DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2022
Volume 16 Number 2
Volume 16 Number 2
Ensuring Minimal Computing Serves Maximal Connection
Grant Wythoff
<gwythoff_at_princeton_dot_edu>, Princeton University 
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6605-9596
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6605-9596Abstract
Originally devised as an insult by Richard Wollheim, the term “minimalism” described a 1960s movement that foregrounded the relationship between an art object and its museum viewer. Today, minimalism is the guiding ethos for a surprising variety of pop cultural phenomena, from belongings that spark joy to contemplative practice that increases mindfulness. This article first takes a broader view of minimalism to register several problematic echoes of minimal computing among digital detoxers and disaster survivalists in intensities ranging from Luddism to asceticism. Attention needs to be given to these echoes, especially when valorizing DIY infrastructures built out of necessity by Indigenous, poor, or coastal communities and out of privilege by doomsday preppers. Second, this article asks what becomes of minimal computing now that we have seen the vital importance of maximal connection during the COVID-19 pandemic. Do arguments for minimalism still hold in a socially-distant, unevenly-connected world? I argue that it will be important to reframe the digital minimalist conversations of the 2010s for the demands of digital equity in the 2020s. Going forward, we should ask: which of these competing claims to minimalism — as a form of attention, mindfulness, and agency — are compatible with maximal connection, with maximal choice, with maximal investment in communities and infrastructures? And when we hold up minimalism as a virtue, is that virtue a property of particular tools or specific techniques for using them? Finally, this article profiles the ways that academic conversations on minimal computing have independently taken root outside universities through grassroots organizing and activism under the banner of community technology. I close by suggesting ways that minimal computing can be led by community input, while also playing a role in public scholarship and community partnerships that extend existing academic research.
The question that has been at the heart of minimal computing — “What do we need?” — may
never quite land the same way again.[1] The summer of 2020 found librarians asking
researchers about books they needed to access, department chairs surveying faculty for
their remote teaching needs, undergraduate students sharing leads on summer work after
paid internships were cancelled, and graduate students turning CVs into resumes as the
remains of the academic job market all but evaporated. As I write this, academics
continue to hash out detailed scenario plans at universities whose fates seem to change
by the day. But these approaches to what we need in academia, these finer-grained
tactics and forms of exchange, have only now become possible to imagine. Not long ago,
we found ourselves asking even more fundamental versions of the question: What do we
need in order to communicate, to eat, to stay healthy, to keep communities intact?
The same pandemic has affected everyone in remarkably different ways. But no one will
soon forget the feeling of preparing in March 2020 for a crisis whose shape seemed to
evolve in real time. I remember standing with my partner in a grocery aisle, wondering
whether microwaveable or stovetop rice would be a safer bet if infrastructure
maintainers could no longer report to work. Which utilities would last longer:
electricity (delivered here in Philadelphia by a private company) or gas (a municipal
utility)? The next day, I tried to reassure myself that it was just paranoia that led me
to download PDFs of grocery checklists and CDC preparedness guides in case our Internet
connection also went down. “Who knew what was true,” says the protagonist of Severance (2018), Ling Ma’s uncannily timed novel of pandemic
survival in New York City:
The sheer density of information and misinformation at the End, encapsulated in news articles and message-board theories and clickbait traps that had propagated hysterically through retweets and shares, had effectively rendered us more ignorant, more helpless, more innocent in our stupidity. [Ma 2018]
The actuality of what communities experienced in the following months — checking on
neighbors, refreshing news feeds, delivering groceries, shuffling endless Zoom calls —
was nothing like the dystopian imaginaries that led us to go with the stovetop rice over
the microwaveable. (Didn’t Snake Plissken cook over an open fire in Escape from New York?) Nor did it make the growing number of doomsday “prepper”
billionaires — whose minds apparently always work this way — look any less silly
[O’Connell 2020] [Osnos 2017]. As Laurie Penny writes on these techno-libertarians, who
for years have been buying underground bunkers, bullets, and meals ready to eat:
Shit-hits-the-fan escapism — a big part of the alt-right imaginary — never predicted this. I have lurked in countless stagnant ideological Internet back alleys where young men excitedly talk about the coming end of civilization, where men can be real men again, and women will need protectors. How inconvenient, then, that when this world-inverting crisis finally showed up, we weren’t given an enemy we could fight with our hands (wash your hands). [Penny 2020]
Instead, the past two years have crystallized the meaning of asking “What do we need?”
both as individuals and as communities, demonstrating how the question surfaces issues
of connection, solidarity, and belonging (Who are “we”?) as well as different orders of
value (Which needs get prioritized?). Countless forms of communal response to this
crisis have quickly overshadowed the individualistic, doomsday prepper imaginary.[2]
Proponents of minimal computing have placed “What do we need?” at the center of digital
humanities practice, beginning with the formation of the Global Outlook::DH Minimal
Computing Working Group in 2014. In a field often tempted by the discourse of
innovation, minimal computing instead has pushed digital humanities conversations toward
issues of technology access, participation, sustainability, stewardship, and equity. In
New Digital Worlds, Roopika Risam describes minimal computing
as “a range of cultural practices that privilege making do with available materials to
engage in creative problem-solving and innovation. These go by names like jugaad in India, gambiarra in Brazil, rebusque in Colombia, jus kali in Kenya,
and zizhu chuangxin in China” [Risam 2018, 43]. Risam shows that
by foregrounding cultural practices rather than tools or platforms, minimal computing
prioritizes a humanist approach to technology, including questions like:
How to repurpose existing technologies to reduce e-waste and engage with obsolescence in generative ways; how to conceptualize the difference between choosing to engage with minimal computing principles and doing so out of necessity; and how to examine the social impacts of computing through postcolonial lenses. [Risam 2018, 43]
Judging from the range of contributions to this issue of Digital
Humanities Quarterly, humanists have experimented with many permutations of
digital methods and media theory to explore these questions over the past eight years.
But the idea that I can’t shake — and the place I began when first proposing this essay
— is that minimal computing often bumps up against problematic echoes of constraint,
disaster, and isolation that circulate in far more public contexts than digital
humanities discourse is capable of reaching. Some of these echoes can be found among
groups animated by imaginaries of collapse, like the aforementioned disaster preppers
and a recent subgenre of speculative fiction known as “solarpunk,” committed to far more
generative stories of “ingenuity, generatively, independence, and community” in the face
of climate change [Flynn 2014] [Konstantinou 2019]. Meanwhile, self-described digital
minimalists promote screen detoxes, mindfulness retreats, and tech fixes to reclaim
control of our attention, ultimately advancing an asocial imaginary of disconnection and
withdrawal. To cite the title of a recent documentary film, “offline is the new luxury”
[Van der Haak 2016].
Still, other echoes can be found in movements that I see running in parallel to minimal
computing, grassroots movements that bear important lessons for our academic
conversations. This includes community technology organizations working to ensure
digital equity in U.S. cities that still, in 2022, see less than fifty percent of
residents in some areas connected to broadband. And it includes proponents of a
decentralized web in response to the advance of data surveillance and tech industry
overreach.
But the imagination of constraint that generated solarpunk stories of climate resilience
is not at all the same one that produced an injunction to limit screen time and reclaim
attention. Nor are the arguments for living out a doomsday scenario in an off-the-grid,
independent bunker commensurate with arguments for a decentralized, interdependent
network topology. And yet all of these discourses are animated by competing visions of
minimalism as a virtue. Across the political spectrum, the idea is in the air.
How ironic then, that maximal digital connection is all that has kept and will keep so
many going during this epoch of social distancing, as every happy hour and routine
healthcare appointment, every first date and kindergarten class moved online. It’s far
too early to describe this shift accurately, but even in the thick of things it’s clear
that the pandemic has shuffled all previously settled distinctions between on- and
offline, distance and proximity, connection and touch. What becomes of minimal computing
now that we have seen the vital importance of maximal connection? Do arguments for
minimalism still hold in a socially-distant, unevenly-connected U.S., let alone around
the world? In order to take some steps toward an answer, I want to understand the
problematic echoes that have informed the practice and reception of minimal computing.
At the same time, I’d like to outline some of the emergent ways that I see minimal
computing growing in this new world.
Community Technology and Mesh Networks
In the context of COVID-19, asking “What do we need” depends largely on the “we” in
question. For Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in the U.S., the
pandemic has exacerbated inequities that have plagued their communities for
centuries. As Stacey Patton put it, “The pathology of American racism is making the
pathology of the coronavirus worse.” Higher rates of incarceration, homelessness,
chronic medical conditions, and a lack of access to quality health care all leave
Black Americans “more vulnerable to increased viral transmission, infection and death
during a pandemic” [Patton 2020].[3] The disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 are seen not only in
health outcomes, but also in employment — the unemployment rate for Black people rose
in May 2020 while the employment rate for white people rebounded — as well as in digital inclusion. When schools closed at
the beginning of the pandemic, roughly half of Philadelphia’s K-12 students lacked an
Internet connection at home, rendering the Chromebook laptop lending program offered
by the school district useless [Hetrick and Purcell 2020].[4] And
according to a March 2020 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, 80% of
White residents had broadband subscriptions, compared to only 53% of Black and 44% of
Latinx residents in the Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington metropolitan area [Sanchez 2020].
Internet accessibility in Philadelphia corresponds so closely with race that a
map of broadband connection rates by neighborhood is essentially identical to a map
of the city’s whitest neighborhoods.[5]
Unfortunately, Philadelphia is not unique among U.S. cities in this regard. When
every classroom and doctor’s office moved online, when bearing witness to violence
and injustice on the Internet became a matter of life and death, the twinned crises
of global pandemic and state-sponsored, racist violence, symbolized by the murder of
George Floyd, foregrounded the urgency of finally addressing digital inclusion in the
U.S., almost a decade after the United Nations declared Internet access a fundamental
human right [Wired 2011]. But in the absence of a competent policy response at either
the federal or local levels in the U.S., communities have devised various forms of
“making do” to fill the gaps. During the summer of 2020, across the country, groups
organized to build networked computing infrastructures from scratch, using various
combinations of hardware, software, policy stopgaps, community ownership, and
cooperative decision-making [Rosen 2021].[6]
These projects center on the development of mesh networks. Greta Byrum, Co-Director
of the Digital Equity Laboratory at The New School, explains:
Instead of requiring a centralized hub to direct network traffic, a mesh operating system automatically searches for the best path for data to travel. Devices (even computers or phones) can become “nodes” or connecting points that enable data to hop from place to place until it reaches its destination. If a node fails or breaks, the network automatically routes around it through other nodes. [Byrum 2019]
In the context of the COVID-19 crisis, many groups have been using community-owned
and operated mesh networks to share a single Internet connection among a broader
group of users with comparatively little cost required.[7] In New York, Community Tech NY
developed DIY instructions for making their Portable Network Kit at home, as the
in-person workshops they led for years became impossible.[8] In Baltimore, the Digital Harbor Foundation and Project WAVES worked with the
public schools to “daisy-chain” the schools’ Internet backbone to neighboring homes
with mesh radios [Digital Harbor Foundation 2021] [Project Waves 2021]. And in several
cities along the East Coast, bookmobiles, ice cream trucks, and satellite vans were
repurposed as mobile WiFi hotspots resembling the 1970s Stanford Research Institute
Packet Radio Vans: the first example of mobile networking. The Kingston Equitable
Internet Initiative also expanded their network with one of these vehicles.[9]
Like the “cultural practices . . . with available materials” detailed in Risam’s
description of minimal computing, community technology involves the construction,
maintenance, and care of technical and community infrastructures alike [Risam 2018, 43].
Many of these mesh groups have learned from the foundational training curricula
developed by the Detroit Community Technology Project, founded by Diana Nucera, who
defines community technology as, “A principled approach to technology that is
grounded in the struggle for a more just digital ecosystem, placing value on equity,
participation, common ownership and sustainability” [Nucera 2016, 15]. From the
perspective of community technology, building mesh networks means not only
maintaining the codebase and buildout, but also “fostering relationships of trust and
cooperation among neighbors, who must work together to make decisions about network
design, services, access protocols, security, and long-term sustainability” [Byrum 2019].
Rather than parachuting in shiny new hardware, mesh network groups and
community technologists host participatory design workshops and technical trainings
that empower communities to maintain and grow their network connections in
relationships of care. As Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara
Kneese write in their introduction to an important new issue of Social Text devoted to “Radical Care,” such forms of care have historically
come to the fore[10]
when institutions and infrastructures break down, fail, or neglect. Reciprocity and attentiveness to the inequitable dynamics that characterize our current social landscape represent the kind of care that can radically remake worlds that exceed those offered by the neoliberal or postneoliberal state, which has proved inadequate in its dispensation of care. [Hobart and Kneese 2020, 3]
Here in Philadelphia, these conversations flourished among a working group composed
of community organizers, technologists, academics, public school teachers, and City
Hall staffers who came together during the early months of the COVID-19 lockdown.
This Philly Community Wireless (PCW) project has been learning from the efforts of
mesh groups in other cities, as well as from the history of past community technology
efforts in Philadelphia. These include Wireless Philadelphia, one of the country’s
first municipal WiFi providers that unfortunately dissolved soon after it was formed
in 2004; Prometheus, a collective that built and advocated for independent, low-power
radio and other wireless technologies throughout the 2000s; and Philly Mesh, an
experimenter group that worked toward interoperability with mesh networks in other
cities in the mid-2010s [Breitbart, Lakshmipathy, and Meinrath 2007] [Dunbar-Hester 2014] [Philly Mesh 2021].
One thing we have learned at PCW by centering our conversations on community
technology is that not all approaches to “minimalism” are compatible. For example, two very distinct versions of minimalism have emerged in our
survey of mesh projects around the country, as well as within our own conversations.
In the first version, decentralized networks, non-proprietary hardware, and open
source software are prized for their ability to build truly independent networks. A
decentralized web (DWeb) could minimize reliance on exploitative Internet service
providers looking to sell user data, as well as minimize the surveillance harms that
disproportionately impact BIPOC communities. The second version of minimalism instead
emphasizes inclusion and access, regardless of the tools used to achieve them. In
this version, access to the Internet is viewed as a fundamental human right. The
Alliance for Affordable Internet — a global coalition of organizations working to
reduce cost barriers to Internet access — further specifies that baseline
connectivity is not enough and instead emphasizes “meaningful connectivity” as the
standard. “Meaningful connectivity,” according to their definition, involves the
following four “minimal thresholds”:
- Regular Internet use | minimum threshold: daily use
- An appropriate device | minimum threshold: access to a smartphone
- Enough data | minimum threshold: an unlimited broadband connection at home or a place of work or study
- A fast connection | minimum threshold: 4G mobile connectivity [Alliance for Affordable Internet 2020].
These debates will continue to evolve alongside the mesh networking technologies that
animate them. As Rory Solomon details, technologists have only recently developed the
routing protocols that make mesh networks scalable, in which every radio sends and
receives packets of information simultaneously, minimizing “hops” between nodes while
avoiding interference between all of that delicately interwoven traffic [Solomon 2020, 2–3].[11] And so the kinds of political
ideas emerging from mesh praxis — ideas about justice, equity, and privacy — will
only become clearer as more communities in cities around the country begin to map
their lines of sight and thread themselves together, node-by-node. It will be
interesting to see whether the “minimal thresholds” of meaningful connectivity can be
achieved through complex, experimental hardware, and whether that highly specialized
hardware can be made responsive to community input and ownership.
For now, the problem is that the non-proprietary hardware prized by one crowd
presents yet another barrier to access in the eyes of the other, who prefers tools
that easily connect people right out-of-the-box. And so the pursuit of
decentralization on the one hand and meaningful connectivity on the other is a
tension that seems present in many mesh communities. But the debate plays out
differently depending on its context. In some cases, one form of tech activism
gradually transforms into another when arguments for network independence and racial
justice are found to be complimentary. In others, a mesh group splinters and factions
end up pursuing different goals. This outcome is more likely to be the case when the
group’s membership consists largely of tech and telecom employees volunteering their
time to build experimental infrastructures without much input from the
community.[12]
What do we need? Clearly, it depends.
Minimalism as Austerity Chic
Community technologists and advocates of the decentralized web each stake competing
claims to “minimalism”: one draws attention to the minimal requirements necessary for
human flourishing, while the other seeks to minimize the influence of corporations
that extract profitable data from everyday life.[13] Working with members of both groups
over the past year, I’ve found myself wondering what the concept and practice of
minimal computing might offer these evolving debates. Does minimal computing offer
its own competing school of thought? Or is it more of an umbrella descriptor for
these interrelated approaches to tech justice?[14]
At the moment, it’s difficult to say. “Minimalism” is an incredibly diffuse idea
circulating in so many different contexts that it’s often tricky to parse the weight
that “minimal” holds when someone says “minimal computing.” Today, minimalism is the
guiding ethos for a surprising variety of pop cultural phenomena, spanning everything
from belongings that spark joy to contemplative practice that increases mindfulness
[Kondō 2014] [Crawford 2016]. A minimalism of paring back and throwing things away can
be found on Instagram and Pinterest: in mid-century modern furniture and lone potted
plants against clean white subway tile backdrops, in sans serif fonts on bright,
monochrome backgrounds with slogans reading “Own less stuff. Find more purpose” and
“The more you throw away, the more you’ll find.” [15] But this aestheticized
minimalism — a choice to pare back made by people who have everything they need — is
a stark departure from the minimalism of necessity highlighted by practitioners of
minimal computing. Taking a broader view of minimalism registers several problematic
echoes of minimal computing among digital detoxers and disaster survivalists in
intensities ranging from Luddism to asceticism. Attention needs to be given to these
echoes, especially when valorizing DIY infrastructures built out of necessity by
Indigenous, poor, or coastal communities and out of privilege by doomsday
preppers.
Minimalism was originally the name for an avant garde movement in 1960s art that
foregrounded the relationship between an art object and its museum viewer. With
techniques like prioritizing shape and scale over representation, artists associated
with minimalism sought to project little more than objecthood from their sculptures
and paintings. “What is at stake . . . is whether the paintings or objects in
question are experienced as paintings or as objects,” wrote Michael Fried, who
preferred the term “literalist” to describe these conceptual works, in 1967. “Like
the shape of the object, the materials do not represent, signify, or allude to
anything: they are what they are and nothing more” [Fried 1998, 151]. In the case of
a minimalist sculpture, brushed aluminum is just brushed aluminum. Think of Donald
Judd’s repeating cubes of identical size, Anne Truitt’s pillars broken by contrasting
bands of color, Dan Flavin’s sculptural arrangements of fluorescent light fixtures,
and Richard Serra’s massive, curved steel structures. At first, critics and artists
alike applied a variety of terms to these works: literalist, cool, ABC, receptive,
primary. But eventually, “minimalist” stuck.
Critics writing about this cadre of 1960s artists emphasized the theatrical qualities
of the museum goer’s experience in the presence of their works. The sculptor Robert
Morris described “one’s awareness of oneself existing in the same space as the work .
. . as he [sic] apprehends the object from various positions and under varying
conditions of light and spatial context” [Fried 1998, 153–154]. Minimalist sculptures
tend to be either massive or scaled to the size of the human body. When massive,
viewers have to back up and circle around the sculptures, participating in space and
time as they take in the objects from multiple angles. When they are
anthropomorphically scaled, like Tony Smith’s six-by-six-by-six foot cube Die, the sculptures possess an eerie presence: coming across
one in an empty room feels like being surprised by someone you didn’t expect to be
there.
If minimalist art amounted to “a new genre of theater,” as Fried wrote, it was a
profoundly atomizing form of theater in which the viewer is confronted, distanced,
and isolated:
That the beholder is confronted by literalist work within a situation that he [sic] experiences as his means that there is an important sense in which the work in question exists for him alone, even if he is not actually alone with the work at the time. . . . Someone has merely to enter the room in which a literalist work has been placed to become that beholder, that audience of one — almost as though the work in question has been waiting for him. [Fried 1998, 163]
This asocial theatricality couldn’t be farther from the communal experience of
theater that Bertolt Brecht or Antonin Artaud advocated for, a theater that
transformed its heterogeneous audience into a collective whole. For Michael Fried, if
minimalism is a form of theater, it only admits an audience of one.
The ubiquity of minimalist sensibilities today makes a lot more sense when seen in
light of its roots in this 1960s conceptual art movement, with its sculptures that
provoked atomization and isolation. For Kyle Chayka, minimalism today is “an
inevitable societal and cultural shift responding to the experience of living through
the 2000s,” from the impossibility of owning a home and paying down debt to the
vanishing likelihood of ever being paid a fair wage in a job that is secure. During a
time when crises fade only as the next one begins, “flexibility and mobility now feel
safer than being static, another reason that owning less looks more and more
attractive. . . . It makes sense that millennials embrace minimalism. My generation
has never had a healthy relationship with material stability” [Chayka 2020, 14].
[16]
The architect Pier Vittorio Aureli is less charitable in his description of
minimalism as a form of “austerity chic.” In Less is Enough,
Aureli argues that the endless romanticization of minimalism in the 21st century is
the result of the inhumane demands that capitalism has made of people since the
industrial age:
Within the history of capitalism, “less is more” defines the advantages of reducing the costs of production. Capitalists have always tried to obtain more with less. Capitalism is not just a process of accumulation but also, and especially, the incessant optimisation of the productive process towards a situation in which less capital investment equals more capital accumulation. Technological innovation has always been driven by the imperative to reduce the costs of production, the need for wage earners. The very notion of industry is based on this idea: to be industrious means being able to obtain the best results with fewer means. [Aureli 2014, 3]
Because capitalism constantly demands that we do more with less, minimalism could
serve as an invitation to ask why: why we should be content with austerity, where
this injunction comes from, and what might be possible with more. Unfortunately,
minimalism is instead broadly seen as a self-apparent virtue, a celebration of
isolated individuals paring back the boundaries of their otherwise shared
experiences.
From Digital Minimalism to Digital Equity
Digital minimalism has recently emerged as an offshoot of the broader minimalist
imaginary in order to cope with ever-intensifying forms of precarity that affect our
ability to maintain not just livable wages, but also uninterrupted trains of thought.
Digital minimalists seek to reinforce the permeable membrane of their attention
through mindfulness exercises, software settings, productivity apps, and other forms
of tech fixes. Approaches in this area fall into a few different categories. First
are the books that seek to identify and change the habits that lead users to
constantly seek refuge in their phones. Proponents in this camp offer prompts like
“spend time alone” and “hold conversation hours.”[17] A related group
consists of tech industry employees and insiders who have seen the light and devoted
themselves to fixing the social harms their algorithms have created. Former Google
engineer Tristan Harris, for example, founded the nonprofit Center for Humane
Technology to draw attention to the ways recommendation algorithms manipulate our
cognitive biases in order to keep us scrolling. The group has begun a laudable
campaign that pressures tech companies to pivot from business models built on
cognitive exploitation by “creat[ing] market conditions for humane tech,” albeit
without a real road map for doing so [Center for Humane Technology 2021].
A second category tries to solve surveillance capitalism with tech fixes. For their
part, tech companies now allow users to seemingly calibrate their attention through
options recently added to the system preferences of all major mobile platforms. These
features are known as “Digital Wellbeing” in Android, “Screen Time” in iOS, and “Zen
Mode” on OxygenOS. A digital minimalist might be further outfitted with gadgets like
IRL Glasses with polarized lenses that block the images on screens and slabs of solid
plastic called NoPhones that act as pacifiers for smartphone addicts. Digital
minimalists can also choose from the Google Paper Phone, a paper printout folded like
a zine containing all of the information you’ll need for the day and the Light Phone,
an app-less device with an e-ink display that only calls and texts. If minimalism has
become synonymous with the capitalist injunction to do more with less, it also
promises that buying more will allow us to do less.
A third group of digital minimalists draws from the medicalized discourse of screen
detoxes and tech fixes used by both groups above. But they go one step further by
attributing the 21st-century crisis of attention not only to overreach by the tech
industry and its powerful algorithms but also to a certain moral failure on the part
of users. Public philosophers James Williams and Matthew Crawford both describe
attention as a battleground for human agency. And both seem almost nostalgic for an
earlier era when humanity could rely on an “off-the-shelf package of religious and
cultural constraints” to regulate our attention, agency, and values [Williams 2018, 21].
Williams writes, “In the twentieth century the rise of secularism and modernism
in the West occasioned the collapse — if not the jettisoning — of many of these
off-the-shelf packages of constraints in the cause of the liberation of the
individual.” Users of digital devices are now faced with “the self-regulatory cost of
bringing your own boundaries” to attention [Williams 2018, 21–22].[18]
For Crawford, “The left’s project of liberation led us to dismantle
inherited cultural jigs that once imposed a certain coherence (for better and worse)
on individual lives” [Crawford 2016, 41].[19] Both writers retreat into the Western philosophical
canon for guidance amid our present “vacuum of cultural authority” [Crawford 2016, 41].
Digital minimalism has emerged at a moment when the tech industry continues to invent
new methods for transforming our habits and desires into profitable data. But most
researchers understand this transformation not in terms of the absence of religion,
but the presence of capitalism. These are the terms that Soshana Zuboff has
persuasively developed in her work on “surveillance capitalism” [Zuboff 2019]. Others
describe the tech industry’s co-opting of our everyday behavior into new forms of
value as a colonial process. Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias see this digital
extraction as an expansion of the ways colonialism has appropriated human life for
centuries: “Colonialism’s sites of exploitation today include the very same West that
historically imposed colonialism on the rest of the world. . . . What if the armory
of colonialism is expanding? What if new ways of appropriating human life, and the
freedoms on which it depends, are emerging?” [Couldry and Mejias 2019, x].
Unfortunately, the self-help nature of digital minimalism is disconnected from a
broader accounting of the tech industry’s collective, social impacts. Instead, much
like the isolated, atomized viewer of a minimalist sculpture, digital minimalists
emphasize the sanctity of an idealized, individual human experience without ever
thinking to address the stratification of those experiences.[20]
While some manuals are better conceptualized than others — especially Jenny Odell’s
wonderful How to Do Nothing, in many ways a parody of the
genre [Odell 2019] — digital minimalism is largely an argument against technology
that forecloses collective action. Digital minimalists often fashion themselves as
21st-century Luddites. But as Megan Ward has argued, Luddism was originally an
economic argument, not a self-help motto or personal virtue: “Refusing to be
ceaselessly on-call may increasingly become the province of the wealthy and powerful,
a return to an era when recreational time was a luxury of the elites rather than a
social right for the masses” [Ward 2017].[21] Unplugging or digitally
detoxing doesn’t absolve us of any ethical entanglements at a time when gig workers
don’t have the privilege to put their devices away, or when Black and Brown
communities don’t have a say in whether they will be surveilled by facial recognition
systems and disproportionately imprisoned by pretrial sentencing algorithms [Ticona 2015].[22] Ruha
Benjamin, who details these and other forms of digital inequity in Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, writes
of
Silicon Valley parents requiring nannies to sign “no-phone contracts” and opting to send their children to schools in which devices are banned or introduced slowly, in favor of “pencils, paper, blackboards, and craft materials.” All the while I attend education conferences around the country in which vendors fill massive expo halls to sell educators the latest products couched in a concern that all students deserve access — yet the most privileged refuse it? . . . Social theorist Karl Marx might call tech personalization our era’s opium of the masses and encourage us to “just say no,” though he might also point out that not everyone is in an equal position to refuse, owing to existing forms of stratification. [Benjamin 2019, 15–16, 17]
Read in this light, “offline is the new luxury” seems to be less a celebration of
leisure and mindfulness than an accurate diagnosis of digital inequity [Van der Haak 2016].
Of course, all these terms have been scrambled amid a pandemic, when broadband
connectivity could mean the difference between going out of business and creating an
online storefront, or going without healthcare and scheduling a virtual appointment.
The writings of the digital minimalists seem almost quaint now that so much of social
existence has become filtered through screens. For some time, maximal digital
connection will be all we have. It’s difficult to say how much of this new maximalist
sensibility will survive the pandemic. But it will be important to reframe the
digital minimalist conversations of the 2010s for the demands of digital equity in
the 2020s. Going forward, we should ask: which of these competing claims to
minimalism — as a form of attention, mindfulness, and agency — are compatible with
maximal connection, with maximal choice, with maximal investment in communities and
infrastructures?
Minimal Computing, Maximal Connection
It’s almost impossible to talk about minimal computing without reference to these
free-floating cultural imaginaries of minimalism as a “solution” to the problems of
technology today, from doing more with less to surviving off the grid. Before we
deploy minimal computing in digital humanities pedagogy and practice, these
problematic echoes of minimal computing need to be examined. At a moment when
minimalism in pop culture commodifies asceticism and romanticizes disconnection,
practitioners of minimal computing should use the term carefully. When digital
humanists use the phrase, what does “minimal” mean? And when we hold up minimalism as
a virtue, is that virtue a property of particular tools or specific techniques for
using them?
In 2014, Dennis Tenen and I published a tutorial that showed how academic writers
could step outside “proprietary word processing software and fragile file formats”
like Microsoft Word and Google Docs. The values guiding that piece included an
emphasis on the fundamentals of computation, legibility of the many layers of
mediation involved in word processing, and above all, sustainability of the media on
which we record our ideas [Tenen and Wythoff 2014] [Gil 2015].
The tools we used to achieve those goals are now closely associated with “minimal
computing”: markdown and the document conversion software Pandoc, as well as static
site generators. But I now wonder whether we were prioritizing the values embedded in
the tools (as do the proponents of a decentralized web who advance non-proprietary
hardware) or the values that informed our selection and use of those tools (like the
community technologists who advocate for meaningful connectivity for all). When it
comes to Pandoc and static sites, do these artifacts have politics, as Langdon Winner
famously asked? Can particular technologies have either inherently democratic or
inherently authoritarian tendencies, “embody[ing] specific forms of power and
authority?” [Winner 1980, 121].
The answer is of course a resounding yes. Pandoc prevents information from being
endangered or locked into proprietary ecosystems, while static sites enable the
democratization and rapid deployment of humanist praxis, which Alex Gil and Élika
Ortega usefully describe as “the renewal, dissemination, and preservation of the
scholarly record” [Gil and Ortega 2016, 29]. However, I would caution against an easy
equivocation between tools and their attendant politics. Too often, digital humanists
attribute democratic tendencies to some tools while overlooking the authoritarian
tendencies of others. I’m thinking in particular about the number of digital
humanities studies that use
facial recognition technologies in studies of film and television without once
mentioning the racist ways those tools are deployed in the world[23] — or work in cultural analytics that sidestep questions about machine
learning’s amplification of existing inequities with the briefest of preambles before
moving on to the value-neutral application of those tools.[24] If we simply borrow a data
science tool in the humanities and apply it to a corpus of photographs or novels
without questioning the assumptions baked into that tool or the harmful ways that
tool is deployed in the world today, that is a missed opportunity for dialogue and
advocacy.
A better approach might be to invert Langdon Winner’s question, as Christina
Dunbar-Hester does in her book Low Power to the People: “Do
politics have artifacts?” This is a much more difficult question, asking how we can
identify which tools best exemplify a particular political argument. Dunbar-Hester’s
book is an ethnography of community technologists working with radio and WiFi in the
early 2000s who negotiated “the construction and implementation of specific beliefs
about what technology can do, what technology should do, or what artifact is most
appropriate to enact a set of politics” [Dunbar-Hester 2014]. Winner explores the
existence of “artifactual politics,” rightly concluding that all artifacts entail
some form of political argument or effect. His approach to artifactual politics would
describe minimal computing as an assemblage of particular tools and platforms —
Jekyll, Hugo, Pandoc, Markdown — that afford a particular form of politics, an
argument about the role of technology in daily life. Dunbar-Hester asks instead how
to identify and describe “political artifacts,” or the artifacts that embody
particular arguments. If the politics of minimal computing are access, participation,
sustainability, and equity, then what tools are best suited to achieve those goals?
The benefit of Dunbar-Hester’s approach is that there is never just one right answer,
and it ensures that we lead with a fluid conversation about values rather than
locking those values into the affordances of a particular tool.
For example, while the tools currently associated with minimal computing are more
sustainable, they can be less equitable in terms of participation (considering the
steep learning curve of starting from scratch) or bandwidth (given their pared back,
lower-definition, lesser-than resources). Jentery Sayers warned of this early on, in
2016: “It’s easy to become preoccupied with technical details and specialization,
which often ostracize people or inhibit participation” [Sayers 2016]. Since then,
minimal computing has become near synonymous with static sites in particular, but
static sites are often at odds with some of minimal computing’s core values of access
and participation. The Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the
Humanities, for example, recently decided against migrating their website from
WordPress to a static site generator due in part to learning-curve concerns. The
Council worried that the command line, markdown, and Git may have presented too great
a barrier to entry for new contributors to the site.[25] While static site generators are remarkable tools — I’m a known fan
— they have become too easily conflated with minimal computing. An artifactual
politics approach has welded a value (rapid deployment) to a tool (static site
generators) at the expense of sustainable community partnerships and equitable
participation.
Values guiding the theory and practice of minimal computing include access,
participation, sustainability, stewardship, and equity. When placed alongside each
other — as we’ve seen — these values often produce rich contradictions that can be
difficult to appreciate if particular tools elevate some values at the expense of
others. I find that this has been especially difficult to remember during the
pandemic, amid a rush to throw tools and platforms at every activity under the sun in
a desperate attempt to recreate the way things felt before social distancing. But the
contribution of minimal computing has always been the way it foregrounds — instead of
particular tools — what Roopika Risam calls “cultural practices,” what German media
theorists call Kulturtechniken, and what we can simply refer
to here as technique, or the way we do things [Risam 2018, 43] [Siegert 2015]. If
minimal computing is to continue asking “What do we need?” in order to define the
“we” in question and elevate the values held in common by that “we,” then it will
have to find new ways to center its principles on the way we do things rather than
the tools we use to do them. I offer three suggestions in closing for how to surface
such techniques in the unsettled months and years to come.
First, minimal computing should be led by community input. For the community
technologist, maximal connection doesn’t necessarily mean more tools. Instead, it
means increased accountability, tangibility, and locality to the ways we connect with
one another. In building social and technical infrastructures alongside one another,
community technologists advocate not only for access, but also for the legibility of
unseen, surveillant infrastructures. As Rory Solomon writes:
Mesh networks are more like students passing notes in class. . . . Even though social media and meme culture are often referred to as peer-to-peer, they remain intermediated by vast agglomerations of actors — corporations, institutions, platforms, infrastructures, workers — that we don’t know and maybe can’t fully know or see. [Solomon 2020, 3]
For Greta Byrum, mesh is “a tool of resilience and mutual aid . . . a way to resist
autocratic control of communications systems” [Byrum 2019]. As we’ve seen, minimalism
is relative. But the version of minimal computing offered by community technologists
is a minimalism of paring back to make visible, of participation and equity. At the
same time, it is a minimalism that remains tool-agnostic and responsive to the values
of a community. Community technology connects the individual user to her shared
social bonds — and the impacts of technology on both — by advancing a form of
minimalism that is rich with social connection.
Second, minimal computing should be responsive to the underlying contradictions and
concerns that have inspired flawed responses to the tech industry like digital
minimalism and disaster survivalism. Both of these ideas advocate for inward retreat
and isolation. But their imaginaries of constraint also offer lessons for the future
of minimal computing as it is practiced in digital humanities scholarship, pedagogy,
and praxis. Clearly, the romance with the tech industry is over and the public is
hungry for new ways to think about the role of invasive technologies in daily life.
And so minimal computing should incorporate the bare minimum literacies needed today
in order to understand what data is captured about our habits and desires, as well as
the impacts that collection will have. It should also incorporate tactics for data
literacy and the obfuscation of surveillance (also known as “sousveillance”), instead
of retreats into mindfulness.[26] Minimal
computing can offer self-determination rather than self-help, an ethics of connection
rather than an injunction to detox, and forms of solidarity rather than
appropriation.
And finally, given this broad hunger for more responsible technology, minimal
computing can play a role in public scholarship and community partnerships that
extend existing academic research.[27] Minimal computing has largely grown in digital
humanities contexts by emphasizing the preservation of the scholarly and cultural
record. But the use of minimal computing tools and techniques in digital humanities
research can also provide a model for the understanding, critique, and application of
those tools in the broader world. What academics call minimal computing has
independently taken root outside universities through grassroots organizing,
activism, and advocacy on technology. Two groups of people are having the same
conversation in two different contexts: for every Maryland Institute for Technology
in the Humanities there’s a Detroit Equitable Internet Initiative, for every Harvard
MetaLab, a Pittsburgh MetaMesh. It’s especially important to recognize these existing
parallels as many expect the makeup of academia to change dramatically from the
coronavirus’s irreparable damage to already-misguided university budgets. Asking
“What do we need?” in minimal computing now means defining the “we” that will
constitute researchers, scholars, and archivists as graduate programs contract and
the professoriate is hollowed out. If we can’t count on institutional support, what
comes next?
While the pandemic has widened fault lines that long predate the current crisis,
academics can now triangulate a new “we” as the common ground shifts beneath our
feet. If universities fail, digital humanities praxis will continue elsewhere. The
pandemic provides the occasion for community technologists and digital humanists to
join efforts, and for academics to contribute their energies to support the voices
and vision of community-based organizations.
Acknowledgments
This essay was written with a sense of urgency in May and June 2020,
during collective reckonings with a global pandemic and state-sponsored, racist
violence: twinned crises that have lasted longer than any crisis, by definition,
should. I’m grateful to Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Zoe LeBlanc, Jessa Lingel, Rory Solomon, Sara J. Grossman, Alex Wermer-Colan, and two anonymous reviewers for their input, to Roopika Risam and Alex Gil for the uncommon lengths they went in order to make this special issue stand as a well-designed, consistent whole, to Lydia Guterman for engaging these ideas so thoroughly during copyedits, and for my friends at Philly Community Wireless.
Notes
[1] As Alex Gil and Élika Ortega frame minimal
computing, “We prefer to (un-)define minimal computing around the question ‘What do
we need?’” [Gil and Ortega 2016].
[2]
Hopefully, one legacy of this pandemic will be an understanding of the uselessness of
preparing alone — preparing based solely on individual needs and isolated experiences
of crisis — rather than preparing as a community.
[3] Ruha Benjamin’s Pandemic Portal “tracks,
synthesizes, and situates the data on the racial dimensions of the pandemic within
historically and sociologically grounded interpretative frameworks” [Benjamin 2021].
[4] According to
Christian Hetrick and Dylan Purcell, “A 2019 survey by the School District of
Philadelphia found that only 45% of students in grades three through five accessed
the Internet from a computer at home, compared with 56% in grades six through
eight, and 58% for high school students” [Hetrick and Purcell 2020].
[5] See, for example, the following two
Philadelphia maps based on 2018 data from the US Census Bureau’s “American
Community Survey”: A map of disconnection rates [Purcell 2021] and a map of race
and ethnicity [Statistical Atlas 2018].
[6] These community technologies respond
to the prevailing mode of Internet access in the United States; even though there
is broad agreement that the Internet is a public good,
neoliberal policies have only privileged private models of
Internet service, financializing the commons and withholding access and ownership
from exploited communities.
[7] See the Community Technology Field Guide for an overview of mesh
networks. It was co-authored by New America’s Open Technology Institute, The Work
Department, Allied Media Projects, and the Detroit Community Technology Project
[Community Technology Field Guide 2021].
[9]
See https://keii.network/. For the SRI
packet van, see [Computer History Museum 2021].
[10] In the wake of 2020, I
highly recommend this special issue as a roadmap for the ways history can inform
collective practice now.
[11]
As Rory Solomon notes:
This process of relaying messages through intermediaries is called routing, and a crucial part of building mesh networks is the development and deployment of routing algorithms that optimize network efficiency in terms of several possible variables, including: minimizing number of intermediate steps or ’hops’ [between network nodes], minimizing time or cost of message delivery, maximizing the quantity of overall throughput in the network, performing well in the presence of high levels of message traffic or noise, and perhaps most importantly, maximizing network resiliency, meaning the capacity of messages to be successfully routed from sender to receiver even in the event of lost intermediate links. [Solomon 2020, 2–3]
[12] As many of us learned when building Philly Community Wireless
beginning in the summer of 2020, not all scholarship happens in the space of
publication and peer review. I am grateful to many people for conversations,
instruction, and advice on community technology praxis that informed this section,
including Adam Longwill, Addie Barron, Andrew Coy, David Johnson, Devren
Washington, Erica Kermani, Franca Muller Paz, Greta Byrum, Hannah Sassaman,
Heather Lewis-Weber, Helyx Horwitz, Houman Saberi, Jennifer Oxenford, Jonathan
Latko, Juliet Fink-Yates, Kate Goodman, Mark Steckel, Michael Major, Monique Tate,
Raul Enriquez, Rory Solomon, Sascha Meinrath, Stasia Monteiro, Tejas Gupta, and
Tithi Chattopadhyay.
[13] For examples of these two
different schools of thought, see the Community Technology Collective (https://www.ctcollective.org/)
and Tim Berners-Lee’s new open source software project Solid (https://inrupt.com/solid), in which “pods store
user data in an interoperable format and provide users with permissioning
controls.”
[14] My understanding of “tech
justice” is informed by the work of the Philly Tech Justice coalition, which
pushes back “against intrusive data collection and unnecessary camera
surveillance, and digital illiteracy and lack of technology access” [Philly Tech Justice 2021].
[15] For examples of this brand of
minimalism, see the Netflix film Minimalism: A Documentary About
the Important Things (2016) and Instagram accounts like @minimalismlife.
For critiques of the self-help industry tied to this minimalist ethos, see
[Brinkmann 2017] and [Cederström and Spicer 2015].
[16] As Chayka notes, “I began thinking of this universal feeling as the
longing for less. It’s an abstract, almost nostalgic desire, a pull toward a
different, simpler world. Not past nor future, neither utopian nor dystopian, this
more authentic world is always just beyond our current existence in a place we can
never quite reach. Maybe the longing for less is the constant shadow of humanity’s
self-doubt: What if we were better off without everything we’ve gained in modern
society?” [Chayka 2020, 14].
[17] See also [Brabazon 2013], [Clear 2018], [Levy 2017], [Newport 2019], [Otto and Westhagen 2016], [Perlow 2012], and
Stanford’s Ritual Design Lab [Ozenc and Hagan 2021].
[18] Williams
continues: “In many cases, this rejection occurred on the basis of philosophical
or cosmological disagreements with the old packages. This has, of course, had many
great benefits. Yet by rejecting entire packages of constraint, we’ve also
rejected those constraints that were actually useful for our purposes. When you
dismantle existing boundaries in your environment, it frees you from their
limitations, but it requires you to bring your own boundaries where you didn’t
have to before. Sometimes, taking on this additional self-regulatory burden is
totally worth it. Other times, though, the cost is too high” [Williams 2018, 21–22].
[19] Crawford continues: “This created a
vacuum of cultural authority that has been filled, opportunistically, with
attentional landscapes that get installed by whatever ’choice architect’ brings
the most energy to the task — usually because it sees the profit potential”
[Crawford 2016, 41].
[20] Laura
Portwood-Stacer argues that “individuals who consciously choose to abstain from
participation on the ubiquitous Facebook platform” end up “framing refusal as a
performance of elitism, which may work against observers interpreting
conscientious refusal as a persuasive and emulable practice of critique.” She
refers to this stance as “conspicuous non-consumption” [Portwood-Stacer 2013, 1041]. See also [Karppi 2018].
[21] On the post-WWII afterlives of
nineteenth-century Luddism, see [Tierney 2019].
[22]
Ticona conducts a comparative study of how workers in different
sectors manage the “entrance of mobile phones into the workplace . . . within a
marketplace where jobs are increasingly uncertain and insecure.” She finds that
“service workers deployed strategies of everyday resistance in concert with their
ICTs to gain a feeling of autonomy within the power structures of their
workplaces. The knowledge workers deployed strategies of inaccessibility to resist
the work-extending affordances of their devices and decouple from work which
threatened to colonize too much of their lives. Both service and knowledge workers
deploy strategies that may obscure the institutional sources of their problems by
overindividualizing risk and responsibility” [Ticona 2015, 509]. On pretrial
sentencing, see especially the Mapping Pretrial Injustice Project, a collaboration
between the Movement Alliance Project and MediaJustice, at https://pretrialrisk.com/.
[23] There is
growing public awareness of the discriminatory effects of these technologies. For
example, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon have all banned the sale of their
facial-recognition systems to police departments [Greene 2020]. See also the Safe
Face Pledge, “an opportunity for organizations to make public commitments towards
mitigating the abuse of facial analysis technology” [Algorithmic Justice League 2021].
[24] These automated
systems introduce “subtler forms of discrimination that give the illusion of
progress and neutrality, even as coded inequity makes it easier and faster to
produce racist outcomes” [Benjamin 2019, 22].
[25] The details on this
decision were relayed to me by Executive Council member Rebecca Sutton
Koeser.
[26] A regular workshop series on Obfuscation
showcases and debates “creative ways to evade surveillance, protect privacy, and
improve security by adding and modifying data instead of concealing it, making it
more ambiguous and difficult to exploit” [Workshop on Obfuscation 2021]. The workshop
grew out of the book by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest [Brunton and Nissenbaum 2016].
For a grassroots parallel to this academic initiative, see Our Data Bodies: Digital Defense Playbook, authored by the
Detroit Community Technology Project [Lewis et al. 2018].
[27] Here, we might think of earlier calls among
digital humanists to ground their theories in community practice, or more
specifically, by rethinking what constitutes scholarly community. Rita Raley,
providing the examples of DHCommons and the HASTAC Scholars program, writes:
“Tactical activities are increasingly framed in terms of community and
infrastructural investment, and the result has been a proliferation of community
labs and gardens and alternative systems of exchange. To take a tactical,
media-informed approach to the digital humanities is thus to renew one’s
commitments to the sharing of knowledge — not simply references and links but,
more important, ideas” [Raley 2014]. More recently, Matthew Applegate has written
on “politicized modes of DH praxis” that have “proven to be a conduit for
centering marginalized voices, creating space for many who are excluded from
academic advancement, and rethinking how humanistic inquiry is practiced”
[Applegate 2019].
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Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2005 -
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
