Dancing with the Dragons of the Digital World – by Anthony Nanson

The title of this year’s gathering of the Centre for Narrative Leadership, convened by Geoff Mead, was ‘Dancing with Dragons’. Some of the ‘dragons’ in question are aspects of our own psyche, to be engaged with through inner work. But there are also some fearsome dragons out there in the world. The gathering's first session was a seminar about cybercrime, and how to protect yourself against it, by cybersecurity expert Ed Hare. Another session looked at AI. For me, the problems generated by advancing digital technology were one of the threads running through the whole gathering.

At one level, the problems are practical ones of evading the attacks of cyberpredators, dealing with all the complexity and surveillance, and continuing to make a living as AI tries to take over many areas of work – in my case, writing and editing and the work my students should be doing to produce their coursework. AI can’t do live storytelling; the challenge there, however, is in getting people to come out to events and switch off their phones and listen. That points towards another level of problem, which has more to do with states of being.

Although I still make little use of my vintage smartphone, I am well aware how addictive and distracting the digital world is. The temptation, with me, is to look at the political news and movie trailers on my desktop when I should be working, or to keep checking my emails. It’s more severe, I know, for young people addicted to multiple social media. Such fragmentation of attention, it strikes me, runs in exactly the opposite direction from the aims of meditation, which has become a central part of my life over the past several years. In meditation you seek to escape random, distracting thoughts and find a space of mental stillness, in which can be found peace, joy, and inspiration for how to act and to speak in the rest of your life.

In the various spiritual traditions in which meditation has developed – Christian tradition calls it ‘contemplation’ – the idea is that the space of stillness brings you closer to the divine (in whatever way you conceptualise that). From that perspective, what are we to make of digital devices that take us in the opposite direction, of addiction, distraction, social isolation, misinformation, and indeed possible exposure to cybercrime such as identity theft which can give you a nervous breakdown? You could call it the realm of the demonic!

But we can’t now function without our digital tools. Much of my work depends on them. I’d never have had the resources to run a small press (Awen) without them. I wouldn’t be able to sell many books without Amazon, whose techno-authoritarian power makes it a prime example of the formidable kinds of dragons we have to dance with.

The ‘Dancing with Dragons’ meeting helped to refine my realisation that the digital world requires the application of spiritual practice in the form of mental discipline. We could make a comparison to healthy eating. Knowing that too much sugar, too much fat will damage your health – and more fibre, more vitamins, less processed food will do it good – you can continually make conscious decisions which foods to buy, what quantities of them to eat. In the same way, I’m trying now to use digital devices mindfully; to use them, as tools, when I need to in order serve a particular chosen purpose; but not to use them otherwise. And to apply the time gained from that discipline to quality experiences in the real world like meeting people in person or being in nature.

I’d also include among such quality experiences the reading of good books. You could argue that reading takes you away from the real world just as cyberspace does. But I think there’s a difference. When you read something that someone has invested great effort and thought in writing, taking it at your own pace, pausing to cogitate or look up at your surroundings, feeling the sound of the language, picturing the images the words conjure, then I think there can be an affinity with meditation, a concentration of the mind, an inspiration to live well.