The Convivial Society, No. 13
"Counterfoil research must clarify and dramatize the relationship of people to their tools. It ought to hold constantly before the public the resources that are available and the consequences of their use in various ways. It should impress on people the existence of any trend that threatens one of the major balances on which life depends. Counterfoil research leads to the identification of those classes of people most immediately hurt by such trends and helps people to identify themselves as members of such classes."
— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
When I started this newsletter a little over a year ago, I thought I had already missed the newsletter bandwagon. Apparently I was wrong. It's just now raining newsletters by some accounts. As I shared recently, I've increasingly turned to newsletters in order to shift my inputs away from social media and toward the inbox. I've signed up for a number of them over the last few weeks, a shotgun approach to finding the ones that will be most useful and enlivening. One of these happens to be Snakes and Ladders, Alan Jacobs's newsletter, which I recommend to you. In a recent post on his blog, Alan deployed Robin Sloan's distinction between stock and flow to explain his newsletter philosophy:
A few years ago my friend Robin Sloan wrote a post in which he applied the economic concept of “stock and flow” to our current media scene: “Flow is the feed,” he said: “It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.” But “Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today."
Alan goes on to apply this to newsletters:
The first — and by far the most common — is a device for flow management. You know, the “cool stories I read this week” kind of thing. And those can be useful and illuminating!
That other kind is an aid to stock replenishment .... they focus on matters of evergreen rather than topical interest. And that’s my aspiration too.
Without having thought about it in those terms, my own aspiration has been some blend of the two, hence the two sections of links: "News and Resources" and "Re-framings." Managing flow, it turns out, is much easier than replenishing stock. I have a folder full of flow-y links, but it's sometimes a bit of a challenge to know what exactly to include in the Re-framings section.
Although I will continue to aim for a blend of flow and stock, I tend to agree with Alan. Replenishing stock is in many respects the more urgent task. The flow is itself part of the problem, no matter how well managed. It's an open and too often undiscussed question whether staying well-informed is indeed an uncomplicated virtue in the age of information abundance. Much depends, of course, on what exactly one means by "staying well-informed." By most measures, though, it's hard to see how it leaves much room for reflection, judgment, or the cultivation of wisdom. The mere injunction to be "well-informed" offers us little to no guidance about what it is worth staying informed about, to say nothing of the fact that many judgments on that score will almost certainly be proven wrong by the passage of time.
I'm just now trying to recall a relatively well-known line from a relatively well-known writer. Perhaps one of you can help me. The gist is something like this: the tragedy of the modern world (speaking in the early 20th century, I think) is that it is impossible for us to know all that we need to know. I believe it was Rebecca West, but I can't say for sure. Whatever the case, you get the point. There's something to this, I think, and the situation has only worsened in this regard. Relatedly, James Schall, commenting on G.K. Chesterton's observation that there is "no such thing as an uninteresting subject only uninterested people," himself observed that "the condition of being human is the risk of not knowing something worth knowing."
All well and good, but it is increasingly hard to tell what's worth knowing. We're too close to everything and all our tools only serve to reinforce that closeness, to lock us into an ephemeral present where everything appears urgent and pressing, yet also somehow inconsequential, fleeting, superficial. Hence my move to distance myself from the torrent of information, especially as it is experienced through social media feeds, and to find ways of replenishing our stock. Here's hoping this is, in turn, useful to you as you seek to make your own judgments about what is worth knowing and what deserves your attention.
News and Resources
"The Wrong Kind of AI? Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Labor Demand" (PDF): "There is a lot of excitement, some hype, and a fair bit of apprehension about what AI will mean for our security, society and economy. But a critical question has been largely overlooked: are we investing in the 'right' type of AI, the type with the greatest potential for raising productivity and generating broad-based prosperity? We don't have a definitive answer right now — nobody does. But this is the right time to ask this question while we can still shape the direction of AI research and the future of work."
"Algorithmic paranoia and the convivial alternative" (2016): "The direction of travel of algorithmic prediction and pre-emption under current conditions is to close down possible futures, and to do so in a way that evades pre-agreed notions of fairness. In contrast, the convivial society 'would have the purpose of permitting all people to define the images of their own future.'"
"Unprecedented privacy risk with popular health apps": "The researchers found sharing of user data by medicines-related apps is routine but far from transparent, and also identified a small number of commercial entities with the ability to aggregate and potentially re-identify user data."
Review of Nihilism and Technology by Nolen Gertz: "As Gertz puts it, we say things like ‘I can’t believe I spent all day on the computer’, rather than ‘I can’t believe I am not taking responsibility for having spent all day on my computer.'"
"What is the world to do about gene editing?": "This month, several of the world’s leading CRISPR researchers published a commentary in Nature, calling for a total moratorium on heritable genome editing until the establishment of an international framework that would compel countries to establish both scientific safety and broad societal agreement—perhaps through a process of public consultation over several years—before allowing the technology to progress." But, please consider the very next line: "No one has yet tied this proposal to a specific overseeing institution ..." Relatedly, here are some observations from a few months back.
"Human Contact Is Now A Luxury Good": "The rich do not live like this. The rich have grown afraid of screens. They want their children to play with blocks, and tech-free private schools are booming. Humans are more expensive, and rich people are willing and able to pay for them. Conspicuous human interaction — living without a phone for a day, quitting social networks and not answering email — has become a status symbol."
Mercury, not Venus, it turns out is, on average, the planet closest to us.
Re-framings
I have a certain fondness for the story of the Tower of Babel, as well as for its artistic representation. Here, for example, is Bruegel's well-known rendering, the tower already beginning to collapse upon itself before it is even complete.
And here is a link to an article in the Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art by Barbara A. Kaminska in which she situates the 16th century painting within the tradition of convivial conversation in Antwerp:
"The Tower of Babel provided an equally decorous Old Testament example of the dangers of miscommunication, urging those participating in a meal gathering to answer the question of how to maintain prosperity in a community characterized by extraordinary pluralism. It presented an open-ended visual argument, which stimulated discussion and self-examination. In this essay, I correlate the painting with contemporary mercantile and demographic circumstances in Antwerp, offering a reading of this well-known composition within the framework of convivial tradition and informed by period commercial and social discourses."
Naturally, I was drawn to the article both for its subject matter and for how it linked up via the idea of conviviality with the concepts that animate this newsletter. Here is more:
"The custom of convivia and the Italian ideal of country life (villeggiatura), which in the mid-sixteenth century found its way to Northern Europe, further contextualized the reception of Bruegel’s painting. Suburban villas provided the perfect setting for a sophisticated yet friendly conversation and allowed discussion of topics that elsewhere might be improper. Guests were encouraged to speak freely and yet they did not trespass against any of the norms of a cultured conversation. This resonated with the diversity of convivial talks promoted by both ancient and early modern authors, who believed that the very exchange of arguments was more important than achieving a consensus, and that a one-dimensional discussion, in which everyone agrees, should be avoided."
The experience of the early modern world was not altogether unlike ours. "'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone," wrote John Donne, born just three years after Bruegel died. The parallels are not exact, of course, but sometimes there are striking similarities, such as the with the problem of simply figuring out how to talk to one another again and creating the convivial spaces where this can happen. We now seem to know better that there are spaces where this unlikely to happen, and that is something I suppose.
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Here are a few lines from Mary Midgley, the philosopher who died at 99 late last year, about how her concerns emerged in conversation with a remarkable cadre women studying philosophy in mid-twentieth century England. They are taken from this lovely tribute from Phil Christman:
"The trouble is not, of course, men as such—men have done good enough philosophy in the past. What is wrong is a particular style of philosophising that results from encouraging a lot of clever young men to compete in winning arguments. These people then quickly build up a set of games out of simple oppositions and elaborate them until, in the end, nobody else can see what they are talking about.… It was clear that we were all more interested in understanding this deeply puzzling world than in putting each other down."
Recently Published
Nothing new to report on this front since the last newsletter, so here are a couple of selections from the archive:
One Does Not Simply Add Ethics to Technology
What Do I See When I See My Child?
As always, welcome to new readers. I hope you've appreciated your first installment. New and old readers alike, below the signature you will find some links to share and support this work.
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Cheers,
Michael
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