Matthew Crawford, in The World Beyond Your Head, contrasts the world of a "peon" airport lounge—saturated in advertising, filled with mesmerizing screens—with the quiet, ad-free world of a business lounge: "To engage in playful, inventive thinking, and possibly create wealth for oneself during those idle hours spent at an airport, requires silence.
But other people's minds, over in the peon lounge (or at the bus stop), can be treated as a resource—a standing reserve of purchasing power." Our digital technologies aren't politically neutral. The young person who cannot or will not be alone, converse with family, go out with friends, attend a lecture, or perform a job without monitoring her smartphone is an emblem of our political economy's leechlike attachment to our very bodies. Digital technology is capitalism in hyperdrive, injecting its logic of consumption and promotion, of monetization and efficiency, into every waking minute.
