN did a story on Kelly

Sutton.60 Once again, the narrative of divestiture is told. His credentials as a software

engineer are played up. His computer is referred to as “his most important possession.”

60 Poppy Harlow, “Dumping Junk, Living Digitally,” CNN Money, 9 Feb 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in5TY_o5AcM.

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We are told people write to him saying that he has inspired them. Even Poppy Harlow,

the journalist reporting the piece, and only a few years older than Sutton, is shown in her

apartment opening up her own closets and expressing shame at the amount of clothes she

has. She seems to have been converted to Sutton’s way of thinking. A clinical

psychologist named Dr. Jeff Gardere is then interviewed, ostensibly to lend credibility to

the report, though it is not clear what his area of expertise is. Gardere says he thinks

Sutton is at the vanguard of something. In his view, Americans are increasingly ascribing

to the cult of less because, in a down economy, less is all they can afford. But this simple

economic explanation is inadequate. Gardere’s insight would be more interesting were

poor people in the U.S. showily divesting themselves of stuff like Sutton. But they are

not. Why? Because, as programmer Charlie Loyd argues, poor people need stuff. In a

post on his personal blog in response to various out-of-touch rich people’s exhortations to

downsize, Loyd writes, “Poor people don’t have clutter because they’re too dumb to see

the virtue of living simply; they have it to reduce risk.”61 You can, according to Loyd, tell

a rich person from a poor person, even in era when rich people sometimes dress like

hobos, simply by how much they are carrying: “If you see someone on the street dressed

like a middle-class person (say, in clean jeans and a striped shirt), how do you know

whether they’re lower middle class or upper middle class? I think one of the best

indicators is how much they’re carrying.” Loyd continues:

Lately I’ve been mostly on the lower end of middle class (although I’m kind of unusual along a couple axes). I think about this when I have to deal with my backpack, which is considered déclassé in places like art museums. My backpack has my three-year-old laptop. Because it’s three years old, the battery doesn’t last long and I also carry my power supply. It has my paper and pens, in case I want to write or draw, which is rarely. It has a cable to charge my old phone. It has gum

61 Charlie Loyd, “Wealth, Risk, and Stuff,” Tupperwolf, 13 March 2013, http://vruba.tumblr.com/post/45256059128/wealth-risk-and-stuff.

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and sometimes a snack. Sunscreen and a water bottle in summer. A raincoat and gloves in winter. Maybe a book in case I get bored.

At the same time, Loyd goes on to say, things would be different if he had more money.

“If I were rich,” he writes, “I would carry a MacBook Air, an iPad mini as a reader, and

my wallet. My wallet would serve as everything else that’s in my backpack now. Go out

on the street and look, and I bet you’ll see that the richer people are carrying less.” What

Loyd is describing here is what one imagines Sutton’s “everyday carry” is, for we know

his MacBook is his most-prized possession. The more money you have, the less you have

to carry around with you. Once you ascend to a certain level—the president, say—you

might not even carry around money; you have people who do that for you.

Rich minimalists, Loyd argues, therefore have it backwards. It is not so much that

having less leads to freedom, but that economic freedom leads to having less: “When rich

people present the idea that they’ve learned to live lightly as a paradoxical insight, they

have the idea of wealth backwards. You can only have that kind of lightness through

wealth.” He offers up the following scenario to illustrate his point:

If you buy food in bulk, you need a big fridge. If you can’t afford to replace all the appliances in your house, you need several junk drawers. If you can’t afford car repairs, you might need a half-gutted second car of a similar model up on blocks, where certain people will make fun of it and call you trailer trash.

“Please,” Loyd pleads by way of conclusion, “if you are rich, stop explaining the idea of

freedom from stuff as if it’s a trick that even you have somehow mastered. The only way

to own very little and be safe is to be rich.”

Loyd’s insights reveal the class component of Sutton’s “innovations” and help

clarify some of the class dynamics of digital minimalism more broadly, for Sutton’s

views are in fact representative of a common technophilic attitude or consumer style. In

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the summer of 2011, when Sutton’s Cult of Less project became famous, digital

minimalism was the trend du jour. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, ran a story in

June 2011 about how, much to the puzzlement of some, “Silicon Valley’s rising young

stars are rejecting the traditional symbols of status: fast cars, yachts, luxury homes.”62

The article introduces readers to another group of people who are in effect digital

minimalists, although that term is not used. Aaron Patzer, for instance, a thirty-year-old

entrepreneur who sold his personal finance site Mint.com for $170 million in 2009 and is

now a top executive at the financial software giant Intuit, lives in a modest one-bedroom

Palo Alto apartment even though he could afford a large home. Dustin Moskovitz (one of

the founders of Facebook and “the world’s youngest billionaire”) remarks, “Things can’t

bring you happiness.” Even Mark Zuckerberg lists “minimalism” and “eliminating

desire” as his interests on Facebook. The article also quotes Alice Marwick who notes

that these Silicon Valley celebrities display their status not through what Thorstein

Veblen famously called “conspicuous consumption,” but through what might be called

“conspicuous asceticism.” Marwick says:

This is not a community that values good looks, visible wealth or having a hot body. Those are not the ways that they distinguish high status from low status. Technology millionaires don’t hobnob with celebrities or buy a fancy car. They travel to Thailand or they fund an incubator. These things are just as expensive, but that’s the classic hacker ethos that prizes the mind, not materials. (emphasis mine)

Marwick’s evocation of hacking here, seemingly out of the blue, is important, in part

because it draws on traditional gender stereotypes. “The hacker ethos is also classically

male,” the article tells us flatly, before quoting Marwick again: “Being concerned with

appearance, shopping for clothes and decorating your house are feminine values. Tech 62 Jessica Guynn, “Silicon Valley Status Symbols Emphasize Mind Over Material,” Los Angeles Times, 18 June 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/18/business/la-fi-silicon-status-20110618-sl-2.

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millionaires see that type of spending as silly and frivolous.” In other words, the world of

things—the physical world, the world of art and clothes and food and the body and so

on—is feminine, and the world of the computer—and the world of the mind from which

is springs and interacts with—is masculine. Minimalism, in such a schema, becomes a

form of hacking that is coded as masculine. At a time when everyone is a consumer,

digital minimalism represents a distinctly masculine consumer style that sets itself against

feminine consumption. Where Loyd highlights class, Marwick highlights gender. But

both illuminate the link between the “philosophy” of digital minimalism and the digital

cultural ethos of life hacking. Getting rid of one’s stuff, not carrying about or even

desiring stuff, is from the start conceived of as a form of hacking.

Who Can Live With Less?: Bruno, Babauta, and Hyde As Loyd and Marwick’s commentaries suggest, Sutton is not the only digital minimalist,

but yes, indicative of some sort of larger cultural trend. Around the same time he was

promoting his Cult of Less project, for example, self-styled digital minimalists like Dave

Bruno, Leo Babauta, and Andrew Hyde were engaged in similar orgies of inventory,

divesture, and promotion. In 2008, Dave Bruno started the 100 Things Challenge, “a

personal simple living project Dave did to break free from consumerism. He lived with

100 personal possessions for a year in order to form new habits of consumption.”63 This

project was written up in Time magazine in 2008 and Bruno published a book about his

experience, The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My

63 See http://guynameddave.com/about-the-100-thing-challenge/.

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Life, and Regained My Soul, in 2010.64 Today the 100 Things Challenge lives on as a

“movement” to inspire would-be digital minimalists to simplify their lives.

Leo Babauta, proprietor of the popular blog Zen Habits, ran for a time another

blog called mnmlist.65 (Get it?) In the spring of 2010, he cut Bruno’s challenge in half

and issued the 50 Things Challenge.66 He writes, “I’m listing all my personal possessions

and trying to keep them to 50 things. I challenge you to join me!” What follows is a list

remarkably similar to Sutton’s. The first item on it? An iMac. The second? A MacBook

Air. The third? An Iomega 1TB hard drive. Once again digital underpins this new brand

of minimalism as a consumer style. We also see its class valence. Who can afford to pare

down their possessions to fifty things? Well, Babauta would probably ask, who can

afford not to? Indeed, a post titled “minimalism isn’t just for the affluent” (lowercase

letters are a way of establishing one’s minimalist bona fides, apparently), Babauta takes

issue with the idea that the brand of digital minimalism he champions is just for rich

people.67 “I disagree,” he writes, “anyone can do it.” “Minimalism is simply eliminating

the unnecessary,” he explains. “And while the poor (anyone who’s not in the middle class

or above) might not have the ridiculously unnecessary things that the affluent have, there

are usually things that can be eliminated.” Babauta urges readers to create their own

versions of minimalism. He acknowledges that “It’s true that the poor are often thought

of as not having the luxury of even thinking about simplifying, or minimalism. They’re

too worried about putting food on the table, or where the rent is coming from, or how to

64 Lisa Mclaughlin, “How to Live with Just 100 Things,” Time, June 5, 2008, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812048,00.html; Dave Bruno, The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My Life, and Regained My Soul (New York: HarperCollins, 2010). 65 See http://mnmlist.com. 66 See http://mnmlist.com/50-things/. 67 See Leo Babauta, “minimalism isn’t just for the affluent,” mnmlist, http://mnmlist.com/not-affluent/.

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avoid creditors until the next paycheck,” but adds that “it doesn’t have to be true: anyone

can pause, breathe, and decide to live differently.” While Babauta comes off as eminently

reasonable in this and posts like “minimalism’s critics,” he is merely flipping things

around: minimalism may not be just for rich people, but Babauta pitches it as a way to

become rich. It is still something aspirational. And it is still, for all of Babauta’s New

Age jargon, something that is thoroughly undergirded by digital technologies.68

For those for whom even fifty things is too much, there is start-up founder and

conference organizer Andrew Hyde, who makes a cameo appearance on p. 76 of Tim

Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Body, and who, in 2010, got rid of everything he owned except for

fifteen things in order to travel the world. In so doing briefly became, like Sutton before

him, a media cause célèbre. After his original post about his “15 things” project, ABC

News did a story on Hyde.69 The popular blog Laughing Squid then commented on it.70

After that, Hyde’s story got picked up by the websites Reddit and LifeHack.org.71 Interest

in Hyde’s whittling down his possessions to fifteen things was so intense that two years

later, the Village Voice did a follow-up story with him.72 By this point, however, Hyde

had upgraded to thirty-nine things. But no matter. His story would be re-circulated online

68See Leo Babauta, “minimalism’s critics, mnmlist, http://mnmlist.com/tics/. 69 Andrew Hyde, “The 15 Things I Own,” http://andrewhy.de/the-15-things-i-own/. See http://abcnewsradioonline.com/technology-news/tech-entrepreneur-andrew-hyde-owns-15-things.html. 70 Scott Beale, “ABC News Radio Interviews Andrew Hyde Who Only Owns 15 Things,” April 28, 2011, http://laughingsquid.com/abc-news-radio-interviews-andrew-hyde-who-only-owns-15-things/. 71 Tucker Cummings, “Extreme Minimalism: Andrew Hyde and the 15-Item Lifestyle,” Lifehack.org, http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/extreme-minimalism-andrew-hyde-and-the-15-item-lifestyle.html. 72 Jen Doll, “Andrew Hyde, the Guy Who Only Owned 15 Things, Has Upsized,” Village Voice, January 17, 2012, http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/01/andrew_hyde_who_owned_15_things_has_upsized. php.

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on websites like Grist, Refinery 29, and Hacker News.73 Over a half million people went

back and viewed his original post.

Taken together, the stories Bruno, Babauta, and Hyde point to how, for a while at

least, interest in digital minimalism seemed inexhaustible, as did digital minimalists’

willingness to capitalize on it as “authorpreneurs.”

Millburn and Nicodemus: Thoreau with Wi-Fi I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses,

barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. —Henry David Thoreau, Walden74

As of 2014, the two bloggers waving the digital minimalist flag most visibly are Joshua

Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, aka “The Minimalists.”75 Best friends since

childhood, Millburn and Nicodemus have similar stories. Really it is a single story, and

one they tell over and over again. They were both “successful” young professionals. “A

few years ago,” they explain, “as we approached age 30, we had achieved everything that

was supposed to make us happy: we had great six-figure jobs, nice cars, big houses with

more bedrooms than inhabitants, pointless masses of toys, and scads of superfluous

stuff.” Unlike Sutton, who never really had anything, these guys bought into the whole

“he who dies with the most toys, wins” ethos of late twentieth-century American life.

They are who Sutton would have become had he not become a minimalist. And in the

eyes of many, they were living the American Dream. But they were unhappy. “We

discovered that working 70–80 hours a week for a corporation and buying even more

73 Andrew Hyde, “Minimalism Project Update: 39 Things,” http://andrewhy.de/minimalism-project-update-39-things/. 74 Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (1854; repr., Boston: Shambhala, 1992). 75 See http://www.theminimalists.com.

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stuff didn’t fill the void. In fact, it only brought us more debt and stress and anxiety and

fear and loneliness and guilt and overwhelm and depression,” they explain. “What’s

worse,” they continue, “we found out we didn’t have control of our time and thus didn’t

control our own lives. So we took back control using the principles of minimalism to

focus on what’s important in life—to focus on living meaningful lives.”76 As with Sutton,

the pursuit of things leads not only to a vague feeling of remorse, but to a more general

feeling of being out of control. Getting rid of stuff is again presented as a way of

regaining a sense of control, capturing the “overwhelm” (the verb turned into a noun),

and throwing or giving it away. Once that is in place, one can go about creating a

meaningful life.

Millburn and Nicodemus’s notion of a meaningful life, however, does not seem

that different from the life they left, save for being filled with less stuff. They just traded

one fast track for another, the entrepreneur track for the “authorpreneur” track. They

explain on their blog, for instance, that “in 2011, we left our corporate careers at age 30

to become full-time authors and speakers. After seven books, several of which were #1

bestsellers, we embarked on an international book tour with more than 3,300 attendees.”

Today these crossover authors write and speak about everything “from simple living and

pursuing your passion, to writing, publishing, entrepreneurship, health, relationships,

personal growth, and contribution.”77 In other words, they are still successful young

professionals (actually more successful young professionals), now they just have less

stuff.

76 “About,” The Minimalists, http://www.theminimalists.com/about/. 77 Ibid.

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Even though their basic message isn’t dissimilar from those of Sutton, Bruno,

Babauta, and the rest, Millburn and Nicodemus have received an incredible amount of

media attention. As they explain on their blog:

Since we started this site in December 2010, we’ve been fortunate enough to establish an online audience of more than 2 million annual readers and have been featured on CBS This Morning, ABC, NBC, FOX, NPR, CBC Radio, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times, Forbes, Elle Canada, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Austin American-Statesman, Seattle Times, Toronto Star, Globe & Mail, National Post, Vancouver Sun, Village Voice, LA Weekly, Zen Habits, and numerous other outlets throughout the world.78

Worth noting is how for Millburn and Nicodemus, being featured on fellow digital

minimalist Leo Babauta’s blog is more or less equivalent to being featured in the New

York Times. This says something not only about Babauta’s stature and Millburn and

Nicodemus’s desire to position themselves as protégés of sorts of his, but also about how

digital minimalism is becoming, like the first wave of life hacking before it, self-

referential. Their message, moreover, has not only resonated in the media, but in

business, academia, Silicon Valley—and the increasingly fuzzy space between the three.

“We have spoken at Harvard Business School and several large events (SXSW, World

Domination Summit), as well as many smaller venues, including churches, colleges,

corporate groups, libraries, soup kitchens, and various non-profit organizations,”

Millburn and Nicodemus inform us.79

In 2012, Millburn and Nicodemus, inspired by Henry David Thoreau and his

“wish to live deliberately,” moved to a cabin in Montana. In a November 26, 2012

appearance on the NPR radio show On Point, Nicodemus even referred to himself as

78 Ibid. 79 That soup kitchens are a place they give talks further suggests how digital minimalism is presented to poor people as a way to get rich.

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“Thoreau with Wi-Fi.”80 Their appearance on the show is noteworthy for another reason.

Before their segment, host Tom Ashbrook chatted briefly with Bloomberg News’s Matt

Townsend about holiday sales. Fifty percent of Americans, Townsend tells us,

participated in Black Friday two days prior. The point of the segment was to give

listeners some facts about how out of control consumerism has gotten in the U.S.

Juxtaposed with Millburn and Nicodemus’s interview, the point was that minimalism

might be the answer. What is important, though, is that Townsend’s report and Millburn

and Nicodemus’s ensuing segment were not that far apart insofar as gadget lust

undergirded both. The hot items that holiday shopping season, Townsend explained, were

things like Apple iPads, Amazon Kindles, and various other digital gadgets. Such gadgets

are precisely what the brand of minimalism Millburn and Nicodemus advocate for is

predicated on. Day 14 of their “21 Day Journey Into Minimalism” program, for example,

is “Digitize Your Stuff.”81 The On Point segment aimed to be a rebuke of consumerism,

but in many ways it ended up endorsing it. Such are the strange politics of digital

minimalism.

In February 2013, four months after moving to a remote cabin in Montana,

Millburn and Nicodemus moved to Missoula to start a publishing company with their

friend Colin Wright, “the de facto third Minimalist.”82 Thoreau tells us at the beginning

of Walden that he “live alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I

had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts” for “two

years and two months.” “At present,” he tells us, “I am a sojourner in civilized life

80 “The Minimalists,” On Point with Tom Ashbrook, NPR, November 26, 2012, http://onpoint.wbur.org/2012/11/26/the-minimalists. 81 “Day 14: Digitize,” The Minimalists, http://www.theminimalists.com/21days/day14/. 82 “Missoula and The Third Minimalist,” The Minimalists, http://www.theminimalists.com/missoula/.

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again.” Like Thoreau, the Minimalists’ time in the woods was a limited one. Unlike

Thoreau, their experiment did not in any way seem like an attempt to reflect on the role

of technology in their lives. Thoreau writes, “My purpose in going to Walden Pond was

not to live cheaply nor to live dearly, but to transact some private business.”83 The

Minimalists, by contrast, seem like they did it to live cheaply and dearly and to transact

some very public business. Part Yuppie vacation, part publicity stunt.

Walden, as Randy Alfred reminds us in Wired of all places, “offers deep insights

not just into the natural world and humanity’s place in it, but how that relationship was

being impacted—and degraded—by the Industrial Revolution. It remains to this day a

trenchant criticism of the excesses of technology.” Alfred calls attention to Thoreau’s oft-

cited critiques of the telegraph—“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph

from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to

communicate.”—and the railroad—“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”84

Notably, the Minimalists’ time in the woods generated no attacks on present-day

communication technologies. “Looking back at Thoreau,” writes Alexis Madrigal in The

Atlantic, “it’s important to realize that he was as out of sync with his own times as he

sometimes seems with ours. He’s part of a long-standing American counterculture, the

one that wonders whether all of our irritable striving to build and buy things is worth the

bother.”85 The Minimalists fancy themselves members of a counterculture, but they too

readily equate their strict antimaterialist message with a broader anticonsumerist one.

83 Thoreau. 84 Randy Alfred, “Aug. 9, 1854: Thoreau Warns, ‘The Railroad Rides on Us’” Wired, 9 Aug 2010, http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/08/0809thoreau-walden-published/#ixzz0w7d3MIT3. 85 Alexis C. Madrigal, “Thoreau’s Walden Is 156 Years Old Today, but Relevant as Ever,” The Atlantic, August 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2010/08/thoreaus-walden-is-156-years-old-today-but-relevant-as-ever/61169/.

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While part of their message does have a connection to an older, anti-industrial

counterculture, as “authorpreneurs” they embrace what might be called digital

producerism, which makes them wholly in sync with digital capitalism. They may

wonder why buying some things is worth the bother, but they are strivers all the same.

Ryan Cordell reminds us that “while Thoreau is often caricatured as a Luddite, he

was actually deeply invested, both personally and philosophically, in thinking through the

implications of technological change.”86 The Minimalists are not. Technology is what

props up Millburn and Nicodemus’s lifestyle. Cordell sees Walden “as an attempt to

decipher which technologies serve human flourishing and which may work against it.”

While Millburn and Nicodemus do reflect on their use of specific technologies in posts

like “Reasons I Don’t Own a TV,” “Why I’m Getting Rid of My Phone,” and “Killing the

Internet at Home Is the Most Productive Thing I’ve Ever Done,” they never really seem

interested in calling new technology or digital productivity themselves as categories into

question. Significantly, in their aforementioned On Point appearance, Millburn admits to

having an Internet connection at home again. Nicodemus may think of himself, and his

partner, as “Thoreau with Wi-Fi,” but the more one reads Thoreau, the more their casual

appropriation of Thoreau’s model of transforming self seems opportunistic. While

Thoreau, for instance, defended the antislavery radical John Brown, Millburn and

Nicodemus, like Ferriss and Sutton before them, call for no similar sociocultural or

economic changes, despite living at a time of police murders, poverty, mass

incarceration, war, illegal surveillance, failing schools, and ecological collapse. Theirs is,

one might say, a civil obedience.

86 Ryan Cordell, “Hacking Walden Pond,” 11 Jun 2011, http://ryan.cordells.us/blog/2011/06/11/hacking-walden-pond/.

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Playing at Austerity Collectively, Sutton, Bruno, Babauta, Hyde, Millburn, and Nicodemus are part of a

growing number of people embracing a lifestyle and society grounded in a digital

sociality that eschews excess stuff. The number of blogs devoted to minimalism today is

in the hundreds, but one of the things many them have in common is that they try to

convince their readers to become minimalists. These bloggers issue “challenges” hoping

to spur their readers into paring down and present themselves as models of how to do so

and be personally and professionally successful. It is this “you too can be a minimalist”

message that I turn my attention to more fully now.

In her 2007 book Stages of Emergency, Tracy Davis argues that mid-twentieth

century civil defense drills were “inherently and crucially theatrical.”87 That is, people

living in the United States and other countries were encouraged to “play act” at surviving

nuclear war. Such play-acting, moreover, was anything but fun and games. “In the Cold

War,” Davis explains,

nuclear attack was assumed to be a nationwide or multinational catastrophe, literally not symbolically, tangibly and factually, jeopardizing not just liberty and the pursuit of happiness but life itself for millions or even billions of people simultaneously, as well as all who might come after them. Scenarios envisioned various risks, depending on population distribution, geography, resource allocation, or assumptions about the enemy’s targets, and endless variations were possible. Civil defense exercises focused on making this plethora imaginable, manageable, and most of all, capable of being acted upon, at least in part.88

Davis’s book “is not a history of civil defense but a historical treatment of how problems

were investigated through theatrical techniques and rehearsal methodologies”; her claim

is not “that everything was ‘performance’ but a more sophisticated … claim that theater

87 Tracy C. Davis, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2. 88 Ibid., 3.

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… had a utility in twentieth-century governance, education, and social life, central not

only to how anxiety was expressed but more importantly to how people envisioned ways

to identify and resolve anxious problems … it is not ‘performance’ that matters here but

the preparation for it: namely, rehearsal and what was accomplished through it.”89

Rehearsal, in short, was a way for people to prepare for and manage anxieties about

unprecedented peril.

Though few of us, save for perhaps the most committed survivalists, no longer

rehearse for nuclear war by doing things like duck-and-cover drills, it would be a mistake

to think that we no longer rehearse for other catastrophes in all sorts of ways.90 As Davis

asks suggestively the end of her introduction, “The identified perils have changed since

the end of the Cold War, and there are more technological sophisticated tools for

monitoring them, but has our recourse for practicing risk management or abatement

fundamentally altered?” In her afterward, the answer she offers to this question is a

resounding no. Only now, instead of rehearsing for nuclear annihilation, we rehearse for

terrorist attacks (and, I would argue, increasingly, natural disasters as well). “Civil

defense scenarios, briefly archived in the 1990s, are current again,” Davis writes,

bolstering her claim with numerous examples drawn from the last decade.91

I would like to go a step further and suggest that Davis’s notion of rehearsal here

might be usefully applied to how we prepare for and psychically cope with all sorts of

other, marginally-less-apocalyptic disasters. We, for instance, rehearse for economic

disaster. A related way of thinking about this comes from Richard Grustin by way of Ian

89 Ibid., 4. 90 An interesting way to view Tim Ferriss’s “experiments” discussed in the previous chapter, for instance, is as rehearsals for disaster. See also this book by Tim Ferriss’s friend: Neil Strauss, Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life (New York: Harper, 2009). 91 Davis, 332.

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Bogost. Grustin argues that media, via what he calls “premediation,” help us prepare for

disaster. As Bogost explains, “According to Grusin, premediation is a phenomenon in

which the media ecosystem depicts possible future calamities in order to heighten public

anticipation. Premediation is not new … but Grusin argues that it became more common

after the turn of the millennium, as a way to help global citizens ‘practice’ their anxieties

so as not to be faced with an unexpected trauma like 9/11.” “Collectively,” Bogost

concludes, “we premediate not to predict the future, but to practice for its many possible

realities.92

In light of Davis’s and Grusin’s arguments, let us now consider another kind of

digital minimalist website: Foster Huntington’s The Burning House.93 On it, digital

minimalism gets aestheticized in the form of carefully curated and composed

photographs, the crafting and consumption of which, I argue, constitute a rehearsal for

disaster. At first blush, it is not obviously a digital minimalist blog, but the ideological

work it is doing is similar. The site poses a simple question: “If your house was burning,

what would you take with you? It’s a conflict between what’s practical, valuable and

sentimental. What you would take reflects your interests, background and priorities.

Think of it as an interview condensed into one question.” Readers submit a single

photograph, usually taken from above, of all the stuff they would ideally grab before

heading out the door if their house was on fire. Foster Huntington, the site’s proprietor,

then posts the photo along with the person’s name, age, location, and website (if

92 Ian Bogost, “Snowpocalypse in Atlanta and The Walking Dead,” The Atlantic, 30 Jan, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/01/snowpocalypse-in-atlanta-and-em-the-walking-dead-em/283450/. Here Bogost is drawing on Richard Grusin’s Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010). 93 See http://theburninghouse.com.

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applicable) followed by a list of the items in the photo, sometimes with short

descriptions.94

In the spin-off book The Burning House, Huntington (who, yes, is also an

“authorpreneur”) gives a history of the site and explains some of the thinking behind it.95

He writes, “on May 10th, 2011 www.theburninghouse.com launched with ten posts.

Within a few hours came my first submission from a complete stranger in Massachusetts,

and then an hour later another submission came in from England.”96 It was, in other

words, popular from the get-go. Huntington, like the other bloggers discussed above, had

hit a nerve. “The Burning House clearly raised a question that people wanted to both

answer and discuss. Word spread quickly, and within just a few days the project was

being written up in the media. This traction drove submissions to the site from all over

the world.”97 Later he tells us that “Eighty years separate the oldest and youngest

participants, and every continent, except Antarctica, is represented.”98

This is the photograph and list of its contents from the first post from May 2011

by Foster Huntington himself:

94 Huntington, a twentysomething former knowledge worker, is also the proprietor of A Restless Transplant (http://www.arestlesstransplant.com), a site dedicated to his adventures living out of his van and traveling the country. I would, needless to say, call him a digital minimalist. Here’s how describes A Restless Transplant: “I left my design job in New York In August 2011 and bought a VW van. Since then, I have put 50000 miles driving around the west, surfing and camping. These are some of my stories and photos.” 95 Foster Huntington, The Burning House (New York: HarperCollins, 2012). 96 Ibid., x. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid., xii.

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Figure 4: Foster Huntington's most important possessions

And here’s the description that follows the photo99:

Name: Foster Huntington Location: New York City Occupation: Fashion Website: http://restlesstransplant.blogspot.com/ List: My Grandfather’s Explorer Scout Shirt Naked and Famous Jeans 99 See http://theburninghouse.com/post/5215907095/foster-huntington.

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Zeiss 35mm f/2 Nike SFB boots Ralph Lauren Alligator Belt Leatherman Wave Black One basalt rock from the Columbia River Gorge One shell from Nicaragua Three shells and one stone from the Maine coast 45 RPM Orange Bandanna Vintage Woolrich Horse skin hunting gloves LaCie Rugged External Hard Drive (all of my photos and image research) Rolex Submariner Date with Zulu Ballistic Nylon Band Oakley Razor Blades Ernest Thompson Seaton, “Two Little Savages” (well worth a read) iPhone 4 Not Pictures Canon 5D Mark II Sigma 50mm f/1.4 Huntington’s photo and description are simultaneously unique to him and typical of the

hundreds of photos and descriptions people all over the world have been submitted to The

Burning House in the years since Huntington started the blog. Commonplace, mass-

produced goods like blue jeans and Nikes—albeit ones for which Huntington feels some

sort or sentimental attachment, or perhaps just deems practical necessities—sit next to

personal items such as a shirt that belonged to his grandfather and rocks and shells from

beaches walked on and rivers waded in on his travels. The quotidian and affectively-

charged keepsakes exist in a museumized, Zen garden-like display alongside both

modern and not-so-modern technological artifacts like a Zeiss camera lens, a LaCie hard

drive, and an iPhone 4—the biographical juxtaposed with the average, the random with

the intentioned and poignant.

Spend time looking through the website, or pick any post at random, and one is

struck by how often practical necessities, personal mementos, and technological tools

appear in people’s photos and inventories, and almost in equal proportion, too. On the

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one hand, yes of course, every photo is unique, a snapshot of people’s individual lives

and what they value—as Huntington says, “A mother of three in her late thirties has very

different priorities from a single, twenty-two-year-old man. Their selections reflect these

differences.”100 On the other hand, there is a relentless sameness to these photographs.

Clothes, souvenirs, and technologies appear over and over. Passports, Moleskine

notebooks, Apple computers, bags, headphones, and cameras are recurring motifs.

Occasionally something will stand out: a cat, a baby, a gun, but those just serve to call

attention to the uniformity of the other photos.

Likewise, almost all of the photographs are staged the same way: items arranged

neatly on the floor and shot from above. In an article about all the various websites

devoted to photographs of things organized neatly, Rob Walker characterized this style as

taxonomic: “There’s certainly nothing naturalistic about it; these are practically

inventories.”101 The connection to Sutton’s list-making is significant. While more attuned

to the affective relations of things in the world, Huntington’s displays are also object

ledgers of what’s left after the apocalypse, so to speak. Walker argues smartly that such

sites, in an era of economic austerity, allow people to vicariously consume stuff without

having to deal with its attendant hassles. They are, he suggests, attempts “to reconcile the

more virtuously possession-resistant stance that some now strike with the stubborn reality

that, ultimately, people really like stuff.” These two things are reconciled through a

design aesthetic:

100 Huntington, Burning House, ix. 101 Rob Walker, “Fun Stuff,” New York Times, 11 Feb 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/magazine/13FOB-consumed-t.html. See, for instance, http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com. This visual aesthetic is known well enough that the site http://coolcollections.tumblr.com is able to parody it by reproducing such images but adding a dildo—yes, a dildo—to every one via Photoshop.

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Best of all, we don’t even have to deal with these collections as physical things; we can simply enjoy them as digital presentations. It is everything we love about stuff—but without the stuff. In a reversal of the desire to have your cake and eat it too, we can consume these lovely objects and not-have them, too. In recent years, we have added a form of vicarious possession to our consumption: there is so much covetable material to drool over online that it is no longer possible, let alone necessary, to imagine owning a tenth of it. You might say that simply pondering stuff has become a form of entertainment.

Walker is on to something here. A site like The Burning House allows visitors to

vicariously consume other people’s carefully-curated images and brand name–conscious

descriptions of their most valuable possessions. It is a kind of show-and-tell for adults, a

way of curating yourself via objects. At another level, though, recalling Davis and

Grusin, the site also functions as a rehearsal, a demonstration of rehearsal, and a call to

rehearse. The pretext is a “house fire,” but it could just as easily be any number of

disasters. What would you grab before a hurricane or tornado or flood destroyed your

home? Visitors, in short, are asked to imagine “what if?” Contributor-curators who

participate have already imagined it; their culling and photographing of their “stuff” both

evidence of their rehearsal and an invitation to others to do the same.

Thus the popularity of the Burning House raises the question of whether a house

fire is what is really being rehearsed. If we combine Davis’s idea about rehearsal being

one of the ways people express and try to resolve their anxieties with Walker’s idea about

websites like this helping people reconcile their urge to be free of possessions with the

pleasure they take in them, we discover that the burning house of the title is a way to ask

people to think hard about the stuff they own at a time when the logics of austerity and

virtualization intersect with threats of disaster, whether from terrorism, global-warming

triggered natural disasters, or the more palatable, more easy to play at, old-fashioned

house fire that circuitously evokes family or private life in homes. When your house is

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foreclosed on, you can take pleasure in this fascinating box-like snapshot, the site seems

to be saying. The pictures and inventories on a site like The Burning House, then, do the

same sort of cultural work Kelly Sutton did with the list of things he was trying to divest

himself of—namely, performing minimalism. The link between Sutton’s and

Huntington’s sites is the centrality of digital devices. Both Huntington and Sutton present

digital devices as essential goods and imply they can live out of a hard drive. Just as

Sutton jettisons almost everything he owns save for his beloved MacBook Pro, the

contributors to The Burning House imaginatively jettison almost everything they own

except their most-prized possessions amid a panoply of laptops, iPhones, Kindles, and

hard drives.

Huntington also invokes biographies, histories, and kinship relations writ large,

and the affect and memory associated with them, when he tells us that “Hearing people’s

stories and seeing their submissions throughout the course of working on this project has

taught me that I need a lot fewer material possessions. When I first considered what I

would save, I selected eighteen items. Six months into the project and my selection

dropped down to just two”102 The possessions in the above picture have been reduced to

just two: a portable hard drive and a camera, the first to hold the past and the second to

capture the future. If Dave Bruno whittled down his possessions to a hundred things, Leo

Babauta to fifty, and Andrew Hyde to fifteen, Huntington has topped them all: he owns

more things, of course, but in the event of an emergency, he would only take two.

Like other digital minimalists before him, Huntington can’t resist pitching his

project as a broader political statement:

102 Huntington, Burning House, xi.

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Today, developed countries are consuming more than ever before. This culture of consumption is often fueled by people’s desire to define themselves by the possessions they amass. The Burning House takes a different approach to personal definition. By removing easily replaceable objects and instead focusing on things unique to them, people are able to capture their personalities in a photograph. More to the point, the objects in the photographs act as stand-ins for key moments in people’s lives and thus, in a way, for the people themselves and all that has shaped them. Tidbits of where they live, what they do for a living, and what they care about manifest themselves in what they choose to include. The most unique items, and therefore the most identifiable to a specific person, often have little to no monetary value. Items like teddy bears, film negatives, and letters from friends are unique to a person’s life and cannot be bought on Amazon. And while the four generations represented in this book expose many differences in people’s selections, at heart there are fundamental and telling similarities. At first blush the younger generations represented here might seem more tech focused—repeatedly saving iPhones, laptops, and hard drives—but the reality is that these choices mirror older generations’ valuing of film negatives, journals, and letters. These items address the same essential connection to others and to self-expression.103

While Huntington is right that today’s digital technologies and yesterday’s analog ones

are both forms of media, his statement here doesn’t allow for media specificity. A Kindle

is not just a new kind of book, but a new kind of library, a new kind of bookstore, a new

kind of reading experience, and, most troublingly, a new system of control. A hard drive

with thousands and thousands of pictures is only superficially similar to a handful of film

negatives. At some point, a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. The work

Huntington does at the end of the above quote to justify the presence of digital doodads

serves to call attention to how, increasingly, it is these devices that people want to save.

In other words, we have reached a point in human history where what is on hard drives is

now equal to or more important to people than what is outside them.

103 Ibid., xii.

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Graham Hill and the Backlash Against Minimalism In a 2013 opinion piece in the New York Times, Graham Hill shared a story about how he

got rich from his entrepreneurial Internet dealings, got a lot of stuff, got rid of it, and then

got happy living in a 420-square foot apartment with very few belongings.104 We have, of

course, heard this story before; it is the same story the Minimalists tell. Working in the

confessional mode favored by many digital minimalists, Hill begins his article by

burnishing his minimalist credentials: “I live in a 420-square-foot studio. I sleep in a bed

that folds down from the wall. I have six dress shirts. I have 10 shallow bowls that I use

for salads and main dishes. When people come over for dinner, I pull out my extendable

dining room table. I don’t have a single CD or DVD and I have 10 percent of the books I

once did.” If nothing else, minimalists love showing off how minimalist they are by

cataloging how little they own.105

Hill’s is, moreover, a quasi-religious narrative of confession and redemption in

the neo-Puritan tradition. He is an anticollection collector, a kind of anticonsumption

consumerist. “I have come a long way from the life I had in the late ’90s, when, flush

with cash from an Internet start-up sale, I had a giant house crammed with stuff—

electronics and cars and appliances and gadgets,” he tells us. But “this stuff ended up

running my life, or a lot of it; the things I consumed ended up consuming me.” So he got

rid of all of it. Or almost all of it. He concludes the piece by telling us, somewhat

cloyingly, “My space is small. My life is big.”

104 Graham Hill, “Living With Less. A Lot Less,” New York Times, 9 March 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/living-with-less-a-lot-less.html. 105 By contrast, “In 2008, Americans owned an average of 92 items of clothing, not counting underwear, bras and pajamas … The typical wardrobe contained, among other garments, 16 T-shirts, 12 casual shirts, seven dress shirts, seven pairs of jeans, five pairs of casual slacks, four pairs of dress pants, and two suits—a clothing cornucopia.” Virginia Postrel, “Saved by the Closet,” The Wall Street Journal, 23 October 2010 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304410504575560552064806106.html.

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Various commentators, à la Lloyd, were quick to seize on Hill’s seemingly total

lack of awareness of his own class privilege. The reactions were swift and brutal. At The

Nation, Richard Kim called Hill’s piece “a majestic display of guileless narcissism,”

arguing that Hill’s criticism of American consumerism is misguided, and that “Hill

and The New York Times would be better off lecturing Washington about pursuing fair

labor practices, tougher regulations and socializing medicine and education than they

would hectoring people for spending too much on stuff.” On Gawker, Hamilton Nolan

wrote: “The problem here is not the message. The problem is the messenger. More

specifically, it is the messenger using his own life as supporting evidence for the

message. … A millionaire does not have the standing to tell regular people that money is

overrated. Graham Hill moved into a smaller apartment and sold some of his stuff. But he

sure as fuck didn’t empty his bank accounts. It’s easy not to have material things when

you can just buy whatever you need, whenever you need it.”106

The people seizing on Hill’s privilege are not just being churlish; Hill operates at

the nexus of several powerful trends. He is the founder of the environmentalist site

Treehugger.com and runs a website called LifeEdited.com. LifeEdited is both a blog and

a business. As a business, it’s “in discussions with developers in several cities to create

apartment buildings based on” minimalist concepts. In other words, he is one of the

106 Hamilton Nolan, “It Would Be Great If Millionaires Would Not Lecture Us on ‘Living With Less,’” Gawker, March 11, 2013, http://gawker.com/5989989/it-would-be-great-if-millionaires-would-not-lecture-us-on-living-with-less. See also Seth Werkheiser, “The Minimalist Choice,” 3 March 2013, http://sethw.com/2013/the-minimalist-choice/; Charlie Loyd, “Wealth, risk, and stuff,” Tupperwolf, 13 March 2013, http://vruba.tumblr.com/post/45256059128/wealth-risk-and-stuff; Sarah Goodyear, “The Minimalist Living Movement Could Use a Different Spokesperson,” Citylab, 21 March 2013, http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/03/minimalist-living-movement-could-use-different-spokesperson/5040/; and Katy Waldman, “Is Minimalism Really Sustainable?” Slate, 27 Mar 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/03/graham_hill_essay_in_the_new_york_times_is_minimalism_really_sustainable.single.html.

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leading advocates of the “tiny house” and/or “micro apartment” movement.107

Additionally, the critiques leveled at Hill might be applied to all of the minimalist blogs

discussed above, all of which are run by relatively well-off men comfortably ensconced

within the information economy. The brand of minimalism they endorse is fundamentally

digital because their lives are fundamentally digital.

Digital Minimalism and Flexible Labor But if digital minimalism is, mainly, a rich man’s game, the cultural and ideological work

it is doing is trying to make it anything but. As a new sort of subject position, digital

minimalists are on the vanguard of a neoliberal digital capitalism where everyone must

make themselves “flexible” in order to be successful.108

Those who choose to be digital minimalists do seem, more often than not, to have

a particular sort of privilege, even if it is merely the privilege to make the choice to be a

digital minimalist in the first place. But in another way, the lifestyle they advocate is not

so much one of privilege as it is a depressing dedicating of oneself to digital devices, of

lashing oneself to the great wheel of digital capitalism. Digital minimalism purports to

make one more flexible in a labor market that increasingly demands flexibility. Getting

rid of stuff is put forward as a means of realizing your personal and professional dreams à

la the Minimalists, but it is also fundamentally a way of repositioning yourself to be more

107 See, for example, Merete Mueller and Christopher Smith, Tiny: A Story About Living Small, 2013, http://tiny-themovie.com/; Natalie Shutler, “Home Shrunken Home,” New York Times, February 20, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/realestate/micro-apartments-tiny-homes-prefabricated-in-brooklyn.html. 108 Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel, “Unpredictable Schedules Inflicted on Workers Are Wrecking People’s Lives,” The American Prospect, October 10, 2014, http://prospect.org/article/unpredictable-schedules-inflicted-workers-are-wrecking-peoples-lives.

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in rhythm with sped-up digital capitalism.109 Thus, “austerity,” “flexibility,” and

“digitization”—three of today’s biggest buzzwords—are all connected.

Here, for instance, is Robert Hassan on “‘flexible accumulation’—a production

system based upon the centrality of the flexibility of machines and workers” (50–51):

The rising influence of neoliberalism was aimed at freeing up capital, to make it flexible and mobile and able to promote faster innovation and more rapid change, and then respond to change with yet more innovation. The mantra of “efficiency, efficiency, efficiency,” was to return as the solution to stagnation, to loss of productivity and (of course) to the loss of profits that derived from these. Computerization was seen by some visionary engineers and business people as a way to radically improve speed, flexibility and efficiency. With computers automating human tasks and taking fatigue and error out of much of the production process—and injecting potentially limitless and untiring speed into it—productivity levels could, in theory, go off the charts.110

Flexible systems, Hassan observes, demand flexible workers. The problem is you cannot

just order people to be “flexible.” It is like telling someone to relax; as soon as you say

“Relax,” they tense up. You have to approach the matter from a different angle. Hassan

explains:

To force people to be more “efficient” and “flexible,” to compulsorily require them to synchronize with an increasingly accelerated way of life, and to develop an obsession with computers, is clearly not going to work in ostensibly democratic societies. What was needed … was … the “construction of consent”; that is to say, for the engineering of a shift in what kind of ideas dominate society and to make these ideas so deep-seated that they appear as “common sense.” In short, the fundamental battle was (and still is) an ideological one.”111

This is exactly how I see the digital minimalist movement functioning. That is, it is a kind

of palliative justification for neoliberalism couched in the language of liberation by

privileged techies so taken with the sleek, austere life of minimalism that they cannot see

109 Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 110 Robert Hassan, The Information Society (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), 45–46. 111 Ibid., 67.

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how they are erasing themselves as human beings.112 Sometimes, as Hassan notes, the

language we use means precisely the opposite of what we say it does: “Speed, flexibility

and efficiency … were the watchwords repeated over and over again … until they

became embedded principles. If these terms had a slightly harsh and onerous ring to

them, then there were other central tenets such as ‘empowerment’ and ‘freedom,’ and

‘entrepreneurialism’ and ‘individuality,’ to act as emolument.”113 These are the digital

minimalists’ stock phrases as well.

Digital minimalism is also characterized by a longing to escape the physical world

and its various ecological, political, and social problems. As George Packer put it in

2013, as the problems of the physical, material world get more and more irremediable,

life in the virtual world looks better and better. Every day some “revolutionary” piece of

technology is introduced, the stock market goes up, corporate profits rise, and yet

America’s economic and social decline continues. The percentage of corporate profits going to employees is at its lowest level since 1966. Unemployment remains stuck around eight per cent, and the long-term jobless make up almost forty per cent of the total—historically high figures that continue to baffle economists. “We have an unemployment crisis and only a debt problem,” says Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate at M.I.T. The concentration of wealth at the top grows ever more pronounced. From 2009 to 2011—the years of the financial crisis and the recovery—the income of the top one per cent rose 11.2 per cent. The income of the bottom ninety-nine per cent actually shrank 0.4 per cent.114

112 Dan Schiller provides a tidy definition of neoliberalism: “Neoliberalism comes by its name because its adherents’ primary aim—paring unwanted state oversight and regulation of the economy to gain more unfettered freedom of action for private firms—resuscitates the liberal economic policy of Victorian Britain. Markets should be left along to obey their presumed natural logic: so goes the laissez-faire doctrine that was reenshrined as domestic orthodoxy during the 1980s and assumed global preeminence during the 1990s.” Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System, 1–2. 113 Hassan, 67. 114 George Packer, “Upgrade or Die,” New Yorker, 6 March 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/03/technological-perfectionism-and-income-inequality.html.

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But life in “the cloud”? Life in “the cloud” looks great. Here Packer invokes

Negroponte’s distinction between atoms and bits. As the “atom world” grows more

chaotic, the hyper-controlled “bit world” grows more attractive:

Obsessive upgrading and chronic stagnation are intimately related, in the same way that erotic fantasies are related to sexual repression. The fetish that surrounds Google Glass or the Dow average grows ever more hysterical as the economic status of the majority of Americans remains flat. When things don’t work in the realm of stuff, people turn to the realm of bits. If the physical world becomes intransigent, you can take refuge in the virtual world, where you can solve problems.115

So, while minimalism in general has an anticonsumerist and environmental component to

it, as well as a spiritual and religious component dating back thousands of years, the

digital minimalisms of the above blogs seem like hysterical, reactionary attempts to

“jump into” the world of the computer. And while digital minimalism may bill itself as

somewhat countercultural, the sleek, fashionable lifestyles it promotes—like that of boat-

dwelling James Hamilton of Amazon—are actually right in line with digital capitalism

and neoliberalism. If, as I suggested in chapter 1, one day we are all going to be hackers,

one day we might also all be digital minimalists—only that, contrary to George Carlin’s

position, that will no longer be radical, but rather right in line with the digital capitalist

status quo.

The Materiality of Immateriality

Computing systems are suffused through and through with the constraints of their materiality. —Jean-François Blanchette

In this chapter I have tried to establish that there is an obsession among a certain breed of

tech geek for getting rid of all their stuff. I see this as insidious, a way of merging, Borg- 115 Ibid.

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like, into the computer—and thus the ultimate sort of life hack—so as to make oneself

more flexible under digital capitalism—a way of life perhaps best captured by Zygmunt

Bauman’s resonant phrase “liquid modernity” and the life of precarity, speed, and

variability it implies.116 This life is pitched, perversely, as a sort of freedom. But what

else might be wrong with it? My answer to that question, by way of conclusion, is that

digital minimalism operates under and perpetuates the illusion that the bright, shiny

future promised by “the cloud” is somehow independent of the material world. The

digital world these minimalists embrace as an escape from stuff is, ironically, as tied to

stuff as the world of stuff they are trying to leave behind; they have merely abstracted and

put it at one remove from themselves so as not to have to think about it. Thus the digital

minimalism advocated by Sutton, Bruno, et al. is a pernicious fantasy because it is based

on multiple delusions: first, that it is truly emancipatory, and second, that “the cloud” is a

new dematerialized utopian space. In the end, the bright, shiny, austere world of digital

minimalism is very much a part of the dirty, messy, complex world of stuff.

A number of scholarly and popular sources discuss the material infrastructure of

“the Internet.” Yet the very thought of a physical reality undergirding our information

ecosystem probably still seems strange to the many of us who have been sold and are

invested in the fantasy of “virtual” space as distinct from “real” space, an illusion Nathan

Jurgenson calls “digital dualism.”117 Indeed, the Internet—despite the weightlessness the

metaphor of “the cloud” suggests—is a thoroughly physical thing. Digital minimalists fail

to keep in mind that their stuff-free, computer-powered lives depend on vast physical

116 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2000). 117 Nathan Jurgeson, “Digital Dualism vs Augmented Reality,” Cyborgology, 24 Feb 2011, http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/.

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infrastructures of computers and cabling, the manufacture and disposal of which are

incredibly brutal and toxic.

I am hardly the first person to observe that “the cloud”—and by extension the

“cloud life” digital minimalists promote—is not the dematerialized heaven it presents

itself as. In fact, as rhetoric pumping up “the cloud” becomes more common, so too have

people sought to pull back the curtain on its fundamental materiality. 2012, for instance,

saw the publication of Andrew Blum’s book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the

Internet.118 In it, Blum tries to map what might be called the nuts and bolts of a system—

namely, the Internet—most people, I think it is fair to say, see as abstract and intangible.

Blum calls attention to the data centers of tech companies like Google and Amazon and

the continent-spanning labyrinths of cables under the ocean in order to emphasize the

“thingness” of the Internet. It is literally, as his title suggests, made of tubes. He writes,

“For all the breathless talk of the supreme placelessness of our new digital age, when you

pull back the curtain, the networks of the Internet are as fixed in real, physical places as

any railroad or telephone system ever was.”

The disconnect between how we think of the Internet and what it actually is is

staggering. Below is a picture, found via the Frank Chimero post discussed briefly below,

of one of Google’s Data Centers. Note, pretty colors aside, how industrial it looks, how

neotechnic, how much like waterworks or sewage treatment plant or oil refinery, how

thoroughly non-minimalist it looks. This is the part of the Internet most of us don’t see,

118 Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 9.

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that we don’t want to see, that we tuck away in out-of-the-way places like Douglas

County, Georgia (population 132,403) so that we don’t have to see.119

Figure 5: Douglas County, GA Google Data Center

2012 also saw a New York Times investigation of the environmental impacts of

these big data centers.120 It notes: “tens of thousands of data centers that now exist to

support the overall explosion of digital information. Stupendous amounts of data are set

in motion each day as, with an innocuous click or tap, people download movies on

iTunes, check credit card balances through Visa’s Web site, send Yahoo e-mail with files

attached, buy products on Amazon, post on Twitter or read newspapers online.” Such

data centers, however, are “sharply at odds with [the computer industry’s] image of sleek 119 “Douglas County, Georgia,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_County%2C_Georgia. The population figure is drawn from the 2010 census. 120 James Glanz, “Power, Pollution and the Internet,” New York Times, 22 Sep 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html.

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efficiency and environmental friendliness.” It is not just that at its base the Internet is a

physical thing, or even that it consumes power, it is that it consumes a lot of power, and

badly, and Americans, who never like being told no, are using more than their fair share

of it. “Worldwide,” the New York Times notes, “the digital warehouses use about 30

billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants.

… Data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the

estimates show.” The article quotes a data center designer as saying, “A single data center

can take more power than a medium-size town.”

Not only do data centers use a lot of energy, they use it inefficiently. The Times

notes that “data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the

grid.” Many are so wasteful, in fact, that they are considered serious polluters: “In Silicon

Valley, many data centers appear on the state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant

Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel polluters.” One of the reasons for

this is that data centers have to be up and running at full speed 24/7/365 lest Americans,

increasingly embracing “always on” lifestyles, are inconvenienced. When all your stuff is

virtual and exists in the cloud, you’re probably going to want to have access to it

whenever you like. Thus, ironically insofar as digital minimalists sees themselves as

environmentalists, they are the sort of people most likely to be inconvenienced by a data

center slowdown. The irony is almost tragic. “These physical realities of data,” the Times

says, “are far from the mythology of the Internet: where lives are lived in the ‘virtual’

world and all manner of memory is stored in ‘the cloud.’” No kidding.

More recently, Nicholas Carr has written about how the idea that the Internet can

free us from the material world, that “bits” are replacing “atoms” as Negroponte put it,

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has a long history.121 Carr goes so far as to suggest that the atoms vs. bits debates might

be “the foundational dichotomy of our time.” But, of course, he notes, “Atoms vs. Bits is

a false dichotomy. When bits enter the world, they take material form: always have,

always will.”

Carr, drawing on Jean-François Blanchette’s 2011 article “A Material History of

Bits” and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s 2008 book Mechanisms: New Media and the

Forensic Imagination, writes that “we have allowed ourselves to be blinded to the

fundamental materialism of the bit, as manifested in local and cloud storage systems and

all the other mechanisms of computing and networking.”122 A bit later, he writes, “A

cloud data center run by a Google or an Amazon or an Apple is in the business of the

material inscription and the material distribution of goods every bit as much as is a

printing press or a record pressing plant. Recognizing the fact of digital materiality helps

strip away some of the political fantasies inspired by digitization,” of which, “austerity”

is one. Carr then quotes Blanchette at length:

A focus on materiality highlights that computation is a mechanical process based on the limited resources of processing power, storage, and connectivity. Indeed, the computing professions devote much of their activity to the management of these limitations. In mediating access to the physical resources of computation, infrastructure software must also manage the competing demands users place on them. A material analysis foregrounds how systems design must necessarily engage in the oldest political problem in the world: the allocation of scarce resources among competing stakeholders. While the shift to cloud computing, the defining infrastructural work of our time, is typically framed either in the language of technical rationality or that of the information age’s infinite frontier, materiality provides for an analysis of infrastructure building in terms of the politics of resource allocation. Indeed, a focus on materiality suggests a profound

121 Nicholas Carr, “Bits are things, too,” Rough Type, 29 March 2013, http://www.roughtype.com/?p=3097. 122 Jean-François Blanchette, “A Material History of Bits,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62.6 (June 2011): 1042–1057; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

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disconnect between such political work and the self-portrayal of computing science as primarily concerned with the design of efficient abstractions.123

In other words, it is important to bring the conversation back to hoary issues like the

allocation of resources precisely because cloud computing is not usually discussed in

those terms. This is where the issues of dematerialization and digital capitalism meet up

again. For as Carr writes,

Once we see that the shift to the digital economy entails a shift not from Flesh to Mind but from Flesh to Flesh, from one set of essential substrates to another … we can begin to see more clearly the true economic and political implications of the shift, which have as much to do with the centralization of power and control and profit as with their decentralization. If the businesses of Google and Amazon and Apple represent not the liberation of material goods into immaterial forms but simply the replacement of one type of printing press with another type of printing press, of one type of record pressing plant with another type of record pressing plant, then those companies lose their privileged positions as the avatars of a new media revolution. The new boss, like the old boss, traffics in atoms.

In short, the idea that we are leaving the world of “atoms” for a world of “bits” is exactly

what the people who are controlling all the “atoms” want you to think. While they are off

enjoying the pleasures of the material world in their gated communities and walled

gardens, the rest of us, the digital underclass, deluded into thinking we are the future, will

literally just be fiddling with our bits.

Likewise, Slavoj Žižek has made the point that by selling people the illusion of

immateriality, “the cloud” functions as a form of control.124 Žižek is interested in how, by

abstracting something, people have less awareness of it, and thus less control over it. It

then, weirdly, has control over them. He writes:

In order to manage a cloud, there needs to be a monitoring system which controls its functioning, a system which is by definition hidden from the end-user. The paradox is thus that, as the new gadget (smartphone or tiny portable) I hold in my

123 Blanchette, quoted in Carr. 124 Slavoj Žižek, “Corporate Rule of Cyberspace,” The New Significance, 14 May 2011, http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2011/05/14/slavoj-zizek-corporate-rule-of-cyberspace/.

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hand becomes increasingly personalized, easy to use, “transparent” in its functioning, the more the entire set-up has to rely on the work being done elsewhere, on the vast circuit of machines which coordinate the user’s experience. In other words, for the user experience to become more personalized or non-alienated, it has to be regulated and controlled by an alienated network.

Even at the level of language (or perhaps especially at the level of language) we

must be careful. Writer and designer Frank Chimero, in a post on his personal blog, from

which I found the above picture of Google’s data center, calls attention to how the

metaphor of “the cloud”—a white, fluffy, heavenly metaphor for power-hungry data

farms and undersea cables and all sorts of other nineteenth century-esque technological

monstrosities—serves to obscure.125 He writes, “‘The Cloud’ is one of these complicated

metaphors, because it’s a clear description of the user’s experience, but overlooks its

costs by misrepresenting the situation. Storing data on servers is light, accessible, and

omnipresent for the user. But The Cloud is not a dissolution of data’s ‘weight’; it simply

outsources its handling, in much the same way your garbage doesn’t disappear when it’s

picked up from the curb.” Chimero’s evocation of garbage in this context neatly recalls

both Sutton’s regime of offloading (of physical possessions deemed detritus) and

uploading (of digital data deemed profitable).

Insofar as digital minimalists perpetuate this sort of metaphor as a way of hacking

one’s life—because a life that’s more computerized than physical is, quite simply, more

amendable to hacks—digital minimalism, like the first wave of life hacking before it, is a

metaphor that obscures an awful lot of ugliness.

125 Frank Chimero, “The Cloud is Heavy and Design Isn’t Invisible,” 13 March 2013, http://frankchimero.com/blog/2013/03/the-cloud-is-heavy-and-design-isnt-invisible/.

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CHAPTER 3: ACADEMIC, HACK THYSELF

In a convergence so massive as to be all but indiscernible in normal academic practice,

advanced literary study has, since the 1970s, evolved from structuralism through deconstruction to cultural/multicultural criticism, so as to swing into conjunction with an information society that meanwhile evolved in parallel from logocentric corporations and

broadcast empires to the postindustrial equivalents of cultural diversity—flexible team corporations and distributed information networks. To put it rudely, in other words, perhaps the academic controversies of the past two decades were not really about

supplanting the author or canon with the deconstructive intertext or cultural context. Perhaps such controversies were really about recruiting professional interpreters for an impending mental merger with the software-telecom-cable-Hollywood conglomerates now promising that ultimate intertext or context, high-bandwidth information. —Alan

Liu, The Laws of Cool1

Nowhere do you find more enthusiasm for the god of Technology than among educators. —Neil Postman2

The Computerization of Academic Work and the Pressure to Technologize One of the most salient aspects of academic life in the twenty-first century thus far has

been the influx of digital information and communication technologies into the classroom

and beyond. Such technologies play an increasingly large role in college and university

life. Beyond routine communication, information technologies are now central to

admissions, registration, financial aid, administration, record keeping, and more. And, of

course, when they are not using them in their research, instructors use such technologies

in the classroom to prepare and deliver lectures, assign activities, host discussions, post

grades, etc. These technologies are invariably pitched as tools that will make the entire

process of higher education—from teaching and grading to research and publication to

1 Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4. 2 Neil Postman, “Virtual Students, Digital Classroom,” in Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club: Pulling the Plug on the Electronic Revolution, ed. Bill Henderson (Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1996), 198.

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communication and coordination—more efficient and productive. Ergo, the pressure put

on academics today to use technology mirrors the pressure, discussed in chapter 1, on the

U.S. population as a whole: professors are told they must not only learn how to use new

digital tools, but they must learn how to use them well.

The last decade has seen many college and university classrooms go from rooms

consisting of desks and whiteboards (or blackboards) to “wired” classrooms replete with

computers, digital projectors, and WiFi. Today, if an American college classroom is not

yet “wired,” you can bet that someone, somewhere (an administrator perhaps, or an

educational technologist, or a company like Apple, Microsoft, or Google) has plans to fix

it, to rescue it from its “backwardness” and make it attractive enough to parent and

student consumers that it can be put in the college brochure. If a college classroom now

does not have WiFi so that students can access the Internet in class via their digital

devices, those classrooms, to quote Saint Joseph’s communications professor David

Parry, are “severely crippled” spaces.3 Parry’s (oddly ableist) description captures the

“new normal” across all levels of education: non-high tech classrooms seem like they are

disabled. Indeed, to quote Daniel Kleinman,

Driven by something that looks a lot like technological progressivism and, in particular, the idea that new technology is invariably better and means progress, educators and education administrators for all levels of schooling have jumped on the information technology bandwagon. Computers are found in classrooms from preschool through secondary school; ownership of laptop computers is required of students at some universities, and the first stop for entering university students is the information services office where they are allocated an email address.4

3 David Parry, “Teaching in the Age of Distraction,” 14 Jan 2009, http://outsidethetext.com/2009/teaching-in-the-age-of-distraction/ 4 Daniel Lee Kleinman, Science and Technology in Society: From Biotechnology to the Internet (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 38.

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It is startling, though, how little debate there has been, relatively speaking, about the

deeper ramifications of the influx of technology into education.5 At the college level, for

instance, why does it seem like so few professors ask whether they might themselves be

changing as teachers and researchers as a result of new technologies and whether these

changes are wholly desirable? As Christine Rosen, a senior editor of New Atlantis: A

Journal of Technology and Society, bracingly observes, “It is intriguing to see how

insidiously and effectively computer and software companies have colonized academia.

A culture that prides itself on research and rigorous inquiry in all other areas—and with

an abiding skepticism about the conventional wisdom—is in this area uncritically

enthusiastic, judging by the amount of money administrators are spending on technology

on campus.”6

Michael Bugeja, professor and director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and

Communication at Iowa State University, argues that there is a connection between

corporatization, efficiency rhetoric, technology, and rising student costs, noting that

“academe has invested heavily in technology since 1995, funding proliferation with easy

student loans, higher tuition, and all manner of technology-related fees.”7 Certainly, the

well-documented U.S. investment in progressive self-production through (new)

technologies feeds assumptions that improvements in the technological sphere must be

intrinsically “good” or somehow “forward looking.” But are they? And have academics

swallowed this rhetoric? Margaret Cassidy, associate professor of Communications at 5 This is not to say that there has been no debate, or that smart, vociferous critics and skeptics of educational technology do not exist. Jonathan Rees, Professor of History at Colorado State University-Pueblo, and self-described “ed-tech Cassandra” Audrey Watters come to mind here especially. See his blog http://moreorlessbunk.net/blog/ and her blog http://hackeducation.com/, respectively. 6 Quoted in Michael Bugeja, “E-Tymology of Inefficiency: How the Business World Colonized Academe,” in The Culture of Efficiency: Technology in Everyday Life, ed. Sharon Kleinman (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 184. 7 Ibid., 175.

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Adelphi University, argues that successive initiatives during the twentieth century to

reform American public education based on the introduction to schools of new electronic

communications media were largely unsuccessful and often deeply misguided.8 Although

Cassidy’s focus in on public K–12 education, her overall argument about the hype and

hope invested in new technologies is applicable to higher education. As Harold Innis

quipped in 1947, “The blight of mechanization spreads from the high schools to the

universities.”9

Simply put, the idea that new media technologies can improve education is a well-

worn one in American culture. Cassidy writes that the “belief that unprecedented

technological change demands that schools alter their practices to prepare children for the

new, technologically different world they are inheriting” goes back at least a century.10

Looking first at claims for film’s supposed revolutionary pedagogical potential in

considerable detail, then at radio’s, then at TV’s, and finally, in two parts, at the

computer’s, Cassidy identifies a recurring theme: every new form of media for the last

hundred years has been billed as the answer for what ails America’s schools, but every

one of them has largely failed to live up to its billing. Why is this? Cassidy astutely

attributes these cycles of hype to Americans’ well-documented faith in three things:

progress, technology, and education, which together “constitute something of an

American trinity”11, which in turn helps explain “why Americans continue to invest their

hopes in educational technology, despite the evidence that has accrued over the years that

8 Margaret Cassidy, Bookends: The Changing Media Environment of American Classrooms (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2004). 9 Harold Innis, “Adult Education and Universities (1947),” in The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). 10 Cassidy, 2. 11 Ibid., 12.

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might have challenged those hopes.”12 Or as James Carey once put it, “Among the

articles of national faith, few have stronger resonance than our belief in technology and

education.”13

Cassidy offers multiple reasons why each technology—film, radio, TV, and

computers—failed to live up to their billing. One of the most-compelling reasons she

gives is that teachers across time and educational levels saw each new technology as

incompatible with their needs or interests. New technologies were pitched to them as

godsends, but teachers were often suspicious of, even outright hostile to, new

technologies because they viewed them—often correctly, it turns out—as challenges to

their professional autonomy.

Tellingly, to Cassidy, the claims made by proponents of computer and

information technologies today are eerily similar to those made by proponents of film,

radio, and TV in the past. Cassidy sees computer and information technologies as

challenges to teachers’ professional autonomy in two main senses: 1) in terms of teachers

trading content they produce on their own for prepackaged content (from a commercial

textbook publisher like Pearson, for instance), and 2) in terms of teachers relying on

technological tools they have very limited control over (a course management system like

Blackboard that everybody in a school is forced to use, for instance). In both cases,

standardization replaces individualization and power accrues up. At the same time, these

technologies are being pitched to teachers—like film, radio, and TV before them—as

ways they can professionalize themselves. Yet one of the more striking contradictions

12 Ibid., 5. 13 James Carey, “Salvation by Machines: Can Technology Save Education?,” in James Carey: A Critical Reader, ed. Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 292.

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about pitching technologies as “professionalizing,” is that learning to use, let alone

master, them often takes a lot of time. As Cassidy writes:

Advocates are once again offering the argument that new technology will professionalize teaching—for example, by bringing to the teaching profession the kind of productivity that has purportedly come to professionals in other fields through their use of technology. However, many teachers are experiencing something different when they start to use new technology. The amount of time required to produce appropriate and valuable curricular materials is staggering. On top of that is the time involved in locating useful Web sites and software programs, evaluating possible software and hardware purchases.14

This contradiction marks a zone of continuation and confluence between industrial era,

Taylorist models of time, labor, and profit and the new “postindustrial” construction of

“education.” Precisely because they demand so much time of instructors, rather than

aiding them in their individualized aspirations for prestige through productivity, Cassidy

actually sees these technologies as de-skilling teachers by 1) forcing them to rely on other

people’s content and software and 2) cutting into their time to do things such as research

and talk to other teachers, once ordinary things they no longer have time for because they

are too busy simply trying to stay “up to date” with the latest program they are being told

is the solution to all their troubles. It is, of course, a vicious cycle, and in a passage that

echoes Merlin Mann’s critique of life hacking, Cassidy writes:

Technology has often been used to systematize instruction and break it down into its smallest components, making teachers merely the executors of a small part of a larger process without a clear sense of what it is or how they might have been brought in on conceptualizing it. Although using technology might appear, even to teachers, to professionalize their work, it may merely add additional tasks onto an already difficult workload, thus creating a work speed-up that leaves teachers looking for shortcuts and ready-made solutions to their problems. In the process, they become more dependent on experts and prepackaged materials, rather than becoming more autonomous as skilled professionals.15

14 Ibid., 250–251. 15 Ibid., 268.

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Here, some might object that, when it comes to education, computers are different

from film, radio, and TV. And besides, should not teachers make time to learn how to use

new tools? Indeed, the pressure to do exactly that is overwhelming, even irresistible,

especially in higher education, where digital technologies have almost wholly colonized

how most of us research (Google alerts, online databases, Academia.edu), write and cite

(Microsoft Word and EndNote), communicate (email and social networks), and lecture

(PowerPoint, YouTube videos). But Cassidy’s argument is important because it is

historical: tracking the rhetorical repetition (and structural contradiction) of new tech

hype as it has recurred over the past hundred years. Computers are indeed different from

film, radio, and TV, but many of the claims made about them are not. “Those claims

about what is new about computers might be true, but that basic argument—that

difference will make the difference—was used in American education to promote every

new educational medium over the past century and a half,” Cassidy writes.16 By calling

attention to how today’s talk of the computer as a panacea for all of education’s ills is

similar to how people used to talk about previous technologies as panaceas for all of

education’s ills, Cassidy prompts us to consider the computer’s contingency. Cassidy, for

instance, is worried about the focus on “issues of implementation and execution,”17

wherein the teacher is re-imagined more as “a technician that simply helps students use

the technology, not a person who selects technology (or some other resource) as a way to

help students learn.”18

Today, though, a new cadre of digitized professors calling themselves “prof

hackers” use some of the same rhetoric about the inevitable essential implementation of

16 Ibid., 263. 17 Ibid., 265. 18 Ibid., 267.

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digital media as corporate and government interests do. Are these professors, especially

those in the humanities and social sciences, at all worried about their autonomy? What

Cassidy, with an eye to the past, sees as fundamentally de-skilling, they, with an eye to

the future, seem to see as skill-enhancing.

Of course, all teachers at every level are and always have been technicians in

some sense. The idea of a technology-free classroom is absurd. As Parry reminds us,

“pencils, paper, books and chalkboards, heck, even tables, desks and chairs, are

technologies.” Or as Alan Liu notes, “Any cultural critic who today uses a personal

computer to write ‘files’ about literature is from the first incorporated within an

information culture closest to hand in the operating system itself.”19 But a smartphone is

not just an updated telephone, and a computer is not just an updated typewriter. One can

subscribe to a broad understanding of technology and still make value judgments about

specific technologies.

Media scholar and cultural critic Neil Postman understood this, and in an essay

written in 1996 on education and technology, he questions what he sees as educators’

unthinking allegiance at all levels to what he calls the false god of technology.20 Postman

makes an observation Cassidy would echo in 2004 regarding the long history of

technologies pitched as educational cure-alls. “I am old enough,” he writes, “to remember

when 16-millimeter film was to be the sure-cure. Then closed-circuit television. Then 8-

millimeter film. Then teacher-proof textbooks. Now computers.” “I know,” he concludes,

“a false god when I see one.”21 If computers were “the next big thing” in education in

19 Liu, 4. 20 For amplification, see Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (New York: Vintage, 1996). 21 Postman, 215.

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1996 when Postman was writing, today the words “computer” and “computing” are

insufficient for describing the vast array of interconnected electronic devices—

smartphones, tablets, wearables, etc.—that are out there. Even this list leaves out the

myriad but often invisible servers, towers, administrative officers, and extended

organizational structures (e.g., IT departments) and emphasizes devices with screens, the

ones individuals physically see, touch, hear, and talk to over the course of a day at home,

work, or school. It is here that this chapter focuses, on how users of these devices are

reached by and drawn into the cultural discourses of not only life hacking and digital

minimalism, but now “prof hacking,” targeted specifically at anxious, hard-working

educators in colleges and universities, especially humanities professors.

This chapter looks at the group blog, ProfHacker (2009–), now part of the

Chronicle of Higher Education’s website. It is a blog that celebrates and seeks to help

academics integrate the latest technologies into their professional and personal lives.

ProfHacker, as its definitive-sounding name suggests, is the chief “prof hacking” blog on

the Internet, but it is far from the only site devoted to the prof hacking idea. Other prof

hacking-style blogs include GradHacker (housed at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s

rival website Inside Higher Education, a fact which suggests how higher education trade

publications today feel the need to have a hacking “vertical” for the purposes of

branding), and HackCollege (co-founded by Kelly Sutton, who helped initiate digital

minimalism). Here is a good way of thinking of the differences among these three sites:

ProfHacker is aimed mostly at professors, GradHacker is aimed mostly at graduate

students, and HackCollege is aimed mostly at undergraduates. All, however, are similar

in that they seek to apply the metaphor of “hacking” to academic life, and their tips,

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though aimed at a more specific audience than the tips proffered by Lifehacker, are

nevertheless frequently very Lifehacker-esque. If life hacking is, as I argued in chapter 1,

a colonizing discourse, here we see it colonizing academe along undergraduate, graduate,

and faculty lines simultaneously.

This chapter argues that the overall message of prof hackers is similar to that of

the life hackers discussed in chapter 1 and the digital minimalists discussed in chapter 2.

By considering prof hacking alongside life hacking and digital minimalism, I hope to

show how life hacking more broadly is an emergent cultural formation that has moved

over time from one sphere of cultural activity to another. While the messages of these

three types of sites vary in their details, their core assumption is virtually identical: think

of everything, including yourself, as if it were a computer amenable to hacks.

Recall from the first chapter that life hacks are colonizing and compulsive, and

from the second, that in their digital minimalism form, they exhibit blindness to larger

structures. Both of these strands come together in prof hacking. One might say, in fact,

that the compulsive nature of life hacking is precisely what makes it blind to larger

structures. Put differently, when one is lost in individualist tips and tricks, everything else

starts to blur. The moment a particular industry, in this case higher education, embraces

life hacking ideas thus also marks, like the digital minimalists discussed in the previous

chapter, a turn away from questions of structure. A cynical analysis would be that, at its

core, prof hacking is a scheme designed to shift risk from institutions to individuals and

discourage collective resistance. As a response offered as aid to professors interested in

digital implementation, it is also an ideological structure that perpetuates the fiction of the

individuated, self-made, “authorpreneur” professor.

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It is high time to pose some neglected questions about prof hacking as a practice.

There must be voices to counter the academics who write for ProfHacker who will ask

fundamentally different questions.22 Is technology really the answer? Is the best way to

approach academic life to hack it? More importantly, regardless of how useful prof

hacking advice is, what are the social and political consequences of propagating it? And,

above all, in whose interest do these professors dispense their tips? And to what end? In

light of these and related questions, I hope make three points in this chapter:

1. Academics, particularly those in the humanities in social sciences, are increasingly

pressured to use digital technologies so as not to become “obsolete.”

2. The blog ProfHacker both responds to and perpetuates this pressure with the tech-

centric, Lifehacker-y advice it offers.

3. Though presented as empowering, even “radical,” the advice ProfHacker dispenses

is in line with the neoliberalization of the university insofar as it addresses the

individualized, professional academic, not the larger structural conditions academics

today find themselves embedded in.

The three “life stages” of life hacking I am tracing in this dissertation that have emerged

from “hacking” more generally—life hacking, digital minimalism, and prof hacking—are

characterized by a curiously uncritical form of postindustrial self-production that is

alienated structurally but continuous with longstanding ideas in American culture

regarding efficiency, productivity, and self-making. By analyzing what ProfHacker poses

as problems, as well as the tips, tricks, and practices it offers up as solutions to those

22 Though, full disclosure, I wrote something for ProfHacker once, read it regularly, consider many of its contributors to be colleagues, and find a lot of its advice useful. Here I reiterate the ambivalence I first expressed in my introduction: I am both deeply skeptical of life hacking and frequently seduced by its promises. All of which is to say, I am not trying to take potshots at individual prof hackers in this chapter but critique prof hacking as a practice.

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problems, this chapter interprets prof hacking—and by reverse extension, life hacking

and digital minimalism—as a response to changing socioeconomic and technological

conditions congruent with those socioeconomic and technological conditions themselves.

These three stages of life hacking thus constitute an overall discursive and cultural

formation of considerable significance because they are deeply embedded in U.S.

capitalist culture and the rhetoric of self-production, self-curating, self-display, and self-

consumption. All three repeat a core set of themes that overlap. In the end, I argue that

prof hacking is not all that different from other kinds of life hacking, but is especially

interesting and problematic given its cultural location. That is, prof hacking is at once an

extension of life hacking, but an extension with an important difference in that it marks

the linkage of the discourse of life hacking with the location of American higher

education.

ProfHacker to the Rescue In this section I analyze a sampling of posts from the early days of ProfHacker to give

readers a sense of its commitments at the time of its inception in 2009, a time when it was

still trying to define itself and articulate its philosophy. I maintain that the early days of a

site like this, as in the case of Gina Trapani’s Lifehacker, are important because, while all

sites grow and change, and may remain open to contradictions, critiques, and resistance,

their founding rhetoric lingers, and as such, is worth trying to pin down. How, essentially,

did the site justify itself?

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The entirely of the first ProfHacker blog post is as follows: “ProfHacker was

launched on 26 July 2009.”23 The only giveaway for what is to come is its title, “Hello

world!” The title is a reference to the very first computer program many people learn

when beginning to study a programming language that, as an output, spits out the phrase

“Hello world!” Used here as a greeting, it communicates, in effect, geek stuff ahead.24

This first post was posted on the website profhacker.com (later incorporated into The

Chronicle of Higher Education website) by George Williams, an associate professor of

English at the University of South Carolina Upstate. Jason B. Jones, then an associate

professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, wrote the second post on

getting started with meditation. Jones simply links to a blog post by Dan Benjamin (who

co-hosts a podcast with Merlin Mann called “Back to Work”) about how to start a

meditation practice, writing, “Dan Benjamin posted today a slew of links, many with

audio, about starting a meditation practice, which he credits with dramatically improving

his focus and quality of life.”25 These two intro posts are slight in terms of actual content,

but they nevertheless link the three “life stages” of life hacking together: the reference to

programming in the first alludes broadly to hacker culture, the reference to one of Merlin

Mann’s friends alludes to the first wave of life hacking (if not Mann’s critique), and the

reference to mediation brings to mind Leo Babatua, one of the digital minimalists I

discussed briefly in chapter 2.

23 George Williams, “Hello world!” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, 26 Jul 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/hello-world/22585. 24 For more, see “‘Hellow, World!’ Program,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Hello,_World!%22_program. 25 Jason B. Jones, “Hivelogic on starting meditation / mindfulness practice,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, 27 Jul 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/hivelogic-on-starting-meditation-mindfulness-practice/22586.

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Short, snappy posts on what to carry in your work bag, manipulating text using

UNIX regular expressions (or “regexs”), scheduling meetings, prescriptive grammar,

tricorders, online research, and the importance of self-Googling followed in short order

over the next few days. But it is the July 29, 2009 post on planners that contains the first

articulation of the blog’s then-still-coalescing ideology. “Prof. Hacker is, as our name

suggests, officially committed to technological solutions when possible,” Jason B. Jones

writes, before confessing he still has a soft spot for paper planners.26 The uncritical belief

in technological solutions is something cultural critic Evgeny Morozov has dubbed

“technological solutionism.”27 Jones’s post itself highlights the contradiction. Though

committed to “technological solutions” (read: high-tech solutions), there are times when

pen and paper, or low-tech, analog solutions, are better. Jones’s caveat here ironically

undercuts his site’s ethos by highlighting the absurdity of an “all high-tech, all the time”

position.

Further evidence of this pro-tech ideology comes in Julie Meloni’s August 10,

2009 post “Teacherly Roles and Technology Integration.”28 (By this point, more people

were contributing to the blog.)29 In it, Meloni links to a blog post by Jeremy Boggs, now

the Design Architect for Digital Research and Scholarship at the University of Virginia

Library, that describes the three roles professors should play with respect to new digital

26 Jason B. Jones, “Do you still buy a planner?” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, 29 Jul 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/do-you-still-buy-a-planner/22595. 27 Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003). 28 Julie Meloni, “Teacherly Roles and Technology Integration,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, August 10, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/teacherly-rolestechnology-integration/22615. 29 “From August 2009 to October 2010,” Meloni explains in a post on her personal blog, “I wrote almost 100 blog posts for (and was the managing editor of) ProfHacker, a blog hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education and providing tips about teaching, technology, and productivity.” See http://www.thickbook.com/more-about-me/. A collection of her posts can be found here: http://www.thickbook.com/2011/11/selected-profhacker-posts-from-the-archives/.

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technologies in the classroom. They are: role model, tech support, and cheerleader. Being

a role model according to Meloni means showing “that you value the technology as well

as the short-term and long-term benefits of its use,” as if the short- and long-term benefits

of a technology can be safely conflated. Acting as tech support “shows that you are

invested in that particular technology, see its importance in general, and understand the

role it plays in student outcomes.” The role of cheerleader, however, is the “most

important.” Meloni writes, “students are not as tech savvy as the media would like us to

believe. Do not expect students to know anything about the technologies you introduce in

the classroom; just because your students can text like fiends does not mean they grok

Twitter. Be patient, and be supportive.”30 “It should go without saying,” Meloni adds,

“that when you introduce technology into your pedagogy you should already know the

reasons for doing so,” such as asking one’s students to blog because of the “benefits that

come from writing for a public audience or receiving feedback from known and unknown

readers.” I find this example a little too pat. Of course, there are good reasons for using

certain educational technologies (and bad ones), but the three roles Meloni allows for

foreclose a whole range of approaches to digital technology as a category. But,

significantly, ProfHacker is not aimed at readers interested in other approaches. Its motto

is “Prof. Hacker delivers productivity, technical, and pedagogical tips to the higher

education community Monday through Friday.”31 As Meloni writes, “One of the goals of

Prof. Hacker is to help readers enhance their productivity both inside and outside the 30 “Grok,” a word coined by Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land means “to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed.” See “Grok,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok. Meloni is right to suggest that students might not be as tech savvy as buzzwords like “digital natives” suggest. Eastern Illinois English professor Michael Leddy has suggested the term “digital naïfs” might be more fitting. Micael Leddy, “Digital Naïfs,” Orange Crate Art, March 22, 2010, http://mleddy.blogspot.com/2010/03/digital-naifs.html. 31 “About,”ProfHacker Aug 2009, http://web.archive.org/web/20090813082729/http://www.profhacker.com/about/.

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classroom by providing technical and pedagogical tips—both for those fully immersed in

teaching with technology as well as those who are simply curious and who are thinking

ahead to classes they will teach in the future.” Like Lifehacker, ProfHacker presents itself

here as a site for those looking to become more “bit literate,” to use Mark Hurst’s term,

only its readers are academics, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, be

they “techies” already or “wannabe techies” looking to dip a toe into the pool that is the

Brave New World of educational technology so that they may be more “productive.”

Only role models, tech support, or cheerleaders need enroll in this school. Symptomatic

of life hacking’s latent gender politics, here Meloni herself, the first woman to write for

the site and like Lifehacker’s Trapani before her, plays the cheerleader.

If Lifehacker hails the “hack curious,” ProfHacker hails tech-savvy academics in

traditionally non-tech disciplines looking to become even more bit literate.32 Similar to

Lifehacker’s mode of address, the site flatters its readers by presenting itself as a place

where geeky academics hang out, even if part of the ideological work it is doing is calling

out to wannabe-geek academics and telling them that if they read the site they can be

“real” geek academics. Part of ProfHackers’s mission seems to be to help the “hack

curious” academic transform into a digitally-versed super academic, to shepherd them

through a process leading to marked productivity gains. Academics who are predisposed

to hacking for whatever reason are who ProfHacker seems to be addressing, especially

academics in the humanities who have a curiosity about technology that is rooted in a

fear of being outpaced and obsolesced. In short, ProfHacker is not for professors who are

32 Though it is not an exact parallel, on why traditionally non-tech academic disciplines might be susceptible to high-tech solutions, see Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/38.

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hackers so much as it is, one tip at a time, trying to turn professors into a hackers by

sharing with them a set of hacker-approved technological secrets.33

Conspicuously absent from Meloni’s three roles, however, is that of critic or

skeptic. This is not to suggest that those who write for ProfHacker are not sometimes

self-reflexive about the technology they let into their lives, or that none of its posts

grapple with technology’s Faustian bargains, merely that from its inception, ProfHacker

has hailed a particular kind of reader, one who uses and cheers, and teaches others to use

and cheer, digital technology, not ask pesky questions about its deeper rhetorical sources

and structures. But this, according to Postman, gets it totally backwards. From his point

of view, the sort of technical tips put forward by ProfHacker are essentially trivial. What

we need to know about technologies, he writes, “is not how to use them but how they use

us.”34 Take the example of cars. “In the case of cars,” he writes, “what we needed to

think about in the early twentieth century was not how to drive them but what they would

do to our air, our landscape, our social relations, our family life and our cities.”35 “I am

talking here,” he concludes, “about making technology itself an object of inquiry.”36

Similarly, Liu has suggested that technological savvy is the perhaps last criterion one

should use to assess whether professors should teach technology classes. He writes,

“‘How to Use a Computer’ perhaps should be a course in every humanities department

taught by its most philosophical broad, theoretically advanced, and/or ‘culturally critical’

33 On academics who might actually be hackers, and the political implications of their work, see Elizabeth Losh, “Hacktivism and the Humanities: Programming Protest in the Era of the Digital University,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/32. 34 Postman, “Virtual Students,” 206. 35 Ibid., 206–207. 36 Ibid., 207.

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faculty member (even if technologically undistinguished or even hopeless).”37 For both

Postman and Liu, “how to” is not nearly as important as “know why and with what risks

or limits.” Yet, just as it is churlish to criticize a book by saying “This book would be

better if it were an entirely different book,” it may be unfair to excoriate a blog for what it

is not trying to do. And yet, Meloni’s post is illustrative of ProfHacker’s philosophy. In

short, it is a blog that is trying to teach academics how to become technological role

models, support staff, and cheerleaders.

In another early post titled “Trying a Course Blog? Trying to Get Others to

Blog?” Jason B. Jones quotes from a blog post by Hillary Miller, wherein she reflects on

using a course blog for the first time.38 What is significant about it is that Miller ends her

post by reflecting on how proselytizing for technology squares with the so-called

adjunctification of higher education.39 She writes:

But I can’t help feeling a little protective of the adjunct in this discussion—don’t adjuncts “do it themselves” enough? Can the full potential of Instructional Technology really be unleashed with the real limitations of the adjunct labor force operating in higher education? … How will Jane Q. Adjunct learn about the potential of a course blog, after tearing her hair out over Blackboard for months and missing the departmental meeting that announced a later workshop about blogs, all time she’s not paid for? How will Jane Q. Adjunct get excited about the

37 Liu, 307. 38 Jason B. Jones, “Trying a Course Blog? Trying to Get Others to Blog?,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, August 11, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/trying-a-course-blog-trying-to-get-others-to-blog/22618; Hillary Miller, “Lessons from a First-Time Course Blogger,” Cacophony, June 12, 2009, http://cac.ophony.org/2009/06/12/lessons-from-a-first-time-course-blogger/. 39 Here is Michael Bérubé writing during his tenure as MLA president on adjunctification: “Adjunct, contingent faculty members now make up over 1 million of the 1.5 million people teaching in American colleges and universities. Many of them are working at or under the poverty line, without health insurance; they have no academic freedom worthy of the name, because they can be fired at will; and, when fired, many remain ineligible for unemployment benefits, because institutions routinely invoke the ‘reasonable assurance of continued employment’ clause in federal unemployment law even for faculty members on yearly contracts who have no reasonable assurance of anything.” Just to underline this point, when Bérubé writes, “over 1 million of the 1.5 million people teaching in American colleges and universities,” that effectively means almost everyone save for a very select few already with tenure or on the tenure track. Michael Bérubé, “Among the Majority,” MLA “From the President,” 2012, http://www.mla.org/fromthepres?topic=146.

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potential of these tools, and why will she motivate to prioritize the time required to integrate them thoughtfully and productively in her course?

The bizarre biz speak of “motivate to prioritize” aside, Miller calls attention to one of the

problems Mann and others first noticed at the root of life hacking more generally:

namely, learning how to use new technologies takes time. Miller’s questions are, as Jones

himself admits in his post, excellent, and Miller deserves credit for at least asking how

already-squeezed contingent faculty members are supposed to deal with what David

Noble wryly calls “the incessant pressures of ‘progress.’”40 ProfHacker, too, is not averse

to sharing Miller’s questions with its readers. Yet, it is telling that neither Miller nor

ProfHacker question the use of technology in the first place. Jones ends his post with a

question: “Thoughts on how to diffuse these approaches to relatively vulnerable faculty?”

The blog “dialogue” of Jones and Miller frames the “desire” to prof hack as one in which

economic vulnerability is not the structural core problem, but rather, something that gets

in the way of the adoption of new tools. The need to use new technologies like blogging

software is simply accepted as a given. In a follow-up post, Julie Meloni even notes that

Miller’s post “meshes quite nicely with the roles of role model, tech support, and

cheerleader we should play when implementing technology in the classroom.”41 What is

not asked in any of these posts, by Miller or ProfHacker, is a more complicated and

troubling question: Are these new digital tools partially responsible for, or at least

congruent with, the labor situation in which we are increasingly being asked to use new

digital tools?

40 David F. Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001). 41 Julie Meloni, “Integrating, Evaluating, and Managing Blogging in the Classroom,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, August 13, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/integrating-evaluatingmanaging-blogging-in-the-classroom/22626.

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One day later, Jones contributed another post concerned with academic labor

issues called “Improve Academe’s Working Conditions.”42 It contains language from a

draft of a policy statement on graduate student employees by AAUP with a link to Marc

Bousquet’s “list of recommended journals, websites, and blogs devoted to academic

labor.” It does not contain any hint of the role technologies like the kind celebrated by

ProfHacker might play in adding a layer of pressure to academic working conditions,

proving that it is possible to be concerned about exploitation without thinking about its

provenance. Though I do not doubt that ProfHacker’s contributors are concerned about

academic exploitation and imagine their tips as empowering, their approach suggests an

unwillingness to think through how technological and economic changes are linked.

On August 13, 2009, Jones is back to more straightforward topics. A reader

named Kay writes to ask how one should organize one’s teaching materials. The question

and the post itself are unremarkable, save for one thing: Jones’s answer comes from

Merlin Mann, specifically his popular “Inbox Zero.”43 Similarly, Julie Meloni’s post the

next day, “Productivity Through Firefox Add-ons,” links to a June 27, 2009 Lifehacker

post called “Top 10 Productivity Basics Explained.”44 But, significantly, ProfHacker does

not nuance, subvert, or critique the posts from Mann and Lifehacker, merely re-presents

them as tips for an academic audience. I suspect Jones and Meloni would say they were

simply raiding these sites for good advice. But another, more disturbing way of looking at

42 Jason B. Jones, “Improve Academe’s Working Conditions,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, August 12, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/improve-academes-working-conditions/22622. 43 Jason B. Jones, “Organizing Class Files, Student Work, and the Like,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker 13 Aug 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/organizing-class-files-student-workthe-like/22624. 44 Julie Meloni, “Productivity Through Firefox Add-ons,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, 14 Aug 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/productivity-through-firefox-add-ons/22629 and Kevin Purdy, “Top Ten Productivity Basics Explained,” Lifehacker, 27 Jun 2009, http://lifehacker.com/5303204/top-10-productivity-basics-explained.

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the covalent of life hacking with prof hacking, especially given the uncritical adoption of

these tips and tricks, is that prof hacking has opened the door for life hacking to move,

Borg-like, into academe. These are not the last times ProfHacker draws on content from

Mann and Lifehacker either.

While multiple ProfHacker posts cite Merlin Mann, one of the key popularizers of

the life hacking concept, the blog as a whole seems unaware of or unconcerned by his

hugely important 2008 critique of life hacking, a critique that could thus ironically be

applied to ProfHacker itself. ProfHacker, for instance, seems to have totally missed

Mann’s point about life hacking’s compulsivity. A year after Mann critiqued life hacking

sites for pumping out tip after tip, what does ProfHacker go ahead and do? Become a site

that, essentially, pumps out tip after tip.

A week in review post on August 15, 2009 gives readers the first inkling of

ProfHacker’s origins.45 “Prof. Hacker almost couldn’t exist without Twitter,” Jason B.

Jones explains. “George (@GeorgeOnline) and Jason (@jbj) cooked up the idea over a

few direct messages (and then a Google Doc—not everything is Tweetable), and Brian

(@briancroxall), Julie (@jcmeloni), and Ethan (@captainprimate) are all in one another’s

networks.”

ProfHacker does in fact allow for another role in addition to that of role model,

tech support, and cheerleader when it comes to technology: that of pusher, essentially. In

an August 17, 2009 post called “Deploying Students as Tech Mentors,” Jeffrey W.

45 Jason B. Jones, “The Week That Was on @profhacker,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, August 15, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/the-week-that-was-on-profhacker/22632.

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McClurken writes about turning students into “tech mentors.”46 He begins by noting that

“One of the common concerns that faculty have when thinking about using digital

technologies in the classroom is how much time they would need to spend in training an

entire classroom of students on the same tool. This task can be made more complicated

given the varying student levels of technical expertise and comfort level with digital

tools.” Not bothering to train students to use such tools at all is not even a question. This

is ProfHacker, after all; technology exists to be used, not questioned. McClurken’s

proposed solution to varying student skill and comfort levels? “Identify those students

who have previous experience with the technology in question … or those who are just

generally comfortable with learning and using digital tools, and ask them to serve as ‘tech

mentors’ for the rest of the class. If they agree, let the rest of the class know who their

tech mentors are. When students have a technical question, they go to the tech mentors

first. Only if they don’t know the answer would they need to come to you.” So in other

words, get your tech-savvy students to push technology on your less tech-savvy students,

while you just sit back and relax. Why act as role model, tech support, and cheerleader

when you can get your students to do all three for you? This is the logic of drug

trafficking—the professor as head technology kingpin and the students under him as

dealers trying to “hook” other students, i.e., convince them to and teach them how to use

the technology. The end result in such a model is a classroom full of technology addicts.

46 Jeffrey W. Mcclurken, “Deploying Students as Tech Mentors,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, August 17, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/deploying-students-as-tech-mentors/22636.

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Yet the very next post—George Williams’s “Preparing for a New Semester:

Conquer the Grocery Store”47—seems to complicate the idea that ProfHacker is

exclusively technophilic. Williams writes, “ProfHacker leans towards how to achieve

better living through embracing the digital, but our emphasis is ‘better living’ and not

necessarily ‘embracing the digital.’ And so we also aim to provide common-sense tips on

getting things done more efficiently—through whatever method—so that you can get on

with spending most of your time on what’s really important to you.” This sounds nice

until you remember that efficiency is itself a technological value, and that any advice that

is primarily about making something more efficient is therefore also fundamentally

technological. As Jacques Ellul writes in The Technological Society (1954),

what characterizes technical action within a particular activity is the search for greater efficiency. Completely natural and spontaneous effort is replaced by a complex of acts designed to improve, say, the yield. It is this which prompts the creation of technical forms, starting from simple forms of activity. These technical forms are not necessarily more complicated than the spontaneous ones, but they are more efficient and better adapted.48

Williams’s post is about grocery shopping—specifically, making it more “efficient” by

buying a whole semester’s worth of non-perishable foodstuffs and toiletries at the

beginning of the semester, so that “once the semester is in full swing with class prep,

piles of grading, committee meetings, writing deadlines, and conference preparations

eating away at your available time,” one doesn’t have to go grocery shopping save for “a

weekly trip to the store … or the farmers’ market” for “fresh dairy and fruits and veggies

and meats.” Williams admits that “Stocking the cabinets in this way was not cheap,” but

does not acknowledge that because such a plan requires a significant expenditure up

47 George Williams, “Preparing for a New Semester: Conquer the Grocery Store,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, August 17, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/preparing-for-a-new-semester-conquer-the-grocery-store/22637. 48 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1954; repr., New York: Vintage, 1964), 20.

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front, not everyone, especially those living paycheck to paycheck like graduate students

and adjuncts, will be able to do this. Here, I cannot help but think of Ellul again: “What

seems to be most personal in the life of man is now technicized.”49 Even something like

grocery shopping exists to be optimized. Though aimed at academics who divide their

time in semesters, Williams’s post would not be out of place on Lifehacker, where tips

about things like grocery shopping now fall under the rubric of life hacks.50

Moreover, the idea that by being efficient one can save time to do “what’s really

important,” a message seen in a lot of Lifehacker’s rhetoric as well, as well as in the

rhetoric of the digital minimalists, is also ideological in nature insofar as “freeing up

time,” as I discussed in chapter 1, is what technology always promises. One might

conclude from these examples that a sure sign of technological thinking is when some

stratagem or technology promises to free up time to do what’s “really important.” In

reality, people tend to just fill the time they save with more work. In this case, it is great

Williams got the bulk of his grocery shopping done at the beginning of the semester; he

now has more time to read and write for ProfHacker. In short, even if Williams’s advice

is not about technology in the way other ProfHacker posts are, it is nevertheless

thoroughly technological in the Ellulian sense.

The next few weeks of ProfHacker posts alternate between tech tips, teaching

advice, personal management strategies, and software tutorials. All of these are grouped

under the rubric of prof hacks. Every Wednesday is “Open Thread Wednesday” where

readers are invited to share what is on their minds in the comments. Every Friday there is

49 Ibid., 128. 50 See, for example, Melanie Pinola, “Top 10 Mistakes We Make When Grocery Shopping (And How to Fix Them),” Lifehacker, April 25, 2015, http://lifehacker.com/top-10-mistakes-we-make-when-grocery-shopping-and-how-1700039890.

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a “week in review” post that summarizes that week’s posts. Sometimes there is also a

“Weekend Reading” post that links out to other things online that readers might find

interesting. The blog’s pro-technology ideology is reiterated every couple of posts or so.

For example:

• August 18th’s “Getting Started with Google Docs in the Classroom”: “One of the goals of Prof. Hacker is to introduce to you some of the tools we use so that the tools become less intimidating.”51

• August 26th’s “What if everyone had an iPod?”: “The idea that all students are net-savvy millennials is a pernicious myth. It’s disabling for students and for faculty, who often feel overwhelmed by their students’ ability to give zombies a cupcake on Facebook, and decide they don’t have anything to contribute. (Not y’all. I know that Prof. Hacker’s readers try to raise their students to the light. But less technically confident professors? Yep.)” (bold in the original)52

• August 28th’s “Modeling Technology in the Classroom: A Student’s Guide”: “many professors—even, or perhaps especially, younger professors—still seem to be at odds with the idea that technology can be integrated into the classroom with any manner of success. It seems that for every tech-savvy edupunk soldier, there is a techno-phobic professor unwilling to consider that the shiny, beeping, distracting things that have invaded their classroom and have been shoved down their throats might actually be useful. However, there are simple, easy ways to entice even the most techno-skeptical professor, and to make our gadgets a welcome friend in the classroom.”53

• August 31st’s “Because It’s Still the Weekend Somewhere: Prof. Hacker Looks Back”: “Profhacker.com takes as its domain pedagogy, productivity, and technology as they intersect in higher ed.”54

• September 8th’s “Advice on Faculty Workload”: “The ProfHacker audience (so far) seems to be made up of people who want to be better, more efficient, more effective in their academic careers.”55

51 Julie Meloni, “Getting Started with Google Docs in the Classroom,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, August 18, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/getting-started-with-google-docs-in-the-classroom/22641. 52 Jason B. Jones, “What If Everyone Had an iPod?,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, August 26, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/what-if-everyone-had-an-ipod/22662. 53 Alex M. Jarvis, “Modeling Technology in the Classroom: A Student’s Guide,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, August 28, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/modeling-technology-in-the-classroom-a-students-guide/22669. 54 Jason B. Jones, “Because It’s Still the Weekend Somewhere: Prof. Hacker Looks Back,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, August 31, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/because-its-still-the-weekend-somewhere-prof-hacker-looks-back/22671. 55 Jeffrey W. Mcclurken, “Advice on Faculty Workload,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, September 8, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/advice-on-faculty-workload/22685.

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Even this short sample of posts convincingly demonstrates ProfHacker’s belief in a better

academic life through technology.

Finally, on Wednesday, September 9, 2009, after over a month of “soft launch”

posts, comes ProfHacker’s official welcome post.56 Written by Jason B. Jones, it begins

by acknowledging the unusualness of waiting over a month to do a proper introduction

and giving us a sense of its early popularity. “It may seem a bit odd to welcome readers

to a blog that’s already got more than 100 posts, or more than 20K page views, but today

marks the official launch of ProfHacker, a site dedicated to pedagogy, productivity,

technology, and especially the intersection of these, in higher education.” Jones, writing

for the collective, continues: “We interpret this mandate pretty broadly, and so you’ll find

posts on everything from gearing up for a commute to learning student names to backing

up your social network. Basically, if there’s a fresh way to think about the daily work of

university life, you can expect to find it here. Publishing roughly three times a day (with

some supplemental links on Twitter), ProfHacker offers reviews, tutorials, commentary,

podcasts, screencasts, and more, in a style that aims to be casual yet informative, friendly

and witty without being snarky.” Jones’s admission here would seem to explain the site’s

sometimes cloying, “technology is your friend” tone. Jones then gives us ProfHacker’s

origin story in more detail:

ProfHacker started just after The Humanities and Technology unconference (#thatcamp) at George Mason, in a Twitter conversation between George Williams and me. Longtime academic bloggers might remember that George kickstarted the teaching carnival several years ago, and so his notion of a website devoted to sharing practical strategies for research, teaching, and service, especially in a technological context, seemed like an obvious fit. That we’ve been

56 Jason B. Jones, “Welcome to ProfHacker.com (Open Thread Wednesday),” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker, September 9, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/welcome-to-profhackercom-open-thread-wednesday/22689.

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able to get other people to join us, not to mention people to read us, so quickly seems like a minor miracle.

He then gives readers some tips for how to read the site that reveal some further

information about its motives and workings. Here’s Jones again:

• ProfHacker is non-disciplinary. Although each of us teaches and researches in particular disciplines, we’re looking to add faculty from a wide range of fields, such that there will be something for all academics.

• ProfHacker is rank-independent. Current contributors range from tenured associate professors to undergraduates, and we’ll draw on that diversity of perspective often.

• ProfHacker reflects a variety of institutions. Some contributors are at research-intensive schools, others at teaching-intensive schools, and, again, we aim to capture something useful from that variety.

• ProfHacker does not offer itself up as an “expert” or “guru” site: Instead, we are all working with, enjoying, or suffering from the very same topics that we write about. We’re interested in the unspoken or assumed knowledge of the university—all those things that “everyone knows,” but aren’t often stated.

• ProfHacker is not a site that fetishizes productivity for its own sake. The point isn’t to do more just to do more, but rather to enable all of us to achieve the kind of work-life balance (or teaching/research balance, or whatever) that one wants. That said, as a group we tend to value experimenting with new approaches to problems over being consumed with stress about them.

Let’s take these points one at a time. The points about Profhacker’s non-disciplinary and

“variety of institutions” presence suggests it is a site aimed at anyone and everyone in

higher education. It might therefore also be taken as a site about higher education. The

point about it being rank-independent seems like lip service to meritocracy, something

“the hacker ethic” holds dear, but in reality most of the posts seem like they are written

by tenured or tenure-track professors. The point about not being a “‘guru’ site” just seems

like an attempt to position it as a non-personality driven site, a tip-driven site, even

though it is quite clearly the product of certain hacker-sympathetic personalities. And

finally, the point about not fetishizing productivity and being about work-life balance

would seem to align it with Merlin Mann’s critique of life hacking, but one need only

look at the posts themselves to realize that this, too, is mostly lip service.

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Academe as Uniquely Hospitable to Hacks Why, of all the industries life hacking could have moved into, did it move into higher

education so early on, just a few years after it emerged as a discourse and practice? Is

there something about higher education that makes it particularly receptive to life

hacking? A partial explanation comes by way of Pekka Himanen’s The Hacker Ethic, and

the Spirit of the Information Age (2001), in which he asserts that “the hacker ethic is a

new work ethic that challenges the attitude toward work that has held us in its thrall for so

long, the Protestant work ethic, as explicated in Max Weber’s classic The Protestant

Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905).”57 In contrast to the Protestant work

ethic—wherein, as Himanen summarizes, “work must be seen as an end in itself, at work

one must do one’s part as well as possible, and work must be regarded as a duty, which

must be done because it must be done”58—the hacker work ethic is “the dedication to an

activity that is intrinsically interesting, inspiring, and joyous.”59

The predecessor for this sort of activity according to Himanen? The academic

world. Hackers “optimize time to be able to have more space for playfulness.”60 And

“Historically,” writes Himanen, “this freedom to self-organize time … has a precursor in

the academy. The academy has always defended a person’s freedom to organize time

oneself.”61 One may bristle at the assuredness with which Himanen makes this

generalization, especially if they know anything about academic work, but his basic

57 Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic, and the Spirit of the Information Age (New York: Random House, 2001), ix. 58 Ibid., 9. 59 Ibid., 6. 60 Ibid., 32. 61 Ibid., 33.

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schema here is useful. Industrial modernity was governed by clock time. The hacker, by

contrast, like the stereotypical humanities academic, works at his own pace. Drawing on

E. P. Thompson’s oft-cited 1967 article “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capital,”

Himanen describes pre-industrial work as task-oriented and industrial work as time-

oriented.62 Post-industrial or information-age work, he claims, represents a return to a

more task-orientated approach. Himanen writes, “the information economy’s most

important source of productivity is creativity, and it is not possible to create interesting

things in a constant hurry or in a regulated manner from nine to five.”63 Academic

humanities departments are often seen—by both celebrants and critics—as sites

representing an alternative to bourgeois capitalism, where work proceeds at its own pace,

not subject to the pressures of the market.

Not only do hackers and academics approach work in the same way, according to

Himanen, they share the fruits of their work similarly. The open-source model subscribed

to by many hackers is a lot like the idealized research-sharing model of academics,

particularly those in the sciences. Like hackers, Himanen observes, scientists “release

their work openly to others for their use, testing, and further development. Their research

is based on the idea of an open and self-correcting process.”64 Here, Himanen uses the

words “academic” and “scientist” more or less interchangeably. “All of our

understanding of nature is based on this academic or scientific model. The reason why

the original hackers’ open-source model works so effectively seems to be—in addition to

the facts that they are realizing their passions and are motivated by peer recognition, as

62 E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, no. 38 (December 1967), 56–97. 63 Himanen, 39. 64 Ibid., 68.

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scientists are also—that to a great degree it conforms to the ideal open academic model,

which is historically the best adapted for information creation.”65

Himanen’s suggestive comparisons between “the hacker ethic” and what might be

dubbed “the academic ethic” offers one explanation for why life hacking, of all the places

it could have wormed itself into, took root not simply within individual academic

departments, but within the institution of high education as a work place very early on.

Here, it has functioned, as in the first wave of life hacking blogs and the consumer

aesthetics of digital minimalism in the second wave, to reconstruct academic work and

professional identities along the lines of faster work and better information processing.

The representative prof hacker is thus both a better producer of work and a better

consumer of information.

ProfHacker’s Complicity with the Neoliberalization of Higher Education

We have met the Info. U., and it is us. —Marc Bousquet66

Himanen’s theory is that academics are naturally amenable to hacking thinking. But

another theory for why life hacking may have taken root in higher education so quickly is

that it is congruent with many of the changes American higher education is undergoing.

Higher education, especially in public universities, has been in an increasingly obvious

state of crisis since the Great Recession of 2009. From budget cuts at public universities

to the miserable job market for newly-minted, debt-ridden PhDs to the adjunctification of

faculty and the erosion of tenure. In particular, an increased emphasis on research

65 Ibid., 68–69. 66 Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 56.

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productivity and quantitative metrics of assessment are transforming “work at your own

pace,” language-based humanities and social sciences as they acquiesce to a quantitative

market logic lest they be eliminated entirely, a process often referred to as the

corporatization or neoliberalization of the university. Myriad books, articles, blog posts,

and symposia have registered this shift.67 In fact, so much has been written on the

problems facing present-day academe that some scholars now suggest it constitutes a

whole field of scholarly activity unto itself. For instance, Jeffrey J. Williams, writing in

2012, proposed the term “critical university studies” for criticism of higher education

characterized by a overarching perspective (i.e., one that isn’t discipline- or institution

type-specific) and a critical bent.68 An early entry into this field was David F. Noble’s

Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education (2001). In it, he tries to

critique the rapid technologization of academia he sees going on all around him before it

is too late to change or resist. “All too often in the past,” he writes on the first page,

“people had only belatedly realized the dimensions of the calamity that had befallen

them, too late to act effectively in their own interest.”69 Noble’s tone throughout is one of

impending doom. However, in 2014, comparing the things he was worried about over a

decade ago (e.g., early attempts at online education) to what is happening today, one

could be forgiven for feeling that it is indeed too late. There is still much to learn from

Noble’s work, though, because it illustrates what Jerry Mander, in 1991’s In the Absence

67 Just in terms of books, see, for instance, Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997); Jennifer Washburn, University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2008); Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham UP, 2008); Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013); Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014). 68 Jeffrey J. Williams, “Deconstructing Academe,” The Chronicle Review, February 19, 2012, http://chronicle.com/article/An-Emerging-Field-Deconstructs/130791/. 69 Noble, ix.

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of the Sacred, termed “the importance of the negative view.”70 Mander argues that all

technologies should be assumed guilty until proven innocent “because it emphasizes

examining the hidden negative values of new technologies, in a society predisposed to

see only the positive side of the story.” “In thinking about technology within the present

climate of technological worship,” Mander continues, “emphasize the negative. This

brings balance. Negativity is positive.” Unlike those who write for ProfHacker, Noble

and Mander would suggest a university’s mission should be to question the technological

imperative à la Cassidy, Postman, and Liu, not facilitate it. But the message of

ProfHacker remains merely prescriptive: it says, in effect, take these tech tips and tricks

and do something with them to make your research, teaching, and life better. The

definition of “better” is unspoken. Perhaps it simply means a cultural deference to

technological change for its own sake as if such change were automatically an

“improvement.” ProfHacker is not interested in the negative view; it is interested in the

positive view.

But why? Or as Noble asks, “What drives this headlong rush to implement new

technology with so little regard for deliberation of the pedagogical and economic costs

and at the risk of student and faculty alienation and opposition?”71 “A short answer,” he

writes, “might be the fear of getting left behind, the incessant pressures of ‘progress.’”72

Yet Noble’s answer here, as much as it would seem to explain the “hack curious,” is

incomplete. It is not just a fear of being left behind that explains why ProfHacker

continues as a fixture of the Chronicle of Higher Education, and other prof hacking–style

70 Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991). 71 Noble, 26. 72 Ibid.

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blogs like GradHacker and HackCollege continue to pump out tip after tip. As Noble

writes, “For the universities [in the 1990s] were not simply undergoing a technological

transformation. Beneath that change, and camouflaged by it, lies another: the

commercialization of higher education. For here as elsewhere technology is but a vehicle

and a disarming disguise.”73

At this juncture, as a full-fledged “critical university studies” might make clear,

the commercialization of higher education has gone from hard-to-believe indictment to

banal truism. As Andrew Ross writes in Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in

Precarious Times (2009),

Well-established trends confirm that the research university is behaving more and more like an adjunct to private industry: the steady concentration of power upward into managerial bureaucracies, the abdication of research and productivity assessment to external assessors and funders, the pursuit of intimate partnerships with industrial corporations, the pressure to adopt an entrepreneurial career mentality, and the erosion of tenure through the galloping casualization of the workforce. From the perspective of the increasingly managed academic employees, the result is systematic deprofessionalization: the value of a doctoral degree has been degraded, while new divisions of labor have emerged that are corrosive to any notion of job security or peer loyalty.74

Ross’s use of the term “deprofessionalization” here recalls Cassidy’s use of the term “de-

skilling.” Like Cassidy, Noble’s treatment is useful precisely because it is historical. His

insight is to historicize the commercialization referred to by Ross and connect it back to

technology. According to Noble, the commercialization of academia happened in two

separate but overlapping stages: first research, then instruction. He writes:

The major change to befall the universities over the last two decades has been the identification of the campus as a significant site of capital accumulation, a change in social perception that has resulted in the systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property. There have been

73 Ibid. 74 Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 172.

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two general phases of this transformation. The first, which began twenty years ago and is still underway, entailed the commodification of the research function of the university, transforming scientific and engineering knowledge into commercially viable proprietary products that could be owned and bough and sold in the market. The second, which we are now witnessing, entails the commodification of the educational function of the university, transforming courses into courseware, the activity of instruction itself into commercially viable propriety products that can be owned and bought and sold in the market. In the first phase the universities became the site of production and sale of patents and exclusive licenses. In the second, they are becoming the site of production of—as well as the chief market for—copyrighted videos, courseware, CD-ROM’s, and websites.75

Noble’s description here gives us perhaps a clue as to why so many of ProfHacker’s tips

and tricks concern teaching. (As of this writing, the only categories on the site that have

received more attention than teaching on ProfHacker are “software,” “productivity,” and

“the profession.”) The commercial potential, it is probably fair to say, of most work in the

humanities and social sciences is low, but professors in the humanities and social

sciences can participate in the commodification of the education function of the

university through technology without much difficulty. If the educational function of the

university has been commodified, though, it has been out of a kind of necessity. “The

result of [the] first phase of university commodification,” Noble explains, “was a

wholesale reallocation of university resources towards its research function at the

expense of its educational function.”76 When the money that once went toward teaching

starts going toward research, because research has the potential to bring in more money,

the teaching side of things, unsurprisingly, had to adapt. As Noble explains:

Class sizes swelled, teaching staffs and instructional resources were reduced, salaries were frozen, and curricular offerings were cut to the bone. At the same time, tuition soared to subsidize the creation and maintenance of a commercial infrastructure (and correspondingly bloated administration) that has never really

75 Noble, 26–27. 76 Ibid., 28.

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paid off. In the end students were paying more for their educations and getting less, and the campuses were in crisis.77

This is where technology comes in. As Noble writes, connecting the two stages together,

“The second phase of the commercialization of academia, the commodification of

instruction, is touted as the solution to the crisis engendered by the first.”78 That is, if the

education function of the university has reluctantly been commodified, the answer,

perversely, seems to be more commodification. As Noble explains, pointing a finger at

ed-tech boosters directly:

Ignoring the true sources of the financial debacle—an expensive and low-yielding commercial infrastructure and greatly expanded administrative costs—the champions of computer-based instruction focus their attention rather upon increasing the efficiencies of already overextended teachers. And they ignore as well the fact that their high-tech remedies are bound only to compound the problem, increasing further, rather than reducing, the costs of higher education.79

Noble was writing nearly a decade before ProfHacker, but is not ProfHacker most often

an attempt to use various technologies to increase the efficiencies of already

overextended academics? I quote Noble at length because what he realized that no one on

ProfHacker seems to want to acknowledge is that by acquiescing to the high-tech higher-

ed paradigm, one essentially becomes complicit in one’s own obsolescence. And what is

especially ironic is that it takes place at precisely the time one is trying to avoid being

obsolesced. Perhaps the problem is not so much that academics are not adequately

hacking themselves; perhaps the problem is with hacks themselves, specifically the

various structural pressures that make them seem like the way out.

Often, the people who stand to gain the most from the technologization of higher

education are not, despite ProfHacker’s rhetoric, teachers or students, but administrators

77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid.

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and corporations. “The foremost promoters,” Nobel writes, of the commodification of

education are “the vendors of the network hardware, software, and ‘content’ … [those]

who view education as a market for their wares, a market estimated … to be potentially

worth several hundred billion dollars.”80 Over a decade later, one imagines the market is

worth significantly more than that. The pro-tech position, moreover, is often associated

with members of the university’s burgeoning administrative class, who, according to

Noble,

view computer-based instruction as a means of reducing their direct labor and plant maintenance costs—fewer teachers and fewer classrooms—while at the same time undermining the autonomy and independence of the faculty. Additionally, they are hoping to get a piece of the commercial action for their institutions or themselves, as vendors in their own right of software and content. University administrators are supported in this enterprise by a number of private foundations, trade associations, and academic-corporate consortia that are promoting the use of the new technologies with increasing intensity.81

Prof hackers might be placed alongside administrators in the class of people Noble calls

“techno-zealots,” people “who simply view computers as the panacea for everything,

because they like to play with them. With the avid encouragement of their private sector

and university patrons, they forge ahead, without support for their pedagogical claims

about the alleged enhancement of education, without any real evidence of productivity

improvement, and without any effective demand from either students or teachers.”82 Who

Noble calls “techno-zealots,” James Carey calls “protechnologists”: “those who believe

our problem is the pace of technological development and believe reflexively that the

major or sole purpose of education is to promote that development. They are all pursuing

a scorched earth policy of the intellect, reducing all knowledge and achievement to a

80 Ibid., 29. 81 Ibid., 29–30. 82 Ibid., 30.

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single technical equation and defining civic and public life solely in technological

terms.”83 Here Noble’s description of techno-zealots and Carey’s description of

protechnologists, each of which also recalls Merlin Mann’s 2008 critique of life hacking,

almost scarily describes prof hackers. In the early 1960s, Norbert Wiener called these

same people “gadget worshipers.”84 This, in other words, is a recognizable American

type.

Noble, a historian of technology, sees what is happening to higher education as a

replay of what happened to other industries after they were automated.85 Recalling

Cassidy’s point about de-skilling, he writes:

teachers as labor are drawn into a production process designed for the efficient creation of instructional commodities, and hence become subject to all the pressures that have befallen production workers in other industries undergoing rapid technological transformation from above. In this context, faculty have much more in common with the historic plight of other skilled workers than they care to acknowledge. Like these others, their activity is being restructured, via the technology, in order to reduce their autonomy, independence, and control over their work and to place workplace knowledge and control as much as possible in the hands of the administration. As in other industries, the technology is being deployed by management primarily to discipline, deskill, and displace labor.86

Any discussion of the role of technology in higher education is thus fundamentally also a

discussion about labor relations. Suffice it to say, prof hackers do not seem to see

themselves as being manipulated by management. Rather, their tips are presented as

empowering, stratagems they have chosen to employ on their own for the benefit of

themselves and their students. Never do they ask, however, why so many stratagems have

to be employed in the first place, why constant self-improvement along technological

83 Carey, 295. 84 Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), 53. 85 Simon Head makes a similar point in his The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 86 Noble, 32.

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lines is suggested as the only reliable insurance against the changes happening in

academe. Thus, perhaps the most insidious thing about ProfHacker is how it has, like the

first wave of life hacking before it, thoroughly internalized and then repackaged for

consumption the values of management as tips and tricks coming from the “bottom up.”

Not only are academics being asked to do it themselves, they are being asked to do it to

themselves. Many of the academics with connections to prof hacking—e.g., those in

digital humanities, advocates of open access publishing, etc.—see themselves on the

vanguard of a revolution in higher education.87 What my analysis would seem to suggest,

however, is that their uncritical embrace of technology as a category for solving problems

inevitably and regrettably aligns them with power.

Prof hacking as a practice, despite the frequent lip service is pays to

“collaboration,” is deeply and troublingly individualist. It encourages faculty (and in its

undergraduate and graduate student incarnations, undergrad and grad students) in U.S.

higher education, like other professional workers, to see the changes wrought by

neoliberalization as problems they have to work out themselves by better managing

themselves through software. Even if, at some level, everyone acknowledges that much

of what people are experiencing as personal problems are in fact deeply-rooted and

broad-ranging sociocultural ones, individualist, technocratic solutions are still the order

of the day. It is a curious thing: the more the structure of academe deteriorates, the more

academics seem to start thinking of things in individualistic terms. Constant self-

improvement, self-reengineering, and learning how to use new technologies are the

solutions people keep coming back to. ProfHacker thus serves as an example of how life

87 Anya Kamenetz, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010).

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hacking ideas get deployed uncritically within a specific industry. The emphasis of

almost every post is how you, and you alone, can be more efficient via technology, not on

consciousness raising, labor organization, or deep structural change. ProfHacker presents

the needy, desperate, overstressed, and overburdened contemporary academic subject to

new neoliberal pressures with the apparent opportunity to do things more quickly and

more easily. It says, in effect, “Hey, you’ve got all this work you have to do now. Here,

let me show you how to manage it all more easily using this new piece of software.”

Rarely, if ever, does it question why academics might be feeling more put upon, and how

such feelings might be related to changing conditions of academic labor, which are

mostly structural, not individual, in nature. In a way, then, a site like ProfHacker

contributes to the problems it purports to help solve. By turning the focus inward, away

from larger systemic issues and to one’s own habits, it promotes a form of academic

navel-gazing that eclipses more collective worries. After all, who has time remake

academe when they’re busy, in the argot of Merlin Mann, dicking around with their

tools?

But Wait, Can the Academy Itself Be Hacked? Most of the tips and tricks on ProfHacker are aimed at individual academics. That is, it

offers up technological stratagems for individuals, things people, by themselves, on their

own, can do, learn, or implement in order to make themselves more “hacker-like.” Even

when they are about other people—teaching tips, for instance—they are about what one

person can do to make themselves better for others. Readers are always being hailed

individually about things they can do. But can “prof hacks” do more than just help an

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individual academic use a particularly technology better? Can they somehow be put

toward change at a level larger than an individual academic’s life? Can higher education

itself be hacked?

That is the question taken up/raised by the “Hacking the Academy” project, a

collection of writings crowdsourced in a week in May 2010 by Dan Cohen and Tom

Scheinfeldt, then both professors at George Mason University and affiliated with the Roy

Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. These documents were eventually

published as the physical book Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship

and Teaching from Digital Humanities by the University of Michigan Press in 2013.88

Various digital versions of it circulate freely as well. The project represents a sort of

apotheosis of the prof hacking project. Indeed, in terms of people and institutions, there is

considerable overlap between the ProfHacker blog and the book’s contributors. The

electronic version of the published volume that I quote from here “was assembled

and edited by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt from the best of over 300 submissions

received during a spirited week when the two editors actively solicited ideas for how the

academy could be beneficially reformed using digital media and technology.” In the

book, contributions are grouped into three sections: Hacking Scholarship, Hacking

Teaching, and Hacking Institutions. Though it tries to expand the notion of hacks from

the individualist life hacking/prof hacking mold to something larger, it nevertheless, I

maintain, falls back on fairly individualist hacks, suggesting, once again, the difficultly

an approach that emphasizes breaking things down into their component parts in order to

hack them has in seeing larger wholes or structures.

88 Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, eds., Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013). See also http://hackingtheacademy.org.

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On May 21, 2010, Cohen and Scheinfeldt “asked for contributions to a

collectively produced volume that would explore how the academy might be beneficially

reformed using digital media and technology.” They gave contributors a week to get their

submissions in. Cohen writes that “Between May 21 and May 28, 2010 we received a

remarkable 329 submissions from 177 authors, with nearly a hundred submissions written

during the week-long event and the other two-thirds submitted by authors from their prior

writing on the subject matter.” The number of submissions here says something about

how thoroughly the metaphor of hacking had been embraced by academics by 2010.

Cohen and Scheinfeldt then pared down the submissions for the final volume, in which,

Cohen writes, “Only one-sixth of the contributions made the cut.” The first really

revealing moment comes after Cohen says who these contributors are: “This book,” he

tells us, “is largely written from the perspectives and concerns of our fellow travelers in

digital humanities—although this is a rather varied bunch, including scholars, educational

technologists, librarians, and cultural heritage professionals.” What unites these people,

according to Cohen, is that 1) they are all people “deeply involved in the digital realm,”

and 2) people “who look to that realm for addressing problems, rather than, say, labor

unions.” Cohen does not develop this point, but it is a telling—even shocking in its blithe

disregard—admission nonetheless, even if, or perhaps because, it is fully consistent with

Noble’s critique. What Cohen is basically saying, in other words, is that these are people

who are unconcerned with traditional collective action; instead, they are looking to the

same digital capitalist technologies that are wrecking academia to fix academia.

After Dan Cohen’s introduction to Hacking the Academy, Tad Suiter, a PhD

candidate in History at George Mason University, offers some prefatory remarks asking

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why “The metaphor of hacking is central to this project … [and] extremely apt.”89

Because, he continues, some readers might be unfamiliar with the term, he will define

“what ‘hacking’ means, and what it might mean to ‘hack the academy.’” Suiter’s

discussion of hacking here is interesting. He begins by acknowledging that for many, the

word “hacker” still has negative connotations, calling to mind images from news stories

and movies of computer criminals living in their parents’ basements surrounded by

computer monitors and junk food. But that is not, Suiter insists, what hacking really

means. He writes:

Originally, the term was used to describe computer code. There were two opposing meanings to calling a piece of code a “hack.” One, it is expertly written, efficient, and does precisely what it is intended to do, with eloquence. The other was that the code was hastily written, sloppy, and essentially only just good enough. It was a workaround, the software equivalent of a hardware kludge.

In other words, in keeping with life hacking discourses, a hack is a fix of some sort, a

modification. But then he goes farther. Whether a hack is beautiful or ugly matters less,

Suiter argues, than the fact that both are born out of “a certain relationship to a certain

type of knowledge.” That is, “a hacker is a person who looks at systemic knowledge

structures and learns about them from making or doing. They teach themselves and one

another because they are at the bleeding edge of knowledge about that system.”

Crucially, Suiter defines the hackers that matter as prototypical early adopters and

tinkerers, testing the boundaries of the systems in which they find themselves. At its core,

then, a hack is a product of one’s relationship to a systemic knowledge structure. As

Suiter writes, “Learning about and improving highly complex systems by playful

innovation is at the core of what I would call the ‘hacker ethos.’”

89 Tad Suiter, “Why ‘Hacking’?,” in Hacking the Academy: A Book Crowdsourced in One Week.

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Like Pekka Himanen, then, Suiter suggests that there is something intrinsic to

hacking that makes it amenable to knowledge workers, particularly at a time when higher

education is being digitized. Indeed, one can scarcely speak of “higher education” and

“technology” as separate things anymore, if they ever could. As Suiter explains, echoing

the descriptions of the commentators with which I began this chapter,

The academy is approaching a new integration with revolutionary new technology. We’ve quickly gone from computers in the classroom to classrooms inside computers, and to the integration of new media into the very fabric of classroom interaction. Computer-based research in the age of ubiquitous, fast, and cheap computing is changing very fundamentally our approaches to research, collegiality, and collaboration. Pure information is getting cheaper and more easily accessible, while the mental and coding chops to process the glut of information are becoming more and more valuable in the new knowledge economy.

That is, if the academy is a system and computers are a system, now the two systems are

merging and becoming what Lewis Mumford once called a “megamachine.”90 Here’s

Suiter again: “We can see two highly complex systems—computer technology and the

academy, one complex by nature and one deeply complex by force of history—colliding

and hybridizing.” In such a system, the paradigmatic professor is a prof hacker. But even

prof hackers can only do so much. As Suiter writes, “we are faced with a situation where

even the very clever people on the cutting edge who have working knowledge of both

systems cannot fully synthesize them and predict outcomes.” To put it somewhat

differently, the megamachine formed by the merger of academe and computers has

become unwieldy. The best we can do, Suiter seems to be saying, is embrace the hacker

ethos and try stay as far ahead of the problems we face using whatever technologies we

can. Once again, I am reminded of Danny O’Brien’s line “For most people, geeks or not,

90 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine Vol. Two: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970).

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modern life is just this incredibly complex problem amenable to no good obvious

solution. But we can peck around the edges of it; we can make little shortcuts. … So the

idea of life hacks is just really appealing to geeks, because it’s an expression of this huge

hope that you can actually hack life in this way, that you might make it a bit more

bearable without having to swallow or understand the whole thing.”91

Here life hacking comes full circle. Academics might not be able to understand

the whole system anymore, but they can peck around its edges. Suiter, to his credit, like a

lot of prof hackers, is not blind to the problems of academe. He writes, for instance,

There’s a lot to be bleak about when you look to the future of higher education. The academic job market is grim. The publishing system seems on the verge of economic collapse. Universities are quickly becoming prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of students, who are in turn forced into an exploitative system of student loans. The system, to some of us, appears to be broken.

But Suiter does not acknowledge or admit that a new regime linking human labor,

institutions, and technology might be at least partially responsible for creating and/or

magnifying these problems. From Suiter’s point of view, the only response to these

problems is to try to hack them. Hacking is both an admission of failure and the answer to

everything. In Suiter’s worldview,

when a system fails, you hack around it. Some hacks may be eloquent and subtle; they may be almost poetic. Others are nasty hacks that only really serve in a single work case—but in either case, you’ve routed around the problem. You’ve fixed something. You’ve improved functionality. And likely, you’ve learned a little something yourself about the functioning of the system you’re working with, and will be better prepared next time you find a bug.

Significantly, for Suiter, and by extension the rest of the authors in the Hacking the

Academy Project, hacks are not a cure-all. Suiter’s position is a more resigned—or

perhaps just realistic—one. Hacks, he seems to be saying, are the best we can do. Hacks 91 Gina Trapani, “Interview: father of ‘life hacks’ Danny O’Brien,” Lifehacker, 17 Mar 2005, http://lifehacker.com/036370/interview-father-of-life-hacks-danny-obrien.

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are patches, not wholesale rewrites. Hacking is a piecemeal approach, a kind of

incrementalism, not a total reorganization. “The academy,” Suiter writes, “ultimately, can

only be invigorated and improved by an infusion of the hacker ethos” but not—and this is

key—transformed. Such is the sort of technophilic, gradualist thinking that underlies not

only the contradictory Hacking the Academy project but prof hacking itself. It is, of

course, easier to think about technical problems than problems that cannot be easily fixed

by technology. Those problems are overwhelming. “The problems of our schools, our

politics, our economy are rooted in our culture, in the flawed operation of our institutions,

in the patterns of our motivation, and in the ugliness of our social relations,” writes James

Carey. “These things cannot be fixed, though they may be temporarily patched, by

automating the office, by displacing the waning capacity of traditional literacy with

competence on new machines, or by investing all our scarce energies in research and

development.”92

Indeed, the Hacking the Academy project has not inspired any serious wholesale

structural transformation of academe along more progressive lines. What it has inspired is

another crowd-sourced book project called Hacking the Classroom (2014), which not

only narrows the focus from “the academy” to “the classroom” (hacking all of academe

was evidently too much), but engages in the same individual encouragement for

professors to use technology we see on ProfHacker.93 Mary Hocks and Jentery Sayers

explain the project’s origins:

At the 2012 Computers and Writing conference, a panel of academics came together and embarked upon a series of lightning round talks, broadly focused on the topic, “Hacking the Classroom.” The organizers, Virginia Kuhn and Jentery

92 Carey, 302. 93 See Mary Hocks and Jentery Sayers, “Introduction,” Hacking the Classroom (2014), http://www2.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/hacking/.

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Sayers, chose this topic because it resonates with the growing practice of hacking academia by turning the critical gaze inward, rethinking institutional structures and practices, and revising them to foster new social relationships, pedagogies, and modes of inquiry.

If this passage sounds similar to the rationale for the Hacking the Academy project, that is

because it is. Hocks and Sayers note that they were directly inspired by it. However, for

all the lip service they pay to “rethinking institutional structures,” most of the

contributions to the collection concern computational pedagogical strategies the

contributors have done with their individual classes. “Each panelist provided particular

examples of their own hacking practices as well as aspirations to hack the classroom at

their respective institutions, while addressing some obstacles, enthusiasms, and

curiosities encountered along the way (including the panelists' own skepticism about the

current ubiquity of ‘hacking’),” Hocks and Sayers explain. It is worth noting that the

editors and contributors here, like the posters to ProfHacker, are not uncritical of

technology in a kind of micro sense. Indeed, they are all perfectly willing to admit that

technologies have biases, that technologies must be looked at in terms of race, class, and

gender, and so on. What they do not seem critical of is technology in a more macro sense

as a category or system like the historians and philosophers of technology that inform my

thinking here. The editors cheerily note in the introduction to the volume that “The eight

pieces included here not only demonstrate how hacking is variously imagined and

received across disciplines; they also give everyone involved a sense of possible next

steps toward institutional critique and a feeling of camaraderie during the transition.” But

do they? Ultimately, both of these books, like the ProfHacker blog itself, focus less on

“institutional critique” and function more about serving up for consumption

representative examples of academics who are using technology in “creative” and

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“interesting” ways, to inspire (or shame) book-bound academics who are not equally

digital or wired.94 The overall effect of this is simply more technological belaboring. It is

not that such technologies are without value; it is that the ceaseless and showy

propagandizing of them seems less resistant to the structural issues facing academe than

in line with them. Instead, professors resolutely committed to hacking themselves,

hacking their classrooms, and hacking the academy fritter away time at their keyboards

while, all around them, academe crumbles.

94 Personally, I follow Thomas Haigh in subscribing to an upended version of digital humanities that seeks to “apply the tools and methods of the humanities to the subject of computing” rather than vice versa. See Thomas Haigh, “We Have Never Been Digital,” Communications of the ACM 57, no. 9 (September 2014).

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CONCLUSION

Hackers understand a system well enough to be in charge of it and make it do their bidding—and maybe make it do things that weren’t intended. [The best hackers are]

world hackers … people who understand not only how to mess with computers but how to mess with everything. —Paul Graham1

This dissertation set out to explore the phenomenon of life hacking and has identified its

origins in Danny O’Brien’s 2004 conference presentation, its mutations from Lifehacker

to Tim Ferriss to digital minimalism to prof hacking, thus taking us more or less up to the

present day. Additionally, I have explored some of the shortcomings inherent in all these

instances. In focusing on shortcomings, in steadfastly taking what Jerry Mander called

“the negative view,” this dissertation has also sought to explore the ideology

undergirding life hacking in its various manifestations, particularly the way seemingly

benign practical tips designed to make daily living more efficient and effective might be

seen as part of long traditions in American culture of self-improvement and technological

utopianism. In other words, this dissertation sought to identify the different parts of life

hacking and explain how they relate to each other, to trace how life hacking has changed

over time, and to explain how life hacking is an episode not only in the larger history of

hacking but in the larger history of American culture.

The general literature on hacking is inconclusive on several vital questions

regarding the recent diversification of its discourse. This project sought to answer some

of these questions: Does the broadening of hacking terminology to all manner of life and

work activities bespeak the popularization of a radical, in the sense of being

1 Quoted in Steven Levy, “Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists,” Wired, April 19, 2010, http://www.wired.com/2010/04/ff_hackers/all/.

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countercultural, hacker subjectivity? (No, not really.) Or is this subjectivity, now

broadened, less radical and more in line with the digital capitalist status quo than those

prone to romanticizing hackers and hacking might want to admit? (Yes, I think so.) What,

essentially, does the wholesale adoption of the term “hack” in and across various cultural

spaces tell us about the current cultural moment? I have attempted to answer, or at least

start to answer, these questions through three different case studies, wherein I drew on a

range of materials—newspaper and magazine articles, blog posts, books, conference

proceedings, social media updates, podcasts, online journalism, and TV shows—in order

to tell a story about how life hacking has developed over time. I have traced, in short, life

hacking’s metamorphoses through three critically important and interlinked realms.

In chapter 1, I tried to emphasize the rhetorical machinations behind the

transformation, in just a few short years, of life hacks from computer-centric tips and

tricks to a whole mode of thinking about the world that gets applied to more and more

things. Today if you go to Lifehacker, you will still find tips and tricks pertaining to

computers, certainly, but also tips and tricks pertaining to how to “Thoroughly Clean a

Hair Brush with a Toothbrush” and “How to Properly Freeze Fruit for Longer-Lasting

Freshness,” among many other wacky and wonderful delights.2 Hacking has become not

just something one does to computers, but something one can (and “should”) do to

anything. If computers have conquered the world, the world has also become viewable as

if it were a computer. Perhaps the latter helped bring about the former more than the

other way around. By taking the idea of computer hacks and applying them to “life,” the

2 Melanie Pinola, “Thoroughly Clean a Hair Brush with a Toothbrush,” Lifehacker, July 18, 2014, http://lifehacker.com/thoroughly-clean-a-hair-brush-with-a-toothbrush-1607307915; Susannah Chen, “How to Properly Freeze Fruit for Longer-Lasting Freshness,” Lifehacker, March 19, 2015, http://skillet.lifehacker.com/how-to-properly-freeze-fruit-for-longer-lasting-freshne-1692241279.

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life hacking movement, perhaps more than any other single entity, was responsible for

expanding the notion of hacking beyond computers. It is this very broadening, I would

argue, that reveals how life hacking is rooted in deep-seated U.S. nationalist discourses of

efficiency, productivity, technology, and work.3 Were it not, I maintain, it would not have

been broadened. Looked at from this point of view, life hacks are less ennobling

stratagems than the technologization of old, often problematic ideas that conceive of the

self, and by extension the world, as endlessly perfectible through technology.

In chapter 2, I turned my attention to how a post-Lifehacker, second-wave branch

of life hacking pitched getting rid of all your possessions and living in “the cloud” as the

ultimate life hack. This “digital minimalism” should not be read as a politically

progressive anti-consumerism, but as an attempt to make oneself more “flexible,” less

physically burdened under digital capitalism. Indeed, in its elevation of digital devices, it

is thoroughly consumerist. Its ostensible anti-materialism, moreover, is a kind of fantasy

invested in a problematic conception of the Internet as an intangible fluffy white cloud.

Finally, in chapter 3, I looked at how life hacking ideas have seeped into

academe. Here I tried to stress how similar a website like ProfHacker is to a website like

Lifehacker, and thus is subject to the same critique Merlin Mann and others have made

about life hacking’s recursivity. And like the digital minimalists, prof hackers, with their

eyes on their own screens like the dutiful pupils they are, seem unwilling to look at larger

structures, namely the changes being wrought by the neoliberalization of the university,

and thus sadly seem more congruent with them than not.

3 Jennifer Karns Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

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Part of the idea of looking at these three sites of life hacking activity back-to-

back-to-back was to suggest a through line between them, to tell a story, in the Neil

Postman-sense of the word, of how these three spheres of cultural activity are

interconnected. Taken together, these three case studies help correct a gap in the literature

on hacking more generally, as well as to deepen the emerging, mostly journalistic

commentary on life hacking specifically. Collectively, they suggest how life hacking is

moving from online blogs into different spheres, and in some cases, even becoming

institutionalized. They show that hacking practices exist in, and are shaped by, culture,

and that it behooves hacker scholars to pay attention to this, for it calls into question

hacking as a liberating or radical practice that somehow exists outside of culture and is

able to change or “modify” it from on high. The technological worldview at the heart of

hacking (i.e., that everything is modifiable and improvable) is, in the end, in sync with an

individualist self-help ideology that has deep roots in American, nay Western, culture.4

From this point of view, life hacking is less a fad than simply the latest manifestation of a

set of linked recurring impulses in American life. These impulses offer up personal

responses as solutions to what are in fact systemic issues. Life hacking, for instance, has

substituted endless tinkering for actually solving problems. That is to say, rather than find

truly transformative solutions, it has put forward a technological logic so incremental that

it epitomizes our larger shortsightedness and failures of imagination when it comes to

dealing with our most pressing national and global problems. It is as if all social,

economic, environmental, etc. problems have been turned into computer problems, and

we are all expected to work on them by ourselves.

4 Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2010).

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These three case studies, though, do not come close to exhausting the theme of

this dissertation: the emergence and popularization of life hacking in the early twenty-

first century. By focusing on digital minimalism and prof hacking, rather than just on the

first wave of life hacking sites, I tried to develop a certain depth of evidence and richness

of interpretation regarding life hacking’s field-jumping tendencies, though other

important areas which it has wormed itself into, including health, politics, and urban

planning remain for other investigations. There is so much more I wanted to talk about

but could not here. One of the threads I have tried to trace, however, is that of gender,

from Lifehacker’s rechristening of “Hints from Heloise”-style tips as hacks, to Tim

Ferriss’s distinctly masculine interpretation of life hacking, to the unsentimental, fraternal

culture of the digital minimalists, to the gender-neutral tips proffered by prof hacks at a

time when things like adjunctification disproportionately affect women5, gender has been

a theme throughout this dissertation, if at times an unspoken one. Perhaps this is not

surprising. Indeed, hacker culture in general, at least historically, is, as Douglas Thomas

argues, a kind of “boy culture”: “Mastery over technology, independence, and

confrontation with adult authority, traits that Anthony Rotundo has identified as

constitutive of boy culture, all figure prominently in the construction of hacker culture …

the hacker demographic is composed primarily (but not exclusively) of white, suburban

boys.”6 Given this, it is to gender that I now turn for a moment in order to suggest a

potential avenue for future research that fascinates me immensely.

5 See Kelly J. Baker, “Contingency and Gender,” Chronicle Vitae, April 24, 2015, https://chroniclevitae.com/news/984-contingency-and-gender; Michelle A. Masse and Katie J. Hogan, Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010). 6 Douglas Thomas, Hacker Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), x.

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In Gina Trapani’s January 16, 2009 Lifehacker farewell post “So Long, and

Thanks for All the Fish,” she tells readers, contrary to Lifehacker’s editorial policy, “I’m

taking off my distanced reporter hat to get all mushy, personal, and behind-the-scenes on

you.”7 Like her very first post, it is self-consciously chatty. She takes us back to the

beginnings of the site in the fall of 2004. “Throughout November and December” of that

year, Trapani explains, “my colleagues at Gawker Media and I designed the personality

behind Lifehacker, the person who would become the site’s mascot.” “It would be a

‘she,’ of course, because I am,” Trapani continues. “The female take on tech would

define the voice of the site, but subtly, without any pink ‘you go girl’ crap—just straight

talk from someone helpful and knowledgeable but not pandering, someone focused not

on the shiny but on the useful, someone brisk and futuristic. We imagined her as a

spaceship flight attendant or pilot of sorts.” Trapani’s postfeminist revelation here that

she always imagined and intended for Lifehacker to have a feminine personality is

fascinating because it is hard to reconcile with the masculine self-making that historically

has been, as I have tried to trace in the previous chapters, at the heart of the life hacking

project.

Gender, though, emerges as a topic of concern on Lifehacker at regular intervals.

Indeed, by September 17, 2014, although he does not mention Trapani’s farewell post,

Lifehacker editor Whitson Gordon publicly worried that the site had become too male:

“Once upon a time, we tried to avoid featuring tricks that were specific to one gender. I

thought that was silly, so a while back I opened the doors to sharing more gender-specific

hacks—like how a man’s suit should fit. However, that introduced a new problem: we

7 Gina Trapani, “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish,” Lifehacker, January 16, 2009, http://lifehacker.com/5132674/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish.

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now have too much male-centric stuff on Lifehacker.”8 Gordon seems genuinely, if in a

de rigueur postfeminist way, concerned by this sorry state of affairs. Lifehacker wasn’t

trying to be male-centric, really it wasn’t, he seems to be saying, it just became that way.

Gordon promises to start reading more blogs geared toward women, strike an equal

balance between male- and female-centric tips, and to be aware more of how gender is

unmarked on Lifehacker. All good things, surely.

What is curious about Gordon’s postfeminist mea culpa here is that earlier that

same year, in January 2014, Lifehacker launched a sub-blog called Lifehacker After

Hours “dedicated to…well, tips and tricks we wouldn’t normally put on Lifehacker,”

Gordon explains in the introductory post.9 “Sometimes, we pass things up because

they’re a little too NSFW for Lifehacker’s persona, a little too polarizing, or just a little

too ‘out there.’ Sure, we’ve dabbled here and there—but starting today, this is going to be

a place for us to push the envelope a little further with things that not everyone would be

comfortable with. If you’ve always liked Lifehacker’s (relatively) uncontroversial

demeanor…this sub-blog is probably not for you.” Lifehacker After Hours—in case

Gordon’s hemming-and-hawing, almost embarrassed-teenage-boy introduction wasn’t

clear—is basically a site devoted to sex hacks, most, but not all, of which seem addressed

squarely to male readers. Recent representative posts include “Everything You Need to

Know to Have a Classy One-Night Stand,” “Choose the Right Mattress for Your Sex

Style with This Guide,” and “Estimate the Right Condom Size For You with a Toilet

8 Whitson Gordon, “Let’s Talk About Gender on Lifehacker,” Lifehacker, September 17, 2014, http://shoptalk.lifehacker.com/lets-talk-about-gender-on-lifehacker-1635428689. 9 Whitson Gordon, “Welcome to Lifehacker, After Hours: Time to Turn On Incognito Mode,” Lifehacker Afterhours, January 20, 2014, http://afterhours.lifehacker.com/welcome-to-lifehacker-after-hours-time-to-turn-on-inc-1503169128.

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Paper Roll.”10 As a part of Lifehacker, the After Hours sub-blog continues its tradition of

colonizing other domains—in this case, sex—but also calls into question the feminine

persona Trapani initially sought to imbue the site with, as well as Gordon’s sincerity

about making the site more gender inclusive, for although it, like the main Lifehacker

blog, contains its fair share of female-centric tips, the overall feeling is more

heteronormative Maxim magazine than LGBTQ-friendly, sex-positive feminist blog. A

February 20, 2014 post promises, for instance, to tell readers “How to Hide Your Porn.”11

Even the posts ostensibly for women, e.g., “Help Prevent Yeast Infections by Blow

Drying Your Nether Regions,” seem to be somehow for straight men’s consumption.12

Beginning with this evidence of Lifehacker’s confused gender politics, one might

extend the analysis of life hacking practices to “pickup artists,” the Internet underground

of men swapping tips on how to seduce women that rose to national prominence at nearly

exactly the same time Lifehacker did in 2005 with the publication of Neil Strauss’s book

The Game, and eventually, as with the other cultural locations of life hacking, manifested

itself across multiple media, including blogs, podcasts, ebooks, printed books, television

shows, social media, conferences, and bootcamps. I think this is a compelling avenue for

future life hacking research, for “pickup artistry” marks yet another cultural location

10 Alan Henry, “Everything You Need to Know to Have a Classy One-Night Stand,” Lifehacker After Hours, November 13, 2014, http://afterhours.lifehacker.com/everything-you-need-to-know-to-have-a-classy-one-night-1658125966; Eric Ravenscraft, “Choose the Right Mattress for Your Sex Style with This Guide,” Lifehacker After Hours, September 22, 2014, http://afterhours.lifehacker.com/choose-the-right-mattress-for-your-sex-style-with-this-1637849081; Eric Ravenscraft, “Estimate the Right Condom Size For You with a Toilet Paper Roll,” Lifehacker After Hours, July 18, 2014, http://afterhours.lifehacker.com/estimate-the-right-condom-size-for-you-with-a-toilet-pa-1607455001. 11 Walter Glenn, “How to Hide Your Porn,” Lifehacker After Hours, February 20, 2014, http://afterhours.lifehacker.com/how-to-hide-your-porn-1525454917. 12 Tessa Miller, “Help Prevent Yeast Infections by Blow Drying Your Nether Regions,” Lifehacker After Hours, February 17, 2014, http://afterhours.lifehacker.com/help-prevent-yeast-infections-by-blow-drying-your-nethe-1524676976.

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where hacking ideas get applied to “real life” in such a smooth way that one wonders

whether there is not a bias at the root of hacking as a cultural technology that makes it

amenable to nefarious applications, not simply in a criminal sense, as others have

remarked upon, but in how it draws upon and recapitulates a long tradition in American

culture of white masculine self-making. Here a man’s worth is measured not only by his

ability to make something of himself economically, but his ability to seduce women. If

computers and dating are both products of industrialization, the leisure time promised by

the former is often imagined as time that might be spent doing the latter.

Pickup artists (or PUAs) take this curious historical linkage to its terrifying

conclusion by approaching the task of getting girls the way one might approach writing a

computer program. With the right “scripts” or “recipes,” you can convince any women to

sleep with you. “It is just a matter of discovering the right algorithms,” writes Aaron

Swartz in his refreshingly clear-eyed review of The Game, “like you do when you are

writing a computer program. (Which probably explains the subculture’s incredible

popularity among computer programmers.)”13 In light of this, is the existence of

Lifehacker’s After Hours sub-blog at all a surprise? PUAs figured out which scripts

worked best, then, like Tim Ferriss does his challenges, they broke down the seduction

process into steps and figured out which scripts went where. Moreover, is it any surprise

that Tim Ferriss and Neil Strauss are friends? Or that one of the episodes of “The Tim

Ferriss Experiment” is about him learning how to pick up women? Or that in that episode

Ferriss consults with hacker Samy Kamkar?14

13 Aaron Swartz, “The Theory of the Game,” Raw Thought, December 24, 2007, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/thegame. 14 Tim Ferriss, “How One Computer Hacker Conquered Online Dating, Opens Locked Cars, and More,” May 2, 2015, http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/05/02/samy-kamkar/.

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“How do ideas born within the technical communities around computation find

their way out to the culture beyond?” Sherry Turkle asked in 1984’s The Second Self.15

Her question is over thirty years old now but still relevant. One might profitably try to

answer it by looking at the pickup artist community, which overlaps in telling ways with

the life hacking community. PUAs attracted mainstream attention after the publication of

Neil Strauss’s The Game, but prior to that, PUAs and aspiring PUAs, like the life hackers

and aspiring life hackers who were the early audience for Lifehacker, mostly interacted

online.16

Apart from the online parallel, what is most interesting to me about PUAs is their

“scientizing” or “microengineering” of attraction. They have, through research and

experimentation, essentially hacked seduction. They have reversed engineered it and

reduced it to a series of steps, scripts, and procedures that any man—theoretically—can

follow and be successful. Like life hackers, then, they operate under the assumption that

anything can be engineered. “Geeks are intelligent individuals who simply haven’t yet

applied that intelligence to social scenarios,” writes celebrity pickup artist Mystery,

“hence, they appear deficient in that area.” “Making matters worse,” he continues, “the

society around us, at first glance, appears very chaotic.” Note the parallel here to Danny

O’Brien’s “modern life is just this incredibly complex problem amenable to no good

obvious solution,” and how the incremental nature of life hacking helps makes it

attractive and able to jump domains. For when, Mystery concludes, “you look at all other

human beings as beautiful, elegant biological machines embedded with sophisticated

15 Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 20th Anniversary Edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 26. 16 Neil Strauss, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (New York: It Books, 2005)

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behavioral systems designed to align with others to maximize their chances for survival

and replication, the task of understanding humanity and your place in it becomes

surmountable.”17 That is, these matters may seem overwhelming to computer geeks, but

they can be hacked. They can always be hacked. It is just a matter of approaching them as

if they are hackable.

In some ways, pickup artists represent the apotheosis of life hacking. To date,

however, the commentary on pickup artists has, unsurprisingly, focused on their

problematic gender politics. Less attention has been paid to how PUAs seek to

technologize attraction and for that reason might be read as part of the larger discursive

structure of life hacking. For as Rob Horning astutely observes:

The pickup artists apparently developed a highly rationalized and mechanistic seduction “technology” that managed to secure a vaunted reputation for efficiency. It’s full of needless acronyms and reductive psychological claims, that in practice requires a zealous, monkish preparation and an Olympian indifference to the ordinary feelings of human association. Love is certainly beside the point, an ideological phantom that prevents weak men from pursing their Darwinian imperative to spread their seed. Rather than establish a spontaneous, open-ended and reciprocal relation with another person, the pickup artists want to assure that interpersonal exchanges follow a rigid script that culminates in sex, with the execution of the script becoming an end in itself, a disciplined mastery of procedures as procedures. They seek to rationalize the sexual encounter into an altogether predictable exchange befitting consumer capitalism, whose logic demands the steady conversion of the full panoply of human experience into on-demand products. Pickup artistry seems a peculiar sort of service work in which a man suspends his ability to experience emotions in order to manufacture a synthetic affective experience for a woman. The reward is sexual activity as currency, as pure payment, safely insulated from any possibility of vulnerability or passionate surrender.18

I quote Horning here at length not only because I think he is a sharp critic, but because

his analysis suggests that pickup artists are what happens when life hacking ideas are 17 Mystery, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed (New York: St. Martin’s, 2007), 7. 18 Rob Horning, “Power & The Pick-Up Artist,” New Inquiry 14 Jul 2010, http://thenewinquiry.com/post/811171586/power-the-pick-up-artist.

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taken to their extreme. Indeed, life hacking and pickup artistry attract the same sort of

person: the prototypical white male geek who is more comfortable talking to a computer

than to a woman. Undergirding the PUA phenomenon is, I think, a postindustrial “crisis

of masculinity” that exists alongside the various other crises undergirding life hacking

more broadly. By examining PUA culture, one might be able to further tease out how life

hacking ideas circulate and operate outside of typical hacking circles. If one of this

project’s aims has been to describe and suggest a wider set of activities and social

locations than is normally associated with the practice of hacking, PUAs would seem to

merit some kind of investigation. Trapani may have conceived of Lifehacker as having a

female subjectivity, but the way life hacking has played out suggests that has not always

held true. Thinking about pickup artists in terms of life hacking—and life hacking in

terms of pickup artists—is just one of many places one might take research on life

hacking. The above is offered as a sketch of the form such research might take.

When I started following life hacking back when it was beginning, I wondered

how long it would last. Though today the participants are different—Mann has not posted

on 43 Folders in years and Trapani retired from Lifehacker in 2009 (though both,

significantly, are still doing life-hacky type things)—life hacking as a cultural practice

continues unabated a decade later with no signs of slowing down. It is a cliché to say that

when you are working on a dissertation, you start to see your dissertation everywhere, but

in my case, I think there is truth to the cliché.

Prof hacking, for instance, like the first wave of life hacking blogs before it,

seems like it might be entering a digital minimalist phase, which of course is wholly

congruent with the virtualization of the university that prof hacking is both a response to

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and continuation of.19 The trajectory I have traced from tech tips to minimalism to a

return to “stuff” (typified by the prominence of sensuous topics like sex and food on

Lifehacker) seems ripe for repetition.

Here are two quick examples. Ken Ilgunas’s 2013 book Walden on Wheels: On

the Open Road From Debt to Freedom is the story of a white suburban teenager who

graduates from the University of Buffalo buried in student loan debt, has an existential

crisis, decides to go work in Alaska in order to pay off his loans, then eventually enrolls

in a master’s program at Duke University, where he, inspired by the frugality and

philosophy of Thoreau à la the Minimalists, decides to live in a Ford Econoline van à la

Foster Huntington. Ilgunas’s story suggests an emerging continuity between digital

minimalism and prof hacking: living like an ascetic becomes a way to get a debt-free

education. And so does the story of Jeff Wilson, aka “Professor Dumpster,” an

environmental science professor at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas who

moved into a dumpster in a stunt that is part Tim Ferriss-esque experiment, part

sustainable-living pedagogy prof hack. One of the implicit messages? Professors can

embrace virtuality by living in garbage cans.20

As interesting as these two examples are, it is important to note that the first wave

of life hacking has not exhausted itself. Life hacking now might best be thought of as a

series of concentric ripples, pulsating at different intervals and occasionally running into

each other. At present, for instance, the cable television network truTV is airing a show

called “Hack My Life” (2015–), which brings Lifehacker-style life hacks to television.

19 Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015). 20 See Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2013) and http://dumpsterproject.org/, respectively.

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Billed as a “weekly half hour show that provides a comedic spin on the never-ending

supply of everyday life hacks” that “demonstrates how to incorporate eye-popping

shortcuts guaranteed to save today's busy adults a lot of time, effort and money. From

learning how to open a bottle of wine with your shoe, to finding out the multiple uses for

a toilet paper roll,” it is confident that “there is never a shortage of hacks to discover” and

that viewers’ lives “will never be the same.”21 Things like this suggest that life hacking

remains a protean concept, able to be endlessly re-spun.

And, of course, Lifehacker itself, Tim Ferriss, digital minimalists such as Leo

Babauta, and ProfHacker are all still going strong. No longer new, life hacking has

simply become part of American culture, observable all over the place online, in books,

on TV, and in business and lifestyle magazines. Food conglomerate Kraft now has a

“food hacks” blog (and Twitter, Vine, Pinterest, and Instagram) run by Danielle Rose.22

Inc. runs articles with titles like “This Crazy Simple Hack Makes You More Creative”

and “7 Life Hacks for Greater Career Success” sans irony.23 Netflix brings together life

hack-y TED Talks in two different collections, “TED Talks: Life Hack” (2011) and

“TED Talks: Life Hack 2: The Next Level” (2015).24

21 “About the Show,” truTV/Hack My Life, 2015, http://www.trutv.com/shows/hack-my-life/about.html (accessed 6 May 2015). 22 See http://www.kraftcanada.com/recipes/food-hacks/blog (accessed 6 May 2015). 23 Geoffrey James, “This Crazy Simple Hack Makes You More Creative,” Inc., March 24, 2015, http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/this-crazy-simple-hack-makes-you-more-creative.html; Jayson Demers, “7 Life Hacks for Greater Career Success,” Inc., April 6, 2015, http://www.inc.com/jayson-demers/7-life-hacks-for-greater-career-success.html. 24 “TED Talks: Life Hack” (2011), 10 episodes, and “TED Talks: Life Hack 2: The Next Level” (2015), 10 episodes, Netflix, Web (accessed 6 May 2015).

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Figure 6: Netflix’s Life Hacks Collections

Life hacking is no longer just a multimedia phenomenon, but seemingly a multimillion

dollar one as well. Ultimately, the period I deal with in my dissertation marks life

hacking’s shift from subcultural discourse to more general cultural discourse. That is,

how the experience of a fairly limited subset of the population is becoming the

experience for the culture as a whole. I predict life hacking ideas will remain a fixture of

the American cultural scene for the foreseeable future partly because, as my digital

minimalism and prof hacking chapters suggest, life hacking will simply take root in

various institutions. Yesterday it was the world of freelance web workers, today it is

higher education, tomorrow it will be healthcare, government, and so on until hacking

becomes the default approach to everything and hacker the default subject position

everywhere.

But maybe this trajectory is not so surprising. Maybe it always had to be this way.

For at the root of hacking is a kind of “technological mastery as self-mastery” ethos that

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has deep roots in American culture. So, in a way, it is only fitting that life hacking should

become mainstream; the ideas at the heart of life hacking are mainstream already. In the

end, then, life hacking embodies a technologized form of self-help, a thinking about

everything in mechanistic terms that is now the “default setting,” and maybe even a kind

of quasi-religion with its own prophets (Trapani, Ferriss, Sutton, et al.), apostates (Mann,

Morozov, me), disciples (the millions of people who read life hacking blogs), and articles

of faith (don’t hack to live, live to hack). Time will tell, of course, how life hacking

changes, and whether it lasts, but I suspect the things I discuss in this project will prove

less cultural blips and more indicators of a turn to the idea that we must all master

ourselves using technology, make do with less, ignore structural conditions, forget about

the past, and work, work, work to make ourselves more productive like good little robots

in a never-ending quest for improvement while being watched over, as poet Richard

Brautigan once put it, by machines of loving grace.25

25 Richard Brautigan, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” BRAUTIGAN.net, 1967, http://www.brautigan.net/machines.html. I am indebted to Adam Curtis’s 2011 BBC documentary series of the same time for the pointer here.

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