As an experiment, Miller, a New Yorker who has lived and worked online for half his life, spent a year in self-imposed exile from social media, search engines, pornography, email access and even text messaging, hoping in the process to discover his "real" self.
In fact, he spent most of that year bored, cut off from family and friends, sitting on the sofa playing video games. "I thought the internet might be an unnatural state for us humans," he writes. "I was wrong."
What Miller discovered is that, even if you decide to ignore the web, the web doesn't ignore you. He continued to turn up in photos on his friends' Facebook feeds and the articles he wrote about his technological self-exile were published and shared online. For a while, you could even download an app that let you know precisely how much time there was to go until Miller made his dramatic return to the world of status updates and cute animal gifs.
There's something oddly puritanical about the urge to disconnect. Miller is a Christian, which might explain why he resorts to the language of sin and temptation that seems to saturate most critiques of the internet, especially when it comes to young people. Miller, for his part, believed that constant communication was "corrupting his soul" and hoped, as many people seem to, that digital hermitage might somehow save it. His disappointment when it didn't is gently tragic.
Communication fasting is the new detoxing and there are simple reasons for the appeal. When so many of us have jobs that require us to be constantly interacting, saying "I hate the internet" is less contentious than admitting to hating work. Living in a world where bosses can email you at 4am is debilitating, but that's a problem of work, not technology. If you were worn out from digging holes for a living, it would make no sense to get angry with the shovel. The solution to a society that demands relentless productivity and ceaseless communication isn't less internet but more autonomy, and you can't find that by switching off your router.
It's time to abandon the idea that there's a clear distinction between the digital and the "real" world, or that we must give up one in order to experience the other. Academics refer to this false binary as "digital dualism", coined by the sociologist Nathan Jurgenson, who defines it as "the belief that online and offline are largely distinct and independent realities". In fact, the physical and digital worlds overlap, and technology, from the iPhone to the telegram and the toaster oven, affects every aspect of our lives, whether or not we choose to engage with it.
Technology, like sexuality, is a part of life that becomes a problematic preoccupation only when you convince yourself it's toxic. Like the dank daydreams of an abstinence preacher, deliberately avoiding something creates obsession; one imagines that Miller was never more aware of the internet than when he made himself live without it.
Every time a new technology changes the pace and scope of human interaction, some curtain-twitchers are always convinced that it's unwholesome, sickness-inducing and bad for kids. People once believed that moveable type was evil because books distracted women from their work and allowed ordinary layfolk to read what was actually written in the Bible. Communications technology can't "corrupt your soul" any more than abandoning it can save your soul, and the internet is no different. – © Guardian News & Media 2013
Laurie Penny is a contributing editor at the New Statesman