Slow technology
Professor David Levy's research borders on the kind of thing that will get materialistic people to sneer: one of his conferences was entitled ”Information, silence and sanctuary” and it became so popular that Levy spent time both on CNN and in the national as well as international press talking about what obviously touched a deep concern in many of us. But what, exactly, is this concern? The best way to answer that may be to point out that there are many different concerns that combine into an overarching suspicion that technology may be destroying something very important in our society. And this is not necessarily luddite intuition, either. It may have more to do with the fact that technology is designed differently than biological systems. A computer – to take a very simple fact – does not need to sleep. Biological systems do. Sleep recharges them and allows them to reorganize, heal and develop. But biological systems are not the template for designing technology – instead we seem to have defaulted to the idea of the machine as a universal model for society, organizations and our life.
Professor Levy has been a part of this process in different capacities for some time. He did his PhD at Stanford in artificial intelligence, but after this he went to London to learn calligraphy and bookbinding. He then went back to Palo Alto and worked within what might be one of the most important technological think tanks ever, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center – Xerox PARC. After two long periods at this institution (credited with such innovations as the laser printer, graphical user interfaces and the computer mouse) he came to Seattle. Here, at the Information School, he teaches something different, however – he teaches the need for leisure.
The course he is giving – on contemplation and technology – is a course that uses Josef Piepers ”Leisure as the basis of culture” (1947) as a starting point. Piepers essay, Levy explains, is fundamentally against all kinds of rush culture, arguing that those who are too preoccupied in fact accomplish nothing lasting. Overwork is nothing else than idleness – since it leads to nothing. What we need instead, Pieper claims, is leisure – time to contemplate, think and develop. (And no – professor Levy says – that does not mean golfing or working out in the gym).
Professor Levy recently finished a workshop – in the form of a retreat – where he developed the theme of silence and sanctuary further with an aikido sensei, a calligrapher and a zen abbott. Aikido – for those of you who do not know this – is a martial art focusing on harmony and peace. What on earth does this have to do with technology? Professor Levy answers calmly that it is obvious: these three arts are about mindfulness, and the theme for the workshop/retreat was mindfulness, work and technology.
Mindfulness has developed – under that name – as a stress management technique drawing heavily on buddhist meditation but devoid of any religious overtones. In books like ”Whereever you go there you are” researchers and philosophers have explored what it means to actually be present in the present, and how this affects you – mentally, neurolgically and spirtually. Mindful technology...that sounds nice – but is it possible to design mindful technologies? Are not all technologies efficient, productive and in a deep sense mechanizing? Perhaps, says Levy, but he rejects any idea of qualities as inherent in technology. It is, in the end, more about how we use technology, and how we allow it to use us.
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The information society knows no luddites. This is, in itself, a fascinating fact. There are no groups that wish to destroy technology or wreck machines (excepting the occasional lust to do so when somebody answers their mobile phone the umpteenth time on your commute back home) any more. The original luddites and the original techno-sceptics were for abstaining from the use of technology. They wanted an option to drop out of the industrial society. There seems to be no, or few, examples of groups that think this possible today.
The counter-revolutions of the information society are actually adaptive strategies rather than opposing strategies. ”Life hacking” is one fascinating example of this. Life hackers mix heavily from several different sources and end up with a productivity-focused, anti-procrastinator and tool-happy movement that incarnates in blogs and seminars all over the country. Life hacker have assembled their particular adaptive strategies from three sources: they use and rely heavily on Dave Allens Getting Things Done – a system for task management that turns everything into an item an an inbox that then is handled with a simple algorithm. They also rely on technology of different kinds – tools and tricks – to increase their productivity. Some of them experiment with drugs, sleep deprivation and...mindfulness to create an environment where they can produce more. The life hackers refuse to become victims in the information society stress war, so they become collaborators instead. In a sense life hacking is about adapting to the machine's way of life – by sorting and searching through the inbox in an extremely mechanistic fashion.
Well, it works. It works splendidly for those that try, but there are of course...lapses. People do well for a while and then they return to the disorganised, messy life they led before they successfully started to imitate simple machines. They become biological systems again, and ”fail” in applying the different rigorous systems developed by productivity experts and computers.
Life hackers want it all: they want peace of mind and they want maximum productivity. You cannoy fault them for ambition, but what are the actual results? The believers will tell you, as believers are wont to do, that they succeed very well, thank you. But the truth is that they succeed only if they maim their fuzzy, blurry and disorganised biological nature.
The other adaptive movement is the slow movement. Slow food, slow reading, slow travelling, slow sex...All of this is celebrated as the modern individuals answer to ever more speed. If the Life hackers try to adapt fully, the slow movement at least resists one component in the information society – the speed, the rate of change. Against fast food and other atrocities, they suggest that we consume time more fully and do one thing at a time. Slowly. But how slow? And should it be uniformly slow? No – obviously not: even slowers – let us call them that – will move quickly when they need to, and their ”counter-revolution” is little else than a wish to signal that they need small remissions from the current rate of change. They ask not that development over all changes or slows down – they ask for slow...well, hobbies (if sex can be a hobby).
Resistance, the Borg are fond of noting, is futile. Well – the resistance to the information society is not only futile, it is half-hearted. Mellow. Cooly uninterested and collaborative.
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Professor Levy, however, is not half-hearted in any sense of the word. He has just begun what might become one of the more interesting projects in the field of informatics: he is working on finding new technologies that are open to mindful use in different ways. One small thing, he notes, that could have large effects is if we could change the everyday working posture of people working on computers. Hunched over the keyboard, cramped, these people – you and I included – look as if they have been crippled and crooked and bent by a cruel master. Speech recognition, sensors, new displays may actually allow us to stand and straighten up, to actually acquire a proud posture while working.
Who knows what could happen in the future if we would work as free men and not crippled slaves...