The Convivial Society, No. 24
Against Inevitability
“To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the events; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect ... One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man's capacity to forget is unlimited ... This situation makes the 'current-events man' a ready target for propaganda.” — Jacques Ellul, Propaganda (1973)
[A bunch of new subscribers means that I feel compelled to give a quick orientation again. If you already know your way around here, skip ahead. If you don't, I'll keep this short. The newsletter's title nods appreciatively toward both Ivan Illich and Jacques Ellul, and it typically opens with a quotation from their work. Below you'll (usually) find an essay reflecting on a theme, which sometimes works its way through the newsletter. Two sections follow with what I take to be useful resources. The first of these features mostly current news and analysis and occasional miscellany. The second highlights resources that help us think more deeply about alternative ways of being-with technology, or at least that's the hope. A quick update on stuff I'm working on comes next, and sometimes a brief personal note after that. Read what you want. I recently explained to an audience that one of the things I like about newsletters is the agency it grants the reader. Take it up when you will, as often as you like, or delete it without so much as opening it. Unsubscribe with a click. Naturally, my hope is that you'll stick around and find it worth reading and even revisiting.]
Ordinarily, I devote this space to a relatively short reflection, not unlike a longish blog post. In this installment, though, I'm keeping things really short. Things have been a bit hectic of late—when is it not, I know—but I did want to get this newsletter out even if it was a bit truncated. I wanted to get it out mostly to let you know about the talk I'm giving next week in the D. C. area. More about that in the "Recently Published" section below, which I guess I really ought to call the "What I'm Up To" section. I also wanted to let you know about the next installment, which will inaugurate a new feature of the newsletter that I'm eager to launch. More on that all the way at the end.
What I will take a few moments to mention here is an audio essay titled "The Myth of Inevitability" by Margaret Heffernan sent my way by @boazhsan a couple of weeks ago. Heffernan eloquently challenges a rhetorical trope frequently encountered in the world of technology: technological development is inevitable, ergo it should not be resisted. Not long after I started blogging about technology, roughly ten years ago, I began to notice how frequently this trope was deployed, mostly to sidestep or discourage serious reflection about a specific technology or about technological development more broadly.
The trope recalled to mind the line from the Star Trek universe uttered by the Borg, "Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated." So, in a move that strikes me as less clever now than it did then, I began referring to those who resorted to this kind of talk as exhibiting a Borg Complex. It remains, I'd say, my most salient contribution to online tech discourse, which, I realize, is not claiming very much for it.
One of my chief concerns in drawing attention to this kind of talk was expressed neatly by Heffernan: "Anyone claiming to know the future is really just trying to own it." Another concern was simply that this language hijacked the serious and crucial work of thinking and deliberation, which should characterize our relationship to technology.
Anyway, I'm supposed to be keeping this short. You can read my primer on the Borg Complex here. And do give Heffernan's short talk a listen, it's less than ten minutes long.
News and Resources
"Catalonia has created a new kind of online activism": "But the group has another point of difference from others: a new app for coordinating protest activity in the region. Tsunami Democràtic has billed this as an organising tool that promises innovative ways of evading police detection and coordinating actions."
Mark Hurst interviews Astra Taylor, author of Astra Taylor, author, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone.
On the rise of surveillance tech in K-12 schools. Disconcerting to read this stated so baldly and self-assuredly: "Some proponents of school monitoring say the technology is part of educating today’s students in how to be good 'digital citizens', and that monitoring in school helps train students for constant surveillance after they graduate. 'Take an adult in the workforce. You can’t type anything you want in your work email: it’s being looked at,' Bill McCullough, a Gaggle spokesperson, said. 'We’re preparing kids to become successful adults.'" Whatever I mean by speaking of good digital citizens and successful adults, it's not what's in view here. You do well to follow Audrey Watters's work on the topic of education and technology.
Adam Elkus on the varieties of the technological control problem.
On cartography: “It really is a perfect combination of art and science, cartography. To have something that’s beautiful to look at but also an object you can look at and think, ‘Oh, I used to live near here’ or ‘I want to go there’ and so on. It’s part of the beauty of mapping, the shared experience.” Relatedly, a stimulating thought from Deb Chachra: "So, Lewis Mumford talks about just this: the role of clocks and standardized time in his TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION. I’ve been thinking a bunch about what it means that GPS on your person locates you *spatially* in the same way that a watch locates you *temporally*…"
Drew Austin on "Bundling and Unbundling" is very good: "Reducing the world’s accumulated complexity — businesses, institutions, or cities — to sets of discrete tasks or features requires viewing the world as a computer does: quantifying value, weighing costs against benefits, and disregarding ambiguity. As if the messy analog world was code itself, unbundling frames each desirable feature of the world as an independent module that can operate anywhere without a loss of performance quality. The process rests on a faith that technology can isolate the true value of anything useful, removing it from its context without any loss of utility or desirability." Austin gets bonus points for citing Chesterton.
It wasn't always obvious what "scrolling" on a computer screen meant. From the Apple IIe manual. More in this thread.
Background ambient noise generator inspired by Eco's The Name of the Rose.
I found these 19th century paintings by Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky to be rather remarkable.
Re-framings
Powers of Ten(1977): "Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward- into the hand of the sleeping picnicker- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell."
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In a 1985 interview, Joseph Weizenbaum was asked what he thought the role of computers in education should be. This was his response.
He was also asked whether he thought the computer was "creating a technical elite, reinforcing old power structures, or remaking American society?" His response:
Recently Published
I've mentioned a time or two a conference in D. C. at which I'd be speaking, that conference is finally upon us. You can read more about it here. It will be hosted by the Center of the Study of Statesmanship at Catholic University next this coming Friday (11/8). If you're in the area, consider dropping in. I'm looking forward to the event and eager to hear from the other presenters. I'm also looking forward to meeting in person a number of folks that I've thus far only known virtually. If you manage to make it, don't hesitate to say hey. A version of the talk, by the way, will appear in the spring issue of The New Atlantis.
If you've been reading for a bit, you'll remember my citing a line from Warren Ellis a few months back: "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.” I'm afraid that I may be letting my lease on the Isles of Blogging run out, but I'm a happy citizen of the Republic of Newsletters. Recently, one of the chief cartographers of the Republic, Robin Sloan, has mapped out my place:
"L.M. Sacasas lives on the back side of the hill in a very old house where a conclave of esoteric scholars occasionally gathers: historians, philosophers, philologists, at least one private detective. They come to the island on the ferry, traveling in twos and threes, whispering to each other in dead languages."
Loved that. I'll happily inhabit that space. If you're here via Robin's newsletter, welcome. If you've not visited Robin's own corner of the Republic, you should.
One last thing. I mentioned a few installments ago that I was working on a new occasional feature for the newsletter: excerpts from recent books on technology and society. The next newsletter will be the first of these special editions and will feature a selection from Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt's Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter(Harvard UP, 2019). I trust you'll enjoy it.
Cheers,
Michael