The Anti-Screens Front

I stopped believing a while ago that social media is a neutral tool. And I don't think it's a matter of individual responsibility, of "using it responsibly." Just as a slot machine isn't designed for you to play for five minutes and walk away happy, the big platforms aren't designed to help you live better. Far from it. They're designed to capture and sell your attention. And the longer you stay inside them, the better business is.

Books like Johann Hari's Stolen Focus, Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism, or Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing, put a name to something we've all felt: the sense that it's getting harder and harder to read a book for an hour, to hold a conversation without checking your phone, or simply to be bored.

I'll say it plainly: infinite scroll makes us stupider. It gets us used to living in a state of permanent distraction, unable to sit with a single idea for five minutes. The algorithm isn't trying to help you understand the world better; it's trying to keep your eyes on the screen. And the longer you stay there, the less able you become to stop, think, and decide for yourself. We jump from an aubergine recipe to a video about productivity, from there to a wellness guru, then to a physiotherapist correcting the guru, then to a yoga teacher promising to unlock your hips in seven days, a nutritionist recommending magnesium, another saying magnesium is useless, and, to top it off, an AI-generated cat playing the violin while stealing croquettes. All of it happens in a matter of seconds. We consume hundreds of fragments of information we forget instantly, convinced we're learning something when really we're just training our thumb's swipe reflex. And somewhere in a corner of your brain, an increasingly clear voice starts begging: "Please. Enough."

Yoga aims for exactly the opposite. Among other things, yoga is about training the ability to stay. To breathe. To feel. To observe. To return, again and again, to the same place. That's why I've decided Yoga Grund won't have a presence on social media. Just this website. A website is, in a way, a sign on a quiet street. It's there, it holds the information you need. If someone wants to find it, they'll find it. It doesn't need feeding every day with photos, videos, inspirational quotes or controversy to satisfy an otherwise insatiable algorithm. It can go weeks, months, without a single line changing and still do its job. Social media, on the other hand, runs on a different logic. It demands constant activity. It rewards frequency over depth. It forces you to compete for a scarce resource: attention. Stop posting, and you disappear. No — I don't want to spend my time on that race.

Is this a slightly quixotic decision? Without a doubt.

Am I, single-handedly, going to change Silicon Valley's business model? I'm afraid not.

But I suppose every battle starts with one small desertion. This is mine. So yes, friends: Yoga Grund Málaga is officially part of the Anti-Screens Front.

And if what I've said hasn't convinced you, maybe these links will:

• "The Social Dilemma" (Netflix, 2020) — former employees of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest explain, from the inside, how the system is designed to be addictive.
• "The Facebook Files" (The Wall Street Journal, 2021) — an investigation based on internal documents leaked by former employee Frances Haugen: Meta itself knew Instagram was harming teenage girls' mental health and did little about it.
• This report by elDiario.es (in Spanish) explains how following hundreds of strangers on Instagram creates a false sense of intimacy that, according to several psychologists and sociologists, ends up taking a toll on mental health.