Rejecting a lucrative offer from Instagram’s early engineering team, Harlow did the unthinkable: she moved to rural Vermont and bought a broken-down bookstore. For four years, Harlow disappeared from the tech press. She ran a bookstore called The Slow Page , where she deliberately installed terrible Wi-Fi. But she wasn’t hiding from technology; she was dissecting it. She kept a journal of every notification she received on her own smartphone, noting the physical sensation in her chest (tightness), the time to recover (seven minutes), and the quality of the book she was reading afterward (diminished).
Her most recent project, Project Hermes , is an AI companion that does not talk. It listens. It tracks the interruptions in your speech during video calls and alerts you only when you have interrupted someone. "Empathy as a metric," she calls it. sarah harlow
She has acknowledged this stingingly. In a 2022 interview with The Guardian , she said: "You’re right. It is a privilege to log off. That is why I don’t ask you to log off. I ask you to redesign the cage from the inside. My methods cost zero dollars. Grayscale is free. The threshold rule is free. The only thing it costs is your addiction." But she wasn’t hiding from technology; she was
It did not sell well at first. It was too honest. It didn’t offer a ten-step plan to delete your apps. Instead, Harlow proposed something radical: It listens