Digital Cabin

Imagine a cabin in the woods.

Inside it is a small library of useful books. a pile of notebooks at a writing desk and a collection of inkpens, colouring pencils, oil paints, pencils, rulers, craft knives and buts of paper. That sort of thing. There’s a toolbox under the bed for fixing up machines, a bunch of carpentry and woodworking tools in the chest by the door. And there’s a bench desk along one wall with a lamp and a bunch of soldering irons, wires, molds, sprays, pokers prodders and small circuits. On the walls are maps of the local area, of the county, of the country, of the world. There’s a book full of them somewhere.

In the distance, a radio plays commercial free music.

Outside is a vegetable patch, and the kitchen contains space for pickling, jamming and storing food over the winter.

The windows are open and you can hear the breeze and the birds.

Nothing needs you attention right now, nothing is out of place. You have everything you think you might need.

A Digital Cabin is the computing equivalent.

A place of knowledge, of creation, or communication, of organisaation, and most importantly, of joy. There’s no notification, continual feeds, no algorithms, advertising, engagement. A place to support thinking and doing.

Local-first software that’s been hand-built to do one thing the way one user wants to use it and to do it well. Calm technology that doesn’t need updating and downloading and nudging and prompting and looking different all of a sudden. It just stays the same. So you can use it the same. A digital garden with the digital cabin that grows as you grow, connects more as you learn.

Something you can build and use and leaves you along so you can get busy building.