In yet another sign that the new age lingo of the 1960sis still very much with us, mindfulness has become the new sustainability: no one quite knows what it is, but everyone seems to be for it. It recently made thecoverofTimemagazine, while a long list of celebrities - Arianna Huffington, Deepak Chopra, Paolo Coelho - are all tirelessly preaching the virtues of curbing technology-induced stress and regulating the oppressiveness of constant connectivity, often at conferences with titles like Wisdom 2.0.

The embrace of the mindfulness agenda by the technology crowd is especially peculiar. Consider Huffington, whose eponymous publication has even launched a stress-tracking app with the poetic name of GPS for the Soul - a new app to fight the distraction caused by the old apps - and turned the business of mindfulness into a dedicated beat. Or take Googles chairman, Eric Schmidt, who has warned that we need to define times when we are on and off and announced his commitment to make his meals gadget-free. There are also apps and firms that, at a fee, will help you enforce your own digital sabbath, undertake a digital detox, or join like-minded refuseniks in a dedicated camp that bars all devices. Never before has connectivity offered us so many ways to disconnect.

In essence, we are being urged to unplug - for an hour, a day, a week - so that we can resume our usual activities with even more vigour upon returning to the land of distraction. Here the quest for mindfulness plays the same role as Buddhism. In our maddeningly complex world, where everything is in flux and defies comprehension, the only reasonable attitude is to renounce any efforts at control and adopt a Zen-like attitude of non-domination. Accept the world as it is - and simply try to find a few moments of peace in it. The reactionary tendency of such an outlook is easy to grasp. As the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj iek once quipped, If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to hisProtestant Ethic, entitledThe Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism. And what a wonderful Kindle Single that would make!

CEOs embrace mindfulness for the same reason that they embrace all the other forms of the new spirit of capitalism, be it yoga in the workplace or flip-flops in the boardroom: Down with alienation, long live transgression and emancipation! No wonder Huffington hopes that the pursuit of mindfulness can finally reconcile spirituality and capitalism. There is a growing body of scientific evidence that shows that these two worlds are, in fact, very much aligned - or at least that they can, and should, be, she wrote ina recent column. So yes, I do want to talk about maximising profits and beating expectations - by emphasising the notion that whats good for us as individuals is also good for corporate Americas bottom line.

But couldnt the disconnectionists - as one critic has recently dubbedthis emerging social movement - pursue an agenda a tad more radical than digital detoxification? For one, the language of detox implies our incessant craving for permanent connectivity is a medical condition - as if the fault entirely resided with consumers. And that reflects a broader flaw in their thinking: The disconnectionists dont seem to have a robust political plan for addressing their concerns; its all about small-scale individual action. Individuals unplugging is not actually an answer to the biggest technological problems of our time just as any individuals local, organic dietary habits dont solve global agricultures issues,complainedthetechnology critic Alexis MadrigalinThe Atlantic.

Note that its the act of disconnection - the unplugging - that becomes the target of criticism, as if there are no good reasons to be suspicious of the always-on mode championed by Silicon Valley, what is called real-time. Madrigal, for example, draws an intriguing parallel between our attitudes to processed foods (once celebrated for their contribution to social mobility but now widely condemned, at least by the upper classes) and processed communications (by which, he means all digital interactions). Like processed foods, social media and text messages are increasingly perceived as inferior, giving rise to an odd form of technophobic - but extremely artisanal - living. As Madrigal sardonically observes, [T]he solution is to make local friends, hang out organically, and only communicate through means your Grandma would recognise. Its so conservative its radical!

Theres some truth to this, but in their efforts to reveal the upper-class biases of the digital detox crowdby arguing, for example, that the act of unplugging falls somewhere between wearing vintage clothes and consuming artisanal cheese - critics like Madrigal risk absolving the very exploitative strategies of Twitter and Facebook.

So far, our debate about distraction has hinged on the assumption that the feelings of anxiety and personal insecurity that we experience when interacting with social media are the natural price we pay for living in what some technology pundits call the attention economy.

But what if this economy is not as autonomous and self-regulating as we are lead to believe? Twitter, for instance, nudges us to check how many people have interacted with our tweets. That nagging temptation to trace the destiny of our every tweet, in perpetuity and with the most comprehensive analytics, is anything but self-evident. The business agenda is obvious: The more data we can surrender - by endlessly clicking around - the more appealing Twitter looks to advertisers. But what is in Twitters business interest is not necessarily in our communicative interest.

We must subject social media to the kind of scrutiny that has been applied to the design of gambling machines in Las Vegas casinos. As Natasha Dow Schll shows in her excellentbookAddiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, while casino operators want us to think that addiction is the result of our moral failings or some biological imbalance, they themselves are to blame for designing gambling machines in a way that feeds addiction. With social media - much like with gambling machines or fast food - our addiction is manufactured, not natural.

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