slowcomputing.org  ·  a pamphlet in one page

slow & deliberate computing

Computers used deliberately, on your schedule, for your reasons.

A clock with one hand. For most of the history of clocks this was the whole instrument, and the hour was the finest slice of a day that anyone needed. The hand above keeps your actual time. It moves about once a minute, which turns out to be often enough.
I

The machine is patient

A computer is the most patient object in your house. It will hold a half-written letter for ten years without complaint. It does not care whether you answer in a second or in a season. It never sighs.

Every urgent thing on its screen was put there by a person who wanted your attention before you had decided to give it. The impatience is not in the machine. It was added later, on purpose, by someone else, and it can be taken back out.

II

On your schedule

The interrupt was invented so that machines could serve people without making them wait. Then it was turned around and aimed at the person. Now the person serves the interrupts.

Slow computing turns it back. You arrive at the machine; the machine does not arrive at you. Mail is read when you sit down to read mail. News is read when you go looking for news. Nothing rings, nothing buzzes, nothing counts your unread life in small red circles.

The test takes one question: who initiated? If you did, the computer is working for you. If you did not, look closer at who is.

III

For your reasons

Sit down with a sentence in your head. I am here to write to my brother. I am here to learn how the pump works. I am here to play, on purpose, for an hour. When the sentence is finished, stand up.

A session with a reason has an ending. A session without one has only an interruption, and you will not get to choose it.

IV

Seven practices

  1. Decide before you wake it. Know what the machine is for today before the screen lights up. The lock screen is a door, not a lobby.
  2. Silence everything that is not a person. A human being who needs you now may ring through. Software may not. Software can wait; that is what it is best at.
  3. Read feeds like post. At an hour you chose, in one sitting, and then done. The mail carrier comes once a day and civilization holds.
  4. Prefer files on your own disk. A file sits still. It does not recommend, refresh, or rearrange itself. It is the same tomorrow, which is a kind of loyalty.
  5. Let interfaces grow old in your hands. Choose tools that look the same next year. Familiarity is a feature that cannot be shipped, only accumulated.
  6. Give the machine a bedtime. The computer sleeps at night, in another room, the way the other tools sleep in the shed. Morning belongs to you first.
  7. Keep one day with no screen in it. Weekly. Not as penance, but as proof: the life is yours, and the machine is a visitor in it.
V

Not a retreat

None of this is against computers. It is the opposite of against. A person who loves a tool sharpens it, keeps it, uses it hard for the work it was made for, and puts it away clean. A chisel does not decide what gets carved. Commanding the tool and loving the tool are the same act.

The machines are marvels. They deserve better than to be the thing you reach for when you cannot think of anything to want.