I've been thinking about monks and tech and attention. If one of the challenges of life today is managing attention in a world of content designed to take it (ref Chris Hayes Sirens Call), then monks stand out as example of group that willingly placed constraints on their life in order to manage attention.

(My idea of monks here is more from books/movies/TV than first-hand experience or even actual accounts - though quite a while ago I was really interested in actual monks and nuns and I want to revisit Thomas Merton writing soon.)

I'm especially thinking about monks in sci-fi - I recently read and enjoyed the Monk and Robot series of books, where a 'tea monk' operates in a society of abundance. Now I'm rereading Anathem which is overflowing with ideas about attention and modern life and what chosen limitations can offer. I also just listened to Player of Games which doesn't really have monks but the 'what do we do in a society of abundance' part feels connected in my head.

Of course I'm thinking about all of this in a context where AI might be able to both do a great deal of work for us (creating abundance) and also create dangerously addictive content that could easily take up all of our attention.

Dune also connects to some elements of this - the idea that they were at a certain point more technologically advanced and then pulled back.

For me this is also all connected to ideas of ritual - ritual as a method for reminding us of what's important - or helping us reach a state of mind where we can appreciate what is important.

Continued interest in meditation as one of our most powerful techniques for directing attention and perspective.

In some sense I think about this stuff because I think about what I want to make. Existing in digital firehose leaves me feeling scattered. Watching my toddler experiment with cause and effect in the physical world feels so much more stable, rooted in the world. Also cozier, human-scale, with constraints naturally flowing from the actual physical world.

So maybe bringing computation into physical interfaces is helpful. I recently made a huge sort of piano/appliance like container for my computer, and it's strange how it makes it feel more like a large machine - more like a place. Again it helps with grounding.

Or maybe I should focus on tech that gets you away from the screen and computer entirely, which could actually be a wide range of things (AI agent assistants fit in this category). But there's still parts of the computer experience I love, I feel like it's a push to better identify what those things are, and not to be too certain about what exact form they take, but hold onto the feelings I want use to leave you with - grounded, in the world, connected.

I read the Tim Berners-Lee book as well, which must be swimming somewhere in my head in all of this - the high-level protocol of the tech of the web (basically hyperlinks and URLs as pointers) which had to be invented, could have gone another way, and probably still haven't fully fulfilled their promise.