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Mr. Jobs didn’t trust third-party developers to offer the same level of aesthetically pleasing and stable experiences that Apple programmers could produce. He was convinced that the phone’s carefully designed native features were enough. It was “an iPod that made phone calls,” Mr. Grignon said to me.

Under what I call the “constant companion model,” we now see our smartphones as always-on portals to information. Instead of improving activities that we found important before this technology existed, this model changes what we pay attention to in the first place — often in ways designed to benefit the stock price of attention-economy conglomerates, not our satisfaction and well-being.

Mr. Jobs probably got it right the first time: Many of us would be better off returning to his original minimalist vision for our phones.

Practically speaking, to be a minimalist smartphone user means that you deploy this device for a small number of features that do things you value (and that the phone does particularly well), and then outside of these activities, put it away

This approach dethrones this gadget from a position of constant companion down to a luxury object, like a fancy bike or a high-end blender, that gives you great pleasure when you use it but doesn’t dominate your entire day

To succeed with this approach, a useful first step is to remove from your smartphone any apps that make money from your attention. This includes social media, addictive games and newsfeeds that clutter your screen with “breaking” notifications.

Turning our attention to professional activities, if your work doesn’t absolutely demand that you be accessible by email when away from your desk, delete the Gmail app or disconnect the built-in email client from your office servers.

Once you’ve stripped away the digital chatter clamoring for your attention, your smartphone will return to something closer to the role originally conceived by Mr. Jobs. It will become a well-designed object that comes out occasionally throughout your day to support — not subvert — your efforts to live well:

The iPhone is a fantastic phone, but it was never meant to be the foundation for a new form of existence in which the digital increasingly encroaches on the analog

While we have gained some skill sets (multitasking, technological savvy), other skills have suffered: the art of conversation, the art of looking at people, the art of being seen, the art of being present. Our conduct is no longer governed by subtlety, finesse, grace and attention, all qualities more esteemed in earlier decades. Inwardness and narcissism now hold sway.

Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places where seriousness is the governing state of mind. My friend Robert Pogue Harrison put it this way in a recent conversation: “Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony.”

As a function of fear and pre-emptive shame, ironic living bespeaks cultural numbness, resignation and defeat. If life has become merely a clutter of kitsch objects, an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective misstep. Could this be the cause of our emptiness and existential malaise? Or a symptom?

This ironic ethos can lead to a vacuity and vapidity of the individual and collective psyche. Historically, vacuums eventually have been filled by something — more often than not, a hazardous something. Fundamentalists are never ironists; dictators are never ironists; people who move things in the political landscape, regardless of the sides they choose, are never ironists.

Ironic living is a first-world problem. For the relatively well educated and financially secure, irony functions as a kind of credit card you never have to pay back. In other words, the hipster can frivolously invest in sham social capital without ever paying back one sincere dime.

The most pure nonironic models in life, however, are to be found in nature: animals and plants are exempt from irony, which exists only where the human dwells.

Moving away from the ironic involves saying what you mean, meaning what you say and considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities, despite the inherent risks. It means undertaking the cultivation of sincerity, humility and self-effacement, and demoting the frivolous and the kitschy on our collective scale of values.

The loosely defined New Sincerity movements in the arts that have sprouted since the 1980s positioned themselves as responses to postmodern cynicism, detachment and meta-referentiality. (New Sincerity has recently been associated with the writing of David Foster Wallace, the films of Wes Anderson and the music of Cat Power.) But these attempts failed to stick, as evidenced by the new age of Deep Irony.

Russia’s flair for “maskirovka” — disguised warfare — has become even more evident under Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer whose closest advisers are mostly from that same Soviet intelligence agency.

The Kremlin insists that Russian forces are in no way involved, and that Mr. Strelkov does not even exist, at least not as a Russian operative sent to Ukraine with orders to stir up trouble. “It’s all nonsense,” President Vladimir V. Putin said Thursday during a four-hour question-and-answer session on Russian television. “There are no Russian units, special services or instructors in the east of Ukraine.” Pro-Russian activists who have seized government buildings in at least 10 towns across eastern Ukraine also deny getting help from professional Russian soldiers or intelligence agents.But masking the identity of its forces, and clouding the possibilities for international denunciation, is a central part of the Russian strategy, developed over years of conflict in the former Soviet sphere, Ukrainian and American officials say.

What is happening in eastern Ukraine is a military operation that is well planned and organized, and we assess that it is being carried out at the direction of Russia.”

Another character in Ukraine’s case against Russia is Mr. Strelkov, the alleged military intelligence officer who Kiev says took part in a furtive Russian operation to prepare for the annexation of Crimea and, more recently, in insurgent action in Slovyansk.No photographs have yet emerged of Mr. Strelkov, but the Security Service of Ukraine, the successor organization to what used to be Ukraine’s local branch of the K.G.B., has released a sketch of what it says is his face.

In the recording, a man nicknamed “Strelok” — who the Ukrainian agency says is Mr. Strelkov — and others can be heard discussing weapons, roadblocks and how to hold on to captured positions in and near Slovyansk with a superior in Russia.

Military analysts say the Russian tactics show a disturbing amount of finesse that speak to long-term planning.“The Russians have used very specialized, very effective forces,” said Jacob W. Kipp, an expert on the Russian military and the former deputy director of the United States Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.“They don’t assume that civilians are cluttering up the battlefield; they assume they are going to be there,” he said. “They are trained to operate in these kind of environments.”

Want to see all of the conversations you had with a particular contact? No problem. Curious what you did and where you were on a certain day in the past? Friday has you covered. Planning a trip and want to associate all of the events to the excursion? Friday supports automatic tagging, which you could enable for a “Family Vacation 2011″ tag before leaving and disable upon your return home. The software also includes analytics to gain insights on how many calls you take or make at various times of the day. var galleryData = [{"title":"friday-events","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/friday-events.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"friday-map","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/friday-map.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"friday-map-filtered","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/friday-map-filtered.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Phone Activity Log","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/phone-activity-log.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"What do you want to track","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/what-do-you-want-to-track.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}];

Intelligent software such as Friday, my6Sense and others like reQall Rover can help cut through the data clutter by indexing or surfacing important information without raising our stress levels. Yes, that could mean enabling devices to capture our every move, but that’s a price I’m personally willing to pay for easier access to the data I’m looking for.

It sees lynching as the precursor of modern-day racial bias in the criminal justice system. The researchers argue, for example, that lynching declined as a mechanism of social control as the Southern states shifted to a capital punishment strategy, in which blacks began more frequently to be executed after expedited trials. The legacy of lynching was apparent in that public executions were still being used to mollify mobs in the 1930s even after such executions were legally banned.

Despite playing a powerful role in the shaping of Southern society, the lynching era has practically disappeared from public discourse. As the report notes: “Most Southern terror lynching victims were killed on sites that remain unmarked and unrecognized. The Southern landscape is cluttered with plaques, statues and monuments that record, celebrate and lionize generations of American defenders of white supremacy, including public officials and private citizens who perpetrated violent crimes against black citizens during the era of racial terror.”

Mr. Stevenson’s group makes the persuasive argument that this history needs to be properly commemorated and more widely discussed before the United States can fully understand the causes and origins of the racial injustice that hobbles the country to this day.

The KonMari method, despite its rather gimmicky portmanteau, isn’t a diet or a class, but a system of manual and emotional labor. And yes, there is actual labor involved.

Following KonMari doesn’t result in evanescent numbers on a screen or slides in a deck, but in a closet once full made empty, or a kitchen once cluttered turned clean and still.

“As I am both lazy and forgetful,” Kondo wrote, “I can’t take proper care of too many things. That is why I want to cherish properly the things I love, and that is why I have insisted on tidying for so much of my life.”

The Marie Kondo craze is just us and our everyday lives, calmly being put into order again. As it turns out, that’s all we really want.

The primary finding was that home-renovation media seems to make people feel uneasy in their own home. In academic terms, the phenomenon is known as dysplacement, or a sense that our long-held understanding of what our home means to us is out of sync with what changing market forces have decided a home should be. In layman’s terms, it’s the unsettling feeling that the home you’ve made for yourself is no longer a good one, and that other people think less of you for it.

People are highly sensitive to feeling out-of-sorts in their home, Grant told me. This is one of the reasons that moving and unpacking are so stressful, and that accumulating unnecessary clutter feels so bothersome.

Americans have long understood successful home ownership and homemaking as indicative of personal success and character. Beginning in the postwar era, “that was largely achieved by customizing your home to the personality that you wanted to portray,”

Even in the tract-home developments of mid-century suburbs, the insides of houses tended to be idiosyncratic, with liberal use of color and texture and pattern—on the walls, the floors, the furniture. Some of those choices were the result of trends, of course, but there was plenty of variety within those parameters, and people tended to pick things they liked and stick with them

Now, however, “personalization is being ripped out of people’s homes” in favor of market-pleasing standardization,

, Grant said that people expressed embarrassment at having friends over to their outdated home, so much so that they’d avoid hosting their book club or planning parties—precisely the kinds of happy occasions that your home is supposed to be for.

The goal of this media apparatus, Grant said, isn’t to provide knowledge and inspiration for people improving the country’s aging housing stock but to keep people engaged in a process of constant updating—discarding old furniture and fixtures and appliances and buying new ones in much the way many people now cycle through an endless stream of fast-fashion pieces, trying to live up to standards that they can never quite pin down, and therefore never quite satisfy

Their policies tend to please no one; it’s a common refrain that antipathy toward Big Tech companies is one of the few truly bipartisan issues

You can just feel it, the cumulative weight of this stagnation, in the tech that most of us encounter every day. The act of scrolling past the same dumb ad to peer at the same bad news on the same glass screen on the same social network: This is the stuck future. There is a sense that we have reached the end of the internet, and no one wants to be left holding the bag

There’s a palpable exhaustion with the whole enterprise, with the men who set out to build the future or at least get rich, and who accomplished only one and a half of those things.

The big social networks are stuck. And there is little profit incentive to get them unstuck. That, after all, would require investing heavily in content moderators, empowering trust and safety teams, and penalizing malicious viral content that brings in huge traffic.

It’s not just social media that’s in decline, already over, or worse.

As its mighty iPhone sales figures have plateaued and its business has grown more conservative—it hasn’t released a culturally significant new product line since 2016’s AirPods—Apple has begun to embrace advertising.

as Google has consolidated its monopoly, the quality of its flagship search product has gotten worse. Result pages are cluttered with ads that must be scrolled through in order to find the “‘organic”’ items, and there’s reason to think the quality of the results has gotten worse over time as well.

YouTube, meanwhile, is facing many of the same policy quagmires as Facebook and Twitter, especially when it comes to content moderation—and similarly failing to meaningfully address them.

What a grim outcome for the internet, where the possibilities were once believed to be endless and where users were promised an infinite spectrum of possibility to indulge their creativity, build robust communities, and find their best expression, even when they could not do so in the real world

Big Tech, of course, never predicated its business models on enabling any of that, though its advertising and sloganeering may have suggested otherwise. Rather, companies’ ambitions were always focused on being the biggest: having the most users, selling the most devices, locking the most people into their walled gardens and ecosystems. The stuckness we’re seeing is the result of some of the most ambitious companies of our generation succeeding wildly yet having no vision beyond scale—no serious interest in engaging the civic and social dimensions of their projects.