It’s late August, and I’m finding it quite difficult to focus on screens and words. I’ve been struggling particularly to pull together this edition of Galaxy Brain because I can’t seem to stop procrastinating by playing guitar. Like every fifth white dude in their mid-30s, I picked up the hobby again during the pandemic and enjoyed relearning some basics, but I’d still describe my approach to the instrument as relatively shallow. Guitar was supposed to be a fun distraction, so whenever I hit a wall, I’d bail and return to familiar territory: a style of noncommittal half-songs and scales that I have dubbed “ambient noodling.”
But in the past two months, my mindset’s shifted. When I hit the wall now, I try, gently, to climb it. This started when I found an archived Instagram Live video that my favorite guitarist did during the pandemic: an introductory music lesson that includes an exercise he uses to warm up his hands to play. It consists of every combination of the ways you can move your four fingers on a guitar string, 36 sequences in all. I printed out a little chart of the combinations and started trying the exercise out.
To be honest, it’s dull, rote practice work. The sound it makes isn’t particularly soothing or cool, and it’s not exactly easy at my level. When I first started doing it, my fingers moved in a stilted, confused manner. The exercise also hurt my brain at first; continually flubbing the sequence or having my hands and brain out of sync made my synapses feel all tangled. I finished the exercise, and every part of me felt spent. Sometimes I felt worse at the instrument than when I’d started.
What follows is predictable: I’ve stuck with the exercise and gotten better. Every time I’ve done it, my fingers and brain have moved with a touch more fluidity. Mentally, it is still exhausting, but there is something satisfying about the energy expense. The only way I can describe it is by likening it to shoveling a path out of deep snow, watching the path as it is chiseled out of the landscape with each heave.
I’ve adopted this kind of rote practice with other aspects of guitar play as well, and while I’m still not very good, I find I’m having microscopic breakthroughs every day. A little piece of theory will click in, or a riff I’m trying to pin down will, for the first time, lock into place as my fingers unexpectedly sync with my brain. Even if the task itself is mundane, the feeling is transcendent—made all the more so by every previous failure.
I’m deeply fascinated by the art of this kind of slow progress, especially when it involves physical activities that engage both mind and body. In addition to guitar, I’ve become equally obsessive about learning how to hit a golf ball straight and long for the same reason: It’s this incredibly complex physical process where minuscule adjustments and repetition give way to small-seeming but big-feeling improvements. I’m fully addicted. Last week, for the first time, I dreamed about the guitar fretboard and notes moving across it. It was weird and cool.
I’m not suggesting that I’ve stumbled onto anything new here. Learning to play guitar is fun! is not exactly a scorching hot take. Still, I’ve spent a good bit of time trying to think about why this appeals so much to me, especially right now. The most obvious reason is that learning an instrument is decidedly not a screen-based activity (though I am using YouTube quite a bit for my instruction). I’ve spent the bulk of my adult life reading, writing, and focusing my attention on overwhelming streams of constantly updating and intruding information. Big chunks of my days require some kind of mental dexterity but much less tactile engagement, so it checks out that a hands-on endeavor might feel extra satisfying. But I have a hunch that there might be more to it.
I started hunting around to see if there were more scientific-sounding explanations for this particular flavor of gratification. What I stumbled on instead was an old idea, but one new to me: the theory of “calm technology,” a phrase coined in a 1996 essay by the computer scientists Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown. Weiser and Brown, who both worked at Xerox PARC, predicted that the growth of the internet and microprocessors would help usher in an era of “ubiquitous computing” sometime between 2005 and 2020. This era, they suggested, would be dominated by the rise of “imbedded [sic] computers” in all kinds of formerly analog devices: “in walls, chairs, clothing, light switches, cars—in everything.” The pair also anticipated that the ubiquitous-computing era would erode our sense of calm. As computers were initially intended for limited daily interaction, Weiser and Brown argued that they were designed to excite by delivering information quickly, perhaps even in overwhelming ways. Naturally, they worried about what might happen to our senses when computers were everywhere and in everything. It’s safe to say that they were onto something.
Weiser and Brown went on to suggest that technology doesn’t have to overwhelm and that, if designed correctly, it can even soothe. They define calm technology as a tool that “engages both the center and the periphery of our attention, and in fact moves back and forth between the two.” Why is this calming? The pair said that we do actually absorb a lot of things that happen on the periphery—“thus the periphery is informing without overburdening.” The second reason is that “by recentering something formerly in the periphery we take control of it.” From the piece:
Peripherally we may become aware that something is not quite right, as when awkward sentences leave a reader tired and discomforted without knowing why. By moving sentence construction from periphery to center we are empowered to act, either by finding better literature or accepting the source of the unease and continuing. Without centering the periphery might be a source of frantic following of fashion; with centering the periphery is a fundamental enabler of calm through increased awareness and power.
Reading this reminded me of my colleague Ian Bogost’s recent ode to the stick shift and reflections on the end of manual transmission in cars. Bogost writes, “The manual transmission’s chief appeal derives from the feeling it imparts to the driver: a sense, whether real or imagined, that he or she is in control.” The stick shift is a great example of calm technology that blends physical and tactile skills with mental focus, asking the operator to move information from the periphery to the forefront of their attention. When driving a stick shift, you’re primarily paying attention to traffic patterns and the road, but you’re also keeping portions of your peripheral attention focused on going in and out of gears. Once you learn the basics, the sensation of operating the manual transmission is empowering, not overwhelming.
I am not sure whether Weiser and Brown would consider the guitar to be a piece of calm technology, but their definition resonates with my experience, especially when I’m playing along with a backing track to a song on YouTube. Playing with other musicians, or along with a recorded song, means absorbing and processing a great deal of information in real time. But so much of that information is kept on the periphery of my attention as I switch my focus between my movements and the world around me. Balancing those needs creates a real feeling of autonomy. One might even call it a sense of calm.
It seems almost too obvious to point out that most of our technologies are designed to obliterate any surrounding context and to make the object itself the absolute center of one’s attention. Weiser and Brown suggested that the best way to combat this experience of information overload would be to design tools that hold excess information on the periphery—that let people know the information is there but help them focus elsewhere until it’s needed. What we got instead were interruptive communication tools dominated by push notifications that rocket peripheral information into our faces constantly. The result is a feeling that we can’t parse what ought to be peripheral and what ought to be central. We feel as if we don’t have control over our attention, which makes us feel unmoored and on edge.
Weiser and Brown suggest that calming technologies, on the other hand, make you feel “at home,” which is something I feel less and less as even the digital tools I enjoy seem to shift and pivot and rebrand. I think this is why people love old websites and forums that still look and feel like they did 15 years ago, and why some people feel a sense of loss when a platform or tool is redesigned. I think this is also why analog or tactile tools more easily fall into the calm-technology bucket.
I worry that, once again, I sound a million years old, or like I’m advocating for a return to a wholly analog world. I’m not! I am still a total sucker for the conveniences of a ubiquitous-computing world, and I love my information on demand and watching new cultures and subcultures explode out of new apps and tools. But I’m also deeply resentful of the ways that an attention economy has put pressure on everyone to build and design for interruptive experiences over calming ones. I’ve long told people that I am exhausted by the internet (shorthand for what is basically our information ecosystem), but I think what I’m really exhausted by is feeling like I don’t have control over what I’m attending to.
What I love about some of my hobbies is that they offer a space that respects my attention and my ability to apply and direct it where I see fit. The satisfaction of slow improvement certainly isn’t relegated to musical pursuits—it happens everywhere in my life. The difference is that the calm technologies offer me the space to focus my attention and perceive that shift happening. This experience is a joy, and an increasingly rare gift.
Shameless media plugs: I was absolutely thrilled to go on The Ezra Klein Show last week to talk about future-of-work stuff and all the botched back-to-the-office plans. It’s one of the deepest conversations I’ve had about the subject. Listen and read the transcript here.
I was also really pleased with how this podcast with The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes turned out. It builds on my interview with Josh Owens about Alex Jones and branches out from there.