The Convivial Society, No. 11
"At present people tend to relinquish the task of envisaging the future to a professional élite. They transfer power to politicians who promise to build up the machinery to deliver this future. They accept a growing range of power levels in society when inequality is needed to maintain high outputs. Political institutions themselves become draft mechanisms to press people into complicity with output goals. What is right comes to be subordinated to what is good for institutions. Justice is debased to mean the equal distribution of institutional wares."
— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
Sometimes it feels as if the internet as we know it has been around forever. Doing the math just now, I'm realizing for the first time that I've now lived more years with the internet than I did without it. In fact, I passed that threshold about five years ago, depending on how one dates things. At other times, it seems like this is all still somehow a novel experiment. I think it may always feel that way for those of us of a certain age. In some respects, it is newer than the early 1990s. The advent of what we used to call Web 2.0 is a decade closer in time, and ubiquitous always-on culture facilitated by mobile devices is closer still, barely a decade old. Of course, a decade has come to feel like a very long time. Whatever the case, I do think that the consequences of digital communication technologies are still far from fully apparent to us. But they will start to become more apparent as those who have been born after the saturation point of digital/mobile technology come of age. I'd suggest, too, that people like myself, who came of age prior to that point, no matter how engaged we may be with digital culture, cannot fully appreciate the transformation afoot. I may be wrong about that, of course.
In any case, the class of people we may think of as "extremely online" are something of a bellweather. If the "extremely online" designation doesn't mean anything to you, then, chances are, you are not a part of that class. I'm not a part of that class either, and I'm reminded of that when I encounter the writing of someone who is. For example: Patricia Lockwood. I don't know very much about Patricia Lockwood (which is to say, not much beyond what I just now read on Wikipedia), which is another reminder that I am not an extremely online person. But I do know that reading her recent lecture at a London Review of Books event (not exactly what we might think of as an extremely online sort of venue) gives us a glance at the what the psychic consequences of digital communication might be. Read it, or watch the video of the lecture, and tell me what you think. Some bits, I should say, are what we used to quaintly call Not Safe For Work.
Two quick observations. First, she writes the lecture in the third person. "It seemed fitting to write it in the third person because I no longer felt like myself," she explained. This seems fitting, especially, when we have become so aware of ourselves in real time that we have become an object to ourselves. Second, consider this from early in the talk as Lockwood recalls her early years online (her talk moves along a chronological arc):
"The amount of eavesdropping was enormous. Other people’s diaries streamed around her. Should she be listening to the conversations of teenagers? Should she follow with such avidity the compliments rural sheriffs paid to porn stars, not realising that other people could see them?"
The normative question—should?—was critical, then and now, and we did and continue to fail. Elizabeth Bruenig, reflecting on the Bezos affair, recently urged her readers in the Washington Post to consider the moral harm of consuming material not meant for our eyes: "But as for the never-ending reel of things we ought not see ever-flickering across our screens — ignore them, don’t look. There are things better left unknown."
Too late, I'm afraid.
The only difference now seems to be that the class of the naive rural sheriffs is shrinking. We all know we are being watched and heard, or that it is possible, at least, that we are always being watched and heard. How else to explain the persistent plausibility to so many that their devices are secretly recording them? Do you have tape over your the lens of your laptop's camera?
News and Resources
Scientists create super-thin 'sheet' that could charge our phones: Phones aren't really the interesting bit here, the title not withstanding. “In the future, everything is going to be covered with electronic systems and sensors. The question is going to be how do we power them?” said Palacios. “This is the missing building block that we need.”
The CRISPR machines that can wipe out entire species: "Although the technical mountains of building a drive have mostly been scaled, we have only just begun scaling the ethical, moral and social quandaries looming over this ecosystem-changing technology. It's true that a release of a self-propagating drive may save thousands of lives or protect native species from invasive threats, but it's also true that we can't fully predict the consequences of releasing such a drive into the wild."
The ever effusive and somewhat breathless Kevin Kelly on the rise of mirrorworlds: "We are now at the dawn of the third platform, which will digitize the rest of the world. On this platform, all things and places will be machine-readable, subject to the power of algorithms."
Modern Weather Forecasts Are Stunningly Accurate
The Man Who Invented Information Theory: "Without meaning, information theory can solve the engineering problem—but only the engineering problem. Granting engineering problems primacy in questions of meaning, however, seems like a hasty, ignominious surrender."
Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes: "The problem in our current digital world, he argues, isn’t about utility, it’s about autonomy: tech greatly improves our life, right up until the point where you stop using it intentionally and unknowingly fall into manipulative black holes—on your phone, on Slack, in your inbox—that are specifically designed to be addicting."
Your digital identity has three layers, and you can only protect one of them.
Amazon’s mission is to make customer identity more primary than citizenship. But you already knew that.
"The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a 'catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems', according to the first global scientific review."
More on the web of surveillance we are all imposing on one another.
The 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight
Speed, Equity, and the Mobility Crisis: Ivan Illich in the Digital Era: "What, then, does Energy and Equity ultimately offer us today? Illich presents a vision of truly human-centered transportation, not the kind to which so many pay lip service, but the kind that replaces the atrophied consumer and user with fully-developed individuals who dictate their own movement."
Re-framings
The far side of the moon and us:
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Space colony art from the 1970s (bonus for folks of a certain age: one of these artists, I learned, also designed Atari game cartridges):
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From a 16th century how-to manual:
Recently Published
Some recent posts on the blog:
Remembering Iris Murdoch
Don't Romanticize the Present
Listening to Those At the Hinges
The re-framings section was a bit different this time around, not necessarily a permanent change. I felt that was the best place to drop those images, which seemed interesting on their own and as a set.
I'm done with Twitter for the time being. I know, I'll spare you the the long testimonial. Suffice it to say that at some point it just became to clear that it was not in my best interest to hang out there on and off through the day. It was exacting a mental toll that was a bit too steep. Of course, that point was probably two or three years ago. For whatever reason, I finally decided it was time to act on it. My account remains online and will tweet out my blog posts. We'll see how it's going in a month.
For now, blog and newsletter seem like the way to go. As Warren Ellis recently put it, “The Republic of Newsletters and the Isles of Blogging, my friend. That's what's left. Messages in bottles from hermit caves by the sea.” (H/t to Austin Kleon for that line.)
Cheers,
Michael
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