tactility
A screenshot of a reply I sent in Kind Words 2
On Thursday night my best friend texted me with a joke meme:
ADHD be like: “Let me build a whole business instead of folding laundry.”
I replied “YES.” Then:
"let me go put a desk together right quick"
This was, obviously, a recent real-life example. My best friend said she wished she’d known about her ADHD sooner. Meanwhile, I was musing that every niche object I own is philosophically grounded in having ADHD. I supported my assertion with the following examples:
"why are you buying a new monitor arm" "short answer, ADHD"
"you don't need a new keyboard" "my ADHD says otherwise. my fingers feel weird on the old one"
"this keyboard has side-printed keys" "yes, because letters on top are distracting"
Then I texted a photo of the Royal Kludge keyboard in front of me (“for the record, these are side-printed keys”). Its only top-printed keys are macOS function keys, I explained, because I’d swapped them in, “because I confused myself with the Windows PC keyboard layout.
“I think the entire hobby of keyboard-collecting is probably an AuDHD thing,” I continued. “It's just constantly looking for the perfect keyboard you can ignore.” The last thing you want to be distracted by is your keyboard.
Then I talked about Unicomp keyboards and why buckling springs are more satisfying than mechanical switches. By this point I’m sure my friend regretted texting me in the first place. I finished out my screed:
so it's a different type of tactile feedback. We've really lost that art with all these smart devices
“Yes, definitely,” my best friend replied.
Now I was thoughtful. “Hmm,” I texted, indicating my shift into contemplativeness. “I think the loss of the physical/tactile is why reality feels so unreal to everyone now.”
Incidentally, this is why we struggle to remember our dreams. Because the imagery isn’t grounded in the physical—because there’s no sensory information, no haptic feedback to grab onto—the narrative gets all slippery.
“Yeah, and add AI and we are over the cliff,” she replied.
“I think you're right,” I said, adding something about “embodiment” and everyone feeling ungrounded, like maybe there isn’t a consensus reality anymore. Yeah, a gradual, corrosive disembodiment.
Just then, my cuckoo clock tooted at me. I’d previously unpacked it and brought it in, but until Thursday it was still sitting around in its original packaging.
Ah!
I texted.
I put the battery back into my tiny cuckoo clock and it is cuckooing
That's another way to get back to feeling "embodied"—marking the hours with a chime or toot. I need to go outside more, lol
I’m a big believer in what is termed “positive friction” in UX design. This is when, instead of sliiiiiding straight through a website or application, there are specific ‘gates’ marking the user’s passage. (Note the difference between opting out and having to consciously, intentionally opt in. Forcing the user to click through is all about informed consent.)
When building a virtual IndieCade festival in Second Life, I made sure to initially plop our attendees into a sealed, underwater vestibule—a literal holding tank—before they were permitted to enter the environment fully. I wanted it to be clear that passing this ‘physical’ gate indicated acceptance of the event’s Code of Conduct. This vestibule wasn’t entirely my idea, actually; it was really Dave Gottwald’s. I'd asked him to give me a crash course in theme park design, and what he ended up talking about was mainly Zen garden design: this idea of expansion and contraction, archways and thresholds and bottlenecks and open clearings that make the wanderer go “ah!”
Anyway, a cuckoo clock marks the passage of time by tooting; it’s how you keep the day from sliding away from you, without your having to stare at a clock the whole time.
In the past I’ve written about deleting apps and wanting to switch back to a dumb phone but not fully understanding what I am attempting to disentangle myself from, what vague opponent I’m railing against.
I’m no luddite. But I think it’s this, this slow erosion of a sense of embodiment—turning what should be buttons or keys into a slick, featureless surface that depicts the suggestions of buttons, “this is not a pipe”—which is maybe the most insidious type of social and societal disenfranchisement there is.
Maybe it is starting to feel like we are ghosts in search of our own bodies.