How the Internet’s most earnest evangelist became its fiercest critic

Jonathan Harris has spent much of his time lately doing two things: writing computer code and meditating. Code is old hat to Harris, an acclaimed digital artist and in-demand TED-talker, who learned to program at Princeton in the late-’90s. The marathon Zen meditations are, however, a more recent addition: Harris’ latest, ever more desperate attempt to reclaim his mind from his Macbook screen. To hear Harris tell it, it’s a battle that he’s waged, on and off, for the past seven years, ever since his early, unbridled optimism about the Internet’s potential began scoring him commissions and high-paid speaking gigs. The Internet is still his medium today. In early October, he released Network Effect, his first major project in two years.

But where his earlier work celebrated big data and social networking, Network Effect pans both as dystopian. “I don’t want to suggest that some moments are more valuable than others,” Harris said on the phone from New York, where he and his meditation-guru girlfriend are about to catch a plane to Australia. “However, I would say the mindset we inhabit on the Internet is a mindset that stops us from seeing moments as sacred.” “Staring at a glowing rectangle,” he’ll say several times, “is no way to live.”