LifeBook.day
reclaiming a corner of the web
After all, what can the Internet do?
Cycling between servers, sliding into Discords, lingering on live streams, minding the feeds. It’s as if the mind online is, increasingly, being conditioned to patterns of networked, ambient consumption. The scar tissue that forms in the mind off these surface interactions is sculpting a new subjectivity in the attention economy.
It’s in these patterns of engagement that we’re increasingly becoming digital. Our minds are caught in feedback cycles with the machine that parade a sequence of images and text snippets in front of us, each pulsing to be held in a certain gaze. Each drawing us deeper and deeper into a disembodied digital sphere. We forget in the midst that not only are we content consumer but we are human. With real needs, existential questions, and tangled in webs of complexity we cannot extricate ourselves from with ease.
What if the internet provided spaces that were not points of engagement, but spaces for collective inquiry? Where do we turn to in moments of digital overwhelm when we simply need to reach out for connection and for mindfulness?
My own experience of being entangled in the internet’s attentional extractive infrastructures led me to the idea that a more humane, inquisitive web could exist.
Hence why my collaborator Virginia and I built https://lifebook.day
LifeBook is a place where you can ask any question. In that sense, it’s a provocation to reach deep and ask the questions that linger within you. It’s an opportunity to encounter questions others have asked and that you may not have had the words for yourself.
Over time, you accumulate a journal of questions. Both questions you’ve asked and those you’ve discovered either on the home page—which shows a blend of recently asked and popular questions—or among the related questions that are posed to you at each turn.
Each question is met with a thoughtfully rendered LLM-generated answer. This may seem a bit paradoxical at first. After all, aren’t the questions we ask deeply rooted in human experience? What would an AI know about what we’re going through?
It’s our working hypothesis that these machines, pattern recognizers and linguistic conduits, have surveyed much of our archive and in doing so tapped into insights articulated time and time again by human writers. When well prompted, the AI will surface these trails of wisdom both as short-form responses as well as related questions that help broaden the field of inquiry. This is what LifeBook does.
Before we go any further, I would encourage you to try it for yourself:
Pause.
Notice where you are.
The room you’re in.
The device you’re looking at.
Think about who you are
and where you’re going.
Take a moment to contemplate
what questions start arising within you.
What comes up in this moment?
What is the nature of your questions?
Take time to simply notice.
Now, go to: LifeBook and explore your questions.
The goal of LifeBook is to create a slower, more contemplative Internet. One that’s not so extractive, but which creates value and cultivates intention. This puts it in a long lineage of contemplative sites.
LifeBook is still in Beta. We’re still figuring out how to best transform these technologies, often used to advance the attention economy, from patterns of engagement towards patterns of self-inquiry.
Your feedback is most welcome. If you wish, spend some time with LifeBook and drop a comment or reply to this email. I’d love to hear your thoughts.