Noohacking – Caring for Minds Beyond Digital Minimalism

It is widely acknowledged that digital media can be toxic to our minds. Is the only solution to log off, to abstain, to become "digital minimalists"? Kyle Booten argues the opposite, proposing that, for all their obvious toxicity, digital media have unexplored potentials for caring for our minds. But to glimpse these still-hidden potentials, we must become designers—noohackers (from nous, mind/spirit)—who experiment radically by crafting our own small-scale digital tools, apps, and other noetic equipment. Part call to action, part conceptual toolkit, Noohacking catalogs and theorizes five forms of digital media that any noohacker should have in their repertoire: the bot, the web extension, the writing assistant, the note-taking app, and the virtual world. Each of these has specific affordances for caring for our minds, often by luring our attention and our desire back from the frantic, short-circuiting interruptions and fleeting fascinations of mainstream digital (and especially social) media. Noohacking, in other words, is a matter of skillfully using the potentially toxic aspects of digital media so that they are rendered beneficial. Booten concludes with a bold appeal directed at educational institutions: if mainstream digital media undermine the possibility of education itself by relentlessly abusing attention, schools and universities must become places where young people collectively imagine, build, and test new infrastructures of thought. The recent proliferation of generative AI makes this task, though more pressing, also more possible.