The Slow Tech Manifesto

Slow Tech isn't about Luddism and I'm not fundamentally anti-tech.

I'm writing this on a Linux machine, on a custom embedded device with a Python application I wrote. AUTEUR's hardware includes a Broadcom BCM2710A1, an STM microcontroller and an e-paper display whose driver firmware took months to tune. There is nothing slow about the engineering.

Slow Tech is about the relationship between you and the machine. It is the idea that a tool should:

• Work for you, not the other way around.
• Do one thing exceptionally well, not eleven things adequately.
• Not require an account, login, sync, subscription or cloud.
• Maintain data sovereignty.
• Not connect to another company's servers.
• Outlive the company that made it.

Most modern software fails every one of those tests. AUTEUR is built to pass them. In a sense, it's as close to a single-purpose analog device as you can get.

Slow cinema, slow tech

Paul Schrader wrote a book in 1972 called Transcendental Style in Film. He updated it in 2018 with a long essay called "Rethinking Transcendental Style".

The essential argument: there is a tradition in cinema, running from Bresson to Ozu to Tarkovsky, that uses withholding as its primary tool.

The long take. The fixed camera. The refusal of score. The scene that runs three minutes after the dramatic content has ended. Schrader called it the slow cinema. The point of the slowness is not to bore you. The point is to give you back the attention that conventional cinema spends on your behalf. The film stops doing the work of feeling for you, and you have to do it yourself.

You either get it or you don't. It sacrifices spectacle for sincerity.

Slow Tech is the same move applied to the device on your desk.

Modern software does the work of attention for you. It surfaces. It suggests. It auto-completes. It notifies. It nudges. By the time you sit down to write, the machine has already had seventeen opinions about what you should write and three of them are quietly logged for later training. The tool is doing the feeling on your behalf, and the cost is that you stop feeling it yourself.

A Slow Tech writing instrument refuses all of that. No suggestions. No completions. No notifications. No connection. The screen does not move unless you move it. The cursor does not blink with intent. The device has no opinion about your draft.

It is a long take, a fixed camera, a black-and-white frame that holds on your sentence until you decide what comes next.

This is uncomfortable at first. Most writers who pick up AUTEUR for the first time spend ten minutes trying to figure out what it's going to do for them, and then realize the answer is nothing, and then realize that nothing is what they actually wanted.

Schrader's slow cinema was a reaction to the maximalist studio film. Slow Tech is a reaction to the maximalist, algorithmic fatigue product. The lineage, discipline and intent are the same: stop harvesting the user's attention and give it back.

It is nothing less than a War on Consciousness itself.

The choices in AUTEUR are slow-cinema choices made in hardware. The enclosure is heavy because a heavy object on a desk holds attention differently than a light one. The display is monochrome because monochrome is what serious writing has looked like for five hundred years. The mechanical keyboard is full-travel because the keyboard is the instrument and instruments deserve sensory and tactile feedback. None of these design choices are accidents. All of them are intentional.

Data sovereignty as a design choice

Your drafts live on internal memory inside AUTEUR. They live on whatever USB drive you export to. They do not live anywhere else. There is no cloud. There is no account. There is no telemetry. The device is offline by design. Your files are plain text, .fountain and .md and .txt, openable by any editor on any computer for the rest of your life.

As long as AUTEUR is AUTEUR, there is no mechanism by which your drafts ever leave your device unless you carry them out yourself.

This is a feature. It is the absence of compromise. The work of getting here was mostly the work of refusing to add things. Refusing to add WiFi sync. Refusing to add an account system. Refusing to add an AI assistant. Refusing to add subscriptions for recurring revenue. The hardest part of building Slow Tech is the constant pressure, from every direction, to add another connection back to the network.

On AUTEUR, your work is yours.

The case for slow tech...

I'm not asking you to throw away your MacBook. I'm suggesting that the device you write your most personal work on might deserve to be different from the device you answer email on -- that the difference between a chef's knife and a Swiss Army Knife is not that the Swiss is worse but that when you're cooking dinner you reach for the chef's knife.

AUTEUR is a chef's knife. It is opinionated, offline, single-purpose and built to last longer than the company that made it. Your draft of the screenplay you have been trying to finish for ten years should not be a line item in someone else's training set.

Auf Wiedersehen!