Dear Reader,

I have a large tattoo on my chest that reads “Take Risk Of Mortality” and I’d like to tell you the story of this tattoo. Originally I was struck by a line I read in a New Yorker article about Van Gogh over 10 years ago. I’m not going to pull it up on the internet to get the exact quotes - I’ll give you my undoubtedly imperfect memory about it. The article was about the passion of Van Gogh for making art and how this impacted his mind and life. The last line of the article was “[t]he artist bets his life.” I have deep admiration and respect for people who put their lives on the line for their art (or their work or anything else they are passionate about). I want to be like those people. I wanted this quote on my chest, but I really didn’t want to use a gendered pronoun for it.

I looked at translating it to other languages for this purpose, but came up empty handed and put the idea away for a bit. Then I read another New Yorker article that quoted Saul Bellow. In a letter to a friend he wrote that “a novel, like a letter, should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of morality and decay.” The small phrase in there - “take risk of mortality” - struck me as the same message as “the artist bets his life” (which is also a cousin of YOLO). I wanted a large and present reminder to myself to not hold back, to put my life on the line for my beliefs and my art and my work. I have no interest in living in a world without risk.

And now for my third New Yorker article reference - in a recent article about Spotify, the theme is not about whether music piracy is good or bad for the industry. It isn’t about how artists get paid or not for their art, and what the philosophical implications of this are. It isn’t about music and musicians and art really at all. It is about us, the listeners, and how we use our technology. Spotify uses data to tailor its suggestions to us. The author notes that “[t]he collection of so much personalized data…suggests a future without risk, one in which we will never be exposed to anything we may not want to hear.”

I have absolutely no interest in living in a world without risk. When data & technology push us in this direction, we have every opportunity to push right back. The Slow Technology Movement can provide a framework for engaging with technology to recognize where it is pushing us and when we want to push back. Here are three values in the Slow Tech Manifesto that we can explore from this lens:

1. Engaging our uniquely human traits: If we are scared that AI can overtake us, then we should not ask computers to substitute for our uniquely human traits, like curiosity. We must wonder about things - things that are new to us and things that we have encountered before. We must wonder about things that please us and things that repulse us, and to do so we must be exposed to all of these things. Finding new music to listen to is a great example. We should be cautious about how and when we trade in our curiosity to technology in exchange for ease, comfort, and time-savings. This even extends to the design of technology. It should not be “so user-friendly” that we have no questions, no curiosity, or do not feel the need to push against the limits of what the design of the technology seems to place around us. As users, we should embrace risk in technology. Sure, you could break it. Let’s wonder about what kind of new opportunities of thought and action that could lead us to.

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1. Shaping culture: Of course our technological advancements have a huge impact on our lives and our culture, to suggest otherwise would be foolish. But I don’t think technology should have the last say in it. With recognition and intentionality we humans can drive our culture in whatever direction we want. The founder of Spotify said that (paraphrasing) some artists won’t be able to make it in the new landscape of fast music delivery - a landscape where you “can’t record music every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough. Rather he suggested that artists would have to adapt to the relentless rhythms of the streaming age.” Here is a big red flag for me and us collectively - do we want our artists to adapt to the technology, or have the technology adapt to our decisions? It is our choice. We can be artists who don’t put out music on Spotify’s timetable, and we can value these artists by taking the time and effort to seek them out or to keep a space open for them.

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1. Embracing Time: If technology were to simply speed up every single one of our activities - eating, drinking, searching for new music, writing articles, making love, learning, collecting trash, etc. - what would we now do with all this free time we would have on our hands? We’d just do more of the same. Free time does not instantly lead to amazing new breakthroughs. If every scientist suddenly had all the time in the world to figure out how to solve the climate crisis, it still wouldn’t be solved any time soon. Real life just doesn’t happen that way - there are no silver bullets or straight pathways. This is the beautiful struggle. We need not fight against time (or technology), but instead choose how we use it. I certainly appreciate that the newest technologies involved in making snowboards and helmets means that I can speed down a mountain faster than ever before. But I don’t want my overall time snowboarding to be “sped up” - I am not trying to cram all my enjoyment into an hour of snowboarding. I still want to use fast snowboard technology, but to use it in a slow way means that I choose to use it all day, even if I could get in all the runs I need on the mountain in an hour. And sometimes I choose not to use it at all - leisurely gliding down a mountain, enjoying the scenery.

What are the risks of the Slow Technology Movement? There are plenty. We risk not finding all the music that we could love based on Spotify suggestions. We risk missing climate deadlines that could mean catastrophe for our world (but we are doing this with fast tech anyway). We risk not setting a world record for how fast you can shoot down a mountain. These are risks that are meaningful and powerful. We as humans get the chance to assess our circumstances and the technology available to us and decide if we want to try to speed something up or not. The Slow Tech Movement suggests that if the thing we are doing is about using our uniquely human traits, shaping our culture, or using our time for things like learning, relationship building, or self-reflection, then we need not look for the “fastest” path forward. This kind of human work may go slowly and take a long time - and that is a beautiful part of life and living.

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