The coronavirus pandemic started to sweep across the globe just as this book was going to press. All aspects of daily life changed once delay, and then containment measures, were put in place. Initially, closing down most workplaces and schools and restricting movement seemingly created new scope for people to practise slow computing. Rather than dashing here and there, trying to cope with a crowded diary and too many tasks, those people not on the frontline would be static and confined to the home. Life would become stationary, routines broken, busyness reduced, and work-life balance restored. However, the scope for pursuing slow computing is now in question like never before.

In many ways our lives have become even more digitallymediated. In our own cases, at very short notice we had to pivot our teaching from face-to-face contact on our university campus into virtual classes. New knowledge and skills had to be acquired about new pedagogies and platforms (Teams, Skype, Zoom, Moodle, etc). Classes and meetings were to be conducted from home. Social interactions with family and friends shifted to video calls, WhatsApp and Facebook. Information was elicited through social media and news sites. Streaming services replaced out-of-home social activities. Our time was still fragmented and interleaved, and rather than our sense of stress being lowered, it was heightened by the sense of isolation and the fear and anxiety expressed through our media channels. We thus tried to follow our own slow computing advice by limiting the use of social media and making sure to do non-digitally mediated activities: exercise, cooking, gardening, reading, playing traditional games.

We’re fortunate. For some of our colleagues (and also our students), the new digital realities of working at home have posed acute challenges. Many were left looking after bored, coopedup children who needed home schooling, play and reassurance. They’ve had to cope with family-wide fights over who will use the computer. New skills have been acquired to access and install software and work out how to use new services. Some have quite limited access to broadband internet. Other workers have not been allowed to self-isolate due to the nature of their job, performing essential work. In many cases, this work has intensified due to increased demand or the stress of trying to deliver it in difficult circumstances.

It's hard to believe that any company would make such a move, right? Or that an employer would install an open source operating system on all of its computers and encourage all staff to use a Tor browser. But why not imagine such collective moves toward slow computing? For all that slowing down requires individuals to adjust their practices and create individual choreographies of data dancing to secure data sovereignty, slow computing collectively is ultimately what's needed. Workplaces are as good an arena to begin as any. In fact, given the reality of ‘working time drift’ there are few sites as appropriate to implementing the slowness in slow computing. In this regard, therefore, we tip our hats to the French ‘right to disconnect’ policy, a move akin to what we have mentioned in our imagined example. Workers in French companies with more than 50 employees now have the right to negotiate times when they will not be obliged to check emails or text messages. Companies in other jurisdictions have implemented similar policies aimed at protecting their workers from stress-related illnesses and burnout and ensuring they get suitable rest. For example, Volkswagen blocks work email being sent to the mobile phones of workers between 6pm and 7am, and Daimler permits workers going on holiday to automatically delete all new emails while they are away. Those seem like positive steps in the right direction.

We need a new ethics of digital care. We need to adopt and enact a philosophy of slow computing – of stepping back and uncoupling the digital leash to reestablish control over our time and our digital footprints and shadows. We stand to experience the joys of computing, while minimizing some of the more pernicious aspects of the emerging digital society and economy if we pursue individual and collective, practical and political, actions. In this chapter, we extend our overall argument by developing the philosophical underpinnings of, and for, slow computing. The target is a rationale and imperative for adopting slow computing; for its practice not just by individuals but also by wider society, including companies. While we could practise slow computing without embracing slow philosophy or becoming members of a slow computing movement – simply adopting some actions as they suit – our practices gain meaning and maximize their impact if they are rooted in a coherent set of ideas and ideals that justify and promote them.

At issue here is understanding the key normative arguments for slow computing. By ‘normative’ we mean a type of thinking concerned with how things should be, not how they presently are.

This start to the day won't be exactly the same as yours. You’ll have your own array of devices. You might not use Twitter. Maybe you live on your own. And maybe you don't (yet) have a screen on your fridge. But for many of us today, regardless of how we go about waking up, we soon start to connect and interact with digital devices and services. In fact, according to a 2017 report by Deloitte, 16% of Americans reach for their smartphone immediately after waking, 42% within five minutes, and 62% check for messages, email, social media, and the news within 15 minutes.

We lead digital lives. Twenty-six per cent of Americans report being ‘almost constantly’ online. Over 80% of people own a smartphone, with the average person checking it about 50 times a day. A large proportion have it at hand at all times, even when asleep. We often check in during the night; a 2017 survey in the UK found that 66% of teenagers wake to check their phone in the early hours, with 35% of parents doing the same. And even if we do not own a smartphone, or use the internet infrequently, we still interface with digitally mediated services all the time – at work, moving through transport systems, using utilities, passing surveillance cameras, and so on.

Is this just the way life is now? Should it be like this? Does it matter at all?

In this book we make two related arguments. First, how we interact with digital devices does matter. Digital technologies are accelerating and fragmenting our everyday lives, and the data our devices gather are used to profile and target us.

This chapter explores the intersection between refugee movements and the broader phenomenon of human mobility today. My starting point is the experience of two young refugee women, Mariam and Semira.1 They were born and grew up in Eritrea – a country which they describe as beautiful, but where ‘security and hope are scarce for most people’. In Eritrea, military service is compulsory, and in practice, for many, extends for several years. Mariam and Semira, like tens of thousands of young Eritreans before them, fled the country after prolonged periods of service, their requests for demobilisation denied. They embarked on a dangerous journey through Sudan, where they first met, and across the border to Libya, travelling at high speed on pick-up trucks for a month through the harsh desert, watching others fall off and die of injuries or thirst, themselves surviving on biscuits and water.

This chapter, which is divided into two parts, includes the script of the performance lecture Men in Waiting, preceded by the research on art and migration that underpins it. The project is in part a phenomenology of incarceration that studies what happens to perception when it is limited to the prison architecture used for immigration detention in the United Kingdom. It is also an artistic enactment of that subjectivity, and this text is a reflection on the time and space produced in this performative reflection. Through puppetry the performance takes place in a shadow world, not unlike that of Plato’s protagonist in the Republic who seeks to bring the people to enlightenment and is made a martyr as a result. Plato’s allegory would indicate that we all have access to the human condition of confinement in the dark with only shadows. However, the specific shadowside of the world as seen through the United Kingdom’s immigration detention centres was what this Darwin Lecture immersed the audience in. Writing and performing this play was a way to sit with the shadow, and within the shadow.

Science is an international endeavour. Its development depends on exchanges of ideas and expertise, which are made possible by people moving from one part of the world to another. I myself am an immigrant at least twice over. I grew up in India and studied in the United States, spending almost three decades there before moving again to England almost 19 years ago to work at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. I was not the first immigrant to arrive there. In fact, the first three directors of the LMB were all immigrants. The first director, Max Perutz (1914–2002), was Austrian. The second, Sydney Brenner (1927–2019), and the third, Aaron Klug (1926–2018), were both South Africans. The current director, Jan Löwe, is also an immigrant, from Germany.

I’d like to begin by asking you to think back to the 2012 Olympic Games. This was an event that I’ve come increasingly to see as the high-water mark of a phase in Britain’s attitudes towards migration, integration, race, and identity. It was a vast, very expensive, very lavish – wonderful in my view – pageant directed by Danny Boyle. It was a celebration of British culture and British creativity. Like all Olympic ceremonies, it was designed to try to say something about the nation to whom the Olympic torch had just been passed.

We all have a story, a narrative. Friends and family members may know it, and it may get passed down the generations. Sometimes stories are all we have of a past; they may be dramatic – witnessing historic moments or disaster; they can be life-changing and are often ordinary. They can knit a sense of self, identity, and even bind a nation.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by the type of footage you see of silverside fish schooling near a coral reef and starlings forming these large murmurations in the sky. And what’s really remarkable, to me as a biologist, is how little we know about both how and why unrelated organisms like this coordinate these remarkable collective patterns. And yet collective behaviour is not only all around us – it’s within us. Our bodies, of course, are a collective of cells. At the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, we really try to understand the principles of collective behaviour across scales of organisation in biological systems. In this chapter, I’m going to set out some of the latest research on collective animal migration: how organisms come together and integrate their minds to solve very complex problems during migration across the globe.

Dengue virus, the cause of tens of millions of cases of dengue annually, and Zika virus, the cause of recent explosive epidemics across Latin America associated with congenital defects and microcephaly, are pathogens with a significant burden on human health and well-being. Beyond their toll on health, these flaviviruses, as the genus is called, share a common evolutionary origin, have each adapted to replicate efficiently in the human host, and are spread by similar species of mosquitoes. These commonalities belie important clinical, epidemiological, and immunological differences between them that necessitate continued research into their respective biology. Moreover, these commonalities and differences have real consequences for control efforts in affected areas around the world.