“Everything begins with attention.” – Alan Jacobs, “Attending to Technology: Theses for Disputation”
A couple of months ago, Kin and I decided to start a weekly podcast together. We figured we’d talk about the latest technology news – drawing from both his focus on APIs and mine on ed-tech but on tech news more broadly as well. It’s something that we spend so much time doing anyway – that is, discussing the politics of technology – that we thought it might interesting and hopefully worthwhile to record some of our conversations.
We’d recorded five episodes when our lives took a radical turn, with Kin deciding to put his work at API Evangelist on pause to spend the summer hiking and camping with my son in order to help him address his ongoing struggles with opiate addiction. When Kin announced his move, he framed it as “more investment is needed,” but that investment isn’t merely a financial one. This is about time. This is about attention.
Our attention has shifted, Kin’s quite profoundly as no longer is he spending his days monitoring the API industry. Indeed, he is now largely disconnected from the Internet, spending his days in the wilderness and not at his laptop. But to be clear, his days are not “technology-free.” He and my son are documenting their journey with a variety of high-tech devices, including a drone.
“How does the drone alter the attention you pay to the natural world?” I asked him last night as he was recharging batteries and packing up for the trek they left on today. “It’s why I can’t fly the drone,” he laughed. “I want to look up and watch it. The drone requires you watch its view through the screen.”
We’ve spent quite a bit of time recently talking about “attention” – we talked about it at length yesterday on the eighth episode of our podcast, riffing off of Alan Jacobs’ recent provocations in The New Atlantis, “Attending to Technology: Theses for Disputation.” The process of changing our worlds so drastically over the past few weeks – professionally, personally, financially, geographically – has certainly defamiliarized the established routines we have had with technology. It isn’t just a matter of a lack of cellphone signal or Internet reception, either. It’s having to carry enough clean water. It’s suddenly owning a car again.
This defamiliarization has made the demands of social media and of mobile computing all the more stark and, frankly, unpleasant. We have been conditioned to think little of technology’s incessant demands for our attention. Or perhaps we’ve been conditioned to see these as “progress,” as one more way in which we live in a world of information abundance. All those notifications, informing you, urging you, cajoling you: You have mail. You have new followers. You have new recommendations. You were retweeted. Your status was favorited. The app has updates. You must open. You must click.
The rattlesnake that we ran across hiking on Thursday – right there on the trail, coiled tight and rattling and ready to strike – sure got our attention. I broke down crying – all the fears, rational and irrational, of snakes, real and metaphorical. Kin said he was thankful the rattlesnake was not on his deaf side. He wouldn’t have heard it, and he’d certainly have been bitten. Isaiah said he didn’t see or hear the snake. He had his headphones on as he hiked. He wasn’t paying attention.
He’s starting to come out of the fog of pharmaceuticals. Oh, how we’ve medicated his generation for “attention deficit,” how we’ve medicated so many so generously for “pain.” How we’ve dulled and deadened all while offering these shallow and destructive distractions.
From Jacobs:
In my judgment, nothing is more needful in our present technological moment than the rehabilitation and exploration of Illich's notion of conviviality, and the use of it, first, to apprehend the tools we habitually employ and, second, to alter or replace them. For the point of any truly valuable critique of technology is not merely to understand our tools but to change them – and us.
That's the point of my writing, my work. That's very much the point of the summer plans Kin is making for him and Isaiah.