In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World

by Nate Anderson

Overview

An Ars Technica Holiday Reading Title of 2021

A lively and approachable meditation on how we can transform our digital lives if we let a little Nietzsche in.

Who has not found themselves scrolling endlessly on screens and wondered: Am I living or distracting myself from living? In Emergency, Break Glass adapts Friedrich Nietzsche’s passionate quest for meaning into a world overwhelmed by “content.”

Written long before the advent of smartphones, Nietzsche’s aphoristic philosophy advocated a fierce mastery of attention, a strict information diet, and a powerful connection to the natural world. Drawing on Nietzsche’s work, technology journalist Nate Anderson advocates for a life of goal-oriented, creative exertion as more meaningful than the “frictionless” leisure often promised by our devices. He rejects the simplicity of contemporary prescriptions like reducing screen time in favor of looking deeply at what truly matters to us, then finding ways to make our technological tools serve this vision. With a light touch suffused by humor, Anderson uncovers the impact of this “yes-saying” philosophy on his own life—and perhaps on yours. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324004790
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/10/2022
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	651,034
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.60(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Nate Anderson is the deputy editor at Condé Nast’s Ars Technica. He is the author of The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed, and lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

1 Burn the Boats 1

2 The Secret of My Happiness 45

3 The Information Diet 79

4 Wisdom Won by Walking 109

5 The Gay Science? 141

A Nietzsche Reading List 159

Notes 165

Index 181

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/28/2022

Anderson (The Internet Police), deputy editor at Ars Technica, explains in this unorthodox and often funny guide what Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy has to say about coping with modern technology and information overload. The author found in Nietzsche’s work a way to reclaim his life from an endless stream of emails and media, particularly via the philosopher’s belief that creation gives life purpose. “Ease, comfort, pleasure—they are all fine as far as they go, but they are certainly not life’s point; creative exertion, even struggle, makes life matter,” Anderson writes, contending that technology has bred contentment but not happiness because it has reduced opportunities for original thought. To forge a more meaningful life, the author recommends taking Nietzsche’s advice to “sit as little as possible” and engage in outdoor physical activities, which foster presence. Anderson finds in Nietzsche’s “hostility against new books” a prescription for deep-reading favorites rather than indiscriminately consuming digital and print media. Unconventional arguments (read less, forget more) and Anderson’s facility in distilling the useful from Nietzsche’s writings while tossing the “bad, cruel or juvenile” breathe some refreshing originality into the screen obsession discourse. This is a must-read for anyone overwhelmed by the Information Age. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Nietzsche’s warning to avoid the seductions of easy comforts remains fresh… [In Emergency, Break Glass is] accessible and lively."

Boston Globe

2022-02-11
A concise primer on how to live a meaningful life in our digital world.

It is one of Nietzsche’s unique attributes that books about him often carry the life force that animates his own works. This book is no exception. As the narrative opens, Anderson, deputy editor of Ars Technica and author of The Internet Police, writes about how he was stuck in an all-too-familiar digital rut. “Perhaps you have felt the same discomfort,” he writes, “looking up from yet another spam email to wonder: What has become of the wonder and danger of life?” Looking for such wonder and danger, Anderson turned to Nietzsche, who offers a rousing and viable alternative to our screen-obsessed lives. So many writers get Nietzsche wrong, but Anderson reads him accurately and thoroughly, and he helpfully points out elements of his life and work that have been misunderstood or reached the level of myth. However, instead of full-on Nietzscheanism, Anderson recommends “thinking with him,” which necessarily entails facing up to the philosopher’s many shortcomings, especially his misogyny, as well as celebrating his many virtues. “Take Nietzsche as your guru and you will run into all sorts of problems,” writes the author. “As one of my philosophy professors told me, ‘If you’re not offended by Nietzsche, you’re not paying attention.’…Nietzsche was a flawed human being and a creature of his time.” Thinking with also means going beyond. “If Nietzsche could see what many of us can’t, perhaps we can see something Nietzsche couldn’t”—that many of his goals “are often accomplished in community….[He] correctly diagnosed the need for joy in an industrializing world, where life and work felt commoditized and flattened.” Anderson’s vision is less heroic and iconoclastic than Nietzsche’s, but it’s more human and moderate and, therefore, more practical.

Anderson gives us the philosopher we need for the moment at hand, and it is a welcome gift.

Kirkus Reviews