How I got my body back from computers

From 2021 to early 2023, I went for a year and a half without a computer of my own. I didn’t read much during that time – I was repairing key parts of my nervous system and couldn’t use functions that had formed at later ages.

I’d been trying to reclaim my own body from technological substitutions for some time. I didn’t want an iPhone or an iDentity; I just wanted eyes. I let my eyes recuperate by giving them a break from blue light and using amber lights in the evening. I’d try to sync my schedule to sunrise and sunset as much as possible. The fatigue lifted for the first time in a while.

I didn’t have a smartphone at all; I used a Scandinavian dumbphone, the Punkt MP02.

I’d walk to the library to use the computers there, check email occasionally, and that was it.

I didn’t want speakers, I wanted to figure out what the fears were that stopped me from speaking when I most needed to. I wanted my reclaim my physical voice as a speaker before investing in tech.

I didn’t want an ARM processor, I wanted my arm to work properly. The right side of my body felt perpetually exhausted and I needed to rebalance.

I noticed that whenever I was typing, I was actually being silent – I wasn’t using my voice, I was using a complex series of actions that substituted for the creation of human sound.

My understanding of this series of sensory actions, and its implications for our connection to the natural world, came from The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, by David Abram. He argues that when we invented reading, we transferred our animistic participation from nature onto an exclusively human world of thought and sound, which facilitates a sense of disconnection from nature.

I began to notice when I was making psychic sound by typing, but not actual sound.

I didn’t even want a router, I wanted better routes in my life. Things that felt like real choices instead of a prefabricated groove.

Eventually, though, after stripping everything down, cooking carefully for myself, and trying to recuperate from the experiences of 2020, I began assembling a desktop computer because it felt like something was missing.

Something I couldn’t do without.

I wanted the experience to be as ergonomic as possible since computers have a way of insisting that you spend a lot of time on them.

I put together various pieces, always dimly aware that most of the remaining objects in my house seemed to be taking the place of some relationship that had disappeared.

(Even the Vitamix, whose packaging celebrated my entry into “the Vitamix family,” and which I gave away because I wanted a family more than I wanted a Vitamix.

Now, after having spent some time with my family, I wish I’d kept the Vitamix.)

I considered whether the computer needed a mouth (speakers) or eyes (camera), always noticing how much my behavior changed whenever the threat of being watched was present. It’s strange to me how the most primal fear in most animals is that of being watched by something you can’t see, and yet we willingly activate this all the time through social media.

After I’d assembled my computer – a small Linux box, a vertical mouse, a monitor propped at eye-level on the built-in 90s desk in the townhome I was renting – the last piece was the keyboard. I looked for one that would let me stretch my arms as wide as possible — again, for ergonomics.

I also noticed how cold and passive the Linux box was, and I could see why dudes like them. No feelings. It’s just infinite space for you to do what you want. The ultimate yin.

I had only one chair left – a kneeling chair that I’d gotten when I wanted to be as engaged as possible while teaching online English classes to kids in China. But using the kneeling chair in front of the computer was freaky. My posture gave me the kind of bottom-up shift in awareness that would later come when I experienced EMDR therapy.

In the kneeling chair, before the computer I’d made, I realized I was kneeling before a god.

Fuck the gods of technology, I thought. This thing should be a tool, not a deity. I moved the kneeling chair back downstairs, and began to stand when I used the computer.

Then I had the last postural revelation in relationship to this thing. The arrangement of parts was almost like a human, and when my arms spread wide at the keyboard, I got it – I was just trying to hug my missing dad. I’d reverse-engineered an approximation of a person, and it was my father, who had been inseparable from computers throughout my childhood. In his absence, the computer took place of that relationship, and so many others.

Once I realized that the computer I’d made was a concretization of such a terribly important presence, I dismantled it. The need for a hug, and for support, felt more important.

Eventually, I bought a laptop, and life wore me down about the smartphone not long afterward. I try to embrace these tools as something I can use to pursue my own goals, and I appreciate that my father gave me technological literacy that I can step into — or out of — at any time.