Out of the Wilderness

In hope

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture … or so it was and now will be again.

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