The Digital Revolution: A Historical Case for Course Correction

The Digital Revolution explores how digital algorithms reshape our minds, lives, and society and offers a powerful call to reclaim time, attention, and humanity in an AI-driven world.

Digital algorithms are reshaping our minds and lives, trading convenience for a loss of agency, self, connection, and humanity. The Digital Revolution, based on over a decade of research across multiple fields—including psychology, technology, and philosophy—pursues a holistic approach to answering the question of how digitization affects us and our relation to the world around us.

The Digital Revolution takes the reader on an unexpected journey, starting from the great revolutions of our age and the invention of the first modern computers in the post-World War II era to inside our very own minds, exploring the neural mechanisms of addiction, hypnotic trances and age-old questions around perception versus reality.

Today, despite unprecedented connectivity and access to information, we feel lonelier, adrift in an era that consumes our time and attention. By college, most young people have already spent tens of thousands of hours on screens, immersed in a silent Digital Revolution that alters our lives without protests or barricades. Instead, it has quietly established a subversive foothold in our previously analog lives. You want to put down your phone but can’t. You want to quit social media, yet you hesitate. You want to read a book but keep picking up your phone instead. You feel like time is slipping away. These devices promise to save us time and make life more convenient, but all they do is keep us busy—and not with the tasks we want to do. Though we sense the negative impact, breaking free is difficult.

Despite clear evidence of harm, the people most affected—parents, teachers, children, and adolescents—lack accessible information on this topic. Drawing on George’s long career as a philosopher and educator, this book offers insights from personal experience, tracing technological shifts from the 1930s to today. It aims to empower readers to become intentional participants in this revolution, reclaiming time, connection, and self-awareness. As AI is becoming increasingly dominant in shaping our daily lives, professional endeavors, and social interactions, The Digital Revolution is both a warning and a guide to conscious change.

The Digital Revolution seeks not only to understand this development—what is “artificial intelligence” and how should we understand its role in our lives?—but also suggests how we can maintain human control in a world where digital algorithms set the tone and the pace of work, leisure, communication, consumption and so much more.

George Eastman, now approaching his mid-nineties, has devoted more than half a century of his life to teaching philosophy, psychology, and education in universities and colleges and to practicing as a clinical psychologist.

From starting a commune and bakery in Bar Harbor, ME, getting his private pilot’s license, completing a Ph.D and an Ed.D, gaining and giving up a tenured professorship, founding a media research institute and twenty-five years of teaching music therapy students, George’s life path has been anything but linear.

His work has been published in educational and philosophical journals. George has been a speaker and contributor to various campus-wide lecture series.

An adventurer of the intellectual and academic, George is not afraid to dig deep, ask hard questions, and do the research necessary to answer his questions. He has lived through the transformation of the world from analog to digital. He has been investigating the effects of technology on our psyche, psychology, education, and behavior since the 1970s. He has conducted original research and founded The Institute of Media Research in 2002.

His interest in human freedom—now the foundation of The Digital Revolution—has been consistent in his work. He worked as an organizational consultant, group dynamics leader, mediator, and counselor. He has been researching the effects of technology on our psyche, psychology, education, and behavior since the 1970s. When not teaching, George maintained an in-demand psychotherapy practice from his home office in Cambridge, MA. Throughout his career, he has helped over 7,500 patients. George is a committed vegan and animal rights activist. He spends his time writing and researching.