Excerpted from Nathan Schneider:

“Many of the brand-name gizmos that we associate with the Internet age—iPhones, Facebook, Twitter and Google—are indeed formidable tools for distraction, extraction and surveillance. But these are not, in fact, our only options. This month in The New Republic, I propose a different way: “Slow Computing.”

What I mean by this is making choices about using computers, and the networks they connect to, with more awareness of how they affect ourselves and others around us. Much as the Slow Food movement emphasizes local economies, traditional knowledge and ecology, Slow Computing means not merely opting for the most competitive, profit-driven hardware and software, but instead building a commons. It means cultivating digital lives that reflect our analog values.

I’m typing these words, for instance, on Emacs, a text-editing program first created in the 1970s. It’s in some respects simpler than Microsoft Word—no fonts, no annoying auto-correct—but in others its simplicity makes it far more adaptable. As a free, open-source program, it has benefitted from the collective wisdom of thousands of coders who have added features and fixed bugs over the years. It echews the new and alluring for the old and functional. I run Emacs in the text-only terminal on Ubuntu, a free, user-friendly operating sytem based on Linux.
Online, most of the cloud services I use—syncing contacts, calendars and files—come through ownCloud, which is also free and open-source. It stores my data not on some mysterious, corporate-owned server, but on the machines of May First/People Link, a member-run organization I belong to. Increasingly, I’m trying to spend less time on Facebook and Twitter and more on social networks like Diaspora and Friendica, which—since they don’t rely on the business model of surveillance—allow users to retain much more control over their personal data.

In some respects, Slow Computing is an act of piety for me. Who knows whether it really makes a difference in the world. But, like other kinds of piety, it makes a difference for me. Slow Computing changes my relationship to these machines, making me feel, in the hours I spend with them, connected to the communities people who build open-source software for the sake of desire more than profit. The tools themselves, and the ways in which they are made, depend on a culture of collaboration rather than competition, as well as a spirit of craftsmanship-for-its-own-sake that would make medieval monks proud.”