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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Maybe you’ve seen the ad. Maybe you’ve already read a dozen critical essays about the ad. Maybe you have yourself publicly commented on the ad. Maybe you are among the blessed, and you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. And you would be blessed indeed if you cannot be made to care. Nevertheless, let’s talk briefly about the ad.

The ad in question was for the new Apple iPad, and it was shared on Twitter by the company’s CEO, Tim Cook. You can click that link above, or you can take a look on YouTube. If you’ve not watched it, please, by all means take a look.

Titled “Crush,” the ad features an assortment of creative tools and media artifacts—piano, guitar, metronome, paints, pencils, trumpet, games, television, record player, books, etc.—being crushed by an enormous hydraulic press. When the press retracts, we see in the place of those instruments and artifacts a slim, sleek iPad. We then hear the narrator’s voice telling us that “the most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest.”

There are a couple of things we might say for this ad. First, this was truth in advertising, although perhaps the ad spoke better than it intended. The ad conveyed the company’s incipient ideology with exquisite clarity: like the ring of Sauron, the iPad here appears as the one device to rule them all, chiefly by overthrowing and displacing them. Are you worried that digital devices will obsolesce the rich and multifaceted array of analog tools and instruments? Apple wants you to know that, yes, this is what it is aiming at. Are you concerned about the flattening of human experience under digital conditions? Boy does Apple have just the visual metaphor to confirm your suspicions.

Second, the ad brought people together, which is no small thing these days. It was met with almost universal scorn and contempt. I mean, honestly, what a remarkable achievement.

I’ll spare you a summary of the various critical perspectives on the ad. You can find them easily enough. As Brian Merchant put it, “The ad was lambasted from so many angles — it failed to read the room, it celebrates the destruction of art and human creation at a time when lots of people feel those very things are in the crosshairs of tech companies, it was just bad, dour marketing — that the tech giant was forced to issue a rare mea culpa.”

I encountered some speculation suggesting that Apple knew precisely how this ad would land and deliberately chose to bring on the outrage for the sake of the attention it would generate. I’m not convinced. I grant that it is hard to believe Apple’s marketing team would miss this badly, but it is easier to account for the misstep as a case of blinding hubris and self-assuredness than as a cynical calculation about how to play the attention economy. Whatever the case, Merchant is right: “Apple came along and handed us a perfect visual metaphor for one of our most potent fears about big tech right now — namely, that it is crushing the arts and transmuting them into dull consumer products.”

Watching the ad, I mostly thought to myself, “I’m glad Albert Borgmann, may he rest in peace, is not around to see this.” (I understand, of course, that this is not what most normal people thought as they watched the ad.) But then I thought, “I don’t know, how good might it have felt to see your whole critical philosophy of technology, first articulated in the mid-1980s, so fully vindicated by both the tech company’s unwitting admission and the negative response it triggered?”

Borgmann, who passed away just over a year ago, was a German-American philosopher of technology. In my view, which you can take with a grain of salt, he was one of the giants of the field, and he has deeply informed my own thinking and writing. On the occasion of his death, I re-published an essay I’d written years ago, which serves as a decent introduction to some of the main themes in his work. The essay was titled, “Why An Easier Life Is Not Necessarily Happier.”1

To keep us moving briskly along and focused on Apple’s implicit vision of human flourishing as conveyed in their recent ad, here are the core relevant concepts from Borgmann’s work.

In an effort to understand the dominant technological patterns of the age, Borgmann identified what he called the device paradigm. The logic of the device paradigm is pretty straightforward. It describes the tendency to hide the complex machinery of a technology below a slick, commodious surface that makes the output of a device available to the user with minimal effort. The goods a device offers its users are “rendered instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.” “A commodity is truly available,” Borgmann writes, “when it can be enjoyed as a mere end, unencumbered by means.” Apple products have long been leading exemplars of the device paradigm.

But this is only part of the picture. Borgmann opposed devices to what he called focal things. Focal things demand something of us. They require a measure of care, practice, and engagement that devices do not. Our use of them induces our focus, which they invite by design. “The experience of a [focal] thing,” Borgmann also notes, “is always and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing’s world.” There are, in other words, embodied and communal dimensions to the use of a focal thing. They involve our bodies, and they involve us in relationships to a degree that devices do not.

Consider just one of many possible examples: musical instruments. To learn how to make music with a guitar, for example, requires time and effort. Mastery of the instrument will take a great deal of time and effort. Your body may literally be marked by the effort with calloused finger tips. But the rewards are great, too. The pleasure of making and not merely consuming music, and of sharing it with others.2 In short, focal things are characterized by the kind of engagement which they invite and sustain. Or as I’ve put it elsewhere, in relation to devices we tend to be relegated to the status of a user, who may more often than not be the one being used. But no one would describe a musician as a user. Yes, they use the instrument, but the richness of the relationship between the musician and their instrument demands a different term, one that signals the degree to which a skill is cultivated in relation to the focal thing. We speak of musicians and not “users of musical instruments” because the musician is characterized by a set of skills they have cultivated in order to make something with the instrument.

So, then, one more thing I can say for Apple’s ad is this: when explaining Borgmann’s work, I can now simply say “watch this.” The ad amounts to a compelling, visceral depiction of a device crushing an array of focal things and thus eliminating the corresponding focal practices and their attendant skills and pleasures. It is a visual depiction of the triumph of the device paradigm.

The near universal response to the ad, which was heartening, also demonstrated another of Borgmann’s core claims: our experience tends to be enriched by focal things and diminished by devices. A good life is supported by a diverse array of focal things and practices, which tend to reward us with deeper, more meaningful experiences; a gratifying measure of bodily skill and competence; and possibly even a stronger fabric of relationships. Alternatively, a life characterized merely by the consumption of virtual goods mediated through devices, and the subsequent dependence and isolation such a life necessarily entails, will not be conducive to our well-being.

Granted, it is hard to resist the promise of ease, safety, efficiency, and convenience, particularly when many of us may already be operating with some degree of burnout and exhausted by what is demanded of us to simply get by day to day. This is the trap set for us by our existing social order. When society is built to run like a machine for the optimization of profit and productivity with little regard for the constraints inherent in the embodied human condition, then we are tempted to embrace the device paradigm as a matter of survival or because we have been conditioned by the machine and have internalized its values.

The point, to be clear, is not that you and I must cook every meal from scratch or listen only to music we make for ourselves or never use a device that may facilitate the completion of certain tasks. The point is that we ought to resist any vision of the good life in which we are reduced to mere consumers of readily accessible digitally simulated goods or in which human flourishing is indexed solely to the sheer quantity of our techno-economic system’s outputs without reference to their kind and quality. Implicit in Apple’s ad is the idea that virtually unlimited access to such goods is the summum bonum of human existence.

I have the good fortune of being able to walk to a farmer’s market most Saturday mornings. Usually, some local musicians will be performing. The acts vary from young, solo artists to duos or groups of various styles and compositions. Last Saturday, I listened as an older couple, easily in their seventies if not their eighties, played and sang together. The old man played guitar and his wife played the fiddle as they sang an assortment of classic American folk songs.

I do not know their story, of course, but they appeared to be enjoying themselves and for a few moments they enriched my life. I can imagine the tale their instruments could tell, and I can imagine how much those relatively simple instruments must mean to them. Ordinarily, the user of a device is only all too ready to part with it when a newer model arrives or when it loses its novelty or functionality. The reaction to the Apple ad reminds us that focal things are not so readily parted with. They are deeply valued and even treasured.

If the Apple ad was a graphic depiction of the triumph of the device paradigm and the crushing of focal things along with the forms of life they sustain, then this couple playing their instruments together after many long years embodied the joy and satisfaction focal things and practices bring to our lives.

These appear to be the two paths presented to us: one in which the device paradigm colonizes more and more swaths of our experience and we are increasingly reduced to swiping along a glassy surface of endless content, or one in which we refuse the lure of limitless and meaningless consumption and reclaim focal things and practices along with the skills, satisfactions, and community they generate.

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A few weeks back I shared a few lines from Kierkegaard about the virtues of walking. “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk,” Kierkegaard advised a friend in despair. “Every day,” he went on to say, “I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” This struck me as good counsel.

Since then, I’ve serendipitously encountered a handful of similar meditations on the value of walking, so I’ve taken that as sign to briefly gather some of these together and offer them to you, chiefly because they collectively remind us that there is a scale of activity and experience appropriate to the human animal and things tend to go well for us when we mind it.

I should acknowledge at the outset that I am not a highly accomplished walker, by which I mean someone who has walked extensively, in varied terrains, and has perhaps also reflected at some length on the practice.1 I’m sure, though, that most people who I might think of as highly accomplished walkers would resist my characterization, and, I should add, I certainly don’t mean to encourage a hierarchical framing of what is a thoroughly egalitarian activity. Nonetheless, you get my point. I try to get out and walk a fair amount, but these are always modest and local walks.2

That said, I’ll first note the Latin phrase solvitur ambulando meaning “it is solved by walking.” The phrase is attributed to both St. Augustine and the Greek philosopher, Diogenes. The sense of it, as I take it, is that when you are stuck on something, you should get up and take a walk. By the act of walking you somehow allow your mind to think more freely and creatively.

In a 2014 report in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz confirmed the effect and postulated a series of causal mechanisms. Among other findings, the authors concluded that “walking substantially enhanced creativity.” They also wisely observed that “while schools are cutting back on physical education in favor of seated academics, the neglect of the body in favor of the mind ignores their tight interdependence.”

Or, as Nietzsche put it in an aphorism cited by Oppezzo and Schwartz, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

I wouldn’t go so far, but the spirit of the sentiment seems true enough. I’ve lately heard a great deal about how writing is a form of thinking. There is a stronger sense in which one could take that claim, but it at least means that the practice of writing, in its material and embodied dimensions, is conducive to and even sustains specific forms of thinking. In the same way, we might perhaps say that walking is a practice that is conducive to certain modes of thought. We can walk in order to think, just as some might write in order to think. My sense is that this has something to do with the pacing of our thoughts. Both writing and waking, each in their own way, seem to calibrate the tempo of our minds to the rhythm of thought.

This notion was also articulated by Rebecca Solnit when she observed “that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought.”3 I stumbled upon this line in a recent essay for Noēma by the travel writer, Nick Hunt, who reflected on his walk from the Netherlands to Istanbul, a walk he undertakes in the footsteps of the great Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose three-volume memoir of his own walk across the continent on the eve of the Second World War is one of the great works of the 20th century, although quite difficult to categorize.4

“At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum,” Hunt astutely observed.

“One thing merges into the next: hills into mountains, rivers into valleys, suburbs into city centers; cultures are not separate things but points along a spectrum. Traits and languages evolve, shading into one another and metamorphosing with every mile. Even borders are seldom borders, least of all ecologically. There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity.”

Hunt also brought the lovely phrase “the soul travels at the speed of walking” to my attention. It is apparently an old Arabic saying, and it is the insight at the heart of Hunt’s essay, which also reflects on the practice of pilgrimage. Not all walking amounts to a pilgrimage, of course, but we can think of all walks as potentially containing a kernel of the pilgrimage experience. In an old post about the distinction between the tourist and the pilgrim, I once noted that the tourist bends the place to the shape of the self while the pilgrim is bent to the shape of the journey. I do think the length of the journey matters in such cases, but perhaps a walk of any sort, if we set out in the proper spirit, might afford us the opportunity to practice the virtue of setting ourselves aside.

But if by walking we might learn to set ourselves aside, it is also true that we might learn how to better assert ourselves. I recently recalled an exchange during an interview in the mid-90s during which Ivan Illich claimed that modern technology had “disabled very simple native abilities” and made people “dependent on objects.” The interviewer, Jerry Brown, suggested, “Like an automobile.” To which Illich replied,

“An automobile which cuts out the use value from your feet […] I recently had the question, ‘You're a liar!’ when I said to somebody I walked down the spine of the Andes. Every Spaniard in the 16th, 17th century did that. The idea that somebody could just walk! He can jog perhaps in the morning but he can't walk anywhere! The world has become inaccessible because we drive there.”

This was one iteration of Illich’s core criticism of late modern industrial tools, by which he meant both technologies and institutions: they had the tendency to render us hapless consumers of goods and service who no longer recalled what we were capable of doing for ourselves and for our communities.

It is also true, of course, that it is hard to walk anywhere because in the United States many of the places we live have been built for cars rather than for people. But the point still remains: the tool we think enhances our capacity may also diminish it. There is, then, a certain freedom to be re-discovered in walking, as well as a commensurate pleasure.

But valuable as these perspectives may be, it was another insight that finally compelled me to write this post. Two or three weeks back, Audrey Watters wrote in defense of walking in her excellent newsletter about fitness tech, Second Breakfast. The title of that installment was a line from the filmmaker Werner Herzog: “The world reveals itself to those who walk.”

That’s a wonderfully concise and profound observation. Of course, I was inclined to agree with the sentiment because it captures something I have been articulating, at much greater length, for some time now. The world is not simply present to us in its fullness and depth by virtue of the fact that we are capable of glancing at it. Instead, if we are to see the world, we must attend to it with care, patience, and even love.

This kind of attention can only unfold under certain conditions—solitude, silence, stillness—and in relation to certain virtues—humility, perseverance, charity. Among the conditions conducive to attentiveness I would also include deliberate slowness. Past a certain speed, we simply cannot perceive the world in depth.

I’m reminded of how in the fictional yet all-too-familiar society of Fahrenheit 451, thoughtlessness is abetted by enforced speed. At one point a key character, while talking about her quixotic family, discloses that being a pedestrian was quite rare and, in fact, illegal. “My uncle was arrested another time—did I tell you?—for being a pedestrian. Oh, we’re most peculiar.” And so would we be “most peculiar” if we chose to walk whenever reasonable.

As Watters observed in her essay, “Walking lets you read the world — and much like the slow, contemplative mental processes involved in reading a book, the pace with which one moves through the world while walking allows for a different, deliberative kind of seeing. You notice more. You think more.”5

To walk, then, is to inhabit a fitting scale and speed. It is the scale and speed at which our bodies are able to find their fit in the world, and the world rewards us by spurring our thinking and disclosing itself to us. Perhaps this is the deeper fitness we should actually be after.

This principle of proportionality or fittingness is one that we do well to remember and insist upon to whatever degree we are able because almost everything about the human-built world, in its economic and technological dimensions, is bent on pushing us past a human scale and speed, which then denies us the opportunity to cultivate our competence and enjoy its rewards. We are, in turn, sold a series of tools and techniques that promise to help us operate faster and more efficiently so that we may keep up with the inhuman demands. Some will even say that the point is to eventually slough off the encumbering body so that we may keep up with the machines and find our fit within the artificial systems we have built. Only exhaustion and alienation lie down this path.

Against these pressures, the act of walking might indeed prove revolutionary because it will afford us an experience of an alternative way of being in the world, one that honors the properly human scale of our experience.

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In writing this essay, I’m committing one of the cardinal sins of the digital age. I am going to be commenting at some length on an essay that is now over a month old. You have been warned!

The essay in question is ’s “The State of the Culture, 2024.” There’s a very good chance that this essay came across your screen at some point in the last few weeks. I’m not sure what the most-viewed Substack post has been during the platform’s relatively brief history, but surely Gioia’s piece must be somewhere near the top. And I know that many of you appreciated the post and found it instructive.

I’ve causally followed Gioia’s work for a number of years, and I’ve read his brother Dana’s poetry even longer. Gioia is an accomplished cultural historian whose work has focused on the history of music, with an emphasis on jazz. He is also the author of a popular newsletter on this platform called . I commend it to you. Gioia is an insightful writer, and I’ve especially appreciated his advocacy for artists and his critical insights into workings of the digital culture industry.

In other words, I’m generally sympathetic to and appreciative of Gioia’s work and his perspective. That said, I’ve had some reservations about this particular, quite popular essay. If you have not read the essay, you should do so and, of course, make your own judgments. Gioia’s basic thesis is that we have moved from a culture dominated by entertainment, to one that is dominated by digitally mediated distraction, which in turn generates a culture of addiction, or, as Gioia memorably puts it, Dopamine Culture.

As Gioia himself puts it, “So you need to ditch that simple model of art versus entertainment. And even ‘distraction’ is just a stepping stone toward the real goal nowadays—which is addiction.”

“The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence,” Gioia adds, “or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers. Addiction is the goal.”

My case throughout the rest of this post is this: the dopamine framing, while grappling with real and important dynamics, is inadequate and may ultimately be counter-productive.

Sketchy Schemas

Gioia crystalized his argument in a chart he created to illustrate “the rise of dopamine culture,” and I suspect the image of the chart made the rounds even more than the essay itself. Here it is:

Some of my reservations with the overall argument and the framing began with my efforts to think through the transitions and distinctions illustrated by this chart. So, I’ll start with a few questions about the chart, and then move on to a series of interrelated observations about Gioia’s dopamine framing. Again, I offer these in the spirit of expanding the conversation about our situation. Gioia draws our attention to important dynamics at work in the world, but I’d like to add a few elements to the mix, which I hope prove helpful in deepening our understanding.

Let’s start with the chart, then. I confess that I am actually a sucker for this kind of thing. By “this kind of thing” I mean a chart or table or schema that attempts to trace in extraordinarily broad strokes the contours of cultural change on a grand historical scale. Of course, one deploys such heuristic devices only while also acknowledging their limitations: they gloss over significant nuance and detail, not all generalizations are equally helpful, they tempt their creators to stretch and fudge a bit in order to fit the facts to the underlying theory, etc. But, like Max Weber’s ideal types, if used circumspectly, such schemas can be illuminating.

Examining Gioia’s chart, however, my initial thought was simply that the three stages—slow traditional culture, fast modern culture, and dopamine—seem to exist chiefly as a-historical abstractions. In other words, I would expect that there would be some rough correlation to actual historical periods and that the shifts would happen somewhat uniformly across all the categories thus suggesting some underlying causal mechanism. Or, alternatively, that the shifts would hinge on epochal technological developments, such as the transition from print to electronic media or the emergence of mass media, but neither does this seem to be the case. Or perhaps I should say, I don’t quite see how it is the case. In other words, if I ask myself “When exactly did we have fast modern culture?” I’m hard pressed to give a time period that would make sense given the situation and artifacts Gioia gives as examples of the category. Maybe the intention is to identify non-concurrent but analogous developments? I’m not sure. Additionally, it’s not altogether clear whether “traditional” and “modern” work well as descriptors or in what exact sense “slow” and “fast” are being used.

Other details also made it hard for me to embrace the implicit argument of the chart for the emergence of dopamine culture. I’m not sure, for example, what work “video” is doing in a category called “video” or how exactly to distinguish it from “film and TV” or what makes it “fast” relative to them. Playing, watching, and gambling on sports all seem to have coexisted for a very long time now, although, of course, the expansion of legalized gambling is no small thing and probably the example that may most clearly fit the “dopamine” framing. I’m also unsure about “film and TV” or even “newspapers” and “albums” classifying as “slow traditional culture.” Moreover, there are only certain kinds of images, and very few of them, that were ever viewed on a gallery wall, and I find it hard to then accept viewing images on a phone as the next stage in any coherent and compelling line of development. Finally, “sexual freedom” seems to exist as a different sort of thing, less temporally oriented, than most of the other examples (although I think there is a hint at something here that might prove useful).

I don’t mean for this to come across as pedantic nitpicking. I tend to want heuristic charts like this to work and I think they can, but I remain uncertain about this one. Gioia, of course, is the professional cultural critic. He knows the history. I’m willing to concede that I’m just not reading the chart well. Whatever the case, these quibbles with the chart are just the prod that got me to thinking a bit more deeply about the “dopamine” framing and its relative usefulness, so let’s move on.

What follows are some more substantive reflections that will clarify my reservations, while offering some additional lines of thought, and, hopefully, suggesting a helpful model of how we relate to our media environment and why.

Addiction or Compulsion?

I have been writing about compulsive tech use for some time now. Commenting on neuroscientist David Linden’s work on pleasure and addiction, I observed the following:

Pleasure of some sort—whether benign,  problematic, or illicit—is involved in our daily interactions with the Internet. If there is a certain compulsiveness to our online experience, then it is because our internet experience shares in an economy of desire, pleasure, and cycles of stimulation and diminishing return that potentially lead to addictive behavior.

I typed those words in 2011. Thirteen years ago. But subsequently, I tended to avoid the word addiction in connection with internet use writ large. My position has been that one might be on reasonably sound footing speaking of addiction in regard to narrowly defined cases of internet use for certain individuals, but not with regard to internet use generally. I have preferred instead to speak of compulsion and habit rather than addiction.

I don’t think this diminishes the significance of the problem. Habits, for instance, become vices or virtues, and these define our character. This is no small thing. But the framing matters. It matters, as you will have immediately noticed, because it shifts our thinking about what exactly is going on, our degree of agency, and, correspondingly, our degree of responsibility.

The dopamine framing at once tells us too little and also claims too much. Why, for example, do we turn to the media of “dopamine culture” in the first place and what keeps us coming back long enough to get addicted (if that is, in fact, what is happening)? Are there no genuine human desires in play at all? Do we keep coming back because we are addicted or because we imagine that we have no better alternative or no good reason not to? What are the underlying fears and aspirations that might be driving our compulsive relationship to digital media? It seems to me that the dopamine framing is far too blunt an instrument to provide nuanced and adequate answers to these questions, hence it tells us too little.

It claims too much, I think, in painting a picture of hapless individuals at the mercy of large tech companies. While the compulsion and force of habit is strong, I think for most of us it falls short of being usefully called addiction. Consequently, we have more agency over the conduct of our lives than a dopamine culture framing seems to suggest. But if we have more agency than we’re given credit for, then we also have more responsibility. It may be tempting to believe we have less agency than we, in fact, possess precisely because it frees us from the burden of responsibility. I’ll let you be the judge of your own situation. For my part, if I have a disordered relationship with the internet, I know, in the immortal words of Jimmy Buffett, that it’s my own damn fault. Which is not to say that tech companies are benign or faultless. Far from it!1

Take, for example, the case Gioia highlights from Dr. Anna Lembke’s book, Dopamine Nation:

My patient Sophie, a Stanford undergraduate from South Korea, came in seeking help for depression and anxiety. Among the many things we talked about, she told me she spends most of her waking hours plugged into some kind of device: Instagramming, YouTubing, listening to podcasts and playlists.

In session with her I suggested she try walking to class without listening to anything and just letting her own thoughts bubble to the surface.

She looked at me both incredulous and afraid. “Why would I do that?” she asked, openmouthed.

Gioia then adds, quoting Lembke again: “A week later, Sophie returned and reported on the new experience: ‘It was hard at first. But then I got used to it and even kind of liked it. I started noticing the trees.’”

I hesitate to label Sophie’s situation as one of addiction, although, of course, I’m not the clinical expert. It is true, of course, that addictions can be described as ranging on a spectrum from mild to severe. But I suppose part of the issue here is whether what we might call a “mild addiction” is not better described otherwise. As in so many other cases, perhaps we are suffering from what the philosopher Bernard Williams once called a “poverty of concepts.”

But more importantly, Sophie’s response to the suggestion that she try walking without her devices gives us a critical piece of information. “Why would I do that?” she asks. Obviously, I only have access to the snippet of the conversation Lembke chose to include, but that question at least suggests the possibility that part of what is going on is that, having grown up with devices at the ready, many people are now simply unable to imagine how to live apart from the steady stream of stimuli that they supply. Maybe this looks like addiction. But perhaps there’s a richer way of understanding what is happening, and maybe this richer understanding can also push us toward better modes of being with our devices, or just better ways of being.

Endless Diversions

It might be helpful to back up a few hundred years and consider a different telling of our compulsive relationship to distraction, and from there to ask some better questions of our current situation. Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, the French polymath Blaise Pascal wrote a series of strikingly relevant observations about distraction, or, as the translations typically put it, diversions. Frankly, these centuries-old observations do more, as I see it, to illuminate the nature of the problem we face than an appeal to dopamine and they do so because they do not reduce human behavior to neuro-chemical process, however helpful that knowledge may sometimes be.2

Pascal argued, for example, that human beings will naturally seek distractions rather than confront their own thoughts in moments of solitude and quiet because those thoughts will eventually lead them to consider unpleasant matters such as their own mortality, the vanity of their endeavors, and the general frailty of the human condition. Even a king, Pascal notes, pursues distractions despite having all the earthly pleasures and honors one could aspire to in this life. “The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self,” Pascal writes. “For he is unhappy, king though he be, if he think of himself.”

We are all of us kings now surrounded by devices whose only purpose is to prevent us from thinking about ourselves.

Pascal even struck a familiar note by commenting directly on the young who do not see the vanity of the world because their lives “are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future.” “But take away their devices diversions,” Pascal observes, “and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.”

I don’t know, you tell me? I wouldn’t limit that description to the “young.” What do you feel when confronted with a sudden unexpected moment of silence and inactivity? Do you grow uneasy? Do you find it difficult to abide the stillness and quiet? Do your thoughts worry you? Solitude, as opposed to loneliness, can be understood as a practice or maybe even a skill. Have we been deskilled in the practice of solitude? Have we grown uncomfortable in our own company and has this amplified the preponderance of loneliness in contemporary society? Recall, for instance, how Hannah Arendt once distinguished solitude from loneliness: “I call this existential state [thinking as an internal conversation] in which I keep myself company ‘solitude’ to distinguish it from ‘loneliness,’ where I am also alone but now deserted not only by human company but also by the possible company of myself.”

It seems to me that these are all now familiar issues and tired questions. As observations about our situation, they now strike me as banal. We all know this, right? But perhaps for that reason we do well to recall them to mind from time to time. After all, Pascal would also tell us that the stakes are high, quite high. “The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries,” he writes. “For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.”

But I think Pascal gives us only part of the story. He helps us understand our compulsive behavior in terms of a turning away from something. We are uneasy with our own thoughts, inactivity and silence bring on existential dread, etc., so we seek to be diverted from such thoughts and we turn to whatever is ready to hand. This condition is not new. It’s just that in ages past, we simply didn’t have a machine for the generation of endless distraction constantly on our person. Now we do.

This analysis can be filled out a bit further by also invoking the notion of acedia, the Latin word for the medieval vice that is usually translated in English as “sloth.” But sloth suggests laziness to most of our ears, and this might be misleading. The nature of the vice is better understood as apathy or a lack of will or discipline to do what we ought to do.3 This may look like lying listless on a couch. But it may also look like incessant busyness, so long as we are busy at everything but what we really ought to be doing. It’s a lack of energy and discipline in pursuit of the good.

So it may be, then, that we are not just turning compulsively to our devices in order to divert ourselves from the threat of existential dread. We might also be turning away from duties, responsibilities, and obligations we ought to be more vigorously pursuing.

What Are We Seeking When We’re Scrolling?

But, again, I think that our compulsive relationship to digital media and digital devices is driven by more than a desire to flee from something we’d rather not deal with whether that be some internal state or external circumstances.

There’s another question we could ask. What am I looking for when I scroll?

One answer to this question is simple and obvious—we’re looking for each other. We’re looking, in other words, for human connection. We are social creatures and among our most profound immaterial needs is the need for community.4 We will seek to meet this need by whatever means we have available to us.

In 2016, writing about claims that we are addicted to the internet or to our devices, Alan Jacobs observed,

All of these answers are both right and wrong. They’re right in one really important way: they link distraction with addiction. But they’re wrong in an even more important way: we are not addicted to any of our machines. Those are just contraptions made up of silicon chips, plastic, metal, glass. None of those, even when combined into complex and sometimes beautiful devices, are things that human beings can become addicted to.

So what then are we addicted to?5

“We are addicted to one another,” Jacobs argued, “to the affirmation of our value—our very being—that comes from other human beings. We are addicted to being validated by our peers.”

This gets us closer to the truth. I think validation may be too narrow a category for what we seek from one another, but the crucial point still stands. It is true, of course, that social media platforms attempt to hijack this desire and put it to their own uses through both their design and the ideologies they promote, but this is part of the problem, as I see it, with the dopamine framing—it tends to diminish the more powerful moral critique we should be making. The problem with social media platforms is not just that they seek to hook us on their products, it’s also that they offer themselves as the answer to profound human desires, which they are ultimately unable to satisfy. We are promised well-being and even joy, but are instead enlisted into a form of life that yields burnout, unhappiness, loneliness, and cynicism. I would quickly add that this is a problem is not limited to tech companies, it is the problem at the root of our entire economic order. But one thing at a time.

In any case, I’d go so far as to argue that the dopamine framing actually subsidizes the social imaginary that reduces the human being to the status of a machine, readily programmable by the manipulation of stimuli, which may itself be the deeper and more malignant problem.

There is, of course, more to be said in response to the question, “What am I looking for when I am scrolling?” We are looking for social connection, yes, but we are also looking for intellectual connection, which is just another way of saying that we long to know. We desire an understanding of things and take pleasure in learning. Just as with our desire for community, the desire for knowledge is itself both deeply rooted in us and deeply good. Both can orient us toward the path of human flourishing. Indeed, I’m tempted to say that the whole of the human condition could be summed up this way: we desire to know and to be known.

And just as with our desire to connect with others, so likewise with our desire for intellectual connection: the internet offers a seemingly endless supply of what we need. But here again, the reality is misleading. What we are offered is not, ultimately, what will satisfy our desire. Information is not knowledge and connection is not quite relationship, although both may become so. Unfortunately, the scale and pace of the internet, along with a host of other techno-social factors, discourage the labor that would transform information into knowledge and connection into relationship, which brings us to the next and final point.

Coping With Super-Abundance In an Anti-Culture

There’s one additional perspective on “dopamine culture” that I think is worth taking. It will combine the claim that the most notable feature of our media environment is that we live under the condition of information superabundance with an element of the late Philip Rieff’s analysis of therapeutic culture, the idea that we inhabit an anti-culture. It is an anti-culture in the sense that it does the opposite of what Rieff understood the role of most traditional cultures to be: impressing upon individuals a set of proscriptions to channel their desires.

Let’s start with information super-abundance. Had Gioia’s chart extended a bit further back in time or had it been organized around writing/print and electronic media as the critical inflection points preceding the rise of digital media, we would notice another set of important dynamics. While there are examples of those who in the aftermath of the print revolution were already clamoring about what we today would call “information overload,” for most people the experience might be better classified as one of relative information abundance as opposed to the information scarcity that characterized the human media environments before the advent of printing.6 Today we live under conditions of information super-abundance, but we sometimes still operate under the presumption of information scarcity. For example, we are tempted to ravenously consume information as if we might somehow miss out on something of value or else find that the information has somehow run out before we’ve had a chance to take some for ourselves.

Now hold that thought for a moment and consider Philip Rieff’s claim, circa 1966, that modern, post-Freudian culture, was, in fact, an anti-culture. When we think of culture, we tend to think of cultural artifacts: music, dress, food, rituals, literature, language, etc. These, however, can be thought of as the epiphenomena of culture or the visible flowering out of deep culture, which exists primarily out of sight in the realm of the taken-for-granted. In this realm resides tacit ways of understanding place, time, community, the good, the nature of reality, etc.

So if we are looking beyond the artifacts of culture—the songs, the films, the clothing, etc.—to the deeply-rooted assumptions that shape our perceptions and our values, Rieff would say that traditionally we would have encountered a series of proscriptions channeling our desires and our will, beyond ourselves to some larger purpose or goal. All traditional cultures functioned in this manner, generating a set of intuited prohibitions and permissions. Modern culture after the therapeutic turn does not.

Accordingly, Rieff writes that “a culture survives principally … by the power of institutions to bind and to loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood.” “Culture,” Rieff adds, “is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.”

But modern culture is different. “The systematic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized,” Rieff argued. This new anti-culture, he explained, “aims merely at an eternal interim ethic of release from the inherited controls.” Permissions all the way down. Which, it is absolutely worth noting, happens to correlate remarkably well with the demands of a consumer economy.7

This situation is compounded by yet another social dynamic analyzed by sociologist Hartmut Rosa. “A modern society,” Rosa argued, “is one that can stabilize itself only dynamically, in other words one that requires constant economic growth, technological acceleration, and cultural innovation in order to maintain its institutional status quo.” The ideal subject of such a society is one who is schooled to be a perpetual and indiscriminate consumer, and digital media is uniquely suited to be the everlasting commodity.

Although I’m sure it’s obvious, let me try to articulate what I take to be the significance of living under conditions of information super-abundance in the wake of the emergence of an anti-culture in Rieff’s sense. In a culture of information superabundance, we need above all else the discipline to say “no” or to set limits upon our engagement with the vast proliferation of digital media. But the anti-cultural spirit has left us ill-prepared to say “no” to anything.

“The wisdom of the next social order,” Rieff predicted, “would not reside in right doctrine, administered by the right men … but rather in doctrines amounting to permission for each man to live an experimental life.” Could there be conceived a medium better suited to the experimental life than the internet.8

Conclusion

But what has this to do with so-called “dopamine culture”?

The organizing principle of this essay has been this: the “dopamine culture” frame is too simplistic and tacitly9 encourages an impoverished view of human personhood. To reduce a discussion of this significance to the operations of dopamine already sets us off on the wrong path. We need a fuller account of our relationship with digital media as well as a richer story of human desire in order to see our way through the challenges we face. Interestingly, the dopamine framing is also an artifact of the condition it tries to explain: it is a powerful and catchy meme, although one that is offered in the best spirit. For these reasons, I fear that it may trap us in the very patterns that it seeks to overcome.

What I have attempted to offer in its place is a wider and more substantive array of explanations for the dynamics of digital culture, grounded in a specific understanding of our media environment and of the human condition. Take these for whatever they may be worth. At the very least, I hope they prompt thoughtful conversation and reflection.

Finally, coming back to the question Sophie posed when asked to consider setting aside her smartphone for a period of time: “Why would I do that?” Why might any of us seek to better order our relationship to digital media?

This is the question we need to be asking and attempting to answer, for ourselves and for others. We need a compelling account of silence, solitude, attention, disciplined engagement, well-considered restraint, vulnerability, and risk. But not for their own sake or for the sake of nebulously resisting the lure of digital technologies, and much less out of a misguided reactionary impulse. Rather, we must come to see these as the necessary skills and requisite virtues for the pursuit of our well-being and that of our neighbors.

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It feels good to be writing more frequently the past couple of months. Five new essays over the last ten weeks feels like a decent pace, and I look forward to keeping it up. Thanks again for your patience and encouragement.

I’m also glad to report that I’ve been posting audio versions of these recent essays. I know there are many of you who appreciate having the audio versions and have missed them over the past year. If you’re wondering why you haven’t seen them in your inbox, however, it’s because I’ve opted not to send out via email, especially since I’ve just uploaded a three installments over the past four days.

If you’d like to listen to them on Substack, you can follow each of these links to the respective posts:

1. Learning to Receive the Day (Audio Version)

2. Vision Con (Audio Version)

3. Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology (Audio Version)

You can also find them on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can subscribe to the podcast feed on either platform to get notified when new audio versions post.

I’ll have the audio for “The Art of Living” up early next week, and I'll then start back at “The Thing That Is Silence” and work backwards from there recording the audio versions of past essays.

Briefly, let me also remind readers that the Convivial Society runs on a patronage model. The writing is and will always remain public—there are no paywalls for the essays—however readers who value the writing and have the means to do so are encouraged to support my work. This newsletter is an important part of how make my living, so I’m grateful for the generosity of those who do become paid subscribers.

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Okay, thanks for considering. Before parting, I’ll leave you with a few random items I’ve come upon recently.

1. I’ve been reading Tolkien again lately, and I’ve been struck by how easily one can substitute “smartphone” for “the Ring.” Take, for instance, this paragraph early on in which Gandalf invites Frodo to rid himself of the ring.

2. Here’s a lovely line from Yeats that would’ve worked beautifully in my recent essay on Vision Pro, but which, alas, came to me too late: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

3. This is Kierkegaard writing on the power of walking: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk … every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

4. Finally, here is a picture I recently took of a gorgeous species of saucer magnolia known as 'Rustica Rubra.’

Be well friends. More to come soon.

Cheers,

Michael

The audio version keep coming. Here you have the audio for Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology.

Below you’ll find a couple of paintings that I cite in the essay.

Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoy it.

Cheers,

Michael

The aim is to get caught up and then post the audio version either the same day as or very shortly after I publish new written essays.

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