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Cheers,

Michael

I regret to say that I have not read much of Ursula Le Guin’s writing. At some point along the way, I read “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” but that’s about it. This is a matter of regret because I know her work is highly regarded by many people whose opinion on such matters I implicitly trust. It’s also the case that whenever I encounter some fragment of her writing, it always strikes me as wise, provocative, and generative.

This was once again the case when I recently read a slice of dialog from one of Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, The Tombs of Atuan (1970), in a brief, bracing reflection published by Mandy Brown on her rich and beautifully conceived website, A Working Library.

The excerpt features an exchange between a wizard and young women after they have escaped great danger but are now weary and hungry with a long way to go before they might find some food. Knowing something of the wizard’s power, the young woman wonders whether he might not be able to make life a little easier for them.

“Can you find food for us?” she asked, rather vaguely and timidly.

“Hunting takes time, and weapons.”

“I meant, with, you know, spells.”

“I can call a rabbit,” he said, poking the fire with a twisted stick of juniper. “The rabbits are coming out of their holes all around us, now. Evening’s their time. I could call one by name, and he’d come. But would you catch and skin and broil a rabbit that you’d called to you thus? Perhaps if you were starving. But it would be a breaking of trust, I think.”

“Yes. I thought, perhaps you could just…”

“Summon up a supper,” he said. “Oh, I could. On golden plates, if you like. But that’s illusion, and when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.”

Perhaps you’ve already intuited where this is going. “Is this not precisely what it’s like to read or watch or listen to slop?” Brown asks. “What you read isn’t really writing or drawing or art—it isn’t the creation of a mind reaching for the world—but illusion.”

I find that this little slice of dialog manages to capture something essential about the experience of our current media environment better than an elaborate analysis or argument. There’s so much in it that readily re-presents our experience to us: the desire for efficiency and convenience, the willingness to risk the rupture of a delicate trust (not with a rabbit to be sure, but with one another), and, of course, the feeling of feeding endlessly at the digital trough and never feeling satisfied, feeling, in fact, hollow, depleted, and alone as a consequence, hungrier than when we started. Better than an elaborate study or technical paper, this scene reinforces our native intuition that a simulation, however compelling or sophisticated, will always be an illusion. And we will know this chiefly by attending to our own subsequent experience: “when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.”

This, in particular, is a wonderfully evocative formulation: “the creation of a mind reaching for the world.” There is solidarity to be had in that motion and in that effort. A motion and an effort that always presumes both the world and the other with whom we share it, for the act of creation, however humble or sublime, is elicited by the existence of the other who is to receive it.

Nearly four years ago, which is hard to believe, I wrote about the estranging quality of AI-generated images. This was, I think, some time before we started referring to the proliferation of such images and texts as slop. What struck me, then, about the output of generative AI was how isolating it felt:

To encounter a painting or a piece of music or poem is to encounter another person, although it is sometimes easy to lose sight of this fact. I can ask about the meaning of a work of art because it was composed by someone with whom I have shared a world and whose experience is at least partly intelligible to me. Without reducing the meaning of a work of art to the intention of its creator, I can nonetheless ask and think about such intentions. In putting a question to a painting, I am also putting a question to another person.

Only another person can be said to be “reaching for the world” through their work, whatever shape that work takes, and by reaching for the world in this way they are simultaneously building or at the very least tending to the “world,” in the sense that Hannah Arendt used that word to mean the relatively stable realm of human things—material culture, traditions, communities—that welcomes us at our birth and outlives us, a realm held in common, mutually intelligible, and of a scale hospitable to the human person. Such a world would not only sustain conditions for friendship, it would also foster an experience of community even in the absence of others by mediating an experience of purpose and presence and relationship.

This is not at all like the world we mostly inhabit, and as Brown is quick to note, “it’s not only AI.” “A good deal of commercial content is more or less the same,” she argues, but AI is not thereby inconsequential to our situation: “AI accelerates that production process, makes it slicker and smoother, makes the illusion seem more real,” Brown notes. “Makes ever more of it, at greater and greater scale, until you come to believe there is nothing else out there. But it remains a deception. You think you’ve had your full but all the while you’re starving.” Slop can only be binged. The simulation never satisfies.

Coda

By pure happenstance, I also recently stumbled upon an article published by an independent type foundry based in the Netherlands, Mass-Driver. The article, “From human hands,” explains why the firm has committed to never using AI in the design and production processes. It was an instructive piece that offered, in my view, a hopeful complement to the foregoing considerations. I learned something about the origins of the letter A and the evolution of typeface. For example:

In ancient Rome, holding a flat brush in the right hand, a writer could make a cleaner line if they began and ended with a short horizontal flick; this was the origin of the serif. And their wrist was less comfortable rotating the brush to always face its direction of travel, so they would have found it easier to hold at one angle, making strokes of different widths — thicker when pulling it downwards and to the right. Our letters still feature this same stroke modulation today. Did the signwriter know their idea would outlast their civilisation?

I was struck by this observation because it illuminated the human traces embedded in the strata of our material culture, the embodied and gestural origins of our treasury of symbols and signs. It is not just that the signwriter’s “idea” would outlast their civilization, it’s that their idea emerged out of an experience of bodily limits and constraints to which I can relate. “ChatGPT,” by contrast, “will never invent a new calligraphy technique, because it has no wrists to feel uncomfortable. A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.”

Read the whole thing. It’s bracing.

And as so much of this turns on how we frame our limitations, either as mere impediments to be overcome or as the very conditions of our flourishing, I’ll leave you with a few lines of “A Prayer for Limits,” recently composed by , and with the invitation to dwell on the remainder here.

It is through your love, O Lord, that we learn to love our limits, which give force to our compassion and shape to the fear we feel for others in their need; which nurture our generosity even as we fall and fail; which frame and enfold our measures of adoration.

…

We suffer from these limits and we learn from them. Without them, we would cease yearning even for love. To love, to learn, and to desire is to wound and be wounded.

The Convivial Society is supported by the generosity of readers. Please share the work with others as you see fit and consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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I was saddened by the news that David Cayley had passed away earlier this month on June 10th. He was 81 years old and died in the company of his family and friends.

Cayley was an accomplished journalist and documentarian. For over thirty years, he found a home at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), where he produced CBC Radio’s Ideas series. During this run, his programs explored the work of Charles Taylor, Simone Weil, Richard Sennet, George Grant, and René Girard among many others. Happily, Cayley created a personal website, where he made an archive of these shows available. There is an education to be had in this archive for those with the time to listen.

But it is likely that Cayley will be chiefly remembered as the great advocate and interpreter of the work of his friend, Ivan Illich. Those of you who have been reading the Convivial Society for some time will know that the name of this newsletter is taken from Illich’s work and that my own thinking and writing has been indelibly shaped by my reading of Illich. So, like many others who have sought to learn from Illich, I am, and will remain, in Cayley’s debt.1

At the height of the pandemic and early in the life of this newsletter, I invited subscribers to read and discuss some of Ivan Illich’s work together. Around the same time, I also took the then-novel prevalence of videoconferencing as an opportunity to interview some of Illich’s friends and coconspirators—a kind of amateur oral history project. Cayley was among those who agreed to indugle me. You listen to our conversation here: “Remembering Illich: A Conversation with David Cayley.”

As you’ll hear for yourself if you do take a few moments to listen, David was extraordinarily generous, humble, and, near the end of our time, vulnerable in a way that I found deeply moving. That was the first and last time that we talked. I regret that we never had occasion to meet in person, but I will remember our conversation with fondness.

When I shared on Notes about his passing, readers commented with personal anecdotes that testified to Cayley’s hospitality and generosity of spirit. He opened his home and himself to those who came unbidden to his door and to his inbox. Given my own experience, this was hardly surprising. And as I reflected on David’s kindness, I recalled as well the charity and hospitality of every one of Illich’s friends that I had the temerity to contact with the request that they share with me, a stranger to them, the memory of their friend. They all did so with warmth and grace: Carl Mitcham, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Gustavo Esteva. To these I can add Madhu Prakash, Dana Stuchul, Dan Grego, Bill Arney, and Sajay Samuel, whose support and encouragement I’ve deeply valued.

It is said that the legacy of a teacher is often undone by their disciples. It is rather the case, at least in my experience, that Illich’s legacy is enhanced and sweetened by his friends. His insistence on the demanding but indispensable character of hospitality and friendship have been beautifully embodied by those among his friends whom I have had the pleasure of knowing.

“I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied,” Illich once said, “it is hospitality.” In the same context, he also claimed that “if there is something like a political life to be, to remain for us, in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship.” “Therefore my task,” he explained, “is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships. Mutual friendships always. I and you, and I hope a third one, out of which perhaps community can grow. Because perhaps here we can find what the good is.”

Illich said this in the mid-1990s. It is, in my view, all the more true today. And the remarkable thing about this is how little, from a certain perspective, it requires: “Hospitality requires a table around which you can sit and if people get tired they can sleep.”

Earlier this year, I closed a couple of my talks on AI in an unusual way: by citing a letter written in the 12th century by a German monk. I came across this letter in a footnote in my favorite of Illich’s books, In the Vineyard of the Text. The letter was from Hugh of St. Victor, a theologian whose work Illich highly esteemed. In this letter, Hugh is writing to another monk, who had hosted Hugh during his travels. In it he reflects on charity (or love), hospitality, and friendship.

“To my dear brother Randolph from Hugh, a sinner. Charity never ends. When I first heard this, I knew it was true. But now, dearest brother, I have the personal experience of fully knowing that charity never ends. For I was a foreigner and met you in a strange land. But the land was not really strange for I found friends there. I don’t know whether I first made a friend or was made one. But I found charity there and I loved it; and could not tire of it, for it was sweet to me, and I filled my heart with it, and was sad that my heart could hold so little. I could not take in all there was—but I took as much as I could, and weighed down with this precious gift, I did not feel any burden, because my full heart sustained me. And now having made a long journey, I find my heart still warmed, and none of the gift has been lost: for charity never ends.”

I shared this letter in my talks, and I share it with you now, because it attests, in its eloquence, simplicity, and historical particularity, to the power of hospitality and the grace of friendship. May we likewise find such friendship on our way.

May we also discover, as Illich once put it, that “friendship suffices,” and thus strive to remove “by little acts of foolish renunciation” all obstacles to its cultivation.

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If you are searching for writers who put this vision into practice and have an abundance of wisdom to offer, I commend , , and to you. For more on Illich and the skill of hospitality, you can read this essay I wrote in 2020.

Cheers,
Michael

Your AI is not a tool. It is an environment, and you are in it.

The same could be said of the whole array of electronic and digital media technologies. I’ve not been especially scrupulous about how I define the particular words we use to talk about various technologies—tools, devices, machines, the Machine, systems, artifacts, instrument, etc.—except to occasionally suggest that the word “technology” itself, used in the all-encompassing sense we use it today, has only enjoyed its extensive semantic range since about the mid-20th century and, precisely because of this extensive semantic range, can be an impediment to clear thinking about the phenomenon to which it lays claim.1

But I’m increasingly tempted to become obnoxiously strident about the ubiquitous use of “tool” to describe contemporary technologies, particularly when coupled with “just,” as in “Technology is just a tool. What matters is what we do with it.”

While there appears to have been a shift in the last 15 years or so in popular assumptions about the purported neutrality of technology toward at least the suspicion that our devices, etc. are not, in fact, merely neutral instruments at our command but rather frustrate, resist, or otherwise evade uncomplicated mastery by their users, such that their users might properly be said to be used in turn by their devices, it is nonetheless true that the myth of technological neutrality remains broadly entrenched.

I confess that I am astounded by how blithely some insist that it is all as simple as learning to use AI well, as if we had not just undergone a nearly 20-year, society-wide experiment showing that a so-called “tool,” say a smartphone or a social media platform, will (mal)form even the most vigilant and virtuous user into its own image and shape. This is the blindness at the heart of modern technological hubris. It is the firm but misguided conviction that our “tools” exist entirely outside of us and thus, if taken up with requisite skill, can be “safely” deployed.

But AI is not a tool in this sense, it is an environment which envelops the user and works on us from the inside out while we naively think that we remain unchanged by our use so long as we are using it carefully and intentionally. The care and intentionality is beside the point, and our confidence in such vigilance probably works against us in the long run.

This is anecdotal, etc., but here is how one reader put it when I made a preliminary version of this observation on Notes: “From inside a very large company (600,000 people) I get to watch this run in fast-forward. The teams using AI most carefully are the ones losing the ability to tell a good option from a merely safe one. The malformation doesn't skip the diligent. It recruits them.” Just this week over lunch, a highly qualified and skilled computer scientist expressed a similar sentiment. He could feel the subtle shifts in his own awareness and judgment, and he could plainly see the detrimental effects that implementing AI was having on junior colleagues.

On this same point—that even careful, self-aware AI use can have unexpected and deleterious consequences—consider Charley Johnson’s patient and irenic critique of Steven Johnson’s exhortation to use AI for cognitive uploading rather than cognitive offloading as well as his advice that we use AI like “a researcher, tutor, and editor at your side.” In conversation with two recent studies (here and here), Charley demonstrates the limitations of this view, observing that “the medium is doing the work, not the information — which is why you can turn down every suggestion and still end up somewhere you wouldn’t have reached alone, feeling the whole time like you walked there on your own two feet.”2 Mileage may vary with regard to the degree of our resistance to cognitive surrender, but we should not be sanguine about our ability to resist.3 And this is because AI is an environment not a tool. I can pick up a tool and put it down, but the environment absorbs me into itself.

On this point, McLuhan remains as useful as ever:

“Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”

Elsewhere, McLuhan put it this way: “The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.” Again: “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinion or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”

This is partially why I have been playing with the idea that one way of framing AI is as a denial-of-service attack on the human psyche.4 Although this particular observation has less to do with how we use AI than how it is used on us.

I realize this rather pugnacious rhetorical mode might be somewhat off-putting, but I think the point needs to be put as forcibly or vividly as possible so that this vital truth lodges not only in our mind but in our heart and gut. And, indeed, it can be a difficult point to fully grasp and I would not pretend to have done so myself.

Andrew McLuhan, Marshall’s grandson who is doing all of us a great service by keeping the McLuhan legacy alive, recently posted a letter from McLuhan to the publisher of the Financial Times of Canada. This letter contains one of the clearest statements of McLuhan’s project.

The relevant part of this note from 1972 is McLuhan’s acknowledgement of the difficulty of the task he has set himself:

“It is not easy to convince people that I am not dealing with ideas but with perceptions, not concepts but observations. It is easy to disseminate ideas, but it is difficult to train new perception. People panic when invited to alter habitual ways of seeing, and looking, and hearing, and feeling. They are quite right in supposing that an effort is being made to alter their identity. The teacher is satisfied with nothing less than that.”

This is not only a wonderfully useful summation of the McLuhanist perspective, it is also one of the clearest mission statements for anyone interested in the educational task that is now before us all, but more about that shortly.5

And, look, if we don’t always fully reckon with the fact that we are formed by our technologies independently of the particular uses to which we put them, we can take some comfort in the realization that even Pope Leo, in his otherwise admirable encyclical on AI, appears to articulate the non-neutrality of AI in a manner that still misses the mark.

As my friend Antón Barba-Kay put it with characteristic élan in the best piece I read on Magnifica humanitas,

“… Leo writes that technology is not neutral, ‘because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.’ Yet this is precisely what people mean when they say that technologies are neutral, namely, that they can be used for good or ill and that it is up to us to decide well. These descriptions of technology’s neutrality proceed from the technocratic terms and premises themselves, the upshot of which is that AI is ‘a valuable tool that requires vigilance.’ Which, to some of us, is interchangeable with the statement that cocaine can be a valuable drug that should be snorted with a pinch of salt.”

“This is not just a potshot,” Barba-Kay continues. “The point is that the language of ‘tools’ implies a set of circumscribed and targeted uses, whereas digital technologies and AI in particular are as multifarious as language. Like drugs, they transform the very conditions of our choosing and thinking.”

Just so. You should read the whole thing.

I’ll draw things to a close by posing the following thesis for your consideration: the best response to emerging technologies, perhaps especially AI, is not media literacy in a cognitivist mode. Rather, what is required is the training of our perception in an ascetical mode.

In the latter part of his intellectual pilgrimage, Ivan Illich, whose work has deeply shaped my own thinking, concluded that his earlier work was inadequate because he had not yet grasped that somewhere in the mid-20th century we had passed from the age of tools to the age of systems.6 While to my knowledge Illich never worked out this distinction at length, the difference seems to lie in the fact that we can stand over a tool, as it were, but we cannot stand outside of a system. The system is an environment rather than a singular artifact. And what is at issue is not simply what we are able to do or not to do, nor even what can be done to us. What is most urgently at issue is our perception.

Although still using the language of tools, in 1988 Illich explained, “I would like to get together a certain number of people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we can do with them, to look at how tools shape our mind, how their use shapes our perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using them.”

Near the end of his life, in the mid-1990s, Illich argued that “existence in a society that has become a system finds the senses useless precisely because of the very instruments designed for their extension. One is prevented from touching and embracing reality.” It was this “radical subversion of sensation,” Illich added, “that humiliates and then replaces perception.”7

Illich went so far as to claim that “we submit ourselves to fantastic degradations of image and sound consumption in order to anesthetize the pain resulting from having lost reality.”

You may not be inclined to take as dire a view of our situation as Illich did nearly thirty years ago, but I believe that his prescription is the right one. Just as McLuhan believed that his role as teacher in response to our technological environment was to train new perception, so Illich believed that what was called for was a new asceticism, although, as he put it in a proposal for a research project exploring the history of perception, “The asceticism which can be practiced at the end of the 20th century is something profoundly different from any previously known.”

“It appears to me that we cannot neglect the disciplined recovery, an asceticism, of a sensual praxis in a society of technogenic mirages,” Illich argued. “This reclaiming of the senses,” Illich went on to elaborate, “this promptitude to obey experience […] seems to me to be the fundamental condition for renouncing that technique which sets up a definitive obstacle to friendship.”

I have always been particularly struck by the line Illich draws from the disciplined training of our perception to friendship. This link is born out by how our digital media environments have constituted not only an epistemic threat but also a threat to our social fabric.

It appears to me, then, that we would do well to take up Illich’s unfinished project. At the very least we should dispense with the idea that AI is just a tool we need to learn to use wisely.

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. I’ll tell you upfront that this is an odd piece in which I try to write my way through an intuition that the role of AI in society can be helpfully framed, at least in part, by analogy to the unconscious. Whether or not you buy the whole thing, I trust you’ll find at least a few helpfully provocative considerations along the way or at least some helpful questions to think with. However useful or not these reflections might be, I offer them out of the conviction that we need better, more fruitful ways of grasping these strange new technologies in our midst and the nature of our relation to them.

Cheers,
Michael

1. According to the early 20th-century English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing.” “The precise opposite is the case,” he argued. In his view, “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” He concluded with a rhetorical flourish: “Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”

There’s a good chance you’ve seen this quoted at some point. It’s fine. It conveys some bit of truth, I’m sure. Nonetheless, it has always struck me as somehow shortsighted or inadequate. Perhaps it’s because I tend to see these lines from Whitehead quoted in defense of indiscriminately outsourcing human cognitive activities to machines without a proper accounting or even awareness of the attendant costs. In defense of Whitehead, who hardly needs my defense, it may also be because those who are quoting him in this manner are almost certainly extending the force of his argument beyond the scope he intended. After all, that paragraph comes from his 1911 An Introduction to Mathematics and what he is actually talking about in that section is the advantage of symbolism and notation in facilitating mathematical calculations, and while he characterizes these as allowing for operations performed without thinking, they are nonetheless learned and deployed by the thinking mind. That said, his talk of “civilization” and that last rhetorical flourish probably invites such a (mis)reading.

The question is not whether such automations of thought, or even externalizations of certain mental processes, can be useful in certain cases. For what it’s worth, I actually think you get a more compelling argument by analogy in the realm of physical rather than mental activities. I’m many years removed from whatever athletic skill I might have once possessed, but the lessons are not lost to me. Much to the dismay of almost every young athlete taking up a sport for the first time, you must spend what always seems like an inordinate and excruciating amount of time executing basic and repetitive drills, over and over again. Wax on, wax off, for those of you of a certain age. But what is, in fact, happening is an ideal example of the dynamic Whitehead is describing. You are in effect automating certain physical movements so that you can perform them without having to think about them. Only then can you play with any kind of creative or exceptional skill. The same holds for learning to dance or to play a musical instrument, etc. Automating basic physical motions is the indispensable foundation of virtuosity.

But does this dynamic apply equally to all realms of human activity? Are there cases in which outsourcing certain forms of activity undermines rather than enables the achievement of the higher goods for the sake of which the activity is pursued? Or might there be goods that attend the “lower order” activities that we would not want to do without? Or is it even always possible, as in mathematics perhaps, to so easily disambiguate distinct sub-routines from given processes or activities? Are there not any irreducibly integral activities that would not survive contact with an attempt to outsource or automate any of their elements? And is there not a difference, as I suggested above, between internally mastered automations of thought and the outright externalization or wholesale outsourcing of cognitive labor? To return to the analogy to physical activity, the would-be athlete that hypothetically employs a machine to do all the “menial” drills for them so that they can get to the really exciting parts of the game will, in fact, never get to them at all. These all strike me as vital and critical questions to explore before we assent to the promises of efficiency and liberation so readily made on behalf of novel technologies.

2. It may be, however, that I’m also rankled by Whitehead’s oft-cited celebration of cognitive automation because it appears to starkly contradict Hannah Arendt’s admonition that we “think what we are doing.” Whitehead was writing nearly half a century before Arendt, and I don’t think Arendt was in any way alluding to Whitehead. It just so happens that these two claims rhyme antagonistically, and I find it useful to explore the tension.

Interestingly, Arendt’s admonition comes from a context that is much closer in its concerns to our present anxieties about technology and human existence. This line comes from the Prologue to The Human Condition, which was first published in 1958. “What I propose in the following,” she explained,

“is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears. This, obviously, is a matter of thought, and thoughtlessness—the heedless recklessness of hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of ‘truths’ which have become trivial and empty—seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”

Among the “newest experiences” eliciting Arendt’s investigations were the launch of Sputnik and the advent of automation. While it may have until recently been judged that Arendt’s fears regarding automation’s impact on labor were misplaced, it might turn out that they are better judged to have simply been premature.

3. As I consider the difference between Whitehead and Arendt on the question of whether we need more thinking or less, I find it useful to distinguish between, on the one hand, building a repertoire of non-conscious routines that allow you to develop higher capacities and, on the other, being in thrall to unconscious forces which erratically drive your behavior in a potentially destructive manner.

Is there a threshold across which Whitehead’s principle flips or reverses? “Civilization advances,” Whitehead claimed, “by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” But what if there is a tipping point? Past a certain threshold, either of quantity or quality, does civilization degrade by extending the number of important operations humans can perform without thinking about them? Or at the very least, do we get a very different sort of civilization than the one we have known? We may soon learn the answer to these questions because the adoption of AI often amounts to the automation of our thinking and the creation of a vast realm of non-conscious action in the world that arises from the externalized storehouses of our personal and collective memory.

4. Arendt worried that we might lose the ability “to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do” as our technological capabilities, explicable chiefly in the language of mathematics, outstripped our capacity to comprehend them in ordinary language. (This suggests that a form of the problem of interpretability predates the advent of LLMs and so-called blackbox algorithms.) In a passage that has renewed relevance and urgency, she went on to say that “it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.” This was a political problem of the first order. Under such conditions, we would no longer be, in any meaningful sense, governing ourselves. Politics as a realm of human action, and constituted by speech, would cease to exist.

5. On Christmas Day, 1958, the same year that Arendt published The Human Condition, W. H. Auden, published “Friday’s Child,” which included these thoroughly Arendtian lines:

The self-observed observing Mind
We meet when we observe at all
Is not alarming or unkind
But utterly banal.

Though instruments at Its command
Make wish and counterwish come true,
It clearly cannot understand
What It can clearly do.

Auden and Arendt were friends and Auden favorably reviewed The Human Condition, but I am uncertain as to the direction of influence.

6. While Arendt offers a straightforward account of how we arrive at the place where we clearly cannot understand what we can clearly do, that is to say, when our technologically enabled action cannot be fully comprehended by our ordinary language, there is another intriguing way of framing the matter.

Actions that are impenetrable to language and thus to conscious thought can also be explained by reference to the unconscious. I am not one to instinctively appeal to the language of the unconscious, but it may be a useful analogy in the service of understanding our relation, individually and collectively, to the artificially intelligent apparatus that is increasingly mediating our experience of the world.

To put it plainly, I can think of two ways of analogizing certain instances of consumer AI to the unconscious. The first is relatively straightforward: as we outsource more and more tasks at the personal, organizational, and institution levels of society to agentic AI, we generate a layer of activity in the world that is functionally sundered from active human judgment and oversight.1 And to the degree that this layer of society structures and informs our experience, the ratio of conscious to unconscious human action shrinks.

Obviously, since at least the dawn of the industrial age if not earlier, there have been relatively opaque systems at work in the human lifeworld. The difference, as I see it, is that these systems were relatively sequestered from the course of ordinary human activity. Artificially intelligent systems on the other hand are increasingly woven far more intimately into our experience. In many cases, these are not only processes that are brought to bear on us by external forces, they are also processes that we unleash and initiate and which act for us and back on us. It is this proximate intermingling of human and machine that leads me to reach for the analogy to the unconscious.

recently made a similar case more eloquently and at greater length. Here is his conclusion:

The traditional danger of AI is usually thought to be superintelligence acting as an existential threat. Yet, this may miss the true and more subtle danger: the AI revolution is a mechanism for transferring the processes of our civilization from under the supervision of consciousness to unconsciousness. But as AI removes consciousness from the workings of the world, it renders the world increasingly uninterpretable, ever more strange and unintelligible. So far, the great ensloppification of the commons has supported this as the major risk of the LLM revolution. And as AI systems become more intelligent, especially if they remain (or are likely to remain) non-conscious, then a further significant risk is consciousness receding in cultural importance.

7. This line of thought runs parallel to an argument I’ve made on and off for about ten years now: digital technology alternatively re-enchants the world. Which is to say that it renders the world mysterious and inscrutable. More:

Our technologically enchanted objects confront us with meaning that imposes itself on us and with which we must reckon. We turn to our technologies for help and invest our hope in their power. We also fear our technologies and see them as the cause of our troubles. The technological forces we encounter are sometimes benevolent but just as often malevolent forces undermining our efforts and derailing our projects.

It is not only that technological objects have the potential to empower us and sometimes even fill us with wonder. It is also that we experience these objects and forces as important determiners of our weal and woe and that they act upon us independently of our control and without our understanding. We are, in other words, vulnerable, and our autonomy is compromised by the lines of technologically distributed agency that intersect our will and desires.

8. The second way of conceiving AI by analogy to the unconscious is perhaps a bit more esoteric, so bear with me. In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan claimed that “with the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself.” At several points, he returns to this idea of electric media as an externalization of our nervous system. For example:

“It is a principal aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system. Our central nervous system is not merely an electric network, but it constitutes a single unified field of experience.”

McLuhan was not the first to suggest as much.2 As early as 1950, the Catholic priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin claimed that media technology constituted “the creation of a true nervous system for humanity” and “the elaboration of a common consciousness.” Through the emerging network of computational and communication technologies, a new layer of reality was emerging, one that enveloped the biological. It was a layer of technologically mediated, unified human consciousness, which he called the noosphere and described as “a stupendous thinking machine.”

(I confess that this is not exactly my customary idiom, but let’s play with these concepts just a little bit. As it is, I’m already trying to convince you that approaching AI psychoanalytically can be a helpful move.)

Electric media extended our capacity to perceive the world, bringing far-flung events to our eyes and ears and collapsing the time it takes to convey a message to near instantaneity. But something else has emerged since the time of Teilhard de Chardin and McLuhan: the enormous growth of artificial memory or data storage capacity. So while electric media extends our nervous system, it more recently also facilitates the collection and storage of unprecedented amounts of information in the form of texts, images, videos, etc. Our nervous system has been supplemented with a digitized memory of gigantic proportions. And it is this digitized memory which has been instrumental in feeding the Large Language Models that are now nearly synonymous with artificial intelligence.

This enormous repository of human knowledge and culture is basically the internet, or at least the internet is how it becomes accessible to us. It is for this reason that in the early 2000s the theorist of digital media, Gregory Ulmer, referred to the internet as a “prosthesis of our collective unconscious.”

Here’s what I think Ulmer means by this. We have always been social animals, that is to say that we are intersubjective creatures of culture. But most of what has shaped us, perhaps especially in our childhood, has also usually faded from our conscious awareness over time. However, the internet functions as a prosthesis of this unconscious dimension of our formation as social beings by making our collective cultural memory accessible. The internet is vast web of the cultural artifacts, symbols, images, texts, and diverse ephemera that have shaped us throughout our lifetimes, linked not by a linear logic but by an almost dreamlike logic of association, not unlike the human unconscious in psychoanalytic theory.

Ulmer believes that this presents us with a profound opportunity. By making the collective unconscious something that we can reflect upon, something accessible to conscious thought, we thereby have a way of overcoming what would have ordinarily been a profound blindness at the heart of our experience. Needless to say, I’ve always been less than sanguine about this possibility. But regardless of your estimation of Ulmer’s optimistic vision—which I have considerably, although I hope not unfairly abridged here—it does seem to me that the emergence of commercial chat-based AIs takes us in a very different direction.

Interestingly enough, the insertion of an ordinary language interface between ourselves and the digitized collective unconscious makes it more obscure and inscrutable to us. The chatbot interface reconfigures our agency in navigating the collective unconscious by, in a manner of speaking, becoming an anti-therapist leading us away from self-knowledge and insight, however disturbing or startling, toward a comfortable and soothing encounter. It offers a false clarity and lulls us into self-satisfaction, guarding us from self-doubt and from lingering too long in an awareness of our ignorance or in a place of troubling uncertainty. It veils the tangled forest of human experience and lights an artificially clear path for us toward the promise of knowledge and wisdom. In this way, though, it sinks us gently but decisively back into the unconscious. Perhaps this is the root of AI psychosis.

Regardless of the correlation to AI psychosis, it is suggestive to consider that some measure of the madness, listlessness, compulsiveness, aggression, anxiety, and despair that characterizes our public and collective existence stems from a progressive retreat of human consciousness in the face of a novel form of the collective unconscious reasserting itself in the form of artificial intelligence.

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Cheers,

Michael

For more than three years now, AI has remained a salient topic of public discussion, debate, and controversy. I suspect that this will remain the case for the foreseeable future. Not surprisingly, then, I’ve been asked to talk about AI quite a bit in recent months. But I confess that I find it difficult to comment on “AI” in a general or abstract way for the same reason that Joanna Bryson gave more than two years ago: “AI is not a unitary actor. It is not unitary, and it does not act.” “It is a set of software engineering techniques and digital services,” she adds, “Thus it is meaningless to discuss what AI will do, or to look for singular solutions about how to govern it.”

Despite the fact that AI is not one thing, however, there are some discernible patterns in the way that “AI” is marketed, hyped, and otherwise foisted on the public. Much of this amounts to the manufacturing of inevitability that I noted a few months back.1 But despite these efforts, or perhaps, in part, because of them, anti-AI sentiment continues to build. Viral clips of commencement speakers being loudly booed are one striking manifestation of this trend, but a team led by reporter Karen Hao has recently published a website mapping various more substantive and organized efforts to resist the encroachments of AI. Oddly enough, it turns out that loudly and frequently touting your product as a potential threat of world-historical proportions to human well-being was a bad marketing strategy. Human beings, after all, have no particular obligation to cheerfully cooperate with our own purported immiseration.

This purported immiseration would have both economic and psycho-social dimensions, but it is with the latter that I am mostly concerned right now. My working thesis about the generalized impact of “AI” as it is currently deployed can be summed up in the observation that the arc of AI bends toward demoralization. As a generalization, there are surely exceptions. But it is hard for me to ignore the mounting anecdotal evidence emanating from diverse and varied quarters.

I continue to think, for example, of something Clay Shirky, who I hardly think of as a technological pessimist, wrote about a year ago describing the state of professors and students at NYU, where he serves as a vice-provost:

“Since the arrival of generative AI, I have spent much of the last two years talking with professors and students to try to understand what is going on in their classrooms. In those conversations, faculty have been variously vexed, curious, angry, or excited about AI, but as last year was winding down, for the first time one of the frequently expressed emotions was sadness.”

Shirky goes on to describe the prevalence of sadness among students as well. This sadness is one form of the demoralization I have been encountering and attempting to understand.

I believe that one dimension of this sadness or demoralization can be attributed to the simple fact that we are increasingly invited to outsource a class of activities that grant us a measure of satisfaction, accomplishment, and purpose.2 But it is not only the case that we outsource these activities and thus fail to reap their existential rewards, it is also true, as recently noted, that the demoralization can set in as a function of AI’s ambient presence in a social ecosystem, such as, in Watkins’ case, the university, where he suggests “the true crisis here is purpose.” “The most galling thing,” Watkins argues,

“is that you don’t have to use AI to still question if your skills matter. You see it in advertising, watch your peers do their homework with it, listen to your professors talk about resisting AI or giving you demonstrations about how to use it, all the while you ask the fundamental question about what is the point anymore?”

There is much that one could say in response, and maybe this isn’t the most pertinent of those potential replies, but I think it should be said: If there is some thing that you are meant to do, who the hell cares if there is a machine that can be made to do it just as well or even better? It is still your thing to do.

Perhaps we’ve been too caught up with the question of human exceptionalism: what is it exactly that makes us special as a species? This is not necessarily an unimportant or trivial question, but it may set us off on the wrong course when we’re thinking about AI. If we are focused on the question of human exceptionalism and we stake our sense of dignity or our experience of purpose on assumptions rooted in the idea that we are special as a species because we can do x, y, or z, then, naturally, we put ourselves in existential jeopardy when we discover that something else in the world, a machine no less, can similarly perform x, y, and z.

But this seems misguided. We’ve made machines that can fly faster and farther than the swallow-tailed kite, but in no way does it follow that the kite should cease from its flight or that it is somehow diminished because of the advent of flying machines. That there is something else in the world that flies tells us nothing about whether the kite ought to fly. Of course it should fly because the point of flying for the kite is not to somehow demonstrate its uniqueness. It is blessedly free from such forms of existential angst, the experience of which might be the thing that does distinguish us as a species!

It seems to me that we would be better off if we were less preoccupied with the question of human uniqueness, if we took for granted that we are creatures of a certain sort making our way in the world with a distinct set of capabilities and potentialities and that we ought to exercise these capabilities and develop these potentialities not because they make us special but because they make us happy.3

I will set aside for a moment the question of whether machines, LLMs specifically, can think or reason or use language in a manner that corresponds to the human use of language, etc. But let us grant for arguments sake that they can. They can certainly generate passable simulations of such things. But why should this mean that I ought not to think for myself and with others? Why should I cease from inhabiting the playground of language because a machine can pretend to play in it as well? Why should I abandon the exercise of judgment or the pursuit of knowledge? We must pursue these things not because the dignity of our humanity is on the line, but because our joy is.

The machine cannot make us yield our ground. It is true that other humans can turn the machine against us, but that is a different problem. Here, I simply want to encourage us not to abandon those activities that bring us purpose, meaning, and delight, which are often the very activities that also bring us together.

In his 1921 book, Tragic Sense Life, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno gave us a rallying cry for our age: “I will not resign from life; I must be dismissed.” Do not resign from life. Let us do what it is ours to do because it is good for us to do it.

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I’ve published a couple of pieces recently that might be of interest to some of you. For , I wrote on the themes of beauty, wonder, and faith: “Do You Still Look at the Stars?” And for Comment, I wrote a piece about AI, the religion of technology, and how we might find our humanity not in our capabilities but in our distinct capacity to receive the gift of existence: “AI as a Christian Heresy.” I also had the pleasure of joining of for a conversation focused on conviviality and Ivan Illich: “Achieving independence for the sake of mutual interdependence.”

Cheers,

Michael

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1. I initially conceived of this post as a relatively brief reflection on the gift of language, and the responsibilities entailed by this gift. As the earliest draft took shape in my mind, these reflections were to be anchored by something the 20th-century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote in a lecture titled “The Idea of Perfection.” “Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them,” Murdoch argued. “The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril.”

This warning has echoed in my mind for some time now, particularly in light of the rise of LLMs and chatbots over the past few years. Whatever else we might say about these technologies and however varied their capabilities, they operate on language as their raw material, language ordinarily constitutes their interface with users, and what they produce in many if not most cases is language. And because one of the foundational principles guiding my thinking is that technology cannot be understood merely as a neutral tool by which we enhance our capacity or secure a measure of convenience, then it seems that with patient urgency we should consider how these technologies will reshape our relationship with, as Murdoch expressed it, these most subtle symbols upon which our human fabric depends.

As I considered what shape these reflections should take, and as I pressed into an array of possible paths and sources, I decided to revive a form this newsletter has occasionally taken, which is that of a numbered list of loosely associated fragments and excerpts all circling around a common theme in a manner which, I hope, proves illuminating—fragments, which when taken together, encourage and sustain meaningful reflection.

2. There are two ways of responding to the rise of language generating machines, or simply “language machines” as Leif Weatherby puts it in the title of his recent influential book, subtitled “Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism.”1 The first is to critically examine their capabilities, their promise and their perils, as well as their actual and potential consequences across a variety of domains (the economy, schools, medicine, politics, etc.) This is an important and necessary response. The second response, no less vital, is to think deeply about language itself and its role in human affairs. The critical impulse often stems from the justifiable intuition that we must weigh the risks, consider the losses, and quite possibly say “no.” But we cannot live by this “no.” We must live by and for that to which we say “yes.” We will be on better footing, all things considered, if we know the good we ought to pursue, affirm, and possibly defend. Conversely, we will be more likely to surrender, unwittingly perhaps, that which we have not learned to properly value or that which we take for granted.

Language is, of course, one of, perhaps chief among, those realities that are so ubiquitous, so woven into the fabric of our existence, nearly coterminous with the fabric itself, that we can barely see it for what it is. So what follows here is an attempt to explore various dimensions of language in a way that might inoculate us against the temptation to readily and unthinkingly outsource our use of language.

3. The poet and teacher Marilyn Chandler McIntyre has reflected eloquently and at length on the need to steward the gift of language. In Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, McIntyre observed that “if language is to retain its power to nourish and sustain our common life, we have to care for it in something like the way good farmers care for the life of the soil.”

4. What might it look like to care for language? McIntyre gives three general prescriptions: “(1) to deepen and sharpen our reading skills, (2) to cultivate habits of speaking and listening that foster precision and clarity, and (3) to practice poesis — to be makers and doers of the word.”

More specifically, she urges readers “regularly to exercise the tongue and the ear: to indulge in word play, to delight in metaphor, to practice specificity and accuracy, to listen critically and refuse clichés and sound bites that substitute for authentic analysis.”

5. “Delight in metaphor,” but only if it’s a good metaphor. In this brief exchange during an interview, J.R.R. Tolkien models one form care for language can take by showing us how to refuse a pernicious metaphor.

Reporter: “What makes you tick?”

Tolkien: “I don’t tick. I am not a machine. If I did tick, I should have no views on it, and you had better ask the winder.”2

While Tolkien might appear a touch cantankerous in this exchange, he is, in principle, right to contest such metaphors because they have a tendency to mediate our self-understanding and shape the way we imagine who we are and what we’re about.

On the matter of metaphor, Iris Murdoch opened another lecture, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts,” with the following claim about metaphor: “The development of consciousness in human beings is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor.” “Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models,” she went on to argue, “they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision.”3

6. Not surprisingly given the analogy to farming noted above, McIntyre draws a good deal on Wendell Berry, particularly a short essay titled “Standing By Words.” In that essay, written over 40 years ago, Berry commented on the “two epidemic illnesses” of the time: “the disintegration of communities and the disintegration of persons.” “That these two are related (that private loneliness, for instance, will necessarily accompany public confusion) is clear enough,” Berry added.

But there was something that was not so well understood in his view, and that was “the relation between these disintegrations and the disintegration of language.” “My impression,” Berry writes, “is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities.”

Notably, Berry also stated that his concern was “for the accountability of language—hence, for the accountability of the users of language.” This is a vital note to strike.

In thinking about the human predicament, I find myself returning to three key ideas: the importance of human judgment, responsibility, and language. These are quite evidently interrelated, and they provide, separately and together, a useful set of lenses through which to consider the impact of artificial intelligence as it takes the form of a language machine to the degree that it undermines our capacity to judge well, encourages the evasion of responsibility, and outsources the vital labor of articulation.

7. Berry also addressed the specialization of language in a later lecture, “The Loss of the University.” Written in the late 1980s, this lecture remains relevant today with regards to its principle subject matter, but, for our purposes, here is Berry commenting on what it means for professors to profess:

“To profess, after all, is ‘to confess before’ [….] But to confess before one’s neighbors and clients in a language that few of them can understand is not to confess at all. The specialized professional language is thus not merely a contradiction in terms; it is a cheat and a hiding place; it may, indeed, be an ambush.”

8. In Berry’s “Standing By Words,” you will find him dissecting the published proceedings of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as experts attempted to discuss how to communicate the risks of a nuclear meltdown to the public. Of this exchange, Berry observes the following:

What is remarkable, and frightening, about this language is its inability to admit what it is talking about. Because these specialists have routinely eliminated themselves, as such and as representative human beings, from consideration, according to the prescribed “objectivity” of their discipline, they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge to each other, much less to the public, that their problem involves an extreme danger to a lot of people. Their subject, as bearers of a public trust, is this danger, and it can be nothing else. It is a technical problem least of all. And yet when their language approaches this subject, it either diminishes it, or dissolves into confusions of both syntax and purpose.

After some further dissection, Berry adds:

And the two commissioners, struggling with their obligation to inform the public of the possibility of a disaster, find themselves virtually languageless—without the necessary words and with only the shambles of a syntax. They cannot say what they are talking about. And so their obligation to inform becomes a tongue-tied—and therefore surely futile—effort to reassure. Public responsibility becomes public relations, apparently, for want of a language adequately responsive to its subject.

So inept is the speech of these commissioners that we must deliberately remind ourselves that they are not stupid and are probably not amoral.

One hears in that last admonition, that we must assure ourselves that they are not stupid or amoral, echoes of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of Eichmann, the banality of evil, and the distinction between stupidity and an inability (or unwillingness) to think, which carries disastrous moral consequences.

9. In an essay titled “Abuse of Language—Abuse of Power,” the 20th-century German philosopher Josef Pieper reflected poignantly on the corruption of language, and his words resonate clearly and distinctly today.

[Plato’s objection to the sophists] could tentatively be summed up in these brief terms: corruption of the word—you are corrupting the language! Still, the core of the matter is not yet identified with this. The specific threat, for Plato, comes from the sophists’ way of cultivating the word with exceptional awareness of linguistic nuances and utmost formal intelligence, from their way of pushing and perfecting the employment of verbal constructions to crafty limits, thereby—and precisely in this—corrupting the meaning and dignity of the very same words.

Word and language, in essence, do not constitute a specific or specialized area; they are not a particular discipline or field. No, word and language form the medium that sustains the common existence of the human spirit as such. The reality of the word in eminent ways makes existential interaction happen. And so, if the word becomes corrupted, human existence itself will not remain unaffected and untainted.

[…]

Corruption of the relationship to reality, and corruption of communication—these evidently are the two possible forms in which the corruption of the word manifests itself.”

10. Pieper, as the title of his essay already tells us, correlated the corruption of language to the corruption of political power:

“… the abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word, indeed, finds in it the fertile soil in which to hide and grow and get ready, so much so that the latent potential of the totalitarian poison can be ascertained, as it were, by observing the symptom of the public abuse of language. The degradation, too, of man through man, alarmingly evident in the acts of physical violence committed by all tyrannies (concentration camps, torture), has its beginning, certainly much less alarmingly, at the almost imperceptible moment when the word loses its dignity.”

11. In Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman, Pieper’s younger contemporary, the eminent critic George Steiner, similarly commented on the plight of a language made to bear the weight of unspeakable atrocities:

“Languages have great reserves of life. They can absorb masses of hysteria, illiteracy, and cheapness … But there comes a breaking point. Use a language to conceive, organize, and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens; use it to dehumanize man during twelve years of calculated bestiality. Something will happen to it …. Something of the lies and the sadism will settle in the marrow of the language. Imperceptibly at first, like the poisons of radiation sifting silently into the bone. But the cancer will begin, and the deep-set destruction. The language will no longer grow and freshen. It will no longer perform, quite as well as it used to, its two principal functions: the conveyance of humane order which we call law, and the communication of the quick of the human spirit which we call grace.”

12. In The Edge of Words, the theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams discusses what he considers to be the under-appreciated musings on language by the 20th-century physician turned novelist and amateur semiotician, Walker Percy, who was in turn channeling the work of the 19th-century American pragmatist, Charles Pearce.

Williams, building on Percy, argues that language transforms the field of our experience from a dyadic environment based on stimuli and response into a triadic world constituted the interposition of linguistic symbols between minds and objects, a world characterized by a measure of freedom and elaboration.

According to Williams, “we cannot easily imagine human speaking without the risk of metaphor, without the possibility of error and misprision, without the possibility of fiction, whether simple lying or cooperative fantasy. In other words, the human speaker takes the world as itself a project: the environment is there not as a fixed object for describing and managing but as a tantalizing set of invitations, material offered for reworking and enlarging.”4

To avail oneself of the power to outsource articulation to a language machine makes a certain sense under particular conditions, that is to say the conditions that constitute efficiency, optimization, and productivity as the highest human goods. Under such conditions, the labor of articulation, which is simply another way of talking about the act of thinking and judging, is reduced to the status of a commodity and its relative value measured under the sign “time is money.” What is lost in this accounting is precisely the experience of the world as a “tantalizing set of invitations” eliciting nothing less than a free relation to the world and an experience of what Ivan Illich, following Aquinas, designated by the Greek word eutrapelia, or “graceful playfulness.”

13. Much of Williams’ analysis builds on the experience of “frustration and bafflement” when we attempt to articulate ourselves before others and how even in this frustration we disclose something of consequence, or perhaps elicit some uncomfortable realization in the other. It recalled Arendt’s observations about the “revelatory quality of speech and action” which “comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against them — that is, in sheer human togetherness.” “Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word,” Arendt urges, “he must be willing to risk the disclosure.” Of course, much of our willingness to take such a risk depends on the degree of trust we have in the community among which we venture the risk. Although it is also true that, absent such trust, courage must at times carry the day.

14. There is one more portion of Williams’s discussion worth mentioning. In discussing frustration and bafflement and what this tells us about language and speaking. Williams writes of an “ethical ‘default setting’ in our exchange of words which prompts me to regard the other’s speaking as something I must treat as other, as making certain demands and having a certain hinterland ... The person I speak with must be assumed to own their words as I do mine.”

That’s an arresting formulation: “The person I speak with must be assumed to own their words as I do mine.”

The ordinary, good faith use of language presumes the fidelity of those who speak and those who listen. It presumes that they have a stake in what is said and will assume responsibility for it. How might we be said to own the words produced by language machines on our behalf? I would venture to suggest that it is the subtle absence of these non-linguistic qualities, qualities perhaps conveyed chiefly by the eloquence of the body, that can produce the experience of the textual uncanny when one encounters artificially generated text, text which no one can be said to own.

15. Wendell Berry’s wife, Tanya, can also teach us something about our use of words. In a recent talk, Grace Olmstead related the following exchange with Tanya Berry.

“Having to commute to work sounds like it could be ‘drudgery,’” Tanya said. “Practicing scales on the piano—that could be seen as drudgery, too.” But then she observed, “The use of a decent language can change your whole idea of what something is.” It is worth repeating. The use of a decent language can change your whole idea of what something is. That transformative sentence has not left me since. Tanya suggested that the right words could change one’s mind. No, more than that—that the right words could change one’s entire perception and experience of a thing. The right language reanimates our work. But to reanimate our work, we must apply a new habit of naming to the things we do.

16. Stanley Hauerwas: “You can only act in the world you can see, but you can only see by learning to say.”5

17. From Eliot’s “Little Gidding”:

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.”

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture and the moral life. And happy New Year. This installment took shape in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, each associated with waiting, although the seconds we count down to midnight are rather different from the days some of us might count down to Christmas. In any case, this piece is about waiting. It is an attempt to reframe waiting as something other than tedious and wasteful, indeed, as something potentially life-giving. As always, I hope these reflections are valuable to you. Thank you for reading. And may this new year, inevitably laden with its frustrations and sorrows, also bring you joy and peace.

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I’m writing a couple of days after Christmas, and thus on the other side of the season of Advent. For those unfamiliar with the rhythms of the Christian liturgical calendar, Advent spans the four Sundays leading up to Christmas Day. Chiefly, it is a season of waiting, recalling and re-enacting an ancient anticipation of a long-expected Savior. The affective register of the season is characterized by patient longing, sober reflection, and resilient hope. Today, of course, this ancient tradition competes and mostly loses out to an alternative liturgical season that tends to be marked freneticism, exhaustion, and, too often, emptiness.1 Yet despite this, the spirit of ardent and even enchanted expectation seems to linger in the childhood experience of Christmas, even when it is observed in strictly secular contexts.2

Maybe it is because my own children have been especially eager for the arrival of Christmas this year. Maybe it’s because I recently learned that Amazon announced it would be piloting 30-minute deliveries in Philadelphia and Seattle, and I’m old enough to remember when the standard window for delivery of goods ordered by mail was six to eight weeks, which was occasionally long enough to forget that had you ordered anything at all! Whatever the case, I’ve been thinking about that practice of waiting and how unusual periods of sustained waiting have become.

There’s no particular virtue in waiting six to eight weeks for the delivery of goods, of course, but I find myself wondering whether certain virtues might be encouraged by the practice of waiting—patience, say, or prudence—and that certain vices, rashness or prolifigacy, are abetted by the eclipse of waiting as an ordinary element of everyday life. Mostly, though, I believe we can come to see instances of waiting as freighted not merely with frustration but also with possibility.

Maybe it’s a bit much to speak about the eclipse of waiting, but the example of shrinking delivery times is just one of the many instances in which the space between desire and fulfillment or impulse and satisfaction has been effectively collapsed.3 Alongside such cases, we might also consider the pervasive availability of distraction and stimulation which has altered the phenomenology of waiting in those instances where we might still be required to wait, even if only briefly. The Pavlovian move to pick up the smartphone when stopped at a red light comes to mind as an example of the latter.

So what exactly does it mean to wait? Why are we so determined to avoid waiting? Is the state of waiting something that ought to be avoided whenever possible? Is there any good that can come from waiting?

Before moving on, it is worth acknowledging that the set of experiences I’m exploring are far from universal. It is those of us with sufficient resources who will be most likely to eliminate times of waiting, and often by being waited on by those who cannot afford not to wait. Moreover, it is also true that there are forms of waiting that cannot be so easily avoided by any of us and that we wouldn’t wish for ourselves or our neighbor: waiting for justice, waiting for a cure, waiting for love, etc. But perhaps it is precisely because these latter forms of waiting impose themselves upon us that it is worth considering how our techno-economic milieu structures and conditions our everyday experience of waiting. It is in and through such ordinary experiences, after all, that we end becoming ourselves.4

When I think about the experience of waiting, I remember that the seventeenth-century polymath and proto-existentialist Blaise Pascal once suggested that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” This is one of the paradigmatic scenes of waiting in my imagination. In our age of perpetual digital distraction, this line is frequently quoted as a prescient rebuke of our contemporary habits. Yet the fact that Pascal wrote long before anyone ever dreamed of a smartphone tells us that there’s something deeper at play in the human psyche, something that precedes the ubiquitous availability of distractions (or diversions, as Pascal called them) and which in fact constitutes an activity as a distraction. After all, an activity is only a diversion or distraction if by it we consequently fail to give our attention to that which rightly demands it of us.

But if we were to look for that line among his Penseés, we would find that Pascal’s insight does not translate quite so straightforwardly to our distraction-addled circumstances. He seems to have in mind something more general: contentment with one’s overall situation rather than abiding solitary stillness. Because a person cannot be content with their situation, even after they have achieved a reasonable and modest degree of prosperity, they go off in search of diversions: gambling, games, adventure seeking, invading a neighboring town, and the like.5 Thus does the malcontent stir up all manner of trouble in the world. However, this seems not to tell us very much about the experience of waiting, solitary or otherwise.

But as Pascal develops his line of thought, his analysis does seem to speak more directly to the experience of waiting, or, more specifically, to why it is that we grow impatient with waiting.6

“On further consideration, when, after finding the cause of all our ills, I have sought to discover the reason of it,” Pascal writes, “I have found that there is one very real reason, namely, the natural poverty of our feeble and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can comfort us when we think of it closely.”

In other words, the human condition can be tough to bear, and, if at all possible, we’d rather not think about it. In moments of solitude and stillness, however, this is precisely where our minds tend to go. It is in these unfilled moments that we may find ourselves becoming acutely aware of our anxieties, failures, and fears, our loneliness and desperation, the futility of our labors, and, naturally, our mortality. It’s why we can’t abide solitude and stillness, and why Pascal believes we are so quick to turn to diversions. When we are not diverted or distracted, either legitimate or frivolous activities, then we begin to feel time and in this way our being comes into focus. In these moments we become an object of thought to ourselves, and we sustain our own gaze about as well as we do the uncomfortable gaze of others. Self-reflection of this sort, inflicted rather than chosen, in which the self is encountered not as a project or projection, but with disconcerting clarity—this kind of self-reflection can be intolerable.7

A later French philosopher, Henri Bergson, who developed an account of time as duration, explored the experience of waiting, along complimentary lines. In his discussion of Bergon’s work, literary scholar Harold Schweizer, puts it this way:

“In saying that he cannot protract or contract time ‘á volonté,’ as he would like, Bergson states the obvious: that the person who waits cannot defer or prolong, shorten or lengthen—his being. In waiting, the waiter thus feels—impatiently—his own being: it is a feeling of the un-measurable, perhaps immeasurable, that which cannot be protracted or contracted.”8

“In other words,” Schweizer continues, “we experience time only then when it is not exactly calibrated to the will, when it is other than, or in conflict with, how we thought time should run.” In these moments time is “slow and thick.”

In Schweizer’s elaboration of Bergson, there lies an implicit perspective on the relationship between waiting and agency: when we wait, we do so because we cannot do otherwise, time is out of sync with our will. There are two directions in which we can take this. In the first instance, this seems obviously correct. We wait because we must. But in this first case there is a further distinction to be made.9 We can imagine cases were it would be right and good for us not to wait should we have the power to calibrate our time to our will. In other words, we can imagine cases of imposed waiting, which might be rightly judged to be unjust. The one who is wrongly imprisoned waits to be vindicated and must bear up under this waiting occasioned by injustice. Or, we might also imagine a person seeking life-saving treatment (whom we aptly call a patient), but who must wait for the machinations of an insurance company and a hospital bureaucracy to determine whether they will receive the care they require. There is in such cases a form of resilient, if also indignant, waiting that must be practiced, but it would be better if they were not made to wait.

But there are also cases in which we wait against our will, and in which it would be unjust of us to force the calibration of our will and our time. I am thinking here of cases where we wait on others whose will and desires might be at odds with our own. To wait when our will is out of accord with the will of others, even when we might have the power to impose our own desires, is both just and good. This is a way of honoring our neighbor and respecting the integrity of their desires. We might think of this as a form of civic waiting, a virtue appropriate to the responsibilities of freedom in a pluralistic society. We might also think of similar situations that unfold in more private contexts such as romantic relationships. In such cases, patient waiting is simply the shape love takes in relation to the other. To wait is to relinquish the desire to exert power, to achieve mastery, or to seek control in cases where such efforts would destroy the very goods that we desire.

But I’m not sure that all forms of waiting can be understood as instances in which we must wait because we must. In other words, not all forms of waiting imply a negative relation to power and agency. For his part, Schweizer, elsewhere in his book, suggests that “we might think of waiting also as a temporary liberation from the economics of time-is-money, as a brief respite from the haste of modern life, as a meditative temporal space in which one might have unexpected intuitions and fortuitous insights.”

We can describe waiting as a condition that is, as it were, imposed from above, but it is also possible to describe urgency, hurry, and immediacy as conditions imposed from above. In such cases, waiting could be conceived of both as a form of resistance and as a warranted insistence on the space for deliberation and reflection, which are the preconditions of freedom. Many of us live under the conditions of the just-in-time economy, that is to say of a techno-economic order that thrives when we feel ourselves deprived of the time and freedom to so order our lives that we are not lured into availing ourselves of the costly, last-minute conveniences proffered by the digital marketplace.10 Under these conditions, waiting, while not without its own costs, is power.

We can also frame such waiting as a resistance to what I have elsewhere described as the enclosure of the human psyche. But to get there, let’s backtrack just a bit. It seems to me that there is a family resemblance between Pascal’s explorations of a spiritual restlessness that cannot abide inactivity and Bergson’s elision of waiting and being. In both cases, we come painfully close to something more basic and real than the illusions with which we ordinarily make do.

To put matter this way recalls how the 20th-century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch conceived of freedom as a liberation from fantasy, which she defined as “the proliferation of blinding self-centred aims and images.” “It is in the capacity to love, that is to see,” Murdoch argued, “that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists.” And this liberation from fantasy begins with “attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.” Thus, in her account, “freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision which, when this becomes appropriate, occasions action.”

The line from waiting to the form of freedom as contact with the real that Murdoch is advocating runs through attention. Accurate vision, a form of seeing that is indistinguishable from love in its selflessness and which generates a freedom from fantasy and for action, arises from attention, which following Simone Weil, Murdoch defined as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” “It is a task to come to see the world as it is,” Murdoch acknowledges, and that task is chiefly the task of patiently and lovingly paying attention. Which is why Schweizer writes that “waiting, as the French activist and philosopher Simone Weil advocates, must be relearned as a form of attention.”11

Thus we might say that waiting is what one is made to do, but also what one may choose to do, and in that choosing, a choosing “not to do,” there is power, and it is, paradoxically, a power that enables our choosing “to do.”

Put less enigmatically, a moment of waiting is not necessarily wasted time; it is a moment of potential. To seize and capture a moment for waiting against the imperatives of efficiency and time-saving is to secure a space of psychic liberation in which the virtues of patience and loving attention can be cultivated. Or, as Schweizer put it, “If we claim our experience of waiting rather than being merely subjected to it, we resist the commercialization of time, we own our time, we make time matter—we matter.”

The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer once observed that “the essence of our temporal experience of art is in learning how to tarry.” Also, in relation to art, Schweizer spoke on behalf of the revelatory power of “waiting on rather than waiting for, special way of waiting, lingering rather than waiting.” “In this lingering,” he argued, “things make their brief appearance.”

I would only add that such tarrying and waiting, which discloses the depths of the work of art to our consciousness, is just as effective in the realm of our ordinary experience as it is in the presence of the work of art. To tarry or to linger at the table, the park bench, the shore, or even busy city street is to invite the things of our common world to make their appearance. It is to learn to see independently of our desire to do as we ought. It is to unlearn the impatience born of the desire to master, predict, and control the world that is first and always a gift.

Reading Schweizer’s book, I discovered the lovely notion of “Sabbath eyes” articulated by Theodor Adorno in his Minima Moralia. “The eyes that lose themselves to the one and only beauty are sabbath eyes,” Adorno wrote. “They save in their object something of the calm of its day of creation.”

Sabbath eyes, in Schweizer’s lovely summation, are eyes that “rest on their object.” May we strive to see with such eyes in this new year.

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I began writing about technology and culture around 2010. It didn’t take long for me to recognize one of the most common tropes deployed by those whose business it was to promote new technologies. It was the trope of technological inevitability. By 2012, I wrote about how those who deployed this trope suffered from a Borg Complex. Alluding to the cybernetic alien race in the Star Trek universe, I defined a Borg Complex as a malady that afflicts “technologists, writers, and pundits who explicitly assert or implicitly assume that resistance to technology is futile.”

The first time I identified the tendency in this way, I argued that “the spirit of the Borg lives in writers and pundits who take it upon themselves to prod on all of those they deem to be deliberately slow on the technological uptake. These self-appointed evangelists of technological assimilation would have us all abandon any critique of technology and simply adapt to the demands of technological society.”

I then proceeded to outline a series of symptoms by which we might diagnose someone with a Borg complex:

1. Makes grandiose, but unsupported claims for technology

2. Uses the term Luddite a-historically and as a casual slur

3. Pays lip service to, but ultimately dismisses genuine concerns

4. Equates resistance or caution to reactionary nostalgia

5. Starkly and matter-of-factly frames the case for assimilation

6. Announces the bleak future for those who refuse to assimilate

7. Expresses contemptuous disregard for past cultural achievements

8. Refers to historical antecedents solely to dismiss present concerns

Throughout the middle-period of my late blog, The Frailest Thing, I would periodically post to the Borg Complex files some then-recent example of the rhetoric of technological inevitability. Before most of you found your way to this newsletter, I revisited some of these themes in a post from 2021, adding some new voices to my argument, including the informed perspective of Thomas Misa, a historian of technology at the University of Minnesota:

“… [W]e lack a full picture of the technological alternatives that once existed as well as knowledge and understanding of the decision-making processes that winnowed them down. We see only the results and assume, understandably but in error, that there was no other path to the present. Yet it is a truism that the victors write the history, in technology as in war, and the technological ‘paths not taken’ are often suppressed or ignored.”

And then there was Margaret Heffernan’s superb reflections on the theme. The goal of those who deploy the rhetoric of technological inevitability, she rightly insists, “isn’t participation, but submission.” “Anyone claiming to know the future,” she adds, “is just trying to own it.”

I don’t need to tell you that the rhetoric of technological inevitability has dominated discussions (or, more likely, directives and pronouncements) regarding AI that you’ve encountered over the past two or three years. In particular, AI-talk has manifested the distinct quasi-religious variety of the Borg Complex, which can be particularly pernicious since it understands resistance to be not only mistaken, but heretical and immoral.

In fact, it sometimes seems to me as if the adoption of AI is driven chiefly by the rhetoric of inevitability exacerbated by the related logics of the prisoner’s dilemma and an arms race. Indeed, it is a curious fact that some of the very people who are ostensibly convinced of the inevitability of AI nonetheless lack the confidence you would think accompanied such conviction and instead seem bent on exerting their power and wealth to make certain that AI is imposed on society. I’m calling this tendency, with a nod to Herman and Chomsky, manufactured inevitability.

It was a phrase that first came to me back in June when I read about how Ohio State was mandating the use of AI as part of its AI Fluency initiative. And I was prompted to write this up by news that Purdue was making “AI competency” a graduation requirement. It is hardly surprising that institutions of higher education, which stand to receive substantial funding from tech companies like Open AI and Google, would find ways to mandate the use of AI under the guise of preparing students for the workforce of the future (which often turns out to be a fool’s errand). But there are, of course, countless banal instances of AI being surreptitiously woven into the fabric of ordinary experience, from search engine results to software updates that introduce AI functions nobody asked for. There is no better way to reinforce the myth of technological inevitability than to stage the ubiquity of AI in such a way that it renders the adoption of AI a fait accompli.

I’d be glad for you to share any other instances of manufactured inevitability that you’ve observed.

I should acknowledge that while there is no inevitability, agency and responsibility are unequally distributed. Thus, it is worth noting that the strategy of manufacturing inevitability has the effect of obfuscating responsibility, especially on the part of those who in fact have the greatest agency over the shape of the techno-economic structures that order contemporary society for the rest of us.

The pioneering computer scientist, Joseph Weizenbaum, told us as much nearly 50 years ago in Computer Power and Human Reason: “The myth of technological and political and social inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience. Its service is to remove responsibility from the shoulders of everyone who truly believes in it. But in fact there are actors.”

The myth of technological inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience. It bears repeating.

More from Weizenbaum, who writes with refreshing conviction:

“But just as I have no license to dictate the actions of others, neither do the constructors of the world in which I must live have a right to unconditionally impose their visions on me. Scientists and technologists have, because of their power, an especially heavy responsibility, one that is not to be sloughed off behind a facade of slogans such as that of technological inevitability.”

But Weizenbaum understood one more thing of consequence: the necessity of courage. Allow me to quote him at length:

I recently heard an officer of a great university publicly defend an important policy decision he had made, one that many of the university’s students and faculty opposed on moral grounds, with the words: ‘We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?’ But the good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility.

I am aware, of course, that hardly anyone who reads these lines will feel himself addressed by them—so deep has the conviction that we are all governed by anonymous forces beyond our control penetrated into the shared consciousness of our time. And accompanying this conviction is a debasement of the idea of civil courage.

It is a widely held but a grievously mistaken belief that civil courage finds exercise only in the context of world-shaking events. To the contrary, its most arduous exercise is often in those small contexts in which the challenge is to overcome the fears induced by petty concerns over career, over our relationships to those who appear to have power over us, over whatever may disturb the tranquility of our mundane existence.

If this book is to be seen as advocating anything, then let it be a call to this simple kind of courage. And, because this book is, after all, about computers, let that call be heard mainly by teachers of computer science.

I’m not a computer scientist, but I do, in fact, feel myself addressed by Weizenbaum’s words. While the degree of agency we share over the shape of our world varies greatly, I remain convinced that we all have choices to make. But these choices are not without consequences or costs. And each one of us will find, from time to time, the need for courage, and it strikes me that such courage, call it civil courage or courage in the ordinary, is the antidote to what Arendt famously diagnosed as the banality of evil.

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Earlier this week, Deb Chachra, whose newsletter, Metafoundry, you should check out, likewise posted for the first time after a period of “hibernation” and cleverly titled that (re-)introductory post “initiating wake-up sequence.”

I liked that, but I needed a more faithful representation of how I’ve experienced the past few months with regard to the labor of thinking well and writing well. It felt more apt for me, although perhaps a touch melodramatic, to allude instead to the experience of emerging from a wilderness. I may, on another occasion, reflect on the experience at greater length because it is not altogether irrelevant to the usual themes of this newsletter, but, of course, it also involves vicissitudes of personal experience that will be uninteresting to others.

Insofar as it may be of interest to you who exist beyond my own “skull-sized kingdom,” to borrow David Foster Wallace’s memorable formulation, it may have involved the emerging psychodynamics of a post-literate society (the topic of a forthcoming installment). This experience has also informed the development of a thesis that I will pursue here and there over the next few months, and one of the few clear intuitions I have about our current technological milieu: that the arc of artificial intelligence bends toward demoralization. Or, to put it otherwise, that burnout society has phased into the demoralized society.

So as this newsletter steps forth out of the wilderness, I did want to send this preliminary post to give you an opportunity to consider whether you wish to remain on the mailing list before I sent out a fresh installment.

By way of (re-)introduction, I usually gloss my writing as having to do with the intersection of technology, culture, and moral life, and I’ve already suggested some of the themes that will preoccupy my thinking and writing in the near term.

Needless to say, AI remains at the foreground of public discussions about technology, and there are numerous writers doing good work exploring the intellectual, political, and moral implications of AI’s various instantiations and applications. I remain more or less convinced by what I wrote two to three years ago about AI companions, AI and mental health, AI and art, and AI’s relationship to already existing techno-social realities. (Those links will give new subscribers a good sense of where I’m coming from.)

But some things need to be said in fresh and more compelling ways, and again and again, for my sake as much as for anyone else’s. So I will again find my way to saying something that will, I trust, be helpful given the particular set of influences and experiences that shape my idiosyncratic thinking about what have become matters of concern for most if not all of us.

I may have received that last bit of encouragement I needed to finally hit “publish” again after reading a recent dispatch from Sara Hendren (whose brilliant work you would do well to follow) when she wrote the following:

I spend a lot of time reading the arguments of my nonfiction writer friends and admirees — peers in policy, academia, journalism — and I am plenty often convinced by them in the usual way. I am convinced by their logic and by their evidentiary appeals. I desperately need that persuasion as nourishment, and I seek out minds much sharper and more skilled than my own. I need a steady diet of their ideas to think with. I’m acutely aware of my limitations.

But I don’t really long to join these writers in that kind of persuasion, to have that form of something to say. I said this a while ago — I want to make art, not arguments — and when [her student] said this thing about being convinced, I recognized it again. I want to be convincing about what it feels like to be a human being.

I resonate with much of this, particularly the bit about an awareness of limitations. Unlike Sara, I am not an artist, or at least I would not claim that title for myself. But I, too, want to articulate something convincing about what it feels like to be a human being. This is, I think, one of the great needs of the moment. Art will do this best, I concede. But perhaps there’s still something worth saying in another register. After all, it has long been my contention that the question of technology, pursued to any depth, simply becomes the question of the human.

So, this is what I will continue to attempt: to put before us the claim, articulated long ago in Lear, “Thy life is a miracle. Speak yet again.”

Okay. Here we go, then.

Cheers,

Michael

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Consider two related experiences. The first is the experience of setting out to accomplish a specific task on your digital device of choice, and then finding, after several minutes of aimless wandering from app to app or tab to tab, that you no longer remember what it was that you set out to accomplish in the first place.

The second is the experience that starts with sitting down in the late evening, maybe to catch your breath after a day of work. You have other things you need or desire to do, but you decide to check your phone while you give yourself this short break. An hour goes by, maybe two or maybe three. You never get to that thing you wanted to do. You don’t quite feel like you got much of a break either. At various points you thought about pulling away from the feed, but you couldn’t quite manage it. Your will power could not achieve escape velocity from the inertial pull of the infinite scroll.

I presume most if not all of you will readily recognize these experiences. What they have in common are the qualities of aimlessness and forgetfulness. And I wonder whether they do not present us with an important clue into the nature of our digital condition. A condition that might be characterized by various words—burnout, exhaustion, alienation, and outrage among them. To these, I would also add lethargy, personal and perhaps also cultural. Might we not, for example, characterize the doom scrolling state as fundamentally a state of lethargy in which we are unable to rouse ourselves to action?

But if so, why? What induces this state of lethargy?

I can no longer recall the source, it was many years ago, but I once heard someone argue that words are repositories of cultural memory.1 The sense was that you could dig into the history of a word—down to its roots—and thereby learn a great deal about the history of human experience and consciousness just as an archeologist might learn a great deal about our history by digging into the earth.

In that spirit, I was recently struck by the realization that at the root of our word lethargy lies the ancient Greek word lēthē, which means “forgetfulness” or “oblivion.” Etymologically, lethargy is derived from lēthē combined with argos, which means “idle,” suggesting that lethargy is idleness or inactivity induced by forgetfulness. Here, perhaps, was a clue worth investigating.

We can start with the observation that Lethe was also the name of a minor deity associated with oblivion as well as of one of the rivers of the underworld whose waters induce forgetfulness. In his evocative book, A Primer for Forgetting, Lewis Hyde collects a number of relevant reflections and observations from which I’ll draw in the next few paragraphs.

Hyde notes, for instance, the account given of the oracle of Trophonios by the ancient historian Pausanias. Those who sought the oracle’s wisdom underwent an elaborate ritual, which included drinking from two fountains: one bearing the Water of Lethe and the other bearing the Water of Mnemosyne.2 The goddess Mnemosyne was the goddess of memory and, not incidentally, the mother of the Muses.

Hyde, who began with a fascination with memory that then developed into an interest in forgetting, observes that “the two waters appear in sequence and are complementary, not contradictory.” Hyde continues: “They bespeak the conjoining or the ambiguity of Forgetting/Not-Forgetting, Covering/Discovering, Lethe/Aletheia, each power inseparable from and shadowed by the other.”

It turns out that lēthē is also at the root of a Greek word for “truth,” alethia—literally, un-forgetting (or un-concealing, the sense of which Heidegger made much). The truth of things lies in our not-forgetting or our remembering.3

Hyde does not mention it, but, more than a millennia later, Dante will complete his journey through the mountain of Purgatory and also encounter two streams:

“To one side, it is Lethe; on the other,
Eunoe; neither stream is efficacious
unless the other’s waters have been tasted:

their savor is above all other sweetness.”

In both cases, and as the whole of Hyde’s compendium of reflections on memory and forgetting suggests, we must remember and we must forget in right measure.4 Indeed, much of our present malaise might be traced back to technologically mediated disorders of remembering and forgetting. But to see this we might first need to expand our sense of what memory is and is for, and Hyde once again supplies us with another relevant anecdote.

In Plato’s Republic, we find the story of Er, a soldier who is killed in battle but returns to life to tell the story of his experience in the Land of the Dead. There, he witnessed how souls preparing to re-enter the land of the living were led through the valley of Lethe and brought to the River of Forgetfulness. “Great thirst drove them to drink this water—” Hyde comments, “those without wisdom drinking especially deeply. As each man drank, he forgot everything.”

Naturally, this accords with Plato’s theory of knowledge. For Plato, the highest knowledge, knowledge of the good, is not so much discovered as it is remembered. As Socrates puts it in the Phaedo, “What we call learning is really just recollection.” Anamnesis is the Greek word for this from knowing arrived at by remembering.

You’ll remember that Socrates’ critique of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus, which I sometimes call the ur-text of technology criticism, focused on how writing diminishes memory.5 Lacking Plato’s metaphysics, we tend to have little sympathy for such arguments. They seem like inordinate hand wringing about the fact that we don’t know anyone’s phone number anymore. But even without embracing Plato’s metaphysical package, there’s an insight here that we ought to take seriously: living well entails remembering. To forget certain truths is to be at a loss as to who we are and what we ought to be about, to enter the state of lethargy.6 To overcome such lethargy, we must remember. Or, perhaps better, we need a practice of remembering.

But to be immersed in the digital stream is to drink from the waters of Lethe, and daily we drink for far too long like the unwise souls in Er’s account of the Land of the Dead. The most powerful tools of externalized memory, by a straightforward logic, have induced a profound forgetfulness.

The critique of externalized memory, however, tends to focus our critical attention on the tendency to forget what we have outsourced as well as the vital difference between what we know by heart and what we merely know how to access. This is no small thing. We need certain truths ready to hand, mingling with our imagination, our thoughts, and our desires. But my interest here is not in this form of forgetting, but in the way that we enter an existential state of forgetfulness when we are immersed in our digital Lethe, in how long we allow ourselves to abide in this state, and in the effect over the course of a lifetime of such indiscriminate immersion.

We need a practice of anamnesis, a remembering of reality outside of the digital cave of shadows. Maybe we just need to practice the discipline of refusing to drink from the waters of the digital stream in the first place.7 What matters most in this regard is obviously not our capacity to recall discrete bits of information. Rather it is the practice of remembering what is deep down at the heart of things, and holding that vision before us. This vision of the good, if we might so call it, has the power to move us to action, to sustain our labor and our care, to strengthen us against the alienating and disintegrating forces let loose in our world. Perhaps this is why Mnemosyne is the mother of the muses. Creative, intellectual, and perhaps even moral energy flows from such remembering.

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My writing is reader-supported and an important part of how I make a living. But there are no paywalls. My work is supported by those who are both able and willing to do so. If that’s you, you can subscribe at the usual rate of $5/month or $45/year. If that seems a bit steep, you could use the second button below to support the Convivial Society at about $3.50/month or $31/year. You know, a cup of coffee a month or something like that.

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On New Year’s Eve, I had the good fortune of having a question raised by one experience in the morning and the answer presented by a second in the afternoon.

First, the question.

In the morning, while aimlessly scrolling through my feeds (not recommended), I stumbled on a post about a music video, which had been created and edited with generative AI tools. The author of the post noted that, although clearly the product of AI, the video nonetheless displayed a certain aesthetic integrity. He was then subsequently surprised to discover that not only was the video created using AI, so too were the music and lyrics. I would share the video with you, but I haven’t been able to track it down again. I’m not even certain about the platform I was using at the time, although I suspect it was Notes. Perhaps you saw it too. The video had a slight Tim Burton-esque feel to it, and one of its recurring aesthetic features was an eye-like sphere that prominently adorned the motley array of whimsical creatures as well as the landscape. The music was unremarkable. It had a repetitive droning quality—the sort of thing I could imagine someone using as ambient music or white noise.

My response was twofold. First, I reflected on the fact that this digital artifact represented an immense technical achievement. Among those who are not AI boosters and techno-optimists, there can be a tendency to reflexively downplay the sophistication of the technology in question or the impressive pace at which it has progressed. But uncritical cynicism can blind us to reality just as easily as uncritical optimism. There’s no use in it.

But, second, I realized that I was, in fact, having to work up this rather tepid appreciation. In truth, it wasn’t even appreciation for the digital artifact itself. In fact, I was bored by the video before it was over. And, look, I admit that this could be saying more about me than about the AI-generated artifact. Perhaps you would feel differently if you saw it. Perhaps you have encountered AI generated images or videos that have genuinely moved you or otherwise provided you with a measure of substantive pleasure. Regardless of the underlying technical achievement, I find my experience of AI-generated content generally forgettable and often demoralizing.

But I don’t want to treat my reaction as a foregone conclusion, something that must necessarily be the case. Why is this my reaction, and, as far as I can tell, the reaction of many others, too? Why does AI-generated content, though impressive technically, become banal so quickly?

That was the question I found myself contemplating in the morning.

In the afternoon, the answer, or at least part of the answer, came to me rather unexpectedly, while I was taking an afternoon walk with my kids.

In the place on an old oak tree where a limb had once been, one of my children spied this. “Daddy, look!”

We’ve walked this path many times before, but none of us had ever noticed this charming cat, or is it a lion cub, looking out at us. But it must have been there all along. At least, it has the appearance of having been there for some time. And I rather like the idea that it was patiently waiting to be seen. Who knows.

However, long it had been there, it delighted my children when they discovered it, as it delighted me, in turn.

Then, my mind went back to the AI music video and the question it had raised for me. Before I could articulate it, I knew that I had somehow stumbled upon an answer in this simple cat staring out of the tree.

This unassuming act of human creativity presented itself as the inverse of the music video. That video was the product of an immensely complex and costly apparatus, yet it yielded no warmth of feeling and little if any abiding satisfaction or pleasure. This painted cat was the product of simple and inexpensive tools, yet it yielded genuine delight and, perhaps more significantly, a sense of companionship.

Was the difference in the materiality, the texture of the thing, so different from the characteristically smooth and glassy surface of the AI image itself and the screen in which it is encountered. Or was it the context? It surprised us, and that counts for something.

I recalled walking along Florence’s narrow streets, nearly twenty years ago, knowing that I was working my way toward the Cathedral of Santa Maria, Il Duomo, but without a sense of how close I was. Then, I turned a corner and suddenly there it was towering before me. I audibly gasped. This immense structure had managed to sneak up on me, and in that way my wonder was doubled by surprise.1 This painting, vastly different in scale and scope, had likewise surprised me.

The surprise was important, but there was more. The surprise suggested intention, and intention suggested a person.2 The painting in the tree was personal, although I suppose not in the sense that word now tends to suggest. This creative act was not personal in that it disclosed some private dimension of its creator’s life. It was personal in that it bore the marks of a person.

Perhaps this is the aura of the work of art, however simple that work of art may be. The aura is not a property which adheres to the artifact, rather it is something that emerges in dialog with another person. The work of art is a medium: it mediates consciousness. The aura of a work of art is what we sense when our humanity, our personal nature perceives another speaking to us through their creative endeavor, however rudimentary or complex it may be. The aura is the echo of intention only another person can perceive.

So in this cat peering from the tree, I hear the voice of the person who thought to put it there: “I was here once, as you are here now. And I thought of you.”

Now it seemed to me that so much of our conversation around the capabilities of artificial intelligence have been misguided, focused as they were on its approximation of human virtuosity. Can it excel as the best of human artists? Can it fool us by its predictable perfection? But a simulacra of human virtuosity is not what we need. We need each other. We need signs of life about us. We need to know that we are not alone. And this is something we must consider not just in relation to the singular artifact, but also in relation to our environment. In a time of acute loneliness, the proliferation of AI-generated content seems not unlike an act of pollution, compromising the integrity of the social ecosystem.

As I continue to think about the cat in the tree, I might also modify a previous claim. I said that it was personal because it bore the mark of human intention, not because it disclosed something personal about the artist. But maybe I was too hasty to dismiss such a possibility. I think I can learn something about the person who took the time to paint this cat in the oak tree.

I can guess something about their spirit, their generosity, their playfulness, their willingness to put something out in the world without any certainty of enjoying the approval or thanks of another. This painted cat, silly as it may seem, invited me to be the kind of person who would think to do likewise—in a different form, perhaps, but in a similar spirit. How different this creative act was in its spirit from so much of what we now encounter in the world.3 It was a gift. It asked nothing for itself or its creator. Its essence was its gratuity.

And that matters. It matters as an example of an alternatively constructed world. The good life must be accessible, it must be congruent to our nature, and it must be, dare I say it, convivial. We know, although we sometimes live as if we have forgotten, that affluence does not necessarily yield happiness. And we have been formed to believe that simple, unsophisticated things cannot truly satisfy us. But this encounter was a reminder to me, and perhaps through me to you, that the good life may require much less of us, and of our world, than what we imagine. No one needs to calculate how much energy was consumed by the creation of this drawing on the tree. And this particular work of art was not something I could posses for myself. I freely share it with every other passerby. It is not a resource to be extracted.

I can no longer recall where I found that AI music video, but I will probably never forget where the cat in the tree found me. And I will come to it again and again. I may recall it with my daughters many years from now, and think back fondly on it. Perhaps one day I will mourn the loss of the tree that bears the image. And through all of that, I will be enriched and my experience enlarged.

My thanks to the artist, wherever they may be.

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Cheers and happy new year,

Michael

A few weeks ago, I posted about how certain lines or quotations can function as verbal amulets that we carry with us to ward off the deleterious spirits of the age. Such words, I suggested, “might somehow shield or guide or console or sustain the one who held them close to mind and heart.”

One such line for me, which I did not include in that earlier post, comes from a rather well-known 1964 essay by historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics.”1 Of course, to say it is “well-known” is a relative statement. I mean something like “well-known within that tiny subset of people who are interested in technology and culture and who also happen to care about what older sources might teach us about such matters.” So, you know, not “well-known” in the sense that most people would mean the phrase.

That said, the essay should be more widely read. Sixty years later, Mumford’s counsel and warnings appear all the more urgent. It is in this essay that Mumford warned about the “magnificent bribe” that accounts for why “our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics.”

Here’s how Mumford describes the bargain. Forgive the lengthy quotation, but I think it will be worth your time if you’ve not encountered it before.

The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified.

There’s a lot to think about in those few lines. For my money, that paragraph, written sixty years ago, tells us more about the current state of affairs than a thousand takes we might stumble across as we browse our timelines today. There is, for instance, just below the surface of Mumford’s analysis, a profound insight into the nature of human desire in late modern societies that is worth teasing out at length, but I’ll pass on that for the time being.2

A little further on, nearing the close of the essay, Mumford tells readers that they should not mistake his meaning. “This is not a prediction of what will happen,” he clarifies, “but a warning against what may happen.” More than half a century later, I’m tempted to say that the warning has come perilously close to reality and the only question now might be what comes next.

But all of this, patient reader, is prelude to sharing the line to which I’ve been alluding.

It is this: “Life cannot be delegated.”

Simply stated. Decisive. Memorable.

Here’s a bit more of the immediate context:

“What I wish to do is to persuade those who are concerned with maintaining democratic institutions to see that their constructive efforts must include technology itself. There, too, we must return to the human center. We must challenge this authoritarian system that has given to an under-dimensioned ideology and technology the authority that belongs to the human personality. I repeat: life cannot be delegated.”

I say it is simply stated, but it also invites clarifying questions. Chief among them might be “What exactly is meant by ‘life’?” Or, “Why exactly can it not be delegated?” And, “What counts as delegation anyway?” So let’s start there.

Whatever we take life to mean, we should immediately recognize that we are speaking qualitatively. Mumford is telling us something about an ideal form of life, not mere existence.3 Earlier, for example, he had spoken about life in its “fullness and wholeness.”

Mumford’s claim is a provocation for us to consider what might be essential to a life that is full and whole, one in which we might find meaning, purpose, satisfaction, and an experience of personal integrity. This form of life cannot be delegated because by its very nature it requires our whole-person involvement. And by delegation, I take Mumford to mean the outsourcing of such involvement to a technological device or system, or, alternatively, the embrace of technologically mediated distraction and escapism in the place of such involvement.

I also tend to read Mumford’s claim through Ivan Illich’s concept of thresholds. Illich invited us to evaluate technologies and institutions by identifying relevant thresholds, which, when crossed, rendered the technology or institution counterproductive. This means that rather than declare a technology or institution either good or bad by its nature, we recognize instead the possibility that a technology or institution might serve useful ends until it crosses certain thresholds of scale, volume, or intensity, after which it stops serving the ends for which it was created and become, first, counterproductive and then eventually destructive.

So, with regard to the principle that life cannot be delegated, we might helpfully ask, “What are the thresholds of delegation beyond which what we are left with is no longer life in its fullness and wholeness?”

This seems to be an especially relevant question as we navigate the ever-widening field of technologies which invite us to delegate an increasing range of tasks, activities, roles, and responsibilities. We are told, for instance, that we are entering an age of LLM-based AI agents, which will be able to streamline our work and simplify our lives across a wide array of domains.

Perhaps. My point is not to rule out any such possibility.4 Rather, I am inviting us to critically consider at the outset where the thresholds of delegation might be for each of us. And these will, in fact, vary person to person, which is why I tend to traffic in questions rather than prescriptions. I am convinced that these are matters of practical wisdom. No one can set out a list of precise and universal rules applicable to every person under all circumstances. Indeed, the temptation to wish for such is likely a symptom of the general malaise. We must all think for ourselves, and in conversation with each other, so that we can arrive at sound judgments under our particular circumstances and given our particular aims.

The principle “Life cannot be delegated” is simply a guidepost.5 It keeps before us the possibility that we might, if we are not careful, delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.

Perhaps we are tempted to think that care, skill, judgment, and responsibility are only of consequence when the circumstances are grave, momentous, or otherwise obviously consequential, which means that we might miss how, in fact, even our mundane everyday work might be exactly how we care, develop skill, exercise judgment, and embrace responsibility. (It occurs to me just now, that the etymology of mundane, usually given a pejorative sense in English, suggests something that is “of this world.” It is the stuff our world is made of, to take flight from the mundane is to take flight from the world.)

If you’ve been reading for a while, you know this is something I’ve sought to articulate at various points in the last few years (for example). So I’m always glad to encounter someone else trying to say the same thing and saying it well. Recently, I stumbled across this bit of wisdom from Gary Snyder6:

“All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher that the religious institutions originally worked with: reality. Reality-insight says … master the twenty-four hours. Do it well, without self-pity. It is as hard to get the children herded into the car pool and down the road to the bus as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha-hall on a cold morning. One move is not better than another, each can be quite boring, and they both have the virtuous quality of repetition. Repetition and ritual and their good results come in many forms. Changing the filter, wiping noses, going to meetings, picking up around the house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick—don't let yourself think these are distracting you from your more serious pursuits. Such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape from so that we may do our ‘practice’ which will put us on a ‘path’—it is our path.”

I’ll conclude by offering you a complementary principle to Mumford’s: To live is to be implicated.

I take the language of implication, with its rich connotations, from Steven Garber, who writes about work and vocation from a religious perspective. Drawing on Wendell Berry and Václav Havel, Garber argues that we should seek to live in a manner that implicates us, for love’s sake, in the way the world is and ought to be. In my view, Garber’s exhortation echoes Mumford’s warning but in another key. To say that life cannot be delegated is to say that life, lived consciously and well, will necessarily implicate us in the world. May we have the courage to be so implicated.

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Year’s End

It is customary for me to share Richard Wilbur’s poem “Year’s End” in the last installment of the year. Enjoy.

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

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On April 20th, 1968, at a small Catholic seminary just outside of Chicago, students gathered for a meeting of the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP). These students were there in preparation to spend their summer as volunteers on service projects in Mexico.

A few weeks earlier in March, a letter had gone out to the participants exclaiming, “Welcome aboard! You’re in for an exciting and profitable trip!” They were assured that the speakers for the gathering would be “top notch,” including a professor from Notre Dame and a representative of the National Council of Churches. But the letter also noted that there would be a “controversial” speaker, “Monsignor Ivan Illich of the Center of Intercultural Documentation [CIDOC] in Mexico.”

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any amount of time, you probably know that Ivan Illich has influenced my own thinking and writing. He is best known for a series of books that came out during the 1970s, which offered radical critiques of industrial age technologies and institutions: Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Energy and Equity, and Limits of Medicine.

For the purposes of what follows, all you need to know is that Illich was already known for his trenchant criticism of western-led development projects in Latin America. The UN had declared the 1960s the first Development Decade. It was also the decade the Peace Corps was launched. And, not to be left behind, the Roman Catholic Church had also embarked on a series of similarly intentioned projects in Latin America. This was the broader context for the gathering to which Illich, the “controversial” speaker, had been invited.1

The text of Illich’s talk, including comments he felt compelled to add as a preface after he spoke with some of the participants beforehand, is usually given the title “To Hell With Good Intentions.” This gives you a sense of what Illich had to say to these very well-intentioned students and the CIASP leadership. Two paragraphs in and he’s telling them he was “equally impressed by the hypocrisy of most of you, by the hypocrisy of the atmosphere prevailing here.”

After wryly offering three guesses as to why someone with his views might be invited to address such a gathering, Illich states bluntly, “I did not come here to argue. I am here to tell you, if possible to convince you, and hopefully, to stop you, from pretentiously imposing yourselves on Mexicans.”

I’m tempted to give you a blow by blow of the whole thing, but I suspect you’re already wondering what, if anything, this obscure talk by a “controversial” priest has to do with technology.

I will not keep you in suspense. I am taking Illich’s blistering speech and, in earnest good will, offering it, by analogy and in spirit, to all of those who would today seek to do good in the world through the development of AI technologies.2

That there are those in the tech industry who seek no good but their own profit, no one would deny. That there are those in the industry who seek to do good in the world, some might deny due to a cynicism that was perhaps not wholly misplaced. But I do not deny it. I know it to be the case. And it is precisely to those who seek to do good that I offer this Illichian provocation.

But I am not Illich and thus not in the habit of speaking quite so stridently, and I have no interest in affecting the style for rhetorical effect. Nonetheless, I will venture this assertion in his spirit to those seeking to do good for the world through the development of technology:

I am not here to argue. I am here to tell you, if possible to convince you, and hopefully, to stop you, from pretentiously imposing yourselves on the rest of humanity.

There are two specific themes in Illich’s talk that I will offer you, but much of it amounts to calling those who would do good to/by others to a critical self-awareness. And, honestly, most of us would probably do well to do a little self-searching in this spirit regardless of whether we work in tech or not. As Illich puts it toward the end of this talk, “it is profoundly damaging to yourselves when you define something that you want to do as ‘good,’ a ‘sacrifice’ and ‘help.’” The implication here is that we are quite adept at deciding what we want to do, and only then calling it “good” so that we might feel better about imposing ourselves on others.

First, though, let’s crystalize this disposition to do good with a recent example. I was motivated to write this piece because I had recently been reading Illich again, but also in response to a blog post Open AI CEO Sam Altman wrote a few weeks back. Titled “The Intelligence Age,” Altman argued (or better asserted) that AI, so long as we don’t lose faith, will soon usher in an era of unprecedented global prosperity.

“I believe the future is going to be so bright,” Altman enthuses, “that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.” He adds that “although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace.”

The discovery of all of physics! But there’s more.

AI will not only fix the climate, it will also help you with your scheduling, hard to tell which presents the greater challenge.3 “AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants,” Altman writes, “who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf.”

“Eventually we can each have a personal AI team,” Altman continues, “full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine.”

Look, I know what many of you are thinking. Altman, by disposition and professional self-interest, necessarily traffics in hype. He is not a man to be taken at his word. So, yes, I’m pretty much in agreement with , who rightly cautioned us against doing so.4

But, let’s just pretend for a moment that Altman is sincere in his belief that AI will usher in an age of ineffable abundance. Okay, fine, maybe that’s too much of a stretch. Let’s just suppose that if not Altman, there are others working in tech—engineers, programmers, and developers, managers and executives, marketers and VCs—who do earnestly believe something like the vision Altman lays out. They are probably more thoughtful than Altman. They have thought more deeply about the possible harms of AI, and are thus more circumspect. But they are, nonetheless, determined to see AI used for good, for the betterment of society, for the general improvement of the world.

Maybe this is you. I hesitate to use the direct address. It strikes me as presumptuous and hectoring. But maybe, maybe it is you.5 You are pursuing AI for good, you want ethical AI, you believe AI can help the disadvantaged, you think AI can improve outcomes for the marginalized. Maybe. Maybe. But I urge you to consider Illich’s challenge as I will briefly translate it for our moment.

Much of what Illich had to say to those bright-eyed students preparing to spend their summer volunteering in Mexico are summed up in these early lines:

“I do have deep faith in the enormous good will of the U.S. volunteer. However, his good faith can usually be explained only by an abysmal lack of intuitive delicacy. By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the middle-class ‘American Way of Life,’ since that is really the only life you know.”

Illich recognized that “development” work, as it was happening in the 1960s, was, in fact, a vehicle by which a whole complex nexus of values and systems was being exported to and imposed upon the “under-developed” world, and ultimately in such a way that the recipients of this aid would be subjected to new forms of poverty and dependence—“modernized poverty,” as Illich called it elsewhere.

In Deschooling Society, for example, Illich observed that “once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will.” “Poverty,” he adds, “then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect.”

Moreover, Illich warned, “the increasing reliance on institutional care adds a new dimension to their helplessness: psychological impotence, the inability to fend for themselves.” “Modernized poverty,” in his view, “combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency.”

Illich’s critique, if we direct it toward the present spirit of Silicon Valley’s evangelists of efficiency and abundance, raises several pointed questions. Those who are developing new technologies and those in a position to decide whether they ought to be adopted in specific contexts might consider asking some version of the following:

— Is this a technology that actually empowers users with agency to accomplish the work they choose for themselves?

— Or, is this a technology that will entrap users in systems which create new forms of dependency and diminish self-directed agency?

— Will this technology generate an experience of real-world competency, or will it undermine the possibility of such an experience by promising to automate essential and meaningful labor?

— What implicit values will this technology bring into an existing social ecosystem? How will it erode the existing values that animate the institution or group it seeks to serve?

— In designing/adopting this technology, are we merely evangelists for a soulless gospel of optimization and efficiency?

— Because computerized systems excel at generating data of varying degrees of quality and usefulness, will this technology introduce measures and metrics into spheres of life where they do little good and mostly induce unnecessary anxiety and competitiveness?

— What versions of “modernized poverty” will this technology introduce into communities and sectors of society which are already under-resourced and inadequately supported?

— Will this technology introduce new social divisions and promote disabling hierarchies in the social ecosystem in which it is deployed?

— If the technology fails or if it is discontinued, will it leave its users worse off than they would have been had the technology never been introduced in the first place?

The line of argument implicit in these questions reaches its climax just after Illich tells his audience that “next to money and guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders”—to which list, of course, we can add the tech evangelist. It is then that he drops this devastating line:

“Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to the people of the U.S. the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared.”

I think this is it. There is a vision of the good life, a vision of what it means to be human implicated in all of our tools, devices, apps, programs, systems, etc. There is a way of being in the world that they encourage. There is a perspective on the world that they subtly encourage their users to adopt. There is a form of life that they are designed to empower and support.

Is this way of life alive enough to be shared?

If I were to become the ideal user of the technology you would have me adopt, would I be more fully human as a result? Would my agency and skill be further developed? Would my experience of community and friendship be enriched? Would my capacity to care for others be enhanced? Would my delight in the world be deepened? Would you be inviting me into a way of life that was, well, alive?

Illich wrapped up his talk with these closing lines:

“I am here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce exercising the power which being an American gives you. I am here to entreat you to freely, consciously and humbly give up the legal right you have to impose your benevolence on Mexico. I am here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your powerlessness and your incapacity to do the ‘good’ which you intended to do.”

At this point, I trust you can make the translation and re-application of these lines for yourself.

But I don’t want to give these lines the final word. There is one other theme woven more subtly in Illich’s talk with which I’ll close. It’s not quite stated positively, but it can be inferred.

For instance, it is there when Illich says to his audience, “you cannot even meet the majority which you pretend to serve in Latin America—even if you could speak their language, which most of you cannot.” Or when he says more forcefully, “If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell.”

What is explicit problem in these lines is the incapacity to hear what those you seek to serve would tell you if you had ears to hear. What is perhaps implicit is that if you could hear, you might then be able to do the good. Perhaps not the “good” you intended, but the good that was needed.

Part of the problem in the case of these Americans in Mexico is that they could not understand the language. But that is only part of the problem. The more significant issue is a deeper incapacity to listen to others not because you do not speak the language but because you have already decided that you know what is best for them. Then, convinced of your wisdom and goodness, you are prepared to impose your will on the other.

Around the same time as Illich delivered this talk, he was also doing language training and reflecting, perhaps more deeply than most, on what it might mean to learn a language. In a reflection titled “The Eloquence of Silence,” Illich argued that “it takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds.” In this same reflection, Illich spoke of three kinds of silences. The first among these Illich described as “the silence of the pure listener … the silence through which the message of the other becomes ‘he in us,’ the silence of deep interest.”

This silence, a silence woven in humility and renunciation of power, is the precondition of any meaningful service to others. But it is this silence, born of the desire to listen and to understand, that seems utterly absent from so much of the innovation that emerges from the tech sector today. This does not mean that it is impossible to produce technology that actually does good in the world. It is only to explain, in part perhaps, why so much of it fails to do so.

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In this installment, I offer you a historical analogy that I hope will be of some use to you as you think about and try to make sense of the social and personal consequences of digitization.

Cheers,
Michael

If you were to ask me something like “What’s the most urgent task before us?” or “What counsel do you have to offer in this cultural moment?” I would say this:

Resist the enclosure of the human psyche.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m sure there are other necessary and urgent tasks. But this would be my contribution to the conversation. I would be offering not only an imperative to pursue, but also, and perhaps more importantly, an analogy to clarify and interpret the techno-economic forces at play in a digitized society. Such analogies or concepts can be useful. They can crystalize a certain understanding of the world and catalyze action and resolve. They can be a rallying cry.

In any case, I’ll say it again: resist the enclosure of the human psyche.

Some of you may immediately intuit the force of the analogy, but I suspect it needs a little unpacking.

Here’s the short version: I’m drawing an analogy between a historical development known as the enclosure of the commons and the condition of the human psyche in the context of a digitized society. The enclosure of the commons is the name given to the centuries-long process by which lands available to the many were turned into a resource to be managed and extracted by the few. My claim is that structurally similar processes are unfolding with the aim of enclosing the human psyche and transforming it into a resource to be managed and extracted.

The long version starts now.

Your Phone Is Listening

In his 1964 classic, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, the late cultural historian Leo Marx remarked upon the frequency with which a certain anecdote appeared in the letters of early 19th-century American writers. The recurring anecdote was an account of when and where the writer first heard the distinctive whistle of a train.1 As Marx went on to demonstrate, this anecdote typically framed the distinctive whistle as the intrusion of an Industrial Age machine into an idyllic pastoral scene.

Perhaps every age has its own set of recurring anecdotes about its encounters with novel technologies—anecdotes which suggest some intrusion of a nefarious or complicated force into the world. In our time, anecdotes of this sort seem to gather around our smartphones. More specifically, I have in mind the stories we tell about how our phones must be listening to us. Usually, the form of the story involves, first, comments we made in conversation, usually about some entirely random thing that we’re sure we haven’t talked about in ages or much less searched for online, and, second, how this thing, whatever it was, now pops up in our feeds, typically as an ad that gets served to us on a website or social media feed. We can think of such stories as tales of digital uncanny. I, for example, have a story like this about Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

More recently, I was talking with two friends and the topic of personalized bookplates came up. I mentioned embossing seals in passing as another option. (I do not, for the record, own an embosser.) The next day, one of these friends texted me a screenshot of an ad that popped up on their feed for embossers from the very same online store where the other friend had purchased their book plates. As in all of these stories, there appears to be, on the surface of things, no more elegant explanation for the timing and specificity of the ad than that a device was listening to the conversation. It is a viscerally compelling theory. It may not be technically correct, depending on who you ask, but it feels true to our experience and that in itself tells us something of interest.2

In an essay published last year, “You Have a New Memory,” Merritt Tierce reflected on these uncanny moments and what she meant by the claim that the “internet is reading my mind.” She gives various anecdotes supporting her sense of the claim, the most elaborately detailed involved ads for opal earrings. I won’t relay the whole thing, you can read it for yourself, but here is her reflection on the incident:

“Maybe I did Google it at some point. I didn’t. But I’m thinking what you’re thinking, that I fed the data to the internet and I don’t remember. Maybe that’s true. (But it isn’t.) Assume for the sake of argument that it isn’t, that the internet just … read my mind. In point of fact, I don’t think the point of fact actually matters, because things like this have happened often enough that I now think there’s no real difference between my feeling that the internet is reading my mind and the yes/no true/false of it. If you feel like it’s happening, that is, itself, a happening.”

Elaborating somewhat on what she is describing, Tierce adds,

“So what I’m experiencing is only advertising, or coincidence, or it’s just frequency illusion, or synchrony. If there is order to the system, but the order is too complex for you to understand it, your experience will be mostly of disorder studded with coincidence and frequency illusion, and you will have no ability to say whether the system is disordered or too complex to understand. They become synonymous and meaningless.”

Whether our devices are, in fact, listening to us or not, it seems clear that the experience of our technological milieu is such that most people find the claim entirely plausible. Indeed, not only plausible, but altogether likely. And while I wouldn’t say that the question of fact is of no consequence, I do think it can be approached rather pedantically by those who want to brush off the fact that there are countless and concerted efforts made to capture our attention and thus our data for the express purpose of rendering us so predictable and pliable that it would be superfluous for a device to be actively listening to us.

However, I’m not sure how helpful it is to describe all of this as a case of “the internet reading our minds.” Instead, I’ll suggest another framing better anchored in historical and material processes, which also has the advantage of implicitly suggesting certain modes of resistance. That the internet is reading our minds conjures an amorphous, quasi-mystical phenomenon about which there would be little we could do. Consider instead that we are suffering through a process that has a concrete, historical precedent, one that we might describe as the enclosure of the human psyche.

Yes, the feeling that our phones are listening to us arises from a specific set of occurrences, but it is plausible and it persists in the face of corporate denials and expert skepticism because the whole technological environment is increasingly designed so as to enclose the human psyche not with hedgerows and fences, but with an array of data gathering tools and techniques so that the human psyche might be rendered more manageable and so that its value can be more readily extracted.

The Enclosure of the Commons

Before developing the analogy any further, though, it might be helpful to describe the enclosure of the commons in a bit more detail for the sake of those who may not be as familiar with the historical process. I’ll keep it brief, and I’ll emphasize the specific aspects that, in my view, give the analogy its explanatory power and punch.

As you might guess, there are numerous works examining the legal and economic processes by which the commons were enclosed, Marx (Karl not Leo this time) figures prominently in the literature as does the 20th-century historian, E. P. Thompson. England, from the late medieval period to the 19th century, supplies the classic case study.3 The process generally involved denying common people, by various means, the right to use the land for their subsistence needs as had been customarily the case.

For our purposes here, I’ll borrow a few observations from a recent essay by Eula Biss, “The Theft of the Commons,” which combines historical research and interviews with residents of Laxton, one of the very few villages in England that were never enclosed.

Biss eloquently described enclosure as “the centuries-long process by which land once collectively worked by the landless was claimed by the landed.” “That land already belonged to the landed, in the old sense of ownership,” Biss is quick to point out, “but it had always been used by the landless, who belonged to the land. The nature of ownership changed within the newly set hedges of an enclosed field, where the landowner now had the exclusive right to dictate how the land was used, and no one else belonged there.”

In a short lecture that I’ve cited before, “Silence as a Commons,” Ivan Illich described the commons this way: “People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households.”

“In addition to common pasture,” Biss explains, “commoners were granted rights of pannage, of turbary, of estovers, and of piscary—rights to run their pigs in the woods, to cut peat for fuel, to gather wood from the forests, and to fish.” These specific rights essentially enshrined the more basic human right to share in what the land provided to all. But enclosure changed this situation. Biss continues:

“In the course of enclosure, as written law superseded customary law, commoners lost those rights. Parliament made property rights absolute, and the traditional practice of living off the land was redefined as theft. Gleaning became trespassing, and fishing became poaching.”

I won’t dwell on the commons or the history of enclosure any longer, but there were two specific ways of justifying the process of enclosure that I wanted to emphasize for the sake of the analogy I’m developing here.

First, enclosure was justified, in part, by the argument that the commoners were backwards and generally unruly. Biss puts it this way,

“Commoners were ‘rough and savage,’ according to eighteenth-century rhetoric. They were lazy. Their practice of sharing land was ‘barbarous,’ and their economy was ‘primitive.’ They had an inexplicable preference for using their free time for sport, rather than for paid labor.”

Enclosure was thus partially advanced as a measure to manage those deemed insufficiently enlightened … for their own good, of course.

But the dominant rationalization for enclosure, already implicit in the comments about the unruly commoners above, was increased efficiency and profit, for the landed few.

As Biss notes, “the landowners who promoted enclosure promised ‘improvement.’” “Improvement meant turning the land to profit,” she further explains. “Enclosure wasn’t robbery, according to this logic, because the commoners made no profit off the commons, and thus had nothing worth taking.”

From this point forward, I will develop the idea that we can make sense of many of the forces operating in a digitized society by analogy to the enclosure of the commons. Only now it is the human psyche that is being enclosed, a process often rationalized along similar lines: the human psyche, unruly and inefficient, is in need of better management, and it is a source of potential value that must be cultivated and extracted.

The Enclosure of the Human Psyche

Digitization and computation have made it so that we can be everywhere tracked, measured, monitored, and surveilled—often voluntarily and even gladly so.4 This is the message of the digital medium. And it is so because digitization, by its very nature, makes it possible to track and encode vast swaths of human experience, making multiple dimensions of that experience susceptible to mathematical manipulation and analysis. The urge to measure with a view to optimization was, of course, already manifest in the time studies of late-19th-century factory workers and the emergence of scientific management. Digitization dramatically increased the scope of what it is possible to measure and analyze, fueling the fantasy that we could bring not just observable bodily movements under administration, but also the human psyche.

Even this fantasy, it is worth noting, predates the advent of digitization. It is implicit in the modern drive to operationalize mathematics as a universal key to understanding and manipulating reality—first nature, then society. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is already complaining of the “gentlemen” who believe “human action will automatically be computed according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, reaching to 108,000 and compiled in a directory.” What was missing then was a sufficiently robust data gathering and computational infrastructure. This is what the digitization of society supplied.

But the enclosure of the psyche required one further development. In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan gives us an important clue to what this development might be in language that fits nicely with the enclosure analogy:

“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.”

When we use any given technology, we tend to be most interested in what we will be able to do with that technology. We want to know how a tool will empower us. But we should be at least as concerned with how any tool we use shapes our perception and our experience.5 We should be especially interested in these dynamics given the degree to which our view of reality, both the reality that is before us moment by moment and the larger reality that exceeds our immediate purview, is mediated by digital media, a degree that I suspect McLuhan, far-sighted as he was, could hardly fathom in the early 1960s.

The senses are the gateway to the psyche. To enclose the psyche, it would be necessary to enclose the senses first. So, in this case, the fences and hedgerows become the devices that channel, direct, and colonize our perception of the world.

As a simple experiment, ask yourself a straightforwardly objective question: how much of your waking hours are spent looking at a digital screen?6 Set aside whatever qualitative judgements such a question might entail, don’t worry about justifying the nature of the activities, etc. All that we are interested in just now is the brute fact. To what degree is our attention, which is to say our perception of the world and the ground of our consciousness, mediated by a digital screen?

To this same degree, we are abetting the enclosure of our psyche. And it is not only that our gaze is captured, it is that in that very process our perception is mediated, our consciousness commandeered, and all of this in such a way that empowers political and economic structures of control and extraction.

One reading of AI is to see it precisely as a further development of the enclosure of the psyche, one that is made possible by an earlier stage of enclosure in which the collective human psyche was mined for raw material, the data which feeds the computational processes. In this new stage of enclosure, altogether novel and disturbing possibilities are opened up. Consider, as an example of the darker eventualities on the table, a recent paper by a group of scholars at MIT and the University of California titled “Conversational AI Powered by Large Language Models Amplifies False Memories in Witness Interviews.” Their research showed the heightened susceptibility to false memories induced by introducing a LLM into the interview process.

The Commons of Thought

Already in the early 1980s, Ivan Illich, in the essay linked above, was developing this line of analysis. Illich described the issue he was addressing in this way: “how to counter the encroachment of new, electronic devices and systems upon commons that are more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads—commons that are at least as valuable as silence.”

So far, I’ve been mostly interested in analogizing certain developments in digitized society to the process (and motives) of enclosure. But it’s also worth considering whether the analogy to the commons can tell us something about the human psyche. Illich gives us a clue: silence.

The enclosure of the commons subjected the land to more efficient and persistent means of extraction, time was money. Improvement meant activity. So, too, with the psyche. The mind at rest, the psyche in a moment of silence, is like the land lying unused and unproductive. From this vantage point, what we might feel as the problem of distraction is just the logic of enclosure at work. The unceasing stream of notifications and pings, the persistent way even the built environment beyond the screen hails us—all of this is just the necessary operation of the engines of value extraction efficiently at work on the raw material that is the human psyche. When the enclosure of the psyche is complete, we lose the right to wander and roam and loaf about in thought, just as the enclosure of the commons restricted freedom of movement and disdained economically unproductive but life-affirming forms of leisure.

And we lose ourselves, too. For as Illich observed, “silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons.” And in lines that seem as if they could have been written in the era of LLMs and AI chat bots, he adds: “It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.”

Several years ago, Matthew Crawford argued along similar lines. “Lately, our self-appointed disrupters have opened up a new frontier of capitalism,” Crawford wrote, “complete with its own frontier ethic: to boldly dig up and monetize every bit of private head space by appropriating our collective attention. In the process, we’ve sacrificed silence — the condition of not being addressed.” “And just as clean air makes it possible to breathe,” Crawford added, “silence makes it possible to think.”

In Crawford’s framing, the commons is an environment that makes thought possible. In my analogy, the mind itself is the commons to be protected against enclosure, the built environment is the means of enclosure. Close enough, of course. But Crawford does also say that “attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it.” On this point, I’ve written before at some length arguing that we should resist framing our attention as a resource.7

Those arguments against understanding our attention as a resource were inspired by Illich’s writing on the commons. Illich believed that even critics of enclosure were missing a critical element of the transformation enclosure wrought. In his view, they tended to focus on the economic injustice of denying the commoners a share in the wealth generated by working the land, but they ignored a more fundamental reality. “The appropriation of the grassland by the lords was challenged,” Illich noted, “but the more fundamental transformation of grassland (or of roads) from commons to resource has happened, until recently, without being subjected to criticism.”

Illich believed that the transformation of the commons into a resource, regardless of who profited, was itself a great loss. By accepting the logic of resources, extraction, and value, we had surrendered the ground on which an entirely different mode of life could be built.

This is why I began by saying that, in my view, the most important task before us is to resist the enclosure of the human psyche, because even our capacity to imagine an alternative way being in the world, to say nothing of enacting such a vision, depends on it.

There is one final dimension of enclosure that I’ll note briefly before wrapping up. Is there an even more literal form of the commons to which the analogy of enclosure points us? The individual human psyche does not seem like a thing held in common. But, in fact, that presumption may itself be a symptom of the enclosure of the psyche, although there are certainly many other forces leading toward that same conclusion. What if the psyche were a thing held in common? That is to say, what if our purchase on reality and the emergence of the self depended on human relationships and communities? From this perspective, the enclosure of the human psyche deprives us of a common world, which yields an experience of solidarity and belonging.

I’ve elsewhere developed this point at greater length, but here I’ll only note Hannah Arendt’s warning that we are deprived of a “truly human life” when we are “deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things.”

That last bit about a common world of things, a material, not only virtual world, is key. The logic of enclosure seeks to lock us into a private virtual world of “bespoke realities,” thus excluding us from the common world of things that yields as well a public consciousness. As Arendt put it, “Only the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense.”

So friends, resist the enclosure of the human psyche. How exactly we might best do that, I may take up in another post. But for now, I hope this analogy proves helpful.

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Cheers,
Michael

1. Some time ago, probably three years or so, the novelist Robin Sloan sent out a short post about arresting phrases or quotations, which he referred to as amulets. I could not track down the post, but I think I’m remembering this correctly. Such phrases or fragments, Sloan suggested, were charged with a certain power. Like an amulet worn around the neck, these words might somehow shield or guide or console or sustain the one who held them close to mind and heart. I also thought of it, and continue to think of it, as a matter of these verbal amulets shaping our perception of the world. They form our thinking, our feeling, and our imagination in such a way that they transform how we see the world around us and how we conceive of the range of actions available to us. Powerful stuff indeed. I was, needless to say, drawn to the metaphor.

2. In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil offers a good example of such an amulet:

“You could not be born at a better time than the present, when we have lost everything.”

Like so much of Weil’s writing, the line is provocative. It cries out for qualifications, but none are forthcoming. I find the line haunting. It yields a dark but hopeful, salubrious energy.

3. Before Sloan supplied me with the evocative and elegant metaphor of the amulet, I would think of how Hannah Arendt once described Walter Benjamin’s historical method (and, by extension, her own). Arendt argued that Benjamin had the rare capacity for what she called poetic thinking, which “works with the ‘thought fragments’ it can wrest from the past and gather about itself.” “Like a pearl diver,” Arendt continued,

“who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past—but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things ‘suffer a sea-change’ and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living—as ‘thought fragments,’ as something ‘rich and strange,’ and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene.”

Arendt believed that the tradition of western thought had been, by the mid-19th century, broken. Deploying a memorable metaphor of her own, she spoke about the consequent need to “think without a banister.” “I always thought that one has got to start thinking as though nobody had thought before,” she added, “and then start learning from everybody else.” But, we need not undertake such thinking without any resources from the past. We can dive for pearls.

4. Arendt herself supplies me with another amulet (or pearl, if you prefer). In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she makes this almost passing observation:

“Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being.”

The miracle of being invites contemplation not action, reverence rather than exploitation. To be wholly uninterested in the miracle of being is to be disposed toward the wanton and indiscriminate use of power over reality so as to bend it toward one’s own purposes.

5. To ward off such spirits, we might also don another amulet crafted by Simone Weil:

"We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.”

We know all too well how to seize, but we must remember how to receive.

6. I have of late thought much these lines from the late Czech playwright, dissident, and president, Václav Havel:

“Whenever I have encountered any kind of deep problem with civilization anywhere in the world [...] somewhere at the end of the long chain of events that gave rise to the problem at issue I have always found one and the same cause: a lack of accountability to and responsibility for the world.”

This particular amulet is indispensable because our techno-social environment is increasingly calibrated to obfuscate responsibility and outsource judgement.

7. I have for many years invoked this amulet from a sabbath poem by Wendell Berry. It is perhaps the briefest statement of my philosophy of technology!

“We live the given life, and not the planned.”

Bonus amulet also via Berry: “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.” That line is from “King Lear.” It is spoken by a loyal son, Edgar, who has convinced his blind, despairing father, Gloucester, that he has survived a great fall, one which the father had hoped would end his own life. In fact, Edgar, unrecognized by his father, had only pretended to lead Gloucester to a cliff’s edge. As Berry puts it, “This is the line that calls Gloucester back—out of hubris, and the damage and despair that invariably follow—into the human life of grief and joy, where change and redemption are possible.”

8. I am convinced that the cultivation of attention is one of the essential tasks before us. The 20th century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch has helped bring me to this conclusion. Here is one fragment to that effect:

“I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the moral agent.”

Bonus Murdochian amulet with profound epistemological implications: “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.”

9. Finally, I’ll leave you with one last amulet for our times. It comes from Ivan Illich, whose words are often on my mind.

“Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.”

“I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied,” Illich explained on a separate occasion, “it is hospitality.”

I invite you, if you are so inclined, to share any amulets you’ve found especially useful in the comments, which are open to all for this post.

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P.S. A few notices that might be of interest. If you’ve found your way to Blue Sky, you can find me there at lmsacasas.bsky.social. Also, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Elias Crim and Pete Davis for their recently launched show, . To be clear, I am not one of the titular lost prophets! But I do write about some of these same figures, including Illich. Lastly, has a new Substack, New Cartographies, which I gladly recommend to readers of the Convivial Society.

Disenchantment is one of the most venerable, and contested, concepts in the vast literature devoted to understanding the state of affairs we call modernity.

The term was popularized by the eminent German sociologist Max Weber in the early 20th century. It is an English translation of a German word, Entzauberung, that means something like “de-magic-ifcation.” To say that the modern world is disenchanted is to say that it is no longer experienced as a realm of magic, mystery, animate spirits, or other non-human forces and agents. According to some accounts, it also means that we inhabit a world bereft of any intrinsic meaning or purpose and which thus generates relations of alienation and exploitation.

I am, of course, glossing a long and multi-faceted tradition of scholarship, which has more recently included arguments to the effect that we have never been disenchanted or that the world remains enchanted (although more like enchanting) if only we’re willing to embrace certain modes of being. The former position is staked out by Jason Josephson-Storm in The Myth of Disenchantment, and the latter claim is argued by Jane Bennett in The Enchantment of Modern Life. And while I do have my own lightly-informed positions on these debates, I certainly don’t intend to adjudicate them here.

Instead, I simply want to posit one idea for your consideration: Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention.1

In other words, what if we experience the world as disenchanted because, in part, enchantment is an effect of a certain kind of attention we bring to bear on the world and we are now generally habituated against this requisite quality of attention?2

In suggesting this correlation between attention and enchantment, I am partially endorsing Bennett’s argument that “the contemporary world retains the power to enchant humans and that humans can cultivate themselves so as to experience more of that effect.” Bennett, a political philosopher interested in the ethical dimensions of enchantment, which she treats more like a state of wonder, believes that enchantment is something “that we encounter, that hits us, but it is also a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies.”

One of these strategies is “to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted.

As the art historian Jennifer Roberts argued several years ago, “Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness.” Or, as she also puts it, just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it. Seeing, in this sense, is a form of knowledge arising from a way of being that brings a greater measure of the fullness of reality to consciousness. According to Roberts, achieving this kind of knowledge and quality of experience requires “time and strategic patience,” which is a form of “immersive attention.”

To speak of attention in this manner, as a patient waiting on the world to disclose itself, recalls how Simone Weil insisted that attention is a form of active passivity. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them,” she insisted, “but by waiting for them.”3

This form of attention and the knowledge it yields not only elicits more of the world, it elicits more of us. In waiting on the world in this way, applying time and strategic patience in the spirit of invitation, we draw out and are drawn out in turn. As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it, we may also find that we ourselves are also extended, that is to say that our consciousness is stretched and deepened. And this form of knowledge is ultimately relational. It yields a more richly personal rather than clinical or transactional relation with the object known, particularly insofar as affection may be one of its consequences.4

After all, attention can also be understood simply as the name for the contact the mind makes with the world, and, if it is sufficiently attenuated, our capacity and inclination to care, desire, love, and act also suffer. This, too, is one of the concerns animating Bennett’s explorations of enchantment. “You have to love life before you can care about anything,” she writes. “One must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it,” she adds, “in order to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.”

In her view, the story we’ve been told about disenchantment already conditions us against the attention that we must necessarily bring to the world in order to perceive its enchanted quality. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think more than the story of disenchantment is at work here, but she is right to observe that we are trapped in a vicious circle. Habituated against attending to the world with patience and care, we are more likely to experience the world as a mute accumulation of inert things to be merely used or consumed as our needs dictate. And this experience in turn reinforces the disinclination to attend to the world with appropriate patience and care. Looking and failing to see, we mistakenly conclude there was nothing to see.

What is there to do, then, except to look again, and with care, almost as a matter of faith, although a faith encouraged by each fleeting encounter with beauty we have been graced to experience. To stare awkwardly at things in the world until they cease to be mere things. To risk the appearance of foolishness by being prepared to believe that world might yet be enchanted. Or, better yet, to play with the notion that we might cast our attention into the world in the spirit of casting a spell. We may very well conjure up surprising depths of experience, awaken long dormant desires, and rekindle our wonder in the process. What that will avail, only time would tell.

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By many measures, it would seem that we are not okay, and, more specifically, that the kids are not, in fact, alright.1 These measures include rates of isolation, loneliness, unhappiness, self-harm, burnout, anxiety, depression, etc. I am not a social scientist, but, as best as I can judge, the findings are well-attested, and they are certainly corroborated by my own limited window on world. You may have other measures worth considering, or simply your personal experience to go on. There is, after all, much more to our uneasiness than what the official metrics capture.

While there appears to be a consensus about the validity of the situation indexed by these measures, there is less agreement about the causes. I suspect there are many relevant factors rather than one singular cause, although not all factors are equally significant. What follows, then, is just one perspective on our situation that revolves around a single fundamental observation: we are starved for personal relationships but we are simultaneously discouraged from nurturing them, de-skilled in the relevant habits, and sold inadequate substitutes in their place.2

The slightly longer version of that claim goes something like this: It is good to be able to relate to the world in a manner that evokes and engages the various dimensions of our human personhood—embodied, imaginative, intellectual, emotional, moral, spiritual, etc.—particularly in relationship with others. But our techno-economic environment generates an experience of the world that is hostile to this ideal. It operates at a pace, scale, and intensity that undermines our capacity to relate to the world with the fulness of our presence, thought, and care. If affection is kindled by time and attention, the default settings of our techno-economic order undermine our capacity to give either. We are instead encouraged to live as machines rather than creatures, optimizing for all the wrong metrics.3

And these same techno-economic structures instill in us a manufactured neediness so that we might be all the more beholden to the goods and services marketed with the promise of alleviating our plight and addressing the very neediness they cultivate. Social robots, AI assistants, VR, generative AI—each of these, as they are often marketed, can be usefully analyzed from this perspective. They are the system’s answers to the problems the system created and they serve the system not the person.

In his most recent post, “Companionship without companions,” addresses a similar set of concerns regarding chatbots. “Many anticipated AI applications,” Horning observes, “seem predicated on the idea that our experience of the world should require less thought and have better interfaces, that we want to consume the shape and form of conversation, consume simulations of speaking and listening without having to risk direct engagement with other people.”

Back in February of 2023, I put it this way: “I’m stuck on the incongruity of populating the world with non-human agents and interfaces that will mediate human experience in an age of mounting loneliness and isolation.” But, of course, the incongruity is only apparent. Considered from a slightly more cynical perspective, we can see that there is a certain unfortunate logic at work: manufactured neediness prepares the ground for new commodities. The goal is not to alleviate loneliness or isolation by fostering vernacular human relationships, which, of course, cannot be readily monetized, but to insinuate, pejoratively, that such relationships are inefficient and full of friction. As Horning noted, “Chatbots are often marketed as though other people represent the main impediment to solving loneliness, and if you remove the threat of judgment and exclusion and rejection that other people represent, then no one will ever feel lonely again.”

Consider, as an almost farcical example of this, the recent launch of friend. Friend is an always-listening pendant that periodically interacts with you via text message or with which you can enjoy on-demand interactions by pressing the pendant and speaking directly to it. Take a minute and a half to watch the product launch video below, if you’re so inclined.

You can also take a look at the interaction arounds the founder’s post on Twitter announcing the new device. Honestly, I feel a certain reticence in using this example, given that it seems almost to be a parody. In fact, more than a few of the initial responses expressed a measure of incredulity along these lines. Honestly, such incredulity is a testament to good sense and charity of those expressing it. “Surely not, no one would actually …” they would seem to be saying. But it is not a parody, unless those involved with the company are keeping the act up with admirable sustained discipline. More dispiriting are the seemingly earnest and enthusiastic replies.

My reticence also stems from the sense that this product must surely be an outlier that will almost certainly fall flat or command a very small number of sincere users. Nonetheless, we can perhaps take it as an ideal type, a distinctly clear example of a trend that does not ordinarily manifest itself quite so starkly, and make use of it as such.

What better example, then, of the pattern we have been analyzing. Demoralized in the pursuit of friendship, companionship, and solidarity by the social structures that order our experience and deskilled by the same in the requisite habits and virtues, we are offered instead a technological commodity in the place of genuine human connection, a personalized device in the place of a personal relationship.

And while I’ve been rather sardonic in my assessment of this device, we should consider that the choices it symbolizes as an ideal type might be more attractive than we’re willing to grant because it holds out the promise of connection without commitment, companionship without responsibility, a facsimile of friendship without the attendant demands and challenges.

And I don’t even mean to suggest that we’re tempted by those choices because we are selfish, although each of us should soberly consider such things. We’re tempted by these choices because we are, to varying degrees, exhausted by the demands of a world ordered by the imperative to optimize for measurable outcomes, and in such a context we end up cutting out the things that don’t compute.4 The tragedy, however, is that it is in such inefficient yet supremely human things that we find renewal, strength, rest, consolation, and even joy.

Allow me, then, to close with a simple exhortation: we need people in our lives, not the simulation of people.

I think we all know this, but our societies are increasingly designed so as to induce a certain forgetfulness about this fundamental truth. We should resist such forgetfulness, and, to whatever degree possible, we should refuse the temptation to eliminate human interactions from our experience like so many inefficiencies in a system optimized for machine-like functionality.

In his 1961 novel, The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s protagonist, Binx Bolling, makes the following observation: “I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen.” Percy is writing as the first movement of depersonalization I mentioned above was reaching its apex. But Bolling goes on to say that “when it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.”

What there is to see is the look of someone remembering a profound truth about themselves, a vital truth without which we cannot hope to live in full. I suspect, or at least I hope, that we have all been on both ends of such encounters, and we should be intent on making such encounters more, rather than less frequent.

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Cheers,

Michael

The founding text of technology criticism is found in one of Plato’s better-known dialogues, the Phaedrus.1 During the course of Socrates’s conversation about love and rhetoric, he recounts the legend of an Egyptian king named Thamus and an inventor-god named Theuth. Theuth presents a number of inventions to Thamus for his consideration, touting their benefits for the Egyptian people. Among these was the gift of writing, but, surprisingly to Theuth, Thamus was less than enthused about this particular invention.

Here’s how the relevant portion of the dialogue goes. It begins with Theuth declaring,“Here is an accomplishment, my lord the King, which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and wisdom.”

And here is Thamus’s reply:

“Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.”

There are two typical responses to the critique of writing Plato here expresses through Socrates. The first is to see this as the prototypical “moral panic” about a new technology. If one takes this view, the best use of this text is to demonstrate how all contemporary tech criticism is similarly misguided and short-sighted. Plato was wrong about writing, thus contemporary critics who adopt the same pattern of analysis are likewise wrong about whatever novel technology they happen to be complaining about.2

The second typical response would be, “Yep, Plato was basically right.”

In this way the passage serves as a Rorschach test for fundamental attitudes about technology.

But there is a third way, of course. Neil Postman, for example, began his discussion of this story by explaining the error of Thamus3:

“The error is not in his claim that writing will damage memory and create false wisdom. It is demonstrable that writing has had such an effect. Thamus’ error is in his believing that writing will be a burden to society and nothing but a burden. For all his wisdom, he fails to imagine what writing’s benefits might be, which, as we know, have been considerable.”

Postman refers to Thamus as a “one-eyed prophet,” seeing only the harms and burdens that a new technology brings. In Postman’s view, however, “We are currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo.”

The point, Postman argued, was to see with both eyes. To recognize both the gains and the losses, the benefits and the burdens. Only then would we be able to judge soundly and wisely. This is, as it turns out, easier said than done. Cycles of hype and criti-hype tend to obscure our collective vision, and we seem to have a predilection for one-eyed prophets.4

That said, my purpose in recalling Plato’s critique of writing is to set up a brief consideration of the work that large language models (LLM) like Chat GPT or Gemini promise to do for us, which I take to be, in short, the work of helping us say what we need to say.

I’ve started with Plato because my thesis here is roughly this: the use of LLMs is rendered plausible by the externalization and outsourcing of memory initiated by writing.

Maybe that sounds like an inelegant way of stating something rather obvious, but there are two claims in that thesis, the obvious one and another less obvious, possibly more contentious claim.

First, the obvious one. LLMs work, in part, by mining massive datasets of the written (and then digitized) word and drawing mathematical correlations among the words in these massive datasets in order to make predictions about what words should follow other words in a string. (There are other critical inputs, but this is the relevant bit for now.) Frankly, it is hard not to be impressed by what can be achieved through this method, which I have described inadequately, to be sure. There can be errors of fact, or what are called hallucinations, and the outputs are often soulless. Nonetheless, while breathless agitation about super-intelligence and x-risk is, in my view, misguided, it would be disingenuous to simply shrug a shoulder at the technical achievement. But the key point here is that none of this would have been possible had we not first received the gift of Theuth, the invention of writing, which, as Plato correctly observed, amounts to the externalization of memory.

So, then, in an obvious and uninteresting sense, externalized memory in the form of writing can be understood as the technical precondition of LLMs. But there’s a second, I think more interesting, way of framing externalized memory as a plausibility structure for the use of LLMs.

I’m more interested in what renders the use of LLMs plausible than in what makes them technically possible. The concept of a plausibility structure, drawn from the sociology of religion, is meant to describe social contexts, structures, or conditions that make it easier to hold certain beliefs.5 Apart from such structures, a belief may become implausible or untenable. Relatedly, I sometimes find it useful to ask, “What do I have to believe to adopt this or that new technology?”6 Or, to put it somewhat differently, “What facts about my social world incline me to adopt a new technology?”

So, in the case of LLMs, we might say that the existing soulless and bureaucratic context of much of our writing—the filling out of forms, thoughtless school exercises, endless email—constitutes a plausibility structure for LLMs. Under such conditions, of course, it becomes perfectly reasonable to adopt a new technology that promised to relieve us of such tasks.

I’m less interested in these cases, however, than I am in the use of LLMs to accomplish what, for the lack of a better word, we might call more personal tasks. Consider, for instance, the anecdote recently shared by in an essay for the Hedgehog Review, which explores some of the same terrain I’m traversing here. Crawford tells of a recent conversation with a father who told him about how he had used Chat GPT to craft a toast for his daughter’s wedding. It’s the use of LLMs for this kind of writing that might be worth considering a bit more deeply, especially because it's abundantly clear that tech companies want us to use their products in this way.7

Here too, of course, a relatively straightforward consideration presents itself—writing is hard. Many people find it intimidating, perhaps especially when you’ll be expressing yourself in public as in the case of a wedding toast. As Walter Ong, among others has noted, writing is not natural. While the use of language is natural to the human animal, the emergence of writing was not, strictly speaking, necessary. So if writing does not come easily, why not take up a tool that promises to do it for us, particularly in cases that call for something more personal than inconsequential boilerplate? Part of the response to that question involves showing what might be at stake, which I attempt to do in the next two or three paragraphs. But then I’ll also come back to why I started with Plato and conclude by considering whether there is not also a case of conditioned dependence stemming from our readiness to externalize our memory.

So let’s start with the observation that in these cases LLMs are more than a tool for writing, narrowly understood, because the act of writing is also the more basic act of articulation.8 When we turn to an LLM to write for us, we are also inviting it to undertake the more fundamental task of articulation, and this is no small thing. Indeed, given the centrality of language to the human condition, we should wonder about the degree to which the outsourcing of the labor of articulation is the outsourcing of a fundamentally human activity.

To see this more clearly, consider what is entailed in the labor of articulation, and it often is, quite literally, a laborious activity. It is not simply the case that articulating ourselves in language is a matter of matching a set of words to a set of internal pre-existing feelings or inchoate impressions, as if the work of articulation left untouched and unchanged what it was we sought to articulate. Rather, the labor of articulation itself shapes what we think and feel. Articulation is not dictation, articulation constitutes our perception of the world.9 To search for a word is not merely to search for a label, the search is interwoven with the very capacity to perceive and understand the thing, idea, or feeling. It is, in fact, generative of thought and feeling, and, ultimately, of who we understand ourselves to be. To articulate is also to interpret, thus it also constitutes the experience of meaning. The labor of articulation binds us to our experience and in relationship with others. The labor of articulation always presupposes the other, and is thus an ethical act that relies on candor, honesty, and attention. And while it is, in part, for the sake of the other that I set out to articulate myself, it is in this way that I also come into focus for myself. If I might be forgiven the analogy, it is through the labor of articulation that the self is birthed.

In the essay I mentioned above, Crawford cited remarks from the philosopher Talbot Brewer in an unpublished paper about what he termed “degenerative AI.” As it happens, I’ve also had occasion to hear some unpublished remarks by Brewer through a friend who attended a recent conference. One phrase in particular caught my attention. As I understood it, Brewer argued that dependence on LLMs took the self “out of play.” This is an evocative way of getting at the matter. In the labor of articulation, we put ourselves in play, with all the risks, rewards, burdens, challenges, and consolations that entails. To outsource the labor of articulation is to sideline ourselves.

So much then for what is at stake in the outsourcing of the labor of articulation. It was an important digression establishing the stakes, but now let’s come back to the main point. When we externalized our memory in the form of writing, we began building the databases upon which LLMs rely. But we also, as Plato argued, began emptying ourselves of the resources upon which the labor of articulation works. Plato was ultimately ahead of his time. It took a good long while for writing to be widely adopted. The residue of oral culture, including its valorization of memory, lingered for millennia. But digital technologies brought us across a critical threshold. The scale and ubiquity of digital databases, the vaunted access they provide to information, the promise of having all human knowledge at our fingertips have made it increasingly likely that people will “rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources.”

My contention, then, is that when we are confronted with the opportunity to outsource the labor of articulation, we will find that possibility more tempting to the degree that we experience a sense of incompetency and inadequacy, a sense which may have many sources, not least among which is the failure to stock our mind, heart, and imagination. There was, after all, a reason why memory was one of the five canons of classical rhetoric.10 It was not just a matter of committing to memory what you had planned to say. It was also a matter of having internal resources to draw on in order to say anything at all. Of course, very few of us have any reason to see ourselves as rhetoricians, except that there may simply be something deeply humane and satisfying about the ability to express oneself well.11

And this is to say nothing of how we might distinguish knowledge from the mere aggregation of disparate, readily accessible facts. Others may distinguish the two differently, but I think of knowledge as something more personal, something that emerges within us as we take in the world from our own unique perspective but also as members of particular communities. In doing so, we construct relationships among the things we come to know (and not merely know about), these relationships are shaped by our history and our desires. And this knowledge, carried within, shapes our ongoing encounters with the world, building a cascading experience of “understanding in light of,” a form of poetic knowledge. But this seems hardly possible if we too readily dismiss the need to curate our memory as carefully as we might curate our feeds.

I am reminded, too, of something the avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman observed many years ago12:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.” A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become “pancake people”—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

My modest suggestion in conclusion is this: perhaps we do well to re-evaluate how we think about memory and what I have called the labor of articulation.

New technologies challenge us. If we are up to the challenge, they give us the opportunity to reconsider things we have taken for granted. They invite us to rethink and recalibrate our assumptions about what it means to be human, perhaps even to reclaim some goods we had lost sight of along the way. LLMs confront us with just such a challenge, and in the vital realm of language no less. If we have assented, in large measure, to the promise of outsourcing our memory and now consequently find ourselves tempted to surrender the labor of articulation. Perhaps the best way to respond to the challenge is to consider how we might deliberately re-source our minds so that we might take up the labor of articulation with confidence and enjoy its very human satisfactions and consolations.

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Sometime last week, I began to see an image floating around social media featuring the following quotation from sci-fi/fantasy author, Joanna Maciejewska:

“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”1

It’s a perfectly understandable reaction, particularly from an artist, to much of what’s been sold and marketed as AI over the past year and a half. As I wrote last month, Apple’s ill-conceived ad, “Crush,” had the (unintended) consequence of reinforcing the well-grounded fear that the big tech companies have little to no regard for artists and their work.

But I found myself somewhat uncomfortable with the underlying logic of the expressed desire. It is the same logic that has underwritten the marketing of new technologies for more than a century, and, in my view, it is tragically flawed. I’ve written before about the problems with the logic of “time-saving” or “labor-saving” technologies, so I will simply point you to one of those posts, which includes the following observation:

Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying. In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production.

“If the point is to care and to love and to keep faith,” I concluded, “then what is to be gained by outsourcing or eliminating the very ways we may be called upon to do so?”

In that essay, I was not thinking primarily about the artistic endeavor but rather about the moral dimensions of ordinary experience and about the character of a life well lived. Given Maciejewska’s expressed desire in those viral lines, however, I find myself wanting to make a similar more specific argument with regard to the artistic process.

I, however, would not consider myself an artist, so I want to tread with a due measure of humility. I suppose my modest question is whether there is not a more intimate link between the tasks Maciejewska would rather have a machine perform for her and the nature of her work as an artist.

I wonder, in other words, whether the work of doing the laundry or washing the dishes—these are almost always the examples, but they stand in for a host of similar activities—might not provide a certain indispensable grounding to the artistic endeavor, tethering it to the world in a vital rather than stupefying manner. Or, to take another angle, whether a fidelity to such tasks might not yield certain virtues that might also sustain the artist in their labors: attentiveness, patience, perseverance, or humility, for example.2

I think, too, of these lines from the 19th century artist and critic, John Ruskin: “Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”3

This is not exactly what Ruskin is saying, but it seems to me that something like this can be said about creativity as well as it can about thought (perhaps because thought and creativity are linked quite intimately together).

Perhaps the best expression I know of the sentiment I’m trying to convey is from a poem by Marylin Chandler McEntyre, “Artists at Work,” from her collection inspired by Vermeer’s women:

The craftsman who made the rose window at Chartres
rose one morning in the dead of winter,
shivered into what layers of wool he owned,
and went to his bench to boil molten lead.
This was not the day to cut the glass or dye it,
lift it to the sun to see the colors dance
along the walls, or catch one's breath
at peacock shades of blue: only, today,
to lay hot lead in careful lines, circles,
wiping and trimming, making
a perfect space for light.

When Wren designed St. Paul’s, he had to turn away
each day from the vision in his mind's wide eye
to scraps of paper where columns of figures measured
tension and stress, heft and curve, angle and bearing point.
Whole days he spent considering the density
of granite, the weathering of hardwoods,
the thickness of perfect mortar; all
to the greater glory of God.

And Vermeer with his houseful of children
didn't paint some days, didn't even mix
powders or stretch canvasses, or clean palettes,
but hauled in firewood, cleaned out
a flue, repaired a broken cradle, remembering,
as he bent to his task, how light shone gold
on a woman’s flesh, and gathered
in drops on her pearls.

This poem, to my mind, makes the implicit argument that certain forms of labor, tedious and mundane though they may appear, are nonetheless essential to the work of being an artist. But as I mentioned earlier, I am not an artist, so I cannot support this claim with my own experience. Although, I would say that my writing, while at times certainly impeded by other labors, is, on the whole, improved by those same labors, chiefly because they tether my thought to the world and shape me in a manner that is conducive to clarity of thought and purpose.

Whatever you make about my claims regarding mundane labors and the work of the artist—and artists among you please do tell me how you think about this—I am quite confident that we must resist the temptation to imagine that the path to a meaningful or satisfying life is secured by the unquestioning acceptance of the promise of time-and labor-saving technologies. More often than we might realize, those labors themselves work on us, making us the kind of people who can make good art and fashion a good life.

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