idle gaze 060: post-screen clarity

regaining control of our real-world curiosity.

A quick PSA before we dive into this edition: From today I will be turning on paid subscriptions to offer you, the readers, even more value, as well as fund some extra idle gaze projects coming your way in the near future. All the regular essays you’re getting now will always be free and available to everyone.

For €10 / month, paid subscribers will receive exclusive access to extra footnotes with additional links and references to explore each essay’s theme in even more detail. There are also discounted annual & group plans.

Additional to this, I’ve also launched an executive tier, designed for those who regularly apply these insights and inspiration in a commercial context. Along with the regular paid subscriber perks, this also comes with a free annual topic deep-dive session, or 25% off your very own custom 2-day insight sprint (DM me for more details on these).

---

When was the last time you really noticed your surroundings? When was the last time you sat on a commute, just staring into space, paying attention to the other riders, listening to the sounds around you?

This simple, yet challenging exercise is what

Rob Walker

calls uni-tasking on paying attention. In today’s hyper-stimulated environment this is an almost impossible challenge, requiring us to break free from our conditioning to glance down at our phone screens at every latent second, gravitating towards the instinctual urge to always be multitasking.

Over the past few weeks, there’s been equal amounts excitement and scepticism around the launch of the Humane AI Pin. And while the press have been obsessing over it’s promised AI features, sleek design and laser display, I think this launch’s significance lies in signalling a broader emerging shift in our relationship with our devices. Whether or not the AI pin gains tractions is irrelevant, it’s a first mover that meets a collective desire to break free from our screens and nudge us to reconnect with the world around us.

This ‘wearable computer’ offers a view into a post-screen world, where information is projected onto your hand if needed, and where the user converses with the device in the form of speech. This opens up attention bandwidth that can be used to glance around, notice things, engage with the people around you.

As Ken Kocienda, head of product engineering at Humane highlighted in a recent interview: “I just love the way the computer’s there, and then the computer’s gone…one of the aspects is, you stay in the moment with people that you’re with.”

This is a marked difference from the current status quo - where the majority of information exchange requires eyes-on-screen. This in turn has a huge impact on the way we interact with the world. Nav apps have conditioned us into a linear form of travel from A to B, absent of spontaneous detours and discoveries. Dating apps have reduced matches to on-screen data points rather than chance encounters at bars. Messaging apps have stunted our ability to naturally interact face-to-face. This is the faustian pact we collectively stumbled into with our screens. We were offered limitless convenience, but in turn the devil robbed us of our curiosity for the world.

The modern luddites say: if we want to feel at one with the world again, we must wean ourselves off technology. But the prevailing Silicon Valley ideology maintains that the best way to solve any problem (even ones exacerbated by technology) is more technology. As venture capitalist Marc Andreessen stated in his recent Techno- Optimist manifesto; questioning the harm of technology on society is “victim mentality… – both unnecessary and self-defeating. We are not victims, we are conquerors”.

Even if the AI Pin doesn’t take off, there will be other products in the near future aiming to conquer this haze that screens have created. When that mist clears, we might be able to take control of our attention again and notice the people and places around us. We might be able to see through the fog and look up at the evening sky to observe what phase the moon’s in, before resorting to Google for the answer. Let’s call this a sense of post-screen clarity.

There’s a pseudo-spiritual essence to this product proposition. It’s perhaps no coincidence that a key advisor to Humane is Brother Spirit, a Buddhist monk who talks regularly about mindful innovation and the importance of inter-being with the world. This is the vision of a post-screen society; one where we have the ability to sit alone with our thoughts, follow our internal compass and make eye contact with strangers, to inter-be with the world.

~additional references and links below, available to paid subscribers only~