Grant Wythoff is the Digital Humanities Strategist at Princeton University. His teaching and research areas include media theory, speculative fiction, and community technology. Grant is the co-founder of Philly Community Wireless, the founding editor of Startwords, and author of The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction (University of Minnesota Press).
This is the source
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.
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.
The question that has been at the heart of minimal computing — What do we need?
— may
never quite land the same way again.We prefer to (un-)define minimal computing around the question ‘What do
we need?’
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
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.
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
prepperbillionaires — whose minds apparently always work this way — look any less silly
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).
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.
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
a range of cultural practices that privilege making do with available materials to engage in creative problem-solving and innovation. These go by names likejugaad in India,gambiarra in Brazil,rebusque in Colombia,jus kali in Kenya, andzizhu chuangxin in China
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.
Judging from the range of contributions to this issue of
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 ingenuity, generatively, independence, and community
in the face
of climate change offline is the new luxury
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.
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
tracks,
synthesizes, and situates the data on the racial dimensions of the pandemic within
historically and sociologically grounded interpretative frameworks
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
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 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
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 becomenodesor 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.
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.daisy-chain
the schools’ Internet backbone to neighboring homes
with mesh radios
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 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
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
Radical Care,such forms of care have historically come to the fore
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.
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
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
:
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 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.
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.
What do we need? Clearly, it depends.
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.pods store
user data in an interoperable format and provide users with permissioning
controls.
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
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
Own less stuff. Find more purpose
and
The more you throw away, the more you’ll find.
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
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 [
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 [
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
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?
The architect Pier Vittorio Aureli is less charitable in his description of
minimalism as a form of austerity chic.
In
Within the history of capitalism,
less is more
defines the advantages of reducing
the costs of production. Capitalists have always tried to obtain
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.
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.
creat[ing] market conditions for humane tech,
albeit
without a real road map for doing so
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 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 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
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
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
vacuum of cultural authority
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
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?
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
While some manuals are better conceptualized than others — especially Jenny Odell’s wonderful
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
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
Silicon Valley parents requiring nannies to signno-phone contractsand opting to send their children to schools in which devices are banned or introduced slowly, in favor ofpencils, 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 privilegedrefuse it? . . . Social theorist Karl Marx might call tech personalization our era’s opium of the masses and encourage us tojust say no,though he might also point out that not everyone is in an equal position to refuse, owing to existing forms of stratification.
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
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?
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 embody[ing] specific forms of power and
authority?
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
an opportunity for organizations to make public commitments towards
mitigating the abuse of facial analysis technology
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
A better approach might be to invert Langdon Winner’s question, as Christina Dunbar-Hester does in her book
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
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
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 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.
For Greta Byrum, mesh is a tool of resilience and mutual aid . . . a way to resist
autocratic control of communications systems
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.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
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.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
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
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.
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.