Why has silence become a commodity? To some extent it seems an outgrowth of a back-to-basics, purity-as-priority impulse. Food can’t get from the farm to the table fast enough; toxins must be avoided at all costs; the "disconnectionists" preach digital detox.

But there are elements of Jurgenson’s argument that I can’t endorse. Let me get at them by noting that the question I would like to put to the disconnectionists is this: What are you going to do once you disconnect? You've got a lot of extra time on your hands now: how do you plan to use it?

The disconnectionists see the Internet as having normalized, perhaps even enforced, an unprecedented repression of the authentic self in favor of calculated avatar performance. If we could only pull ourselves away from screens and stop trading the real for the simulated, we would reconnect with our deeper truth.