https://x.com/daviddorg/status/2037050583274954882
I question the idea of pastoralism though, I would argue this is another kind of construct. Laurel Hatcher Ulrich’s ‘age of homespun’ talks about this in detail, and how handcraft revivals were an expression of fear or anxiety about the radical changes brought about by industrialisation, and became a sort of myth making device for the rejection of technological overlords.
In any case, Paper Computer charts neat reformulation of the personal computer into something more interesting. If all individual computing tasks become distributed back into real spaces, objects and physically manipulable media it becomes more of an interpersonal computer, and distributed computing power can be pushed to things that don’t ordinarily engage with computational tasks such as wind or plants or anything within the shared working environment.
Using paper and space to organize ideas is nice, but that's a niche use-case. And in any case, you'll have to digitalize it anyway afterwards, so better start on the digital version immediately, and be good at it. Everytime I start a new project, I'm tempted to take a pencil and paper, but then I refrain and use draw.io or the like because I know it will be winning on the longer run.
For the rest, you can easily customize your phone / browser / anything to be less distracting.
As for using AI just for convenience, this looks like very expensive in terms of resource.
This holds even with really-nice drawing interfaces like ProCreate on a 13" iPad. Paper's still better for some things. Outside of work, the way I make maps (of just about any zoom-level) for RPGs I run is to sketch them on paper, take a photo of that and import it to pro-create, trace the lines there (in a new layer), and add color/texture. I get way better results faster, and am way less frustrated, than if I start with a blank "sheet" on the iPad. The paper sitting fully flat on my table, being able to easily and precisely turn it this way and that, erasing or smudging out or just X-ing elements I mess up, plus just messing up way less to begin with, all that adds up to real paper being a way better UI for an initial draft-sketch, for me.
Not that I haven't done exactly the same thing as you, I never keep paper around and my handwriting has gotten terrible. I'm saying this to myself and others as well.
Just the other day, I noticed my thinking was so hijacked by distractions while building something (with AI help) that I started writing in a notebook to stay on track. The last time I'd written in the notebook was 3 years ago; in this case writing stuff down in it really helped to get me unstuck.
I'm excited to imagine workflows that could make computing a more physical activity. Thanks for writing and sharing this.
(My blog post btw if you’re curious https://bhave.sh/make-humans-analog-again/)
http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-...
That said, I do much prefer reading on paper, or at least on e-ink, for many of the same reasons outlined in the post. Computers and phones are just too distracting, and too dynamic.
And I'd love some way to write down shopping lists or appointments, and have them available wherever, without having to pull out the phone. Our current method is a whiteboard + a photo whenever we need it, which doesn't quite cut it.
The only compromise would be a limited area like a physical desktop that had affordances like an overhead camera and some form of paper output.
It’s fantastic that computers can be so effective at this read-only work but so much of what I do needs write feedback from the machine.