Slowcore started out as a made-up term to express distaste for hustle culture. First used in this context by Danica Swanson, slowcore took on a life of its own after Black Stone Sanctuary launched our Farcaster channel /slowcore-hq on April 8, 2024.
The term slowcore is an affirmation of a commitment to cultivating patience, holding space for emergence, protecting our time and attention from extractive forces, and respecting the indwelling intelligence of the creative process.
For example:
- Slow culture is the norm, not the exception. Slow culture is the norm for all our endeavors, business endeavors included. As much as possible, we work in ways that allow sufficient time for leisure, rest, play, reflection, and quality attention for everyone involved.
- Prioritize meeting unmet needs. We prioritize meeting unmet needs (human and non-human; this includes our own) for care, reciprocity, health, service, silence, rest, darkness, deep listening, play, beauty, time spaciousness, incubation, artistic integrity, and collective long-term sustainability.
- Cultivate emergence, not "jobbing." We endeavor to shape the emergent entity into what it wants to become, at its own pace, through an iterative process. If we compromise, rush, overcommit ourselves, or cut corners, sooner or later the work will become more like a job than a creative process. "Jobbing" is not the right approach for this project; taking on excessive attention labor will lead us in the wrong direction.
- Our north star is deep refinement, reclaiming, and sovereignty of human attention.
Of course, in a culture that normalizes endless micro-dispersals of attention and extractive "creator economy" patterns, all this is far easier said than done.
A slowcore philosophy serves as a reminder to keep these ideals top-of-mind as we endeavor to build something that might endure beyond our lifetimes.
(Text adapted from "Slowcore and the Inner Genius" by Danica Swanson. Originally published in the Black Stone Sanctuary newsletter on Paragraph, April 8, 2024. Thumbnail art by Trish Deneen).