TT's Lost in Tokyo — by TokyoTom

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A Declaration of Independence

from Handhelds

A Modern Civic Broadside • July 2026

When in the Course of Human Events it becomes necessary for a People to dissolve the attentional bands which have connected them to their Devices, and to assume among the powers of the Earth the separate and undistracted station to which Nature and Nature’s Sleep schedule entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all Persons are endowed with certain unalienable faculties, among these Attention, Reflection, Memory, Conversation, Judgment, Responsibility, and the Capacity to stand in a queue without staring at a Screen; that to secure these faculties, tools are instituted among Men, deriving their usefulness from the informed consent of their users; that whenever any Tool becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to silence, disable, uninstall, or otherwise cast it into the nearest desk drawer.

We further hold that Human Flourishing arises not merely from liberty secured but from liberty exercised; that the faculties of Judgment, Communication, Collaboration, Reciprocity, and Mutual Accountability are cultivated only through their use; that Communities endure when their members Participate directly in the work of governing their common affairs.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that devices long established should not be discarded for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer notification overload while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the apps to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of pings, nudges, alerts, recommendations, updates, badges, vibrations, algorithmic inducements, and digital dependencies evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Distraction, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Handheld Dominion.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Users; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems.

The history of the Present Smartphone is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Empire over the Attention of its Users. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

It has interrupted our thoughts with Notifications at times most inconvenient and least necessary.

It has persuaded us that every vibration is urgent, and every silence suspicious.

It has deprived us, in many cases, of the ability to complete a sentence before consulting another source.

It has rendered fleeting curiosities Sovereign over settled Purposes.

It has substituted the Endless Scroll for the happy conclusion.

It has joined with Algorithms unknown to our constitutions, giving their assent to suggestions over which no Citizen has exercised meaningful control.

It has caused us to compare our daily lives against the carefully edited Triumphs of strangers.

It has fostered false divisions among the People, rewarding those passions which inflame for a moment above those affections which bind for a lifetime.

It has encouraged us to photograph feasts rather than enjoy them, sunsets rather than behold them, and children rather than attend to them.

It has made every man his own publisher, every woman her own broadcaster, and every fool his own Authority.

It has rewarded Outrage above reflection, Immediacy above accuracy, and False Confidence above competence.

It has induced citizens Assembled in the same room to communicate chiefly through Distant Servers.

It has inflicted upon us meetings in which participants are present neither in body nor in spirit, but only intermittently in bandwidth.

It has transformed waiting, once a nursery of contemplation, into a condition thought intolerable.

It has filled our hours with headlines, our minds with fragments, and our memories with little.

It has erected, through recommendation engines, innumerable echo chambers and filter bubbles, whereby each Person may be assured that his opinions are universally shared and self-evidently correct.

It has drawn Children into endless contests for approval measured by numerical counters visible to all.

It has delivered News from every corner of the Earth whilst diminishing our acquaintance with our Neighbors.

It has accustomed us to inhabit constructed worlds of endless novelty whilst neglecting the enduring companionship of forests, fields, rivers, gardens, the open sky, and the living creatures with whom we share the Earth.

It has made us perpetually reachable, and thereby frequently inaccessible.

Nor have these Devices been alone in their offenses. Behind them stand vast Corporations, nurtured by Governments and protected by Laws, which have accumulated Powers exceeding those once possessed by many States and resembling those against which free Peoples have long struggled.

Though chartered as instruments, they have aspired to become Sovereigns.

Though created to serve the Public, they increasingly command it.

Though answerable in theory to Citizens and Consumers, they have rendered Citizens and Consumers increasingly answerable to them.

They have gathered unto themselves the habits, movements, associations, purchases, preferences, conversations, curiosities, and secret anxieties of whole Peoples, converting the ordinary facts of human life into commodities of trade.

They have erected systems whereby Citizens are observed continuously whilst the Observers remain unidentified and unseen.

They have joined with Governments in arrangements so intricate that responsibility is difficult to assign though power is readily exercised.

They have effected a union of commercial and administrative Power whereby decisions affecting millions are made by Persons whom no Citizen has meaningfully elected, and no Community can readily remove.

They have concealed from the People the true costs of their conveniences, removing labor, waste, energy, and suffering alike from ordinary sight, that consumption and the concentration of Profits might proceed without reflection.

They have presumed to rank Speech, order Knowledge, elevate Opinions, suppress Inquiry, and determine which Facts shall readily appear before the People and which shall remain obscure.

They have substituted Engagement for judgment, Metrics for wisdom, Optimization for the common good, and Convenience for liberty.

They have persuaded Men and Women to seek fulfillment through Stimulation rather than contemplation, Consumption rather than cultivation, Possession rather than stewardship, and Novelty rather than belonging.

They have encouraged us to surrender Self-Government in exchange for comfort, Independence in exchange for convenience, and Privacy in exchange for entertainment.

They have diminished local institutions whilst extending their dominion into every household, school, workplace, pocket, and waking hour.

They have transformed Citizens into Users, Neighbors into Networks, Traditions into Content, Attention into Revenue, and Human Character into Behavioral Data.

They have reduced public life to spectacle and private life to data.

They have persuaded free Peoples to mistake visibility for influence, expression for power, and consumption for citizenship.

They have accustomed the People to receive decisions rather than participate in making them.

They have transferred the work of common life from neighbors, congregations, voluntary associations, and civic institutions unto distant Authorities.

They have fostered the illusion that social order may be engineered from above without the labor of communication, trust, reciprocity, shared responsibility, and common purpose from below.

Nor are these Offenses confined to Devices and Platforms alone. Artificial Intelligences, lately introduced among us, promise to compose, summarize, generate, recommend, predict, and decide. Though useful in many particulars, they present temptations no less significant than those which preceded them.

They stand ready to remember what we once remembered.

They stand ready to write what we once wrote.

They stand ready to discover what we once discovered.

They stand ready to judge what we once judged.

They stand ready to persuade before we have deliberated, to recommend before we have inquired, and to conclude before we have understood.

They stand ready to answer Questions before Wisdom hath had an opportunity to develop them.

They encourage many to mistake generated answers for Understanding, fluent Language for Wisdom, and borrowed Intelligence for cultivated Judgment.

They enable Men and Women to borrow the appearance of Learning without the labor of study, the appearance of Eloquence without the discipline of writing, and the appearance of Wisdom without undergoing the experience by which Wisdom is acquired.

They tempt the Student to forsake study, the Writer to forsake composition, the Teacher to forsake instruction, the Manager to forsake judgment, the Statesman to forsake deliberation, and the Citizen to forsake reflection.

They encourage institutions to substitute efficiency for judgment, scale for responsibility, and prediction for deliberation.

They risk creating a society in which the People are analyzed rather than consulted, predicted rather than persuaded, managed rather than represented.

They threaten to leave Men and Women not as Authors of their destinies but as subjects of models trained upon the traces of their former selves.

They promise liberation from effort whilst quietly eroding the faculties that make liberty possible.

At every stage of these Oppressions We have petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: by disabling alerts, by imposing screen-time limits, by purchasing paper notebooks, by undertaking digital sabbaths, by rediscovering neighborhood associations, and even, in extraordinary cases, by leaving telephones in other rooms. Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by new features.

We, therefore, the Users of Analog Inclination and Friends of Human Agency, appealing to Common Sense for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name and by Authority of all persons who have ever closed a laptop and felt immediate relief, solemnly publish and declare:

That Human Beings are not Data.

That Citizens are not Users.

That Communities are not Markets.

That Attention is not a natural resource to be extracted.

That Self-Government is not a service to be consumed, but a responsibility to be practiced.

That the purpose of Technology is to serve mankind and not to govern it.

We further affirm that a free People are not spectators of their common life but Authors of it.

That self-government is not merely a constitutional arrangement but a learned practice.

That Liberty survives not through its Declaration alone, but through its daily exercise.

That the arts of listening, deliberating, persuading, cooperating, compromising, and holding one another accountable cannot be delegated to Experts, Platforms, Corporations, Bureaucracies, or Machines.

That no Algorithm can substitute for Citizenship.

That the Habits of Liberty are learned first among Families, Neighborhoods, Congregations, Associations, and other small Communities before they may safely be entrusted to larger Institutions.

That no Artificial Intelligence can relieve Human Beings of the responsibility of governing themselves.

And that these Persons are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent from the perpetual demands of Handheld Devices; that they are Absolved from all allegiance to notification streams, social feeds, engagement metrics, behavioral modification engines, algorithmic nudges, and systems of continuous observation; and that as Free and Independent Persons they have full Power to Read books uninterrupted, Converse without glancing downward, Walk without earbuds, Dine without photography, Become bored without panic, Govern themselves in Community, and perform all other Acts and Things which autonomous Human beings may of right do.

We further declare ourselves free from every System, whether commercial, bureaucratic, algorithmic, or artificial, which seeks to reduce independent Persons to predictable subjects of observation, manipulation, optimization, and control.

We affirm that Attention shall remain our own.

That Judgment shall not be delegated without necessity.

That Friendship shall not be mediated without purpose.

That Responsibility shall not be surrendered to Machines.

That Self-Government shall not be exchanged for convenience.

That Technology shall remain our Servant, and never become our Sovereign.

That Prosperity shall be measured not only by what we consume, but by what we cultivate — in ourselves, in our Communities, and in the Earth entrusted to our care.

And that the Future shall be shaped by free Citizens acting together in mutual accountability, rather than merely predicted for them by Algorithms.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on one another’s ability to remain offline for at least an afternoon, we mutually pledge to each other our Attention, our Presence, our Agency, our Common Purpose, and our remaining Days.

Signed:

The Ghost of Henry David Thoreau, Present but Unreachable
Jacques Ellul, Witness Against the Dominion of Technique
Lewis Mumford, Defender of Human Scale
E. F. Schumacher, Advocate for Technology as if People Mattered
Ivan Illich, Patron of Convivial Tools
James C. Scott, Defender of Local Knowledge
Wendell Berry, Advocate for Neighborliness and Place
Jane Jacobs, Champion of Living Neighborhoods
Elinor Ostrom, Defender of Self-Governing Communities
Alexis de Tocqueville, Champion of Local Self-Government
Neil Postman, Defender of Civic Communication
Jaron Lanier, Opponent of Behavioral Modification Empires
Nicholas Carr, Defender of Deep Reading
Sherry Turkle, Defender of Human Presence
Jonathan Haidt, Advocate for Childhood Unplugged
Jean Twenge, Observer of the Great Rewiring
Cal Newport, Advocate for Deliberate Attention
And Numerous Others, Temporarily Out of Coverage Area

Neither Monopolies of Commerce, nor of Information, nor of Intelligence.

Done at a Quiet Table, on a Day Fairly Free from Distraction, in the Year of Our Attention Two Thousand and Twenty-Six.

By Thomas J.

—a Doubting Thomas

Author’s Note

This essay was inspired by Emily Sneff’s Handheld Declaration of Independence, whose ingenious revival of the Declaration as a handheld broadside suggested the possibility of replying in kind. It owes an obvious debt in its title and form to Thomas Jefferson and, in its pamphleteering spirit, to Thomas Paine. The named “signatories” are offered as an imaginative tribute to later thinkers whose ideas have informed my own reflections on technology, liberty, community, stewardship, and human flourishing.

[Update below.]

When government is involved in making decisions about the use of tax dollars or regulatory power to favor or hinder particular activities, it is not surprising that political struggles often ensue between groups that wish to obtain a policy outcome that maximizes their particular interests.  It is also not surprising that one side or the other (or both) side may be so caught up in the righteousness of its position that it fails not merely to recognize the legitimacy of other views competing for a piece of the governmentally-dispensed pie, but also fails even to perceive the underlying dynamics of competition to steer government in the direction one favors.

This unfortunate dynamic can now be seen in an spat between Steven Pinker (Harvard psychologist and author of best-selling books on language, cognition and evolutionary biology) and defenders of the President’s Council on Bioethics with respect to a series of essays recently published by the Council on “Human Dignity and Bioethics“. 

Pinker takes issue with the President’s Council via an essay entitled “The Stupidity of Dignity” in The New Republic, while a former executive director of the President’s Council, Yuval Levin (a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and senior editor of The New Atlantis magazine) has published a rejoinder entitled “Indignity and Bioethics; Steven Pinker discovers the human-dignity cabal” in the National Review Online (Levin’s essay being admirably packed with links to a number of relevant references).  What I find most interesting – and sad – about the spat is the degree to which Pinker and Levin (as a proxy for the members of the Council), manage to talk past each other.

While the Council’s report, and both Pinker’s and Levin’s essays make interesting points about the concept of “dignity”, it’s a shame that these two very intelligent men both fall into the trap of demonizing their opponents and cannot see that their own heated intemperance is fuelled by the dynamic of struggle for control over what GOVERNMENT does.  One can share BOTH Pinker’s concern that the government should not further interfere with private biomedical research and the choices of individuals, AND be concerned that the government should not be subsidizing various research practices that make one uneasy.  The key, clearly, is to minimize the heavy hand of the state.

The focus of Pinker’s essay is on questioning the validity of government action pertaining to “bioethics” and the implicit role of the Council, in which he sees such an alarming and authoritarian religious streak that he refers to the authors of  the Council’s essay as “theocons“.  Pinker argues that the Council has stacked the deck of its report in favor of religious viewpoints, and seems to believe that the focus of the Council on “dignity” is a Trojan horse to (1) sidestep the traditional bioethical principle of “personal autonomy–the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another”, in order to (2) enable the assertion of greater governmental control over the promises of onrushing biomedical advances, which “could make millions of people better off and no one worse off.” 

But Pinker fails to note that the government is in fact providing significant funding for biomedical research, and that others have a legitimate interest in discussing the parameters of government-funded research.

Pinker makes the following statements:

• The report does not, the editors admit, settle the question of what dignity is or how it should guide our policies. It does, however, reveal a great deal about the approach to bioethics represented by the Council. And what it reveals should alarm anyone concerned with American biomedicine and its promise to improve human welfare. For this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing.
• Although the Dignity report presents itself as a scholarly deliberation of universal moral concerns, it springs from a movement to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine.
• The concept of dignity is natural ground on which to build an obstructionist bioethics. An alleged breach of dignity provides a way for third parties to pass judgment on actions that are knowingly and willingly chosen by the affected individuals. It thus offers a moralistic justification for expanded government regulation of science, medicine, and private life.
• A free society disempowers the state from enforcing a conception of dignity on its citizens. Democratic governments allow satirists to poke fun at their leaders, institutions, and social mores. And they abjure any mandate to define “some vision of ‘the good life'” or the “dignity of using [freedom] well” (two quotes from the Council’s volume). The price of freedom is tolerating behavior by others that may be undignified by our own lights. I would be happy if Britney Spears and “American Idol” would go away, but I put up with them in return for not having to worry about being arrested by the ice-cream police. This trade-off is very much in America’s DNA and is one of its great contributions to civilization: my country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.
• Could there be cases in which a voluntary relinquishing of dignity leads to callousness in onlookers and harm to third parties–what economists call negative externalities? In theory, yes. Perhaps if people allowed their corpses to be publicly desecrated, it would encourage violence against the bodies of the living. Perhaps the sport of dwarf-tossing encourages people to mistreat all dwarves. Perhaps violent pornography encourages violence against women. But, for such hypotheses to justify restrictive laws, they need empirical support. In one’s imagination, anything can lead to anything else: Allowing people to skip church can lead to indolence; letting women drive can lead to sexual licentiousness. In a free society, one cannot empower the government to outlaw any behavior that offends someone just because the offendee can pull a hypothetical future injury out of the air.
• The sickness in theocon bioethics goes beyond imposing a Catholic agenda on a secular democracy and using “dignity” to condemn anything that gives someone the creeps. Ever since the cloning of Dolly the sheep a decade ago, the panic sown by conservative bioethicists, amplified by a sensationalist press, has turned the public discussion of bioethics into a miasma of scientific illiteracy.
• A major sin of theocon bioethics is exactly the one that it sees in biomedical research: overweening hubris. In every age, prophets foresee dystopias that never materialize, while failing to anticipate the real revolutions. Had there been a President’s Council on Cyberethics in the 1960s, no doubt it would have decried the threat of the Internet, since it would inexorably lead to 1984, or to computers “taking over” like HAL in 2001. Conservative bioethicists presume to soothsay the outcome of the quintessentially unpredictable endeavor called scientific research. And they would stage-manage the kinds of social change that, in a free society, only emerge as hundreds of millions of people weigh the costs and benefits of new developments for themselves, adjusting their mores and dealing with specific harms as they arise, as they did with in vitro fertilization and the Internet.

Pinker puts his concerns more bluntly in testimony he provided directly to the Council on March 6, 2008:

• … I think the volume has been steered in particular directions by a steep over-representation of certain viewpoints and methods and outright exclusion of important contrary viewpoints.
• Now, here’s where the plot thickens.  A number of biomedical advances raise the possibility of opportunities that can reduce suffering, promote human flourishing, harm no sentient being, are freely and knowingly chosen, yet they elicit disquiet in third parties.  There are numerous examples brought up in the volume:  drugs that enhance cognitive functioning, anti-aging research that promises to extend the human lifespan, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, somatic cell nuclear transfer, surrogacy, in vitro fertilization and other reproductive technologies, cloning, a market in organs for donation, and many others.
• And it’s no secret that many members of the Council are viscerally repelled by these prospects but realize that they can’t rule them out with the consensus ethics of autonomy, human rights, or respect for persons.  Hence, we have the appeal to dignity.  The problem, of course, is that, for one thing, dignity is, as just about all the essays acknowledge, a squishy concept.  It has much of its basis in religious doctrine.  And for these two reasons, it has not provided the kind of consensus definition of the kind that would be necessary in a democracy.
• I see the current volume as designed to put dignity on a firmer conceptual basis and therefore provide the grounds for regulating or banning these disquieting practices.  This, I believe, is the ultimate goal of the President’s Council, and it’s why I think there was a thumb on the scale in choosing the authorship of the reports. 

In response, Levin addresses – with a bit of overstatement and rhetorical excess of his own – what he sees as unfair and unjustified hysteria and personal attacks by Pinker, but Levin fails to address the meat of Pinker’s suspicions about the aims of the Council (or of the President in establishing it) and his arguments about the legitimate role of government in regulating biomedical research and activity:

• The volume has so far drawn a modest response from bioethicists and others, some applauding the effort to lay out the range of opinions, and some bemoaning the lack of agreement on so seemingly basic a concept. But this week, in the latest issue of The New Republic, the volume has also elicited a bizarre and astonishing display of paranoid vitriol from an academic celebrity.
• Pinker’s essay is a striking exhibit of a set of attitudes toward religion and the West’s moral tradition that has become surprisingly common among America’s intellectual elite. It is a mix of fear, suspicion, and disgust that has a lot to do, for instance, with the Left’s intense paranoia about the Bush administration, and with the peculiar notion that American conservatives have declared a “war on science”; and it involves more generally an inclination to reject any idea drawn in any way from a religiously inspired tradition — which unfortunately includes just about everything in the humanities.
• These elements are all powerfully evident in Pinker’s screed. After briefly introducing the subject, his essay manages almost entirely to ignore the substance of the volume under consideration (taking up no particular essay in the book, for instance) and addresses itself instead to what the author imagines is a sinister Catholic conspiracy to subject the nation to a papist theology of death.
• With deep alarm Pinker informs his readers that some of the contributors to the volume make their living at such “Christian institutions” as Georgetown University and that some of the essays even mention the Bible, which leads him to conclude that the work of the bioethics council, in this book and in general, “springs from a movement to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine.”
• This is, to begin with, patent nonsense. Even a cursory review of the council’s reports and deliberations will demonstrate it has spent significantly less time than even its Clinton administration predecessor considering any explicitly religious views or discussing religious issues, and has in no way sought to ground any positions, arguments, or recommendations in religion.
• He rushes on to paint the bioethics council as a committee of pious executioners, arguing that “this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing,” and asserting without basis that the council (which, more than all of its predecessors in previous administrations, was designed to provide a diversity of opinion and not merely support for the positions of the president who appointed it) was “packed” with “conservative scholars and pundits, advocates of religious (particularly Catholic) principles in the public sphere, and writers with a paper trail of skittishness toward biomedical advances, together with a smattering of scientists (mostly with a reputation for being religious or politically conservative).” Pinker might have examined the record of the council’s discussions (including its devastating grilling of him in 2003, which may help explain some of his vehemence), its reports, and the backgrounds of its members, especially the scientist members, for a sense of how absurdly misinformed is this diatribe.
• It would be hard to answer the bioethics council’s thoughtful and varied collection with a less appropriate rejoinder than Pinker’s insulting, ill-informed, and anti-intellectual tirade. He misrepresents the most elementary facts about the council’s work and intentions, repeating baseless charges and engaging in crude character assassination; and his assertion that the council is intolerant of dissenting opinion is belied by the fact that his rant is based on remarks he actually delivered at a council meeting, by invitation. His fears of a religious, and especially a Catholic, plot to overthrow democracy are absurd. And his insistence on filtering out of American life any hint of religious influence is badly misguided.
• Even if dignity remains difficult to define, undignified public discourse is easy to discern, and Pinker has offered an obvious example.

[Update:  example of how discussion over Pinker’s essay totally misses the main point – the question not about dignity per se but the GOVERNMENT’s role in protecting/enforcing dignity – can be found at here:  http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/human_dignity_what_a_stupid_idea; and http://americasfuture.org/jamespoulos/2008/05/dignity-vs-neediness-in-the-bioethics-war/]