Deactivate Your Account?
On attention to disconnection
Friends!
Why are people turning off their phones? Productivity movements like Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and the increasingly popular Brick encourage us to silence our digital devices and “take control of time” in favor of focus and general life improvement. Young people are filling “analog bags” with junk journals and crocheting projects to stop doomscrolling. Rave organizers are enforcing phone bans for the sake of the vibe. And in New York City, the eight-day Summer of Ludd festival gathered together disconnection-curious individuals and committed Neo-Luddites to imagine life beyond the algorithm, offering free workshops on offline flirting and digital security for activists.
This summer, I’ve found myself unintentionally digital detoxing thanks to happenstance – namely, a weeklong stay near Mount Rainier with only occasional glimmers of phone service, plus a phone that leapt off my bathroom sink and shattered a corner of the screen. As a result, I committed to remembering the colors and shapes of blooming wildflowers without on-demand online plant ID and learned to put my trust in trail signage without Maps. I’m still searching Google less frequently, given my continued limited access to the letters “A”, “S,” “W” and “Z.” Disconnection, I’m learning, is a redirecting force, a detour that makes you ask yourself where you really want to go. The destination, whether it’s joy on the dancefloor or self-optimization, is determined by the one who disconnects.
In this issue, we’re thinking about disconnection. In Visions of Attention, Eleanor walks us through the Middle Way of the Dharma. In Stuff for Study, I share readings on darkness retreats, the so-called analog revival, and the Great Offline. And in IRL, we invite you to direct your attention offline, to seminars on CULTURE JAMMING and LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND.
Yours offline,
Czarina Ramos
Managing Editor
Visions of Attention
An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention
The Middle Way
Beneath the open sky of the Sarnath deer park , Gautama Buddha sets the Wheel of Dharma into its first revolution. Before him sit five ascetics who were once his companions in extreme “self-mortification.” Siddhartha Gatuama’s path was itself carved through a landscape of extremes: first the opulence of a prince’s life, then six years of ascetic self-denial. But enlightenment did not bloom at either extreme; it was the Middle Way he discerned during this legendary sit that became the way of the Dharma: the still midpoint where liberation resides.
Strains of asceticism run through spiritual and religious traditions across time and place. The Śramaṇas, spiritual wanderers who preceded and surrounded the Buddha’s own path, practiced total renunciation, shedding household, caste, and name. For them, discipline was found in the total severing of every earthly tether. This profound disconnection was meant to reveal what remains when everything is stripped away.
This scene in the deer park shows what fruits asceticism can bear. The five bhikkhus sitting before the Buddha had once practiced asceticism at his side, until he chose the Middle Way. To the five bhikkhus, his moderation looked like giving up. Turning their backs on him, the ascetics had cast him into isolation. It was there, solitary beneath the Bodhi tree, that the Buddha arrived at the awakening that he subsequently returned to his exilers. Disconnection was not a barrier to insight; it was the very path by which insight emerged.
Stuff for Study: Pages Not Found
Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics
Gentle parenting my smartphone addiction — Kyle Chayka for The New Yorker
In nature, life is not easily bounded — Derek J. Skillings for Aeon
The romanticization of the Great Offline — Lauren Collee for Real Life
Can you lose your mind on a “darkness” retreat? — Chris Colin for The New York Times Magazine
The analog revival did not take place — Eugene Healey for Considered Chaos on Substack
— Czarina Ramos
IRL
Wed, July 15th: ATTENTION LAB: COALITION is a participatory workshop dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Sign up HERE!
Thu, July 16th: Join us for our IRL seminar CULTURE JAMMING, where we’ll explore what role culture jamming can play in liberating attention from the extractive grasp of the attention economy’s profiteers. Enroll HERE!
Tue, July 21st: Join us for our IRL seminar LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND, where we’ll ask what it means to understand cognition as something that happens at multiple ecological scales – and what is at stake when those ecologies are threatened by human fracking. Enroll HERE!
Find more workshops, events, and gatherings HERE!