On Slowness as a Political Act

There is a particular kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep. It is the tiredness of being kept slightly behind oneself — always replying, never speaking; always reading the next thing before one has finished the last. The economy that surrounds us is not, primarily, an economy of money. It is an economy of attention, and like all economies it has a preferred behavioural rhythm: fast.

Slowness, in such an environment, is not a luxury. It is a refusal.

The default tempo

Each generation inherits a default tempo from the technologies that surround it. The telegraph slowed nothing; the radio slowed nothing; the television, perhaps, slowed living rooms for a few decades, but at the cost of conscripting them. The internet has done something stranger: it has not so much accelerated communication as collapsed the interval between stimulus and response. Where once a letter required composition — a sitting down, an addressing of someone in their absence — a message now arrives mid-sentence and demands continuation of the same sentence, now branched.

The political consequence of this is rarely named. A populace that cannot finish a thought is a populace that cannot finish an argument. A populace that cannot finish an argument cannot test it. And a polity in which arguments are never tested becomes one in which the loudest sentiment wins by default.

A small defence of finishing

To finish a book — even a slow one, even a frustrating one — is to perform a small act of sovereignty over one’s own time. So is to write a letter that no one will reply to for a week. So is to walk, without earbuds, in a city that wants to sell you something.

I am not arguing for nostalgia. The slow world had its own brutalities, and the speeds we have unlocked do real good. I am arguing only for a kind of unilateral disarmament: the personal decision to refuse, in a small but consistent way, the pace that is asked of us.

The first essay in this notebook is therefore an essay about how to read the rest of them.

“Hurry has no blessing on it.” — somewhere in Berry, I think

What this notebook is, then

Slow. On purpose. Most pieces will appear once a month, occasionally less. Comments are turned off, not because I dislike conversation but because I prefer it to happen in email, in pubs, on benches.

If a sentence here is worth your time, take it with you and turn it over for a day. If it is not, close the tab — that, too, is a vote.