Ensuring Minimal Computing Serves Maximal Connection

Originally devised as an insult by Richard Wollheim, the term minimalism described a 1960s movement that foregrounded the relationship between an art object and its museum viewer. Today, minimalism is the guiding ethos for a surprising variety of pop cultural phenomena, from belongings that spark joy to contemplative practice that increases mindfulness. This article first takes a broader view of minimalism to register several problematic echoes of minimal computing among digital detoxers and disaster survivalists in intensities ranging from Luddism to asceticism. Attention needs to be given to these echoes, especially when valorizing DIY infrastructures built out of necessity by Indigenous, poor, or coastal communities and out of privilege by doomsday preppers. Second, this article asks what becomes of minimal computing now that we have seen the vital importance of maximal connection during the COVID-19 pandemic. Do arguments for minimalism still hold in a socially-distant, unevenly-connected world? I argue that it will be important to reframe the digital minimalist conversations of the 2010s for the demands of digital equity in the 2020s. Going forward, we should ask: which of these competing claims to minimalism — as a form of attention, mindfulness, and agency — are compatible with maximal connection, with maximal choice, with maximal investment in communities and infrastructures? And when we hold up minimalism as a virtue, is that virtue a property of particular tools or specific techniques for using them? Finally, this article profiles the ways that academic conversations on minimal computing have independently taken root outside universities through grassroots organizing and activism under the banner of community technology. I close by suggesting ways that minimal computing can be led by community input, while also playing a role in public scholarship and community partnerships that extend existing academic research.