The refrain once urged us to expand: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Its inversion is now the survival mechanism: Tune out, turn off, drop in. Digital platforms have mastered the art of capture. They are not designed to serve us but to extract attention, time, and revenue from us. The architecture is parasitic—every click reaffirms our role not as user but as resource. In this arrangement, the system grows stronger the more we are depleted.
What makes the predicament intolerable is the refusal of responsibility at the top. Executives praise innovation while quietly offloading the costs onto society: addiction, distraction, polarization. To call this negligence would be too soft; abrogation is the real word, a cultivated blindness that is baked into the business model. The machine cannot acknowledge harm, because acknowledgment itself would threaten its smooth function. In this sense, idiocy is not incidental but strategic—seeing only the dollar is the condition of continued operation.
If there is survival, it comes not through embracing more of what technology offers but through conscious withdrawal. The endless stream of content, notifications, and signals masquerades as enrichment, yet what we require is subtraction. Reducing intake, refusing novelty for novelty’s sake, deliberately dulling the channels of technological mediation—these are the acts of defense. “Tune out” becomes an active gesture, not passive apathy. “Turn off” is an act of reclaiming one’s own nervous system. “Drop in” is a return to the local, to embodied presence, to a field of life not yet colonized by algorithmic capture.
The paradox is that such resistance is not glamorous, not revolutionary in the old sense. It looks small, almost trivial: closing the tab, powering down the screen, stepping away. Yet these gestures are the beginnings of sovereignty. They are the minimal refusal upon which anything beyond survival might be built. The companies may indeed be idiots, but idiocy wields extraordinary power when scaled across billions of devices. Our answer cannot be to outwit them with more clever tools. It must be the slower art of withdrawal, the discipline of deciding what not to let in.
Daedelus Kite 