Ten Steps To Giving Up Email

I mentioned the other day that, returning from Cuernavaca with the concepts of askesis and otium on my mind, I seemed to keep bumping into friends who were choosing to give things up or trying to spend less time with technology and get back to their bodies. Well, here's an example.

Saul Albert is an extremely smart guy, someone I've been crossing paths with for years, and whose understanding of computers is in a different league to mine. He's an artist and technologist, and (among much else) co-founder of The People Speak which develops 'Tools For The World To Take Over Itself'.

He's also just given up email.

In the spirit of Pick Me Up, he's written a ten step plan of how he's going about this. Here's a taste:

1. I’m going to talk to all the people I’m collaborating and communicating with via email, and work out together how we can continue this relationship without email.


2. I’m going to unsubscribe from all my mailing lists (while making sure I can follow them via RSS).


3. I’m going to tell all my friends and family about this experiment, and make sure they know how to contact me...

You can read the rest over on his blog, along with his reasons for quitting. What struck me was the tenth step of his plan:

10. Finally, I’m going to organise my time in a way that suits me. This is what I’m most excited about. The thought of time without email, or worrying about email accumulating is really enticing. This will include regularly being in places where I can meet people (by arrangement or randomly) - having certain times of the day for calls and voicemail, and having other parts of the day for work - but just work, as in doing things I need to do - rather than simply shovelling the top off the growing email pile.

This is precisely what askesis should mean: not self-denial, but a deliberate decision to make room for people and things that matter to us.

To be AND not to be

As words must be learned by listening and by painful attempts at imitation of a native speaker, so silences must be acquired through a delicate openness to them. Silence has its pauses and hesitations, its rhythms and expressions and inflections; its durations and pitches, and times to be and not to be.

The last phrase of that passage, from Illich's reflection on 'The Eloquence of Silence', makes me sit bolt upright whenever I reach it. Let me try to explain.

'To be, or not to be?' That is the question with which we are familiar. The figure of Hamlet, like that of his creator, stands at the back of what (in the long sense) is called modern English literature. 'Modernity' is a slippery concept, but there is a certain peculiar way of thinking about the world which became dominant among the powerful and 'forward-thinking' in western Europe from the 17th century onwards.

One of the peculiarities of this way of thinking is a tendency to insist on 'either/or' answers. (Anthony - who would probably steer me away from historical narrative here - talks about 'the elimination of uncertainty' as a key characteristic of the 'dynamics of enclosure' which he critiques.) This 'either/or' tendency is itself a characteristic of a desire for once-and-for-all solutions.

One of the things which is lost, as this way of thinking becomes dominant, is the sense of timeliness. The assumption that different, seemingly opposite, things may be right at different moments gives way, for example, to the attempt to identify timeless, universal Rights. (Paradoxically, the superiority of these tends to be bound up with the non-timeless assumption that the present is necessarily superior in wisdom to the past. This, however, is a very different kind of time to that experienced by those immersed in the sense of timeliness.)

Much of this is sensed in Shakespeare, anticipated and handled with careful ambiguity. (Hamlet himself observes that 'the times are out of joint'.) Harold Bloom made the bold claim that Shakespeare 'invented the human as we know it'. In a different key, it might be said that Hamlet seems the prototype of the modern individual, the subject who feels obliged to contain a universe within his self - to reach 'either/or' answers.

So, when Illich ends his list of the properties of silence with its 'times to be and not to be', I hear an echo arcing back over the centuries, or outwards from those centres of power where Hamlet-like leaders strut and fret, to the vernacular world in which Illich was at home. In Shakespeare's England, this world was still close enough at hand to feed in and out of his writing - soon afterwards, the gap between the vernacular understandings of reality and those common among the intellectual, political and literary elites would extend to a point where, finally, high culture could rediscover 'the folk' as (more often than not) an exotic object of fascination and condescension.

Time for Tea

This came via Tim.

I've felt for years that we suffer from the loss of a sense of 'timeliness' - or at least its marginalisation, edged out by Ben Franklin's famous equation of time with money. Believe that and time becomes purely a matter of quantity, a currency to be exchanged.

For me, the qualities of time are important: apparently contradictory actions may be equally proper at their different occasions. Lose sight of this - of the incommensurability of what matters - and life becomes harshly impoverished.

Superpowers, Snowflakes and Silicon Chips

My colleague and co-founder at the School of Everything, the code-artist Greenman (left), tells me that if he could choose any superpower it would be the power to give people surprise holidays. A few mornings a year, just as you're about to leave the house, you would get an unexpected call from him to let you know you don't have to come in to work. (Maybe you would decide to have a walkabout day instead...)

Anyway, that's exactly what the snow in England did for lots of people last week. They woke up and found they couldn't get to work. Cue the predictable made-up statistics from "Industry Chiefs". David Frost, director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, ignored the irony of his name to tell the BBC: "It is expected that the lateness and loss of work hours caused by transport disruptions will cost the British economy up to £400 million."

Well, our Greenman is having none of this:

In all my time spent working for organizations, it was only in the few days after a holiday that most people actually tried a bit harder at their job.

The idea that productivity is about how many hours you are working needs to be consigned to the grave. It comes from the world of smokestacks and sweatshops. I suppose it is only in that stale, polluted world that Industry Chiefs can really matter. The same probably applies to most of the politicians. Unfortunately, there are still enough smokestacks and sweatshops (of all forms) for these points of view to have their place, but, luckily we wont have to worry about them for too much longer.

Now, I'm with him all the way on the benefits of holidays, but where I do get a little cautious is on the next bit:

(Here comes a big generalisation, that may not apply everywhere yet, but I do feel that it is valid in the UK)
We no longer live in a world where human time is simply a matter of quantity. When most of the economy operates on a service and information level, the quality of human effort is vital.

When I hear people talking about the "shift to an information economy", it usually seems like they're caught up in a rhetoric which obscures lived experience. Such a shift is neither as real nor as desireable nor as irreversible as they make it sound.

Certainly, countries like mine have outsourced much of the making of stuff to poorer parts of the world, and this makes it both less expensive and less visible to us. This is not the same as having arrived at a way of living which is less dependent on people making stuff.

Nor is the idea of stuff being made without the involvement of people necessarily attractive. "Untouched by human hand" is a cliché from the advertising of another era. It is also, more or less, the logic of Bernard Matthews and his like - and we've seen this week where that can lead. (This, I sincerely hope, stands as a reductio ad absurdum and not a prototype.)

Leaving meat behind - as the techno-gnostic devout aspire to do! - even the tools on which the information economy depends depend in turn on the "old economy" whose obsolescence its rhetoric seems to propose. My friend Dan challenges people from time to time to think about where their computers were made and what they were made from. Last week, he blogged a Google Earth link to the Export Processing Zone in the Philippines where Intel chips are made. The manufacturing of computers is by no means a clean industry. And then there are the extractive industries at the back of the process.

Finally, the precariousness of a way of living is hard to take seriously until something happens to destabilise it. In many of the decisions we make day to day, sanity is best maintained by assuming that things will go on roughly the way they're going right now (whatever that seems to be). But that's not a good way of predicting the future. So even the swelling value of information and service industries, in proportion to the making of stuff, probably shouldn't be taken as an irreversible trend.

So what am I saying? Well, to go back to Greenman's surprise holidays, I'd like to decouple the celebration of "play" time from the idea that we're evolving from a grim-but-necessary era of industrialisation into a post-industrial world where all manual work will be done by machines. I know Greenman doesn't subscribe to that idea any more than I do, but it's one which I think is implicit in the language of the "shift to an information economy".