The Convivial Society, No. 9
"I have identified five realms in each of which the efficiency of tools can upset the balance of life. Faulty technology can render the environment uninhabitable. Radical monopoly can force the demand for affluence to the point of paralyzing the ability to work. Overprogramming can transform the world into a treatment ward in which people are constantly taught, socialized, normalized, tested, and reformed. Centralization and packaging of institutionally produced values can polarize society into irreversible structural despotism. And, finally, engineered obsolescence can break all bridges to a normative past. In each or several of these dimensions a tool can threaten survival by making it unfeasible for most people to relate themselves in action to one of the great dimensions of their environment"
— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
One goal for the new year is to make this newsletter, slightly more frequent and slightly more regular. That probably means leaving behind the thematic focus that I more or less stumbled into after the second installment. You'll notice that this is simply installment "No. 9" with no particular title. It also probably means that the reflections that usually appear here in this space below the quotation, may be more abbreviated. I'll just assume no one is going to be especially troubled this development.
Not only are we in a new calendar year, it is also approaching the first anniversary of The Convivial Society. Throughout this year during which I've been writing a newsletter, rather sporadically, I've also been subscribing to more newsletters myself. I'm increasingly convinced that this is the way to go, or at least an important component of any larger strategy. Several years ago, there was a time during which I relied heavily on the late, great Google Reader to organize my feeds. Since then I've never quite settled on a useful way of gathering and gleaning online. I've relied a great deal on those I follow on Twitter, but that has its much-discussed drawbacks. What I most appreciate about newsletters involves their seeming remove from the more chaotic and cacophonous flow of the internet, especially as it is mediated by social media. The inbox, which can have its own problems, is nonetheless a more static place. Material arrives and stays until I decide to do something with it. It also feels like a more solitary space. I'm not reading in the putative presence of an audience with the attendant pressures and temptations. At the same time, however, it also feels like a less lonely place in that I come to know and appreciate the voice of the newsletter's author. And that is the best part, really: the intimacy of the voice, the unique perspectives that unfold on the world, the measure of trust that emerges over time—all of it seems, you know, more humane in the best sense.
News and Resources
It seems that we are beginning to see the rough outlines of whatever shape politics in the age of digital media will take (of course, those outlines could just as easily vanish before we're able to fully apprehend them). The career of Alexandra Octavio-Cortex appears to be instructive. Here are three pieces reflecting on that possibility: "How Alexandria Octavio-Cortez Shapes a New Political Reality" | "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is A Perfect Foil For The Pro-Trump Media" | "The Political Question of the Future: But Are They Real?" As an aside, I'll note, too, that there are two equally important dimensions to consider with regards to politics in the digital age. 1. What happens when digital media becomes the context for politics? 2. What happens as individuals who came of age with digital media enter the political arena?
George Dyson considers the end of the digital revolution: "The digital revolution began when stored-program computers broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Numbers that do things now rule the world. But who rules over the machines?" | "What deserves our full attention is not the success of a few companies that have harnessed the powers of hybrid analog/digital computing, but what is happening as these powers escape into the wild and consume the rest of the world."
An exchange at The New Atlantis with Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, the author of The Myth of Disenchantment: "Why Do We Think We Are Disenchanted?" (It's something I've thought about some.)
From CBC Radio, "Internal Hard Drive: What's lost when we forget to remember?" Featuring commentary from Nick Carr and Maryanne Wolf among others. During the first two or three years of my blog, I wrote a good deal about memory. It's something I'll likely be coming back to more in the future.
"How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually." "What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t 'truth,' but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be."
"Say goodbye to the information age: it’s all about reputation now": "There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we rely on so-called reputational devices to evaluate it."
Jeff Erickson, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, offers a pre-publication edition of his book on algorithms.
"Things that Beep: A Brief History of Product Sound Design": "We’d do well to consider how these resounding things are designed to interpellate, placate, motivate, even manipulate us – and, increasingly, to record and process the sounds we make, too."
"Who pushes the button?: From elevators to iPhones, the rise of pushbuttons has provoked a century of worries about losing the human touch"
Finland aims to train 1% of its population in AI.
Justin E. H. Smith offers a decidedly cranky take on the state of the "discourse": "It's All Over." "People are now speaking in a way that results directly from the recent moneyballing of all of human existence. They are speaking, that is, algorithmically rather than subjectively, and at this point it is not only the extremely online who are showing the symptoms of this transformation." More than a few useful observations therein.
A new journal has recently launched that may be of interest to some of you: Delphi - Interdisciplinary Review of Emerging Technologies.
Re-framings
Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A philosophical inquiry into the moral sense of nature (1984):
"It is not my purpose in this book to condemn the works of technology or to extoll the virtues of a putative 'natural' life. I have lived close to the soil for too long not to realize that such a 'natural' life can also be brutish, worn down by drudgery and scarred by cruelty. I am aware that technē, too, can be an authentically human mode of being in the world .... A technē which would set humans free from the bondage of drudgery, to be the stewards rather than the desperate despoilers of nature, should surely not be despised.
"Yet in our preoccupation with technē we stand in danger of losing something crucial—clarity of vision. Surrounded by artifacts and constructs, we tend to lose sight, literally as well as metaphorically, of the rhythm of the day and the night, of the phases of the moon and the change of the seasons, of the life of the cosmos and of our place therein. The vital order of nature and the moral order of our humanity remain constant, but they grow overlaid with forgetting ....
"I have not sought some alternative, 'more natural,' life-style nor some 'more authentic' mode of being human. Artifacts, I am convinced, are as 'natural' to humans as the dam and the lodge are to the beavers, culture as 'authentic' to them as nature. Nor do I wish to recall humanity to an earlier stage of its technological development. It is, surely, good that there are synthetic medicines to ease the surplus of pain, telephones to break through loneliness, and electric lights to keep the wayfarer from stumbling.
"There is, though, something wrong when we use medicine to deaden our sensitivity, when we obliterate solitude with electronics and blind ourselves with the very lights we devise to help us see. There is nothing wrong with our artifacts; there is something wrong with us: we have lost sight of the sense, the purpose of our production and our products. Artifacts, finally, are good only extrinsically, as tools. They have no intrinsic sense of their own. A humanity which knew only a world of artifacts might justly conclude that the world and its life therein are absurd."
Recently Published
Some recent posts on the blog:
Winners, Losers, and One-Eyed Prophets
New Media and the Recurring Crisis of Norms
Waiting to See
On Past Visions of the Technological Future
The Losing Game of Time
Just Delete It
Cheers,
Michael