Resisting the Call for a ‘Digital Mindset’

From the heights of the digital sanctum, the decree descends, veiled in the language of innovation but heavy with obligation, an edict issued not for enlightenment but for compliance.

In a 2022 Harvard Business Review article, the author expressed the following: “Every executive, every worker needs to have a digital mindset, which means understanding how these technologies work, but also understanding the deployment of them and then the change processes you need to do in terms of your organization to make use of them.” From the heights of the digital sanctum, the decree descends, veiled in the language of innovation but heavy with obligation, an edict issued not for enlightenment but for compliance, not for wisdom but for efficiency.

But let us resist. Not with Ludditic sledgehammers but with a slow-turning skepticism. Let us interrogate this “digital mindset” asserted as a carefully engineered imperative, a velvet-gloved coercion designed to coax every living soul into the machinic ontology of ones and zeroes, perpetual upgrade cycles, and neuroplastic rewiring toward consumption and passivity.

To begin with, we must reconstitute a defense of the analog, rearticulating those human modes of being that persist outside the circuitry of mass computation. We must become, if not monks, then at least curators of the ancient crafts: handwriting, arithmetic done on paper, books bound in leather and ink instead of glowing in simulated pixels. The physicality of thought must be preserved, for the screen-mediated mind is one entrained toward that which is fleeting. Algorithms cultivate attention-deficit precisely because distraction is the engine of digital commerce; every interruption is a new potential revenue stream. (There’s a lot of money to be made!) If the “digital mindset” is a form of enclosure, then the analog practice is open-field resistance, the great commons of unmeasured contemplation.

Yet there is something more insidious in this mandate for digital subjugation than mere efficiency worship. The “mindset” is, after all, not simply a matter of acquiring technical literacy, not just a plea for understanding how algorithms function, but a wholesale philosophical restructuring. To “have a digital mindset” is to accept, consciously or otherwise, a mode of thought in which all problems resolve into solvable, programmable issues; in which all value is reducible to quantifiable data; in which every inefficiency, every friction, every bit of human complexity is framed as something to be eliminated, optimized, or sold. It is, in other words, a way of seeing the world that excludes precisely those elements that make the world worth seeing: beauty, mystery, serendipity, the slowness of thought that allows something beyond mere calculation to emerge.

So what, then, do we do? The first move is not reactionary rejection but critical reappropriation. The machine, like any tool, can be wielded against its intended function. The digital economy thrives on transparency, on the tracking of every movement, every keystroke, every purchase, every errant thought rendered into metadata—so we cultivate opacity. We embrace the anonymous, the encrypted, the untraceable. We learn from the counter-surveillance tactics of the dissident, the hacker, the artist who understands that to be unseen is the first step toward freedom.

Next, we must refuse the homogenization of thought that digital culture promotes. The algorithm rewards predictability; it shuttles users toward ever more of the same, ensnaring them in the infinite regression of their own preferences until they mistake this narrow simulation for reality. The only countermeasure is deliberate unpredictability, the cultivation of thought patterns that refuse easy categorization. Read the obscure, the difficult, the long-winded. Write in cursive, take notes by hand, cultivate ideas in solitude before they enter the public sphere. Above all, resist the impulse to be efficient at all times—allow for idleness, for boredom, for the creative dead-ends that lead somewhere only when one has abandoned the need to be led at all.

Finally, we must return to the question of education. If the “digital mindset” is to be the new orthodoxy, then education is the site of its greatest imposition. The classroom is the testing ground, the great laboratory in which the digital subject is formed. Schools, once centers of slow contemplation, have been refashioned into factories of digital compliance, where the young are trained to interface with machines rather than master the art of independent thought. We must, therefore, reclaim education as a space of resistance. We must teach our students to doubt, to distrust, to question the digital systems that seek to remake them in their image. We must restore the practice of deep reading, of sustained argument, of knowledge pursued not for its immediate utility but for its intrinsic worth. The classical model of education—grounded in the patient cultivation of wisdom rather than the frenetic acquisition of skills—offers one of the last bastions against the encroaching totality of the digital paradigm.

This is not a call to primitivism, nor a naïve rejection of technology as such. It is, rather, a plea for balance, for discernment, for an understanding that the world is not merely a problem to be solved but a mystery to be encountered. The digital world encroaches because it is easy; it is frictionless, seamless, seductive in its promises of efficiency and connection. But real thought is never frictionless. Real thought requires difficulty, requires resistance, requires the willingness to be out of step with the prevailing currents of the age. To resist the “digital mindset” is not to retreat from the world but to engage it on one’s own terms, to refuse the tyranny of convenience, and to reclaim, inch by inch, the last remaining spaces of human freedom.

Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human (Angelico), Ugly As Sin and other books. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, New York Newsday, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News.