Thank you for this (I too finally bought a subscription). The drive to remove friction from existence has become so intuitive; but a perfectly frictionless world is one of total artifice: it is delusive, meaningless, anti-human. Still, that's the spiral we're on: the more artificial our environment grows, the more we allow ourselves to believe reality imposes no constraints but is a canvas for our self-actualization. It's a disorder of the imagination.
Ironically, as David Bentley Hart pointed out in his recent substack series, the transhumanist fantasy of uploaded consciousness is the antithesis of the historical Gnosticism to which it is often compared. The Gnostics believed in an escape to the Real, not from it.
I was struck how you and Wallace both use the term "care" in your "advice." I've noticed that discussions about what tech tools rob us of are often framed around concepts like "freedom," "autonomy," "agency" and "attention," but rarely around "care," or more specifically the ability to care about or take care of the people and things around us. (Perhaps because care and care-taking are historically feminized concepts, imagined as the purview of the mother and not the scholar?) One of the things we offload when we cede tasks, even mundane ones like meal planning, to tech is care and one of the things we lose is our ability to care about and take care of others. This seems, to me, like the real loss.
Thanks for a year of insights, a space to reflect on them, and for taking such good care of your readers!
What a truly beautiful reflection and benediction. I wonder if this jives at all with why Marie Kondo became the phenomenon she did - something about touching the material world, physically, and building our psychic connections to our space and habits with attention and joy.
I was browsing through the used bookstore over winter break and picked up "One Straw Revolutionary" about Masanobu Fukuoka, author of the "One Straw Revolution." The short story is he developed a form of no-till agriculture in Japan when the society there was still in the thrall of technological innovation in agriculture, and his yields equaled or exceeded those of industrially grown crops. Your mention of Chris Gilliard's comments made me think of Fukuoka. In some ways, his system called for less work, because he left the work to the natural world. I recently read a passage where he told the students that they should go out and pick whatever their bodies told them they should eat, and that the Japanese word for "feast" originally meant "wander around" because a feast is a collection of things you wandered around and picked. (I cannot verify if that is really true.) To some extent, vastly oversimplified, it seems that we are using technology in an attempt to make our lives easier, but in that attempt, we are severing our relationship to the natural world as the place where our basic needs are fulfilled, and we are also filling our time with managing the apps and devices required to free up the time we might spend on the more convivial pursuits of gardening and preparing meals. Fukuoka is a good example of a visionary who abandoned industrial technique to learn what basic technique is already at work in nature. It seems he did observe what needed to be done and worked hard doing it, but in cooperation with natural systems. (My own half-hearted efforts at letting my garden do what it wants leads to arugula taking over everything, which, admittedly, not the worst thing in the world. The honeybees love the flowers.) Happy New Year!
I think the language used in this installment got me to reinterpret Between Past and Future a bit. It provoked a reformulation of something like ~"The end of Tradition implies a promotion of introspection because it leaves a void" into what seems a little more casual/interactive to me: "A stronger emphasis on thinking is necessary today because a rapid development of technics over the last century requires a cognitive capacity for control".
I think you're right in bringing DFW into this because the question of "Does it ever get too good to handle?" is a big theme in all his speculations about modern times. This is also a good lens to read Nietzsche through (something like "We do not have a morality that supports our technology, and that's frightening").
WRT the gnostic fantasy - I'm reminded of Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own, which I'd always read as a creative argument that traced social injustice for women to the fact that women are less likely (unless the are fortunate enough to afford a room of their own) to be insulated from mundane interruptions, and that those small but frequent diversions are barriers to *longer trains of thought*, which is ultimately where a kind of meaningful freedom appears.
This post convinced me to subscribe. What a great way to end the year. Thank you.
Thank you so much!
Me too.
You won't be disappointed!
Thank you for this (I too finally bought a subscription). The drive to remove friction from existence has become so intuitive; but a perfectly frictionless world is one of total artifice: it is delusive, meaningless, anti-human. Still, that's the spiral we're on: the more artificial our environment grows, the more we allow ourselves to believe reality imposes no constraints but is a canvas for our self-actualization. It's a disorder of the imagination.
Ironically, as David Bentley Hart pointed out in his recent substack series, the transhumanist fantasy of uploaded consciousness is the antithesis of the historical Gnosticism to which it is often compared. The Gnostics believed in an escape to the Real, not from it.
I was struck how you and Wallace both use the term "care" in your "advice." I've noticed that discussions about what tech tools rob us of are often framed around concepts like "freedom," "autonomy," "agency" and "attention," but rarely around "care," or more specifically the ability to care about or take care of the people and things around us. (Perhaps because care and care-taking are historically feminized concepts, imagined as the purview of the mother and not the scholar?) One of the things we offload when we cede tasks, even mundane ones like meal planning, to tech is care and one of the things we lose is our ability to care about and take care of others. This seems, to me, like the real loss.
Thanks for a year of insights, a space to reflect on them, and for taking such good care of your readers!
What a truly beautiful reflection and benediction. I wonder if this jives at all with why Marie Kondo became the phenomenon she did - something about touching the material world, physically, and building our psychic connections to our space and habits with attention and joy.
I was browsing through the used bookstore over winter break and picked up "One Straw Revolutionary" about Masanobu Fukuoka, author of the "One Straw Revolution." The short story is he developed a form of no-till agriculture in Japan when the society there was still in the thrall of technological innovation in agriculture, and his yields equaled or exceeded those of industrially grown crops. Your mention of Chris Gilliard's comments made me think of Fukuoka. In some ways, his system called for less work, because he left the work to the natural world. I recently read a passage where he told the students that they should go out and pick whatever their bodies told them they should eat, and that the Japanese word for "feast" originally meant "wander around" because a feast is a collection of things you wandered around and picked. (I cannot verify if that is really true.) To some extent, vastly oversimplified, it seems that we are using technology in an attempt to make our lives easier, but in that attempt, we are severing our relationship to the natural world as the place where our basic needs are fulfilled, and we are also filling our time with managing the apps and devices required to free up the time we might spend on the more convivial pursuits of gardening and preparing meals. Fukuoka is a good example of a visionary who abandoned industrial technique to learn what basic technique is already at work in nature. It seems he did observe what needed to be done and worked hard doing it, but in cooperation with natural systems. (My own half-hearted efforts at letting my garden do what it wants leads to arugula taking over everything, which, admittedly, not the worst thing in the world. The honeybees love the flowers.) Happy New Year!
I think the language used in this installment got me to reinterpret Between Past and Future a bit. It provoked a reformulation of something like ~"The end of Tradition implies a promotion of introspection because it leaves a void" into what seems a little more casual/interactive to me: "A stronger emphasis on thinking is necessary today because a rapid development of technics over the last century requires a cognitive capacity for control".
I think you're right in bringing DFW into this because the question of "Does it ever get too good to handle?" is a big theme in all his speculations about modern times. This is also a good lens to read Nietzsche through (something like "We do not have a morality that supports our technology, and that's frightening").
WRT the gnostic fantasy - I'm reminded of Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own, which I'd always read as a creative argument that traced social injustice for women to the fact that women are less likely (unless the are fortunate enough to afford a room of their own) to be insulated from mundane interruptions, and that those small but frequent diversions are barriers to *longer trains of thought*, which is ultimately where a kind of meaningful freedom appears.