Digital Detox
Happy New Year! Fresh starts, new opportunities, old habits to break. It’s that time of year again and rituals now include ‘fake news diets’ and updating algos to go along with dry January.
I was inspired by a client of ours who posted on LinkedIn about his digital detox over the holidays that included his removal of x number of contacts, y number of newsletters, and the closing of z number of online accounts. They were each in the hundreds!
I reread an article about keeping our online data current and how to delete oneself from the Internet. And then there is the perennial game of whack-a-mole with the persistent need to unsubscribe from unsolicited emails that assault us every day.
Now we are faced with making sure what we are receiving is accurate, quality, factually correct, authentic, and everything else that comes with fake answers that makes fake news and the need to weed it out downright pedestrian. The Guardian reports Google AI putting people with pancreatic cancer at risk. What if that is fake news? This is too much to think about on the 7th day of a new year. But we must.
Just yesterday a simple search about the revenue of a company run by a well-known media CEO yielded nonsense. She announced her departure. I wanted to learn more about her and her company. With 80 million followers, a litany of amazing brands under her leadership, and her firm now part of a larger media conglomerate, Google’s answer yielded $7.5 million. Bah! There is no way that is the number especially when one triangulates with a revenue per employee estimate. That number was all over the place because guess what — the big tech LLMs are relying on the same public information and soon the same synthetic data.
This is why before Christmas we wrote about the hierarchy of information and where unique, data, and IP-compliant, provenance-assured information will increasingly be in demand. On one hand we have amazing access to answers at our fingertips. On the other, as with fast food and fast fashion we have to understand some of it is pure junk and put our effort and our energy into consuming the good stuff.
And that is now part of the January ritual of setting new habits and tuning out the noise and stepping out of the muck as so aptly shared yesterday by Vivek Ramaswamy.
So alongside whatever resolutions you are making here are a few others to consider.
- Close unnecessary online accounts
- Unsubscribe to newsletters
- Edit news sources for a balanced high-quality diet
- Hit delete, block, or unsubscribe frequently to email solicitations you didn’t invite
- Get off LinkedIn or use it less or only connect with people you know. And same for X, Tik-Tok, Truth Social or whatever you use.
- Go have dinner with real people, develop real relationships, and validate that the knowledge you are consuming and the people you are with are actually real.
It’s good for you. We need real data, real answers, and the ability to discern without having to spend hours doing more research to validate the answers we get in seconds. And we know where to get it. Thank God for the business of our industry. It is finally having its moment. Wishing you all the best in 2026!