(est. 2021) explores the intersections of technology, culture, and human experience. From urban phenomena and digital spirituality to the evolving landscapes of creativity, we investigate how modern life reshapes perception, identity, and society.
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#21 — VIOL: the ‘anti-violence’ drug that is spreading through Lisbon by Mark Ellison
#20 — Signal Ghosts: The Cities Where Wi-Fi Never Dies
#19 — Digital Detox Retreats: Escaping the Algorithm by Cassandra Myrren
#18 — The Urban Sleep Crisis by Eleanor Voss
#17 — Cryptic Art: NFTs and the Revaluation of Creativity by Marcus Ellwood
#16 — Virtual Pilgrimages: Religious Experience Online by Mark Ellison
#15 — The Dark Side of Wellness: When Self-Optimization Becomes Obsession by Eleanor Voss
#14 — AI Companions and the Loneliness Epidemic by Isolde Maren
#13 — The Rise of Microdosing in Corporate Culture by Cassandra Myrren
#12 — Sonic Immunity: Healing Through Frequencies by Cassandra Myrren
#11 — The Ethics of Immortality by Adrien Veyra
#10 — Algorithmic Faith: When Machines Preach by Mark Ellison
#09 — Post-Human Erotics: Desire Beyond the Flesh by Elin Vårnes
#08 — Synthetic Memory: The Future of Personal Archives by Caio Navarro
#07 — Neurosprawl: Mapping the Brain as a City by Eleanor Voss
#06 — The Archive Will Outlive You by Liang Wei
#05 — Eternal Scroll: The Infinite Feed as a Prison by Isolde Maren
#04 — Terraforming the Mind by Alessio Romano
#03 — Digital Necromancy by Mark Ellison
#02 — Speculative Hunger: Future Diets in a Synthetic World by Cassandra Myrren
#01 — The Ecology of Glitches by Alessio Romano
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In the forested silence of northern Scandinavia, or among Bali’s terraced rice fields, a subtle exodus unfolds. Participants in digital detox retreats seek to disentangle themselves from the invisible tendrils of algorithms, yet the very act of withdrawal raises a question: can one truly escape a system that shapes desire itself? Byung-Chul Han describes our digital milieu as a space of psychopolitical self-exploitation, where freedom is a simulacrum and attention the currency of control. In detox retreats, this currency is suspended, if only temporarily. Silence replaces notifications, analog rituals replace endless feeds, and the body, long subordinated to data, begins to reclaim its temporal rhythm.
Foucault’s panoptic gaze is inverted here. The external observer is absent, yet participants enforce self-discipline with an intensity born of internalized algorithmic logic. The retreat becomes a laboratory of autonomy, a paradoxical stage where freedom is both performed and felt. Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world” gains new resonance. With screens gone, the self encounters elemental presence: sunlight through leaves, the cadence of breath, the slow erosion of habitual reflexes. Algorithmic scaffolds dissolve, revealing spaces and temporalities that resist datafication.
Reza Negarestani might call this an experiment in computational thought unbound from computation itself: a confrontation with the infrastructural underpinnings of cognition, rendered visible only through absence. The retreat is not merely leisure—it is a mode of philosophical inquiry, a negotiation with the mechanics of attention and the structures of contemporary subjectivity.
Yet these sanctuaries are fraught with contradictions. Globally marketed, commodified, Instagrammable, they turn the very act of escaping the algorithm into another product. The tension between liberation and consumption mirrors the central paradox of modern life: the more we seek to flee systemic influence, the more we encounter its imprint on our desires and expectations.
From Stockholm to Bali, from the mountains of Patagonia to remote Japanese temples, digital detox retreats illuminate our collective unease. They reveal how deeply embedded the algorithmic gaze has become, and how fragile autonomy is in a world designed to capture attention. Here, for fleeting hours or days, participants glimpse an alternative temporality—a space to breathe, to think, to remember that being human precedes being quantified.
In the end, the retreat poses a persistent question: if escape is provisional, if withdrawal is curated, what does freedom mean in the era of pervasive computation? Perhaps it is neither total nor permanent, but in the deliberate act of stepping aside, a fragment of autonomy is glimpsed—a whisper of resistance in the ceaseless hum of the digital.
References
- Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time. Stanford University Press.
- Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish. Vintage Books.
- Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and Time. Harper & Row.
- Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press.