The Convivial Society, No. 18
The Form Is Never Neutral
"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."
— Ivan Illich, "The Cultivation of Conspiracy"
I'm back from a three-week road trip with stops in semi-rural Ohio, western PA (it's never Pennsylvania), and South Carolina. When I left central Florida, we were in the last stages of what passes for spring here. Evening temperatures were still dipping into the upper sixties and day-time highs were topping out at the lower 80s. In my absence it would appear that an infernal portal opened up, swallowed spring and spit out summer. This is fine, as the dog says. In any case, it was a fine trip. I've always enjoyed the change in scenery. I was frequently greeted by robins, rabbits, and chipmunks when I stepped outside—which I'm sure is normal for many of you, I don't know, but isn't exactly typical where I live in the heart of suburbia.
In any case, you're not here for a travelogue, especially the many (many!) of you who are here for the first time. I hesitate to give another orientation as I did a couple of installments ago, suffice it so say that I'm doing a balancing act of sorts here. I'm interested in keeping readers modestly well-informed about current trends in technology, but also in providing context to make sense of these trends.
Earlier today I came across this observation from Samuel Loncar on Twitter: "There is a lot of focus on #technology - that’s obvious. But there is almost no attention given to the meaning, the significance, of technologies. I’d submit we can’t answer basic questions because we still lack even a vocabulary of meaning around our tools." This resonates with me, I think it's basically right. The question of meaning, which in some respects precedes the moral question, seems especially urgent to me. I'd describe what I'm doing as wrestling with the question of the meaning of technology as way of getting at the moral significance of our tools.
In a thoughtful comment on a recent blog post, Luke Fernandez suggested that technology can be "a platform for contemplating more philosophical questions about how human (and conversely) how machine-like we really are." He added that thinking about technology can be a short-cut into philosophy. This seems right to me, too. You can't get very far in thinking about technology without finally having to think about what it means to be human and what it means to flourish as a human being. These are the questions that I find most interesting and most urgent. Of course, they entail a number of prior questions involving the relationship of technology to politics, economics, the arts, education, etc. Technology, it turns out, is not just a short cut into philosophy, it's a short cut into almost every conceivable discipline. Hence the rather eclectic nature of the resources on which I tend to draw. You'll get a little bit of everything.
So there you have it. If any of this sounds interesting to you, you've come to the right place.
Ordinarily this space features a short essay, in this case I'll make it quite short. In the last installment, I mentioned two reviews that spurred some thoughts on life in the digital age, but I ended up only writing about one of those. Let me take up the second briefly.
The review is of the first and second volume of The Oxford History of Life-Writing, covering the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, respectively. I confess that the term life-writing was new to me, but it implies pretty much what you would assume, writing about the lives of people. The editor of the second volume, Alan Stewart, observed that life-writing, was partly motivated by "the overwhelming need to preserve what would otherwise be ephemeral."
Upon reading that line I immediately thought about how so much of what we have done with digital media can be similarly described. Whether it was our first digital cameras, life-logging tools, or LiveJournal, we deployed digital technology in an effort to preserve what would otherwise be ephemeral. Life-writing by other means, as it were. It is a very human impulse—who wants to be forgotten?—and digital media appeared to empower us to document our lives as no other technology before had done.
But as the reviewer, Patrick Murray pointed out, there's a catch of sorts:
"Yet unpacking the idea that life-writing makes possible the transubstantiation of spirit into form highlights the slippery nature of life-writing itself. In many ways, the writer is chasing shadows, trying to give some sort of solidity to evanescent experience. Writer's of lives—whether their own or other's—seek to record the unrecordable."
And so it is with our digitally mediated efforts to document our lives. We are tantalized by the apparent power of our tools, tempted by what they seem to make possible, but, in truth, we often discover that they hold out a promise they cannot fulfill. One might go so far as to say that they may actually undermine the possibility of attaining the very thing they promise to deliver.
This is the case because technologies alter our relation to the experiences they mediate by the nature of their particular structure and the scale at which they operate. Consider how Roland Barthes famously withheld a treasured photograph of his mother from Camera Lucida, his well-known critical study of photography. It was too intimate a photograph to share. It hardly seems possible for us to relate to a digital image in this way. Or consider the distinct emotional registers of tearing a photograph and deleting an image. Then there is the public nature of our documentation, which again changes the character of our recollection.
Much of this became clear to me when my first child was born and I experienced the urge to document each tender moment, every milestone, all of the smiles and giggles and peaceful naps. What was I after? What exactly was I trying to capture? I was trying to record the unrecordable. I knew that something remarkable was unfolding and I knew that it would pass. But the images, however many of them I captured, could not contain what was most important, and somehow the effort itself diminished the impossibly fragile reality I was trying to horde for my future self. What's more, the capacity to document these moments somehow made me all the more aware of their fleeting nature. Because I could document the moment its ephemeral character became more apparent and I was simultaneously alienated from the event itself as it unfolded.
As with the desire to be known, which I considered in the last installment, so with the desire to remember and to be remembered: how we pursue the fulfillment of the desire matters. The technologies we turn to in our pursuit, whether analog or digital, matter. The form is never neutral.
Sources
Loncar's tweet
Fernandez's comment
News and Resources
This wide-ranging and thoughtful essay on privacy, visibility, and identity by Russell Bogue is worth your time: "One way forward is to identify what both impulses share: the desire to tell a story. We fear being seen because we fear being unable to give an account of ourselves, to contextualize who we are. Yet our desire to belong and to be recognized is a desire to tell precisely this story, and to have someone listen when we tell it."
Amazon's helping police build a surveillance network with Ring doorbells.
Russell Brandom argues deepfakes aren't going to be as much of a threat as some have made them out to be.
I'm skeptical of his skepticism. If they're considered as an isolate reality, perhaps. As part of a larger pattern generated by digital technology, I'm not so sure. I think the key in cases like this is to remember that, in terms of historical scale and societal impact, digital technology is still in its nascent stages. Also, the point is not exactly that people will fall for deepfakes. The consequences will be more subtle, impacting what we might think of as the epistemic infrastructure of public discourse.
According the Matthew Longo, "The age of data-based statecraft and interminable data accumulation is upon us, and it will affect us all." More.
An evocative essay by Laurence Scott about YouTube as time machine: "Its channels open new routes back to the past. Over these years I’ve come to understand that my YouTube, what I make of it, is one of the most melancholy places I’ve ever visited. I find that I turn to it to experience an exquisite kind of sadness, born from its way of restoring lost time only to take it away once more."
I can't be sure, but I'm guessing Scott is about my age, which is to say that we were young adults when the commercial internet came on the scene. I've wondered the degree to which that impacts how we experience the internet in relation to memory. The experience Scott describes seems to imply a chasm of forgetting that YouTube helps bridge. So it was when Facebook first came to the adult world: we sought out old, half-forgotten friends. But what if this prosthetic memory has been around your whole life? Some old thoughts on the transition from memory scarcity to memory abundance here.
Metaphors matter. They do a lot of work in structuring how we think. Two of them caught my attention recently. First, here is one from Jim Balsillie: "Data is not the new oil – it’s the new plutonium. Amazingly powerful, dangerous when it spreads, difficult to clean up and with serious consequences when improperly used. Data deployed through next generation 5G networks is transforming passive infrastructure into veritable digital nervous systems."
And here is philosopher Michael Lynch writing about "information pollution." This piece labors under some illusions about the nature of the digital condition, but it does conclude with a useful reminder: certain ideals ought to be pursued even if it is not clear that they can be realized.
Interestingly, Cory Doctorow deployed the data as plutonium metaphor as early as 2008: "Every gram - sorry, byte - of personal information these feckless data-packrats collect on us should be as carefully accounted for as our weapons-grade radioisotopes, because once the seals have cracked, there is no going back."
"The way we learn to use the Internet in the next few years (or fail to learn) will influence the way our grandchildren govern themselves." That's from Howard Rheingold's answer to the annual question posed by Edge in 2000, which I stumbled upon recently. More: "These technological capabilities have emerged only recently, and are evolving rapidly. While much attention is focused on how many-to-many audio technology is threatening the existing music industry, little attention is focused on political portals."
"The Most Choice Books": On Gerard of Cremona’s twelfth-century quest to translate Arabic scholarship.
Ross Anderson on the stories ancient trees have to tell: "The burning of books and libraries has perhaps fallen out of fashion, but if you look closely, you will find its spirit survives in another distinctly human activity, one as old as civilisation itself: the destruction of forests. Trees and forests are repositories of time; to destroy them is to destroy an irreplaceable record of the Earth’s past ... To find a tree’s memories, you have to look past its leaves and even its bark; you have to go deep into its trunk, where the chronicles of its long life lie, secreted away like a library’s lost scrolls. This spring, I journeyed to the high, dry mountains of California to visit an ancient forest, a place as dense with history as Alexandria."
Re-framings
So, look, there's a lot going on in this lengthy essay by ecologist and philosopher David Abram titled "Magic and the Machine." I might hesitate to put some things exactly as he does, but ... there's a great deal worth considering. In my own way, which owes decidedly less to animistic traditions, I've been trying to understand how modern technology has mediated our experience of world so that we are, in some way that is difficult to pin down, somehow less at home in it and, as a result, fail to flourish as the sort of creatures we are. If you have thoughts on this piece, I'd be happy to hear them. Here is just one of the many sections that I could have excerpted:
"PERHAPS IT IS EASIER to understand, now, why we’re so enthralled by our digital technologies, such that once we’re online and synapsed to the screen, it’s remarkably difficult to tear ourselves away. For all these technologies awaken something primordial in us, a biophilic proclivity layered deep in our genome, a penchant for animate interchange with bodies whose shapes are very different from our own. The renewal of that age-old animistic sense of a world all alive, awake, and aware brings an upwelling of wonder, or at least an anticipation of a wondrous possibility waiting just around the corner. And so we remain transfixed by these tools, searching in and through our digital engagements for an encounter they seem to promise yet never really provide: the consummate encounter with otherness, with radical alterity, with styles of sensibility and intelligence that thoroughly exceed the limits of our own sentience. Yet there’s the paradox: for the more we engage these remarkable tools, the less available we are for any actual contact outside the purely human estate. In truth, the more we participate with these astonishing technologies, the more we seal ourselves into an exclusively human cocoon, and the more our animal senses—themselves co-evolved with the winds, the waters, and the many-voiced terrain—are blunted, rendering us ever more blind, ever more deaf, ever more impervious to the more-than-human Earth."
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From a 1930 French guide to drawing animals by R. and L. Lambry:
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This finely sculpted ivory mammoth is one of the earliest surviving works of figurative art. It dates back at least 35,000 years and was excavated in 1931 by Gustav Riek in the Vogelherd Cave in Germany. It measures 3.7 cm in length. More here.
Recently Published
On the blog, some preliminary reflections on the relationship between what we make and what we are.
A couple of pieces are in the works. They may be out in the next month. Stay tuned.
One last thing. I mentioned a couple of months ago that I was contemplating a shift to another newsletter platform. I'm about ready to pull the trigger on that now. I'll send out another installment shortly explaining the move. You need do nothing. Stay tuned.
Trust you all are well. Glad to hear from those of you who've dropped me a note of late. Please feel free to do so, it's always a pleasure to hear from readers. Thanks to those of you have passed along links to the subscription page, I appreciate that as well.
Cheers,
Michael