An early Youtube content creator and app developer, Richard Ryan has also enjoyed success as part of larger entrepreneurial projects (including the popular Black Rifle Coffee brand). But after living for years in a fast-paced digital world, Ryan is very aware of how corporations use increasingly insidious tactics to trap users in seemingly innocuous behaviors—ultimately leading to endless consumption. THE WARRIOR’S GARDEN: Tools For Guarding Your Mind Against Big Tech shines a light on these practices and suggests habits for greater mindfulness.
THE WARRIOR’S GARDEN does not mince words about its perspective: “Big Tech wants to make money […] to extract as much value out of you (their product) as possible so that their customers (the advertisers) increase profits and shareholder value. They are manipulating you—learning from your behavior and optimizing their algorithms—in order to extract that value.” The text goes right for the jugular, and it chooses to approach this as an individual behavior question using the model of addiction. From here, it offers a useful conceptual vocabulary, as well as some concrete strategies and even example journal pages, to guide the reader out of their maladaptive patterns of tech use. (Only very late into the text does the role of community come into play; more on that below.) The tone is grim, although never alarmist, and it feels well-informed and conversational. There’s a kind of well-meaning, man-to-man nudge when THE WARRIOR’S GARDEN asks the reader to reflect on how much time they spend on Pornhub, for instance. The text can also be surprisingly funny: remarks on the effects of cold-water baths are framed with the tongue-in-cheek introduction, “According to doctors, and more importantly, influencers.”
There is a notable shyness here about capitalism, though. The underlying ideas are sound—corporations use seemingly harmless data collection to control consumers’ behavior and drive them towards future purchases—and the book draws heavily (though indirectly) on works like Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Yet THE WARRIOR’S GARDEN never calls this what it is, even when it makes insightful remarks like how tech CEOs themselves often take steps to limit their own (and their children’s) use of data-collecting and time-sucking devices and apps. With this seemingly deliberate turn away from economic reality, THE WARRIOR’S GARDEN feels blinkered. At best, it seems to be geared towards an audience that doesn’t actually want to fight the fight: there’s no anti-capitalist call for collective action that could actually curtail the power of big corporations. At worst, the book acts as part of the very system it critiques: it makes informed guesses about its audience and sells the reader a lifestyle (a mindful, low-tech Stoicism-lite) under the guise of withdrawing from capitalism’s behavioral traps.
Nevertheless, if a reader wants precisely what THE WARRIOR’S GARDEN is selling—to shake their fist at Big Tech and spend less time listless, depressed, and glued to their phone—there’s a clear, concrete, well-informed program here that will meet that precise desire.
Richard Ryan’s THE WARRIOR’S GARDEN: Tools for Guarding Your Mind Against Big Tech diagnoses real problems in language that will both inform and compel its intended audience.
~ Dan Accardi for IndieReader