Silence: More Precious Than Gold

Guest blog by Sal Orofino

What’s the standard line?  Fear sells?  For all things digital security, there is no shortage of fear-based selling.  But you know what’s funny?  It’s all pretty damn simple.  We can talk SEC, Equifax and blah, blah.  But let’s talk about us – for us and forget them.  What can we do when on the one hand we have the temptation and in the other, the punishment?

Remember silence.

Silence for us means “us.”  The sovereign individual, full of autocracy.  Old-timey?  Corny? Boring??  Well, hell, so what. Silence is the true voice of us, of the natural world and our connection to it.  And it’s only through silence that we begin to hear the voices that are true to us.  Not “them,” but us.  Frank Lloyd Wright wrote in his 1958 book “The Living City:”

“This long discourse, hard to write or read, is a sincere attempt to take apart and show (from the inside) the radical simplicities of fate to which our machine skills have now laid us wide open and try to show radical eliminations are now essential to our spiritual health, and to the culture, if not the countenance, of democratic civilization itself.” 

The master himself was espousing elimination and simplification decades before the real threat to individuality and democracy showed up.  Consider the recent Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled How Smart Phones Hijack Our Minds (October 7,-8, 2017).  The “smart” phone inherently blocks of our mind’s ability to retain information which founds the basis for cognitive abilities to be critical and conceptual.  Smart, at least in the context of the phone and the living, breathing human being, is a one-way street with the phone getting smarter, the human less so.  Let’s hear more from the author of that piece, Nicholas Carr:

“The irony of the smartphone is that the qualities we find most appealing – its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability – are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds.  Phone makers like Apple and Samsung and app writers like Facebook and Google design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours, and we thank them by buying millions of the gadgets downloading billions of apps every year.”

So what do we do?  Silence.  Simple.  Companies like Silent Pocket are designing simple products that produce silence.  Sure, they have tactical and strategic benefits that can help in protecting our device from intrusion, but, they look really beautiful, are elegantly simple – and they produce silence.  The phone, when encased in a Silent Pocket, becomes subject to a metaphor, it has been captured by elegance, encaged and silenced with a fashion statement.  This is brilliant thinking, the kind we need more of.  The product has an honest aesthetic meaning.  There are no hidden capabilities operating behind the scenes, no falsely marketed message. 

Silent Pocket encourages others to “Mind the Grid,” which to me means “get your ass out there and leave the dead stuff behind.”  To people like Frank Lloyd Wright, Silent Pocket is continuing his concept of the good fight:

"The sense of this natural aesthetic would make of man a gracious, integral, potent part of the whole of human life.  Ethics, Art and Religion survive in civilizations only as departments of this aesthetic sense, and survive only to the extent that they embody human sentiment for the beautiful"

To learn more about Sal Orofino and his quest to future proof client outcomes please visit his website here: Future Proofing

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