Fig. 1
Kyocera 902KC
My journey to dip into the winds of retro-ality converged after reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport (and a few other of his books), being inspired by James Scholz (jvscholz) who escapades with niche tech, hearing and absorbing the wisdom of someone once saying "the future (if we are to have one) will be analog", and how I have generally lived through and still am living through this "disconnect to reconnect" paradigm I think is so integral to my health and tuning in to my body's needs.
Yet what I was not the most fulfilled by is how dumbphone have become associated with 'productivity', as Alan Watts once quipped:
Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.
I see Watts pointing us towards the moon that shines bright with the craters of how we have been required to keep meausuring, quantifying, and evaluation our progress, as if this is a motivating effort to encourage ourselves. Yet these are craters we all share, in the commitments that have us generating time in a rushed manner, taken in through the form of deadlines, our intense sense of timefullness facing traffic on an urgent trip or grocery line, and simply a night's rest that actually fulfilled our need for rest yet is 'not acceptable' from the standards of a time imposed by business, work, and bureacracy.
All these stimulate our cells in stress—this heightened pace of regulation and care of ourselves—where we increase our oxygen recycling, increase pulse, and circulate to the regions most needed in bodies filled with alert. Yet sadly, stress many times is seen as unpleasant to the point of negativity, not alikened to a natural immune system reponse, and this probably has to do with how stressful our lives have become in response to the systems of oppression around of today. As Bayo Akomolafe has observed that the slave ships have never left the shores, and even that the ships have spilled out all its wounds and taken form in the hierarchical, vertical systems of fear found today.
So how does this connect to my focus phone? I have noticed in a way, to take from Neil Postman, that many of my endeavors on the digital landscape have been an act of amusing myself to death. To dry out my life-full pathways in deference to truly feeling the loneliness, boredom, and drain and to honor my needs in ways that take up more friciton. For, of course, the digital world is design to be an ice-skating rink—corporations being the zamboni that further makes all the icy screens more slippery out of desires for profit, attention, and an ill-informed idea that we need to design the heartmind's of consumers to a wicked liking.
Stephanie Kaza observed this very ecological niche into the hearts of many, naming the effects as "consumer states of mind", and how
Movies and computers both carry the disadvantage of absorbing one's attention visually by constant motion and change on the screen. They can perpetuate a kind of addiction to fast-paced peripheral change that is not at all characteristic of the natural world. Young people today are very prone to boredom because they are so used to highly distracting forms of entertainment and learning. They do not have the patience for the slow pace of the natural world.
Stephanie's concerns mirror my own: for those releasing periods of my life when I have realized my expectations to be informed by the sicknesses spread about the Interwebs and acting as Jorōgumo[1] that brings us in the immediacy of a web. That is web as trap, not as home, sanctuary or place of rest. But this talking cobweb (as Indigenous prophecies foretold) that connects us to nothing but this separate, individualized, pixelated, and destitute online identity. Forlorn from all of creation and put to rest by business running upon deadening people to points of zombification.
What I found most peculiar about Kaza's keen awareness is her wide view of how the youth are driven to highways of speed, caught in streams of life not of water but of attention residue, sticking to grasphing at phenomenon purely made to cultivate a drowning of senses—this reaction that cannot remediated simply by stopping but by deep listening, slowing down, and attenuating to gut, liver, stomach, heart, hand, lung, leg, and eye. This patience so found in nature, so patient with our spirited adolescence and misunderstanding of our togethered-individuality our impenetrating presence upon all of life and our arrogance in believing we are the centers of creation in the primacy of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms. Not realizing we are lonely. We are hurt. We are not aligned with life with these rebellious and unfocused lives lived aligned with mere 'happiness', 'making the most of it', and 'doing what I love'. All of which spill some truth yet are only curds in the broth of life. For what could be the meaning of stewardship? Of a tending to and gentleness? How often do you see this in media? In movies? In all our stories? Could those forgottened, marginalized spaces hold the carrier-bags to life? To a holding of life (rather than a fear-inspired domination)? To how the Earth allows us to rest, tending to all its veins of life with seeping storms and surging erotic growth and regeneration, yet do we forget that these spaces all occur on plates tectonically active. These thrones of life underneath us all... holding up all our weight yet maintaining our gravity in balance? For the plates of creation lie, move and rest upon lava. Does that not bring the gravity of our attention to the strength that underlies us all, not having to do with heroes, villains, and those stories of good/bad, right/wrong, and any beauty or ugliness, yet still holding all our stories up. This understory—these plates that allow us to be released into the world carefully divided in connection. These plates shifting seas, transformings, and shaping not only mountains but skies, as they lay the foundation of all of life—that allow overstories to grow in play.
For the plates that we rest upon are never once the same, being cycles in slow processions of birth and death, cradling ourselves in re-creation. How can this inform ourselves hospicing systems in full collapse around us?
Though that tectonic understory definitely shapes my understanding of dumbphones, the internet, and all of life, I want the epicenters of this post to tap back into what it means to bring attention to (rather than turning away) and bearing witness in full to our needs of truly observing what is happening with the sapping of our attention.
What I have been tuning into is not only the 'focus' lost but the entire redirection of values present in our (toxic? or intoxicating) relationships with the internet with how we see each other and how we interact in our relationships. As in the way that the Internet (the cobweb of attention capturing) is always on as long as one has a connection, I am feeling into a pressure of our bodies to mirror this notion of 'always-on -ness' that you can see on the faces of any type of -aholic or a tired parent always on the mode of helicoptering concern over children who are always so sensitive to their needs of play, comfort, and adventure. That the 'always-on-ness' of the Internet informs distorts those needs in crying symphony.
There is so much of a pressure to perform nowadays that is so easeful to get caught in the web of 'always being on', as we board the train that tracks to Burnout Boulevard and Sickening Drive. A few actions I can observe in my personal life is the expectation that we always need to be available by phone. As even my psychology teacher once expressed a story about leaving work (around a two hour drive) after just arrived after realizing that he did not have his phone. Cal Newport has critiqued this phone-y model of the constant companon model (I unsure the origin of this term...? Perhaps you know?) and how a despondant dependency enslaves our mind waxing our flames into a bonfire of false senses of security. As Newport has observed that very rarely is there an 'emergency' where a phone is necessary on the day to day basis. And a focus phone has the bare minimnm needed to adequately get around (calling, texting, maps, and lovely non-luminous, non-white-florescent rectangely structures of terror)
What I find most heartening is how there is this movement of 'dumbphones' and focus phones, and how we are reclaiming our attention back, which spurs me into missing my own focus phone as I have returned back to the sterile iPhone 'ecosystem'. Which is in some way eco- but its roots uprooted tell the tale of an echo from our traumatic past of separation. For the many points of contact between this ecosystem is the illusion of consumers. These producing and consuming states mind that are figurative black holes, reaching inward by sucking all of life outward, never having enough or being enough the void expands consuming itself as a treatise to it's self-collapse.
How I want to make clear croacks and creeks so vividly through the vernal words of Yuval Harari at the end of Sapiens:
Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?"
So much of what I find alerting, disheartening, and disengaging with the Internet is how isolated its experience can be from beauty, love, and life-affirming acts of grace, genuineness, and generous giving that regenerates our cells and brings us to life. I am talking towards those decomposers, fermentative fungal elements, and the re-cycling of life through death, decay, and disorientation. These embracings that if disoriented by fully, bring us fully into an orientation of life filled with our visceral gut-mind Earth-body. I do not see death, decay, and disorientation honored by many on an Internet that is always 'ON', always allowed into our experience as if it is a 'need.' As if we need to depend on screens designed to capture, deaden, and create cycles of suffering, desire, and fear. That fear we are missing out. But then I ask, what are we truly missing out on... as I have opened the thyme of my wound, smelling and locating into how there is this gaseous quality of regret, grief, and utter sorrow for all the time I had spent as a teenager living out my needs through incompatible threads of addiction rather than spending the quality time with my family. That is one of my deepest fears now: what am I missing out on by pursuing the comfort of the moment rather than regulating my comfort to the discomforts and laying my head not on a pillow but the Earth-ground itself and feeling into that bleeding, beating radial pulse of connection that can be found in any moment.
I wrote a post on slowness a while back, and I've met that this message I've cloistered upon back then was this measuring, evaluative patriarchal industrial approach—measuring my moments by speed. And I realize I was longing, touching the corners of the seed-bearers that speak to a message of meeting rather than measuring. I grasp the word back then in remembrance that 'slow' really meant and longed be this 'intimacy', knowing the true depths of contact with life and its everything. And wanting to be washed in every dye of its natured love—whether that be in the sparks of anger I feel when I hear people homeless despite all the available housing. When I hear people at war when at home there is another struggle going on. When i hear that people are in hunger, impoverished simply by our systems of mass restriction, mass regulation, and mass fear. So I choose to direct witness, directly be in intimate connection even if I cannot act, I grieve.
In the same way that the internet—it's crazy, confetti colored kaleidescope of images, videos, concepts, and illusions of reality, I wonder if the expectation of knowing everything—having that Google-y search engine that confirms all our woes and allows us to answers some pretty neat questions—actually gets in the way of curiousity. I wonder if connecting through the screen by honoring the peoples enslaved by business to mine our geological capacities for cities of exploitation, by honoring all that effort and good-will honed in technologies that encapsulate eternities of learning and love, and by honoring how our screens and petro-chemically active devices still fall withinn our webs of life—webs being wings of sorts lest we become Icarus-y. I am curious with engaging with this story—how our technologies have been birthed through ecologies and how far disconnected and divorce they've become in our everlasting marriage. I am so curious to explore how our tectonic slowness, those plates that rides the seas of lava, ecologies of slow change have birthed and wombed our technologies of anxietic and anorexic speed, starving ourselves of all those moments of silence we need. Moments of silence that remind us of the words that speak without our say.
I wonder into this true knowing and intimacy of what matters—beyond the premises of both matter and anti-matter—so more like what 'meets' and what 'converges'. Of the value of the unknown and embracing of the uncertainty to only be in love with the learning through and wading through hidden swampy waters, not realizing that it was even called water. Not realizing those stalks were breathing us into latent realization, loving us unconditionally despite this.
I wonder what it would truly mean to 'disconnect to reconnnect,' as I deeply fear I am not spending enough time with my family. As I have once before and feel the grief of my mother passed, knowing I was caught up in places I did not even want to be. Places of dislocation and dispirited sorrow.
I wonder how I can see a 'dumbing' of my phone or an intimacy-mizing of leukocytic presence to burst myself into the trunks and root-structures of life, into the bones of boredom, and into the marrowed struggles of bearing witness to all the pain of life? I wonder if tugging into that intimacy to my pain is the rowboat to a liberation without leaving our shore. That narrowing my choices frees my mind from self-created shackles. That there is love in limitation....
That there is love right where you stand, if you sit-standing up, knowing that we are in extension to the body of the Earth.
- [1]
- This website expresses about this Japanese Yōkai:
Her eyes and smile entice you, but don't be fooled.
(Back to text)
She is the Jorōgumo. To the men she meets, she is death.
To the Japanese, she is a Yōkai. Attractive in all ways, but not as she seems.
Specifically, she is a wicked shape-shifter. To some, she breathes fire and controls a small army of spiders. To others, she is more beautiful than the sun and all the flowers combined. To all, she is evil.
She isn’t looking for love. She is looking for a meal.
If you see a woman more alluring than any you’ve known, stay away. Do not smile in return. If she drops a glove, leave it there. If she whispers your name, cover your ears. Run.