Dancing with Technology

Resisting "the machine," cultivating attention, and stardust

Since I started writing this newsletter back in December of last year, I’ve had in mind a post with the above title, “Dancing with Technology.” The phrase holds a particular feeling for me, a constellation of ideas and concerns that feel important to the conversations I want to be having, but because the idea hadn’t yet pointed to a clear entry point, it’s continued to gestate on a page in my notebook. 

This post is an attempt to share some shining points from this constellation, even if the shape they make together isn’t yet clear (incomplete, and sprawling). I suspect it will be a topic I return to, whether as a series of posts or as a periodic practice of adding another star or two to the emerging figure. 

To start, I should reveal to those of you who don’t already know me well that I’ve always had a Luddite streak. I’ve generally been a late-adopter of digital technologies and media, and naturally practice small acts of resistance against the pull of the technological tide (I don’t use X or Tiktok, nor do I have Apple Pay or a tappable credit card, and I make strange cell phone choices, as I will explain). I’m one of those people—you may be one too—whose heart sinks a little when the person I’m conversing with immediately pulls their phone out to answer a question that comes up in conversation, interrupting the flow of collaborative thought. 

Björk (Credits: Far Out/YouTube)

Although I’m a (partially willing) participant in digital culture, and aware that my way of accessing and processing information has been impacted by my use of the internet and smartphones, my relationship with these technologies always includes a sizable portion of tension—a pulling away that often exceeds the moving towards. 

A few examples: For the past two years, my husband and I have been experimenting with alternatives to the standard smartphone. We started with the Lightphone 2, a “minimalist” phone that calls and texts as well as having GPS navigation, podcasts, mp3 music, a calculator and notes, and hotspot capabilities, but no browser, camera, or ability to install apps. It also has a pleasing, e-ink screen with no eye fatigue-inducing blue light. We used these phones for about a year, and gosh, it was liberating. The elimination of so many screen-based possibilities from any given moment was for me – 90% of the time – a blessing, a little taste of what the present moment used to feel like for me before 2012 when I got my first iPhone. Eventually, though, the lack of a couple of crucial apps—the one my son’s school uses to communicate with parents and google maps were the two biggies for me—made me start looking at options again. Now I have tiny (and I mean tiny) android phone called a Jelly. This phone has all the functionality of a smartphone, but has such a small screen that it’s impractical to spend any length of time on it, and I have a launcher installed that makes it look like a minimalist device. I don’t have any social media apps on it—nothing extraneous other than, perhaps, Duolingo, but I can now do most of the things this culture expects me to be able to do at a moment’s notice: pay someone on Venmo, scan a QR code menu at a restaurant, order an Uber. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the compromise that’s working for me right now. 

I also had a landline phone installed at our home last year, mostly because I wanted my son to have the experience of learning phone manners and operating an actual telephone. He mostly uses it to call his grandparents next door. Also, right now, I’m composing this post on a word processor from the early 2000s, an Alphasmart Neo I purchased from eBay and painted green. I purchased it because a little subculture of users rave about it as a distraction-free writing tool, and I thought it could be useful for a new book project I’m embarking on. I’ve only had it for maybe three months, and it’s slowly become an integral part of my drafting process. 

Two of my devices: The Alphasmart Neo and our home phone

The devices aren’t the point though. The reason I spend time and energy experimenting with less-networked gear is a prioritization of presence. A feeling of being in the world, in the moment, without the constant tug of elsewhere. Time expanding out into minutes of nothingness, of boredom, even, without something to immediately fill it. Time not as a commodity, but a body of water one can swim in, even if only for the 20 minutes I sit in the waiting room before the nurse calls me back for my appointment. 

I want to experience my life as I live it, yes, and give my brain and heart room to spread out, to doze and dream. And, I confess, I want the people around me—my loved ones—to look back when I look at them. To swim with me in that water. Not to look around in that hunted way, holding their phones in their laps like talismans. 

“What I am sure of is that we seek out ways to make time stop. That only happens in moments of total attention, which is why we pursue them.” - Anne Carson

Poet’s have always cultivated attention, presence, as a sacred practice. And maybe people who are inclined to revere presence have a higher likelihood of becoming poets. “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” says Mary Oliver. Linda Gregg talks about “the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.” And Anne Carson recently commented, in an interview with the Paris Review: “What I am sure of is that we seek out ways to make time stop. That only happens in moments of total attention, which is why we pursue them.” 

I often think that the presence required in poem-writing, or art-making generally—that total attention that suspends and bends time so that when one finally thinks to glance at the clock, hours may have passed as if in minutes—is really what we’re after, maybe even more than the act of creation. It recalls the absorption we experienced as infants observing the play of light on the wall, or as children moving rocks in the stream to see how the water’s path changes. 

The research (as well as our own wisdom) tells us that such states of being and their accompanying suspensions of time are different in kind from the time-suck of scrolling, where our attention stays at a surface level of perpetual stimulation due to constant novelty, actually blocking our brain’s ability to process, synthesize, and rest. 

But the questions that technology raises for me as a human animal, a poet, and a member of modernity, are more complex than finding ways to resist its thrall. The question I’ve been asking myself lately is how I can think of my relationship with technology not as a struggle, but as a dance. Playful and spontaneous, yet controlled and intentional, with movement both towards and away from it in turn. 

Me and Kathleen Kelley in “Vibracorpus” (2022), literally dancing with technology.

For me, the dance acknowledges a series of unresolvable truths: 

-The damaging systems behind these technologies, which extract data and attention from us (and material and energy resources from the planet) and seek to control our minds and behavior for profit. This is part of what writer

Paul Kingsnorth

and others refer to as “the machine.” We are made complicit in these extractive systems by residing in the global north, just as we are complicit in the harms of capitalism at large.

-The privilege of choice in some people’s interactions with digital media and technology. The structure of modernity and unequal access to wealth and resources means that many people don’t have access to basic online resources and systems that would benefit their lives. Others have jobs or lives which necessitate constant availability online. For example, I have a close friend with Type 1 diabetes who must keep not one, but two smartphone devices with her at all times as part of the blood sugar management system that keeps her healthy. 

-The intense cultural pull to conform to ever-encroaching norms around tech use and access. When I stopped using my iPhone and could no longer order at restaurants that use QR code menu systems or gain entry to a concert without a digital code on a networked device, these norms became much more visible to me. The seeming simplicity of my desires (to order at a restaurant by talking to a person, for example) then come up against my ingrained fear of being perceived as “difficult.” 

-The incredible affordances that digital technology offers for creation and communication—the fact that I can write to you all here is part of that. My collaborations with choreographer and video artist Kathleen Kelley are other obvious examples (see Territory and Vibracorpus and Portlet). 

“You can’t blame the computer. If there’s no soul in the music, it’s because nobody put it there.” - Björk

Bjork—one of my favorite artists–is a wonderful model of how digital tech can be not only used, but cherished and celebrated, for beautiful and subversive ends. For decades, her albums and the visual worlds around them, have been, in some sense, arguments for the continuity between digital technology and “nature.” Defending electronic music against detractors, Bjork’s argument has always been clear: “You can’t blame the computer. If there’s no soul in the music, it’s because nobody put it there.” Notably, much of Bjork’s oeuvre comprises music created with a combination of electronic and analog instruments that are odes to the natural world. 

So, this is the dance, as I’m trying to dance it today. To both embrace and complicate my Luddite tendencies. To use the tech around me both thoughtfully and playfully rather than thoughtlessly complying with the slow creep of smart devices and algorithmic control into every aspect of our lives. To think of digital tech as a collection of tools (sometimes voluntary, sometimes required) that can be picked up and put down. To remember that, as a force of modernity, tech is not innocent. But also that, as in my own body, the matter that makes up my computer comes from stardust.   

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*Note: If you’re interested in digital minimalism and thoughtful interactions with technology, three wonderful Substacks that I read that focus on these topics are

Carmella Guiol

’s “SCROLL SANITY,”

Jose Briones

’ “Moving Offline,” and

Ruth Gaskovski

and

Peco

’s “School of the Unconformed.”