The Convivial Society: Recent Episodes

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Welcome to the first installment of the Convivial Society for the year 2025. Most of you know the drill: this is a newsletter exploring the intersection of technology, culture, and human flourishing. I’m glad to have kept up a decent pace of writing over the last couple of months, and hopefully that will continue. This post comes just a few days after the last, which is a bit unusual, but I’ve also learned that I need to write the thought quickly or else it will take leave of me. So here, briefly, my reflections on a contrast that I hope illuminates the difference between a creative human act and AI generated content. I hope you find it both helpful and hopeful, even if it is not all that needs to be said about the matter.

My writing is reader-supported and an important part of how I make a living. But there are no paywalls. My work is supported by those who are both able and willing to do so. If that’s you, you can subscribe at the usual rate of $5/month or $45/year. If that seems a bit steep, you could use the second button below to support the Convivial Society at about $3.50/month or $31/year. You know, a cup of coffee a month or something like that.

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On New Year’s Eve, I had the good fortune of having a question raised by one experience in the morning and the answer presented by a second in the afternoon.

First, the question.

In the morning, while aimlessly scrolling through my feeds (not recommended), I stumbled on a post about a music video, which had been created and edited with generative AI tools. The author of the post noted that, although clearly the product of AI, the video nonetheless displayed a certain aesthetic integrity. He was then subsequently surprised to discover that not only was the video created using AI, so too were the music and lyrics. I would share the video with you, but I haven’t been able to track it down again. I’m not even certain about the platform I was using at the time, although I suspect it was Notes. Perhaps you saw it too. The video had a slight Tim Burton-esque feel to it, and one of its recurring aesthetic features was an eye-like sphere that prominently adorned the motley array of whimsical creatures as well as the landscape. The music was unremarkable. It had a repetitive droning quality—the sort of thing I could imagine someone using as ambient music or white noise.

My response was twofold. First, I reflected on the fact that this digital artifact represented an immense technical achievement. Among those who are not AI boosters and techno-optimists, there can be a tendency to reflexively downplay the sophistication of the technology in question or the impressive pace at which it has progressed. But uncritical cynicism can blind us to reality just as easily as uncritical optimism. There’s no use in it.

But, second, I realized that I was, in fact, having to work up this rather tepid appreciation. In truth, it wasn’t even appreciation for the digital artifact itself. In fact, I was bored by the video before it was over. And, look, I admit that this could be saying more about me than about the AI-generated artifact. Perhaps you would feel differently if you saw it. Perhaps you have encountered AI generated images or videos that have genuinely moved you or otherwise provided you with a measure of substantive pleasure. Regardless of the underlying technical achievement, I find my experience of AI-generated content generally forgettable and often demoralizing.

But I don’t want to treat my reaction as a foregone conclusion, something that must necessarily be the case. Why is this my reaction, and, as far as I can tell, the reaction of many others, too? Why does AI-generated content, though impressive technically, become banal so quickly?

That was the question I found myself contemplating in the morning.

In the afternoon, the answer, or at least part of the answer, came to me rather unexpectedly, while I was taking an afternoon walk with my kids.

In the place on an old oak tree where a limb had once been, one of my children spied this. “Daddy, look!”

We’ve walked this path many times before, but none of us had ever noticed this charming cat, or is it a lion cub, looking out at us. But it must have been there all along. At least, it has the appearance of having been there for some time. And I rather like the idea that it was patiently waiting to be seen. Who knows.

However, long it had been there, it delighted my children when they discovered it, as it delighted me, in turn.

Then, my mind went back to the AI music video and the question it had raised for me. Before I could articulate it, I knew that I had somehow stumbled upon an answer in this simple cat staring out of the tree.

This unassuming act of human creativity presented itself as the inverse of the music video. That video was the product of an immensely complex and costly apparatus, yet it yielded no warmth of feeling and little if any abiding satisfaction or pleasure. This painted cat was the product of simple and inexpensive tools, yet it yielded genuine delight and, perhaps more significantly, a sense of companionship.

Was the difference in the materiality, the texture of the thing, so different from the characteristically smooth and glassy surface of the AI image itself and the screen in which it is encountered. Or was it the context? It surprised us, and that counts for something.

I recalled walking along Florence’s narrow streets, nearly twenty years ago, knowing that I was working my way toward the Cathedral of Santa Maria, Il Duomo, but without a sense of how close I was. Then, I turned a corner and suddenly there it was towering before me. I audibly gasped. This immense structure had managed to sneak up on me, and in that way my wonder was doubled by surprise.1 This painting, vastly different in scale and scope, had likewise surprised me.

The surprise was important, but there was more. The surprise suggested intention, and intention suggested a person.2 The painting in the tree was personal, although I suppose not in the sense that word now tends to suggest. This creative act was not personal in that it disclosed some private dimension of its creator’s life. It was personal in that it bore the marks of a person.

Perhaps this is the aura of the work of art, however simple that work of art may be. The aura is not a property which adheres to the artifact, rather it is something that emerges in dialog with another person. The work of art is a medium: it mediates consciousness. The aura of a work of art is what we sense when our humanity, our personal nature perceives another speaking to us through their creative endeavor, however rudimentary or complex it may be. The aura is the echo of intention only another person can perceive.

So in this cat peering from the tree, I hear the voice of the person who thought to put it there: “I was here once, as you are here now. And I thought of you.”

Now it seemed to me that so much of our conversation around the capabilities of artificial intelligence have been misguided, focused as they were on its approximation of human virtuosity. Can it excel as the best of human artists? Can it fool us by its predictable perfection? But a simulacra of human virtuosity is not what we need. We need each other. We need signs of life about us. We need to know that we are not alone. And this is something we must consider not just in relation to the singular artifact, but also in relation to our environment. In a time of acute loneliness, the proliferation of AI-generated content seems not unlike an act of pollution, compromising the integrity of the social ecosystem.

As I continue to think about the cat in the tree, I might also modify a previous claim. I said that it was personal because it bore the mark of human intention, not because it disclosed something personal about the artist. But maybe I was too hasty to dismiss such a possibility. I think I can learn something about the person who took the time to paint this cat in the oak tree.

I can guess something about their spirit, their generosity, their playfulness, their willingness to put something out in the world without any certainty of enjoying the approval or thanks of another. This painted cat, silly as it may seem, invited me to be the kind of person who would think to do likewise—in a different form, perhaps, but in a similar spirit. How different this creative act was in its spirit from so much of what we now encounter in the world.3 It was a gift. It asked nothing for itself or its creator. Its essence was its gratuity.

And that matters. It matters as an example of an alternatively constructed world. The good life must be accessible, it must be congruent to our nature, and it must be, dare I say it, convivial. We know, although we sometimes live as if we have forgotten, that affluence does not necessarily yield happiness. And we have been formed to believe that simple, unsophisticated things cannot truly satisfy us. But this encounter was a reminder to me, and perhaps through me to you, that the good life may require much less of us, and of our world, than what we imagine. No one needs to calculate how much energy was consumed by the creation of this drawing on the tree. And this particular work of art was not something I could posses for myself. I freely share it with every other passerby. It is not a resource to be extracted.

I can no longer recall where I found that AI music video, but I will probably never forget where the cat in the tree found me. And I will come to it again and again. I may recall it with my daughters many years from now, and think back fondly on it. Perhaps one day I will mourn the loss of the tree that bears the image. And through all of that, I will be enriched and my experience enlarged.

My thanks to the artist, wherever they may be.

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1Some of you will know Walker Percy’s essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” in which he argues that it is very difficult for the tourist to see, actually see the Grand Canyon.

“Why is it almost impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon under these circumstances and see it for what it is—as one picks up a strange object from one’s back yard and gazes directly at it? It is almost impossible because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind. Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head on. The thing is no longer the thing as it confronted the Spaniard; it is rather that which has already been formulated—by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon. As a result of this preformulation, the source of the sightseer’s pleasure undergoes a shift. Where the wonder and delight of the Spaniard arose from his penetration of the thing itself, from a progressive discovery of depths, patterns, colors, shadows, etc., now the sightseer measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex.”

What then? Be taken by surprise.

“How can the sightseer recover the Grand Canyon? He can recover it in any number of ways, all sharing in common the stratagem of avoiding the approved confrontation of the tour and the Park Service.”

It is instructive here to consider what Percy tells us about predictability and vision alongside the fact that generative AI is functions precisely by prediction, prediction of the generic.

2The implicit argument here is not unlike the one I made at greater length in my first post about AI-generated images two years ago: “Lonely Surfaces.” I think it holds up, you can judge for yourself.

3It was what I once called an anti-viral.

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Welcome to the last installment of the Convivial Society for 2024. Come January, this iteration of the newsletter will celebrate its fifth year. It’s been a joy to write, and a pleasure to connect with readers over the past five years. Thank you all. In this short installment, I offer you a principle which might guide our thinking about technology in the coming year, along with a couple of year-end traditions tagged on at the end.

Cheers and happy new year,

Michael

A few weeks ago, I posted about how certain lines or quotations can function as verbal amulets that we carry with us to ward off the deleterious spirits of the age. Such words, I suggested, “might somehow shield or guide or console or sustain the one who held them close to mind and heart.”

One such line for me, which I did not include in that earlier post, comes from a rather well-known 1964 essay by historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics.”1 Of course, to say it is “well-known” is a relative statement. I mean something like “well-known within that tiny subset of people who are interested in technology and culture and who also happen to care about what older sources might teach us about such matters.” So, you know, not “well-known” in the sense that most people would mean the phrase.

That said, the essay should be more widely read. Sixty years later, Mumford’s counsel and warnings appear all the more urgent. It is in this essay that Mumford warned about the “magnificent bribe” that accounts for why “our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics.”

Here’s how Mumford describes the bargain. Forgive the lengthy quotation, but I think it will be worth your time if you’ve not encountered it before.

The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified.

There’s a lot to think about in those few lines. For my money, that paragraph, written sixty years ago, tells us more about the current state of affairs than a thousand takes we might stumble across as we browse our timelines today. There is, for instance, just below the surface of Mumford’s analysis, a profound insight into the nature of human desire in late modern societies that is worth teasing out at length, but I’ll pass on that for the time being.2

A little further on, nearing the close of the essay, Mumford tells readers that they should not mistake his meaning. “This is not a prediction of what will happen,” he clarifies, “but a warning against what may happen.” More than half a century later, I’m tempted to say that the warning has come perilously close to reality and the only question now might be what comes next.

But all of this, patient reader, is prelude to sharing the line to which I’ve been alluding.

It is this: “Life cannot be delegated.”

Simply stated. Decisive. Memorable.

Here’s a bit more of the immediate context:

“What I wish to do is to persuade those who are concerned with maintaining democratic institutions to see that their constructive efforts must include technology itself. There, too, we must return to the human center. We must challenge this authoritarian system that has given to an under-dimensioned ideology and technology the authority that belongs to the human personality. I repeat: life cannot be delegated.”

I say it is simply stated, but it also invites clarifying questions. Chief among them might be “What exactly is meant by ‘life’?” Or, “Why exactly can it not be delegated?” And, “What counts as delegation anyway?” So let’s start there.

Whatever we take life to mean, we should immediately recognize that we are speaking qualitatively. Mumford is telling us something about an ideal form of life, not mere existence.3 Earlier, for example, he had spoken about life in its “fullness and wholeness.”

Mumford’s claim is a provocation for us to consider what might be essential to a life that is full and whole, one in which we might find meaning, purpose, satisfaction, and an experience of personal integrity. This form of life cannot be delegated because by its very nature it requires our whole-person involvement. And by delegation, I take Mumford to mean the outsourcing of such involvement to a technological device or system, or, alternatively, the embrace of technologically mediated distraction and escapism in the place of such involvement.

I also tend to read Mumford’s claim through Ivan Illich’s concept of thresholds. Illich invited us to evaluate technologies and institutions by identifying relevant thresholds, which, when crossed, rendered the technology or institution counterproductive. This means that rather than declare a technology or institution either good or bad by its nature, we recognize instead the possibility that a technology or institution might serve useful ends until it crosses certain thresholds of scale, volume, or intensity, after which it stops serving the ends for which it was created and become, first, counterproductive and then eventually destructive.

So, with regard to the principle that life cannot be delegated, we might helpfully ask, “What are the thresholds of delegation beyond which what we are left with is no longer life in its fullness and wholeness?”

This seems to be an especially relevant question as we navigate the ever-widening field of technologies which invite us to delegate an increasing range of tasks, activities, roles, and responsibilities. We are told, for instance, that we are entering an age of LLM-based AI agents, which will be able to streamline our work and simplify our lives across a wide array of domains.

Perhaps. My point is not to rule out any such possibility.4 Rather, I am inviting us to critically consider at the outset where the thresholds of delegation might be for each of us. And these will, in fact, vary person to person, which is why I tend to traffic in questions rather than prescriptions. I am convinced that these are matters of practical wisdom. No one can set out a list of precise and universal rules applicable to every person under all circumstances. Indeed, the temptation to wish for such is likely a symptom of the general malaise. We must all think for ourselves, and in conversation with each other, so that we can arrive at sound judgments under our particular circumstances and given our particular aims.

The principle “Life cannot be delegated” is simply a guidepost.5 It keeps before us the possibility that we might, if we are not careful, delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.

Perhaps we are tempted to think that care, skill, judgment, and responsibility are only of consequence when the circumstances are grave, momentous, or otherwise obviously consequential, which means that we might miss how, in fact, even our mundane everyday work might be exactly how we care, develop skill, exercise judgment, and embrace responsibility. (It occurs to me just now, that the etymology of mundane, usually given a pejorative sense in English, suggests something that is “of this world.” It is the stuff our world is made of, to take flight from the mundane is to take flight from the world.)

If you’ve been reading for a while, you know this is something I’ve sought to articulate at various points in the last few years (for example). So I’m always glad to encounter someone else trying to say the same thing and saying it well. Recently, I stumbled across this bit of wisdom from Gary Snyder6:

“All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher that the religious institutions originally worked with: reality. Reality-insight says … master the twenty-four hours. Do it well, without self-pity. It is as hard to get the children herded into the car pool and down the road to the bus as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha-hall on a cold morning. One move is not better than another, each can be quite boring, and they both have the virtuous quality of repetition. Repetition and ritual and their good results come in many forms. Changing the filter, wiping noses, going to meetings, picking up around the house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick—don't let yourself think these are distracting you from your more serious pursuits. Such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape from so that we may do our ‘practice’ which will put us on a ‘path’—it is our path.”

I’ll conclude by offering you a complementary principle to Mumford’s: To live is to be implicated.

I take the language of implication, with its rich connotations, from Steven Garber, who writes about work and vocation from a religious perspective. Drawing on Wendell Berry and Václav Havel, Garber argues that we should seek to live in a manner that implicates us, for love’s sake, in the way the world is and ought to be. In my view, Garber’s exhortation echoes Mumford’s warning but in another key. To say that life cannot be delegated is to say that life, lived consciously and well, will necessarily implicate us in the world. May we have the courage to be so implicated.

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Year’s EndIt is customary for me to share Richard Wilbur’s poem “Year’s End” in the last installment of the year. Enjoy.

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

“The Hunters in the Snow,” Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1565)1For a more extensive consideration of this essay, see this excellent discussion by Zachary Loeb: “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics, revisited.”

2Here’s another paragraph that remains timely: “The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual cost to life.”

3Although I am immediately tempted to add that there is no such thing as mere existence. Existence itself is a miracle, and the recognition of this fact the beginning of wonder and thus thought.

4Although I commend to you Rob Horning’s analysis: “Generative AI, [Ben] Recht argues, ‘always seems to provide the minimal effort path to a passing but shitty solution,’ which actually seems like a fairly charitable assessment. But it is obviously something that worker-users would employ when they don’t care about what they are asking for or how it is presented, for optimized producers who see research as an obstacle to understanding rather than the essence of it, for people conditioned to be absent at any presumed moment of communion. Generative AI is the quintessence of incuriosity, perfect for those who hate the idea of having to be interested in anything.”

5I’m tentatively planning on following up with two additional posts on related principles: Life cannot be simulated, and life cannot be accelerated. We’ll see!

6In the original post, I wrote “the late Gary Snyder,” which, as more than one attentive reader pointed out, was a grave mistake. Snyder is still with us, and I’m not sure how I got it in my head that he had passed. Snyder was the subject of a recent episode of the wonderful . Also, I think the most recent episode with is quite pertinent to the content of this post, and well worth your time.

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. The newsletter takes its name from the work of the late 20th-century social critic, Ivan Illich. He features prominently in my writing, and in this essay I’m revisiting a talk he gave in the late 1960s and reapplying it to the current drive to deploy AI for good. I trust the provocation will be useful, especially to those among you who might professionally identify with this imperative. In truth, I think there’s something in this for all of us, regardless of whether we work in tech or not. May it find its audience.

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On April 20th, 1968, at a small Catholic seminary just outside of Chicago, students gathered for a meeting of the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP). These students were there in preparation to spend their summer as volunteers on service projects in Mexico.

A few weeks earlier in March, a letter had gone out to the participants exclaiming, “Welcome aboard! You’re in for an exciting and profitable trip!” They were assured that the speakers for the gathering would be “top notch,” including a professor from Notre Dame and a representative of the National Council of Churches. But the letter also noted that there would be a “controversial” speaker, “Monsignor Ivan Illich of the Center of Intercultural Documentation [CIDOC] in Mexico.”

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any amount of time, you probably know that Ivan Illich has influenced my own thinking and writing. He is best known for a series of books that came out during the 1970s, which offered radical critiques of industrial age technologies and institutions: Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Energy and Equity, and Limits of Medicine.

For the purposes of what follows, all you need to know is that Illich was already known for his trenchant criticism of western-led development projects in Latin America. The UN had declared the 1960s the first Development Decade. It was also the decade the Peace Corps was launched. And, not to be left behind, the Roman Catholic Church had also embarked on a series of similarly intentioned projects in Latin America. This was the broader context for the gathering to which Illich, the “controversial” speaker, had been invited.1

The text of Illich’s talk, including comments he felt compelled to add as a preface after he spoke with some of the participants beforehand, is usually given the title “To Hell With Good Intentions.” This gives you a sense of what Illich had to say to these very well-intentioned students and the CIASP leadership. Two paragraphs in and he’s telling them he was “equally impressed by the hypocrisy of most of you, by the hypocrisy of the atmosphere prevailing here.”

After wryly offering three guesses as to why someone with his views might be invited to address such a gathering, Illich states bluntly, “I did not come here to argue. I am here to tell you, if possible to convince you, and hopefully, to stop you, from pretentiously imposing yourselves on Mexicans.”

I’m tempted to give you a blow by blow of the whole thing, but I suspect you’re already wondering what, if anything, this obscure talk by a “controversial” priest has to do with technology.

I will not keep you in suspense. I am taking Illich’s blistering speech and, in earnest good will, offering it, by analogy and in spirit, to all of those who would today seek to do good in the world through the development of AI technologies.2

That there are those in the tech industry who seek no good but their own profit, no one would deny. That there are those in the industry who seek to do good in the world, some might deny due to a cynicism that was perhaps not wholly misplaced. But I do not deny it. I know it to be the case. And it is precisely to those who seek to do good that I offer this Illichian provocation.

But I am not Illich and thus not in the habit of speaking quite so stridently, and I have no interest in affecting the style for rhetorical effect. Nonetheless, I will venture this assertion in his spirit to those seeking to do good for the world through the development of technology:

I am not here to argue. I am here to tell you, if possible to convince you, and hopefully, to stop you, from pretentiously imposing yourselves on the rest of humanity.

There are two specific themes in Illich’s talk that I will offer you, but much of it amounts to calling those who would do good to/by others to a critical self-awareness. And, honestly, most of us would probably do well to do a little self-searching in this spirit regardless of whether we work in tech or not. As Illich puts it toward the end of this talk, “it is profoundly damaging to yourselves when you define something that you want to do as ‘good,’ a ‘sacrifice’ and ‘help.’” The implication here is that we are quite adept at deciding what we want to do, and only then calling it “good” so that we might feel better about imposing ourselves on others.

First, though, let’s crystalize this disposition to do good with a recent example. I was motivated to write this piece because I had recently been reading Illich again, but also in response to a blog post Open AI CEO Sam Altman wrote a few weeks back. Titled “The Intelligence Age,” Altman argued (or better asserted) that AI, so long as we don’t lose faith, will soon usher in an era of unprecedented global prosperity.

“I believe the future is going to be so bright,” Altman enthuses, “that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.” He adds that “although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace.”

The discovery of all of physics! But there’s more.

AI will not only fix the climate, it will also help you with your scheduling, hard to tell which presents the greater challenge.3 “AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants,” Altman writes, “who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf.”

“Eventually we can each have a personal AI team,” Altman continues, “full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine.”

Look, I know what many of you are thinking. Altman, by disposition and professional self-interest, necessarily traffics in hype. He is not a man to be taken at his word. So, yes, I’m pretty much in agreement with , who rightly cautioned us against doing so.4

But, let’s just pretend for a moment that Altman is sincere in his belief that AI will usher in an age of ineffable abundance. Okay, fine, maybe that’s too much of a stretch. Let’s just suppose that if not Altman, there are others working in tech—engineers, programmers, and developers, managers and executives, marketers and VCs—who do earnestly believe something like the vision Altman lays out. They are probably more thoughtful than Altman. They have thought more deeply about the possible harms of AI, and are thus more circumspect. But they are, nonetheless, determined to see AI used for good, for the betterment of society, for the general improvement of the world.

Maybe this is you. I hesitate to use the direct address. It strikes me as presumptuous and hectoring. But maybe, maybe it is you.5 You are pursuing AI for good, you want ethical AI, you believe AI can help the disadvantaged, you think AI can improve outcomes for the marginalized. Maybe. Maybe. But I urge you to consider Illich’s challenge as I will briefly translate it for our moment.

Much of what Illich had to say to those bright-eyed students preparing to spend their summer volunteering in Mexico are summed up in these early lines:

“I do have deep faith in the enormous good will of the U.S. volunteer. However, his good faith can usually be explained only by an abysmal lack of intuitive delicacy. By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the middle-class ‘American Way of Life,’ since that is really the only life you know.”

Illich recognized that “development” work, as it was happening in the 1960s, was, in fact, a vehicle by which a whole complex nexus of values and systems was being exported to and imposed upon the “under-developed” world, and ultimately in such a way that the recipients of this aid would be subjected to new forms of poverty and dependence—“modernized poverty,” as Illich called it elsewhere.

In Deschooling Society, for example, Illich observed that “once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will.” “Poverty,” he adds, “then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect.”

Moreover, Illich warned, “the increasing reliance on institutional care adds a new dimension to their helplessness: psychological impotence, the inability to fend for themselves.” “Modernized poverty,” in his view, “combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency.”

Illich’s critique, if we direct it toward the present spirit of Silicon Valley’s evangelists of efficiency and abundance, raises several pointed questions. Those who are developing new technologies and those in a position to decide whether they ought to be adopted in specific contexts might consider asking some version of the following:

— Is this a technology that actually empowers users with agency to accomplish the work they choose for themselves?

— Or, is this a technology that will entrap users in systems which create new forms of dependency and diminish self-directed agency?

— Will this technology generate an experience of real-world competency, or will it undermine the possibility of such an experience by promising to automate essential and meaningful labor?

— What implicit values will this technology bring into an existing social ecosystem? How will it erode the existing values that animate the institution or group it seeks to serve?

— In designing/adopting this technology, are we merely evangelists for a soulless gospel of optimization and efficiency?

— Because computerized systems excel at generating data of varying degrees of quality and usefulness, will this technology introduce measures and metrics into spheres of life where they do little good and mostly induce unnecessary anxiety and competitiveness?

— What versions of “modernized poverty” will this technology introduce into communities and sectors of society which are already under-resourced and inadequately supported?

— Will this technology introduce new social divisions and promote disabling hierarchies in the social ecosystem in which it is deployed?

— If the technology fails or if it is discontinued, will it leave its users worse off than they would have been had the technology never been introduced in the first place?

The line of argument implicit in these questions reaches its climax just after Illich tells his audience that “next to money and guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders”—to which list, of course, we can add the tech evangelist. It is then that he drops this devastating line:

“Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to the people of the U.S. the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared.”

I think this is it. There is a vision of the good life, a vision of what it means to be human implicated in all of our tools, devices, apps, programs, systems, etc. There is a way of being in the world that they encourage. There is a perspective on the world that they subtly encourage their users to adopt. There is a form of life that they are designed to empower and support.

Is this way of life alive enough to be shared?

If I were to become the ideal user of the technology you would have me adopt, would I be more fully human as a result? Would my agency and skill be further developed? Would my experience of community and friendship be enriched? Would my capacity to care for others be enhanced? Would my delight in the world be deepened? Would you be inviting me into a way of life that was, well, alive?

Illich wrapped up his talk with these closing lines:

“I am here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce exercising the power which being an American gives you. I am here to entreat you to freely, consciously and humbly give up the legal right you have to impose your benevolence on Mexico. I am here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your powerlessness and your incapacity to do the ‘good’ which you intended to do.”

At this point, I trust you can make the translation and re-application of these lines for yourself.

But I don’t want to give these lines the final word. There is one other theme woven more subtly in Illich’s talk with which I’ll close. It’s not quite stated positively, but it can be inferred.

For instance, it is there when Illich says to his audience, “you cannot even meet the majority which you pretend to serve in Latin America—even if you could speak their language, which most of you cannot.” Or when he says more forcefully, “If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell.”

What is explicit problem in these lines is the incapacity to hear what those you seek to serve would tell you if you had ears to hear. What is perhaps implicit is that if you could hear, you might then be able to do the good. Perhaps not the “good” you intended, but the good that was needed.

Part of the problem in the case of these Americans in Mexico is that they could not understand the language. But that is only part of the problem. The more significant issue is a deeper incapacity to listen to others not because you do not speak the language but because you have already decided that you know what is best for them. Then, convinced of your wisdom and goodness, you are prepared to impose your will on the other.

Around the same time as Illich delivered this talk, he was also doing language training and reflecting, perhaps more deeply than most, on what it might mean to learn a language. In a reflection titled “The Eloquence of Silence,” Illich argued that “it takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds.” In this same reflection, Illich spoke of three kinds of silences. The first among these Illich described as “the silence of the pure listener … the silence through which the message of the other becomes ‘he in us,’ the silence of deep interest.”

This silence, a silence woven in humility and renunciation of power, is the precondition of any meaningful service to others. But it is this silence, born of the desire to listen and to understand, that seems utterly absent from so much of the innovation that emerges from the tech sector today. This does not mean that it is impossible to produce technology that actually does good in the world. It is only to explain, in part perhaps, why so much of it fails to do so.

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1Hilarity ensued … depending on your sense of humor, I suppose. I can’t help but find the whole thing rather amusing. Deadly serious, but also amusing. I mean, what were they thinking?

2Of course, all of the salient points apply just as well to other technologies.

3This is only partially tongue in cheek, as anyone who has attempted to navigate the torturously byzantine American health care/insurance system will tell you.

4From Karpf’s essay: “At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future so we don’t get too caught up in the underwhelming details of the present. Why focus on how AI is being used to harass and exploit children when you can imagine the ways it will make your life easier? It’s much more pleasant fantasizing about a benevolent future AI, one that fixes the problems wrought by climate change, than dwelling upon the phenomenal energy and water consumption of actually existing AI today.”

5To some degree and in some way or in certain circumstances and with certain people, it is all of us.

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. Before getting on to the usual business I wanted to note that a few days ago I was more than a little surprised to discover that I had been included in Vox’s Future Perfect 50, a list of “innovators, thinkers, and changemakers working to make the future a better place.” Being on the same list with Billie Eilish and Christopher Nolan was not something I ever anticipated, but the real honor was sharing the list with the likes of Shannon Vallor and Deb Chachra. I even got a flattering illustrated portrait with all the grey taken out of my beard. But I mention this chiefly to say thank you to you. This week in the U.S. we will be celebrating Thanksgiving. In that spirit, let me express my thanks to you for reading and supporting my work. I’m deeply grateful, and I’m quite certain any plaudits I earn flow from the generosity of my readers.

In this installment, I offer you a historical analogy that I hope will be of some use to you as you think about and try to make sense of the social and personal consequences of digitization.

Cheers,
Michael

If you were to ask me something like “What’s the most urgent task before us?” or “What counsel do you have to offer in this cultural moment?” I would say this:

Resist the enclosure of the human psyche.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m sure there are other necessary and urgent tasks. But this would be my contribution to the conversation. I would be offering not only an imperative to pursue, but also, and perhaps more importantly, an analogy to clarify and interpret the techno-economic forces at play in a digitized society. Such analogies or concepts can be useful. They can crystalize a certain understanding of the world and catalyze action and resolve. They can be a rallying cry.

In any case, I’ll say it again: resist the enclosure of the human psyche.

Some of you may immediately intuit the force of the analogy, but I suspect it needs a little unpacking.

Here’s the short version: I’m drawing an analogy between a historical development known as the enclosure of the commons and the condition of the human psyche in the context of a digitized society. The enclosure of the commons is the name given to the centuries-long process by which lands available to the many were turned into a resource to be managed and extracted by the few. My claim is that structurally similar processes are unfolding with the aim of enclosing the human psyche and transforming it into a resource to be managed and extracted.

The long version starts now.

Your Phone Is ListeningIn his 1964 classic, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, the late cultural historian Leo Marx remarked upon the frequency with which a certain anecdote appeared in the letters of early 19th-century American writers. The recurring anecdote was an account of when and where the writer first heard the distinctive whistle of a train.1 As Marx went on to demonstrate, this anecdote typically framed the distinctive whistle as the intrusion of an Industrial Age machine into an idyllic pastoral scene.

Perhaps every age has its own set of recurring anecdotes about its encounters with novel technologies—anecdotes which suggest some intrusion of a nefarious or complicated force into the world. In our time, anecdotes of this sort seem to gather around our smartphones. More specifically, I have in mind the stories we tell about how our phones must be listening to us. Usually, the form of the story involves, first, comments we made in conversation, usually about some entirely random thing that we’re sure we haven’t talked about in ages or much less searched for online, and, second, how this thing, whatever it was, now pops up in our feeds, typically as an ad that gets served to us on a website or social media feed. We can think of such stories as tales of digital uncanny. I, for example, have a story like this about Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

More recently, I was talking with two friends and the topic of personalized bookplates came up. I mentioned embossing seals in passing as another option. (I do not, for the record, own an embosser.) The next day, one of these friends texted me a screenshot of an ad that popped up on their feed for embossers from the very same online store where the other friend had purchased their book plates. As in all of these stories, there appears to be, on the surface of things, no more elegant explanation for the timing and specificity of the ad than that a device was listening to the conversation. It is a viscerally compelling theory. It may not be technically correct, depending on who you ask, but it feels true to our experience and that in itself tells us something of interest.2

In an essay published last year, “You Have a New Memory,” Merritt Tierce reflected on these uncanny moments and what she meant by the claim that the “internet is reading my mind.” She gives various anecdotes supporting her sense of the claim, the most elaborately detailed involved ads for opal earrings. I won’t relay the whole thing, you can read it for yourself, but here is her reflection on the incident:

“Maybe I did Google it at some point. I didn’t. But I’m thinking what you’re thinking, that I fed the data to the internet and I don’t remember. Maybe that’s true. (But it isn’t.) Assume for the sake of argument that it isn’t, that the internet just … read my mind. In point of fact, I don’t think the point of fact actually matters, because things like this have happened often enough that I now think there’s no real difference between my feeling that the internet is reading my mind and the yes/no true/false of it. If you feel like it’s happening, that is, itself, a happening.”

Elaborating somewhat on what she is describing, Tierce adds,

“So what I’m experiencing is only advertising, or coincidence, or it’s just frequency illusion, or synchrony. If there is order to the system, but the order is too complex for you to understand it, your experience will be mostly of disorder studded with coincidence and frequency illusion, and you will have no ability to say whether the system is disordered or too complex to understand. They become synonymous and meaningless.”

Whether our devices are, in fact, listening to us or not, it seems clear that the experience of our technological milieu is such that most people find the claim entirely plausible. Indeed, not only plausible, but altogether likely. And while I wouldn’t say that the question of fact is of no consequence, I do think it can be approached rather pedantically by those who want to brush off the fact that there are countless and concerted efforts made to capture our attention and thus our data for the express purpose of rendering us so predictable and pliable that it would be superfluous for a device to be actively listening to us.

However, I’m not sure how helpful it is to describe all of this as a case of “the internet reading our minds.” Instead, I’ll suggest another framing better anchored in historical and material processes, which also has the advantage of implicitly suggesting certain modes of resistance. That the internet is reading our minds conjures an amorphous, quasi-mystical phenomenon about which there would be little we could do. Consider instead that we are suffering through a process that has a concrete, historical precedent, one that we might describe as the enclosure of the human psyche.

Yes, the feeling that our phones are listening to us arises from a specific set of occurrences, but it is plausible and it persists in the face of corporate denials and expert skepticism because the whole technological environment is increasingly designed so as to enclose the human psyche not with hedgerows and fences, but with an array of data gathering tools and techniques so that the human psyche might be rendered more manageable and so that its value can be more readily extracted.

The Enclosure of the CommonsBefore developing the analogy any further, though, it might be helpful to describe the enclosure of the commons in a bit more detail for the sake of those who may not be as familiar with the historical process. I’ll keep it brief, and I’ll emphasize the specific aspects that, in my view, give the analogy its explanatory power and punch.

As you might guess, there are numerous works examining the legal and economic processes by which the commons were enclosed, Marx (Karl not Leo this time) figures prominently in the literature as does the 20th-century historian, E. P. Thompson. England, from the late medieval period to the 19th century, supplies the classic case study.3 The process generally involved denying common people, by various means, the right to use the land for their subsistence needs as had been customarily the case.

The Gleaners by Jean-Francois Millet (1857)For our purposes here, I’ll borrow a few observations from a recent essay by Eula Biss, “The Theft of the Commons,” which combines historical research and interviews with residents of Laxton, one of the very few villages in England that were never enclosed.

Biss eloquently described enclosure as “the centuries-long process by which land once collectively worked by the landless was claimed by the landed.” “That land already belonged to the landed, in the old sense of ownership,” Biss is quick to point out, “but it had always been used by the landless, who belonged to the land. The nature of ownership changed within the newly set hedges of an enclosed field, where the landowner now had the exclusive right to dictate how the land was used, and no one else belonged there.”

In a short lecture that I’ve cited before, “Silence as a Commons,” Ivan Illich described the commons this way: “People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households.”

“In addition to common pasture,” Biss explains, “commoners were granted rights of pannage, of turbary, of estovers, and of piscary—rights to run their pigs in the woods, to cut peat for fuel, to gather wood from the forests, and to fish.” These specific rights essentially enshrined the more basic human right to share in what the land provided to all. But enclosure changed this situation. Biss continues:

“In the course of enclosure, as written law superseded customary law, commoners lost those rights. Parliament made property rights absolute, and the traditional practice of living off the land was redefined as theft. Gleaning became trespassing, and fishing became poaching.”

I won’t dwell on the commons or the history of enclosure any longer, but there were two specific ways of justifying the process of enclosure that I wanted to emphasize for the sake of the analogy I’m developing here.

First, enclosure was justified, in part, by the argument that the commoners were backwards and generally unruly. Biss puts it this way,

“Commoners were ‘rough and savage,’ according to eighteenth-century rhetoric. They were lazy. Their practice of sharing land was ‘barbarous,’ and their economy was ‘primitive.’ They had an inexplicable preference for using their free time for sport, rather than for paid labor.”

Enclosure was thus partially advanced as a measure to manage those deemed insufficiently enlightened … for their own good, of course.

But the dominant rationalization for enclosure, already implicit in the comments about the unruly commoners above, was increased efficiency and profit, for the landed few.

As Biss notes, “the landowners who promoted enclosure promised ‘improvement.’” “Improvement meant turning the land to profit,” she further explains. “Enclosure wasn’t robbery, according to this logic, because the commoners made no profit off the commons, and thus had nothing worth taking.”

From this point forward, I will develop the idea that we can make sense of many of the forces operating in a digitized society by analogy to the enclosure of the commons. Only now it is the human psyche that is being enclosed, a process often rationalized along similar lines: the human psyche, unruly and inefficient, is in need of better management, and it is a source of potential value that must be cultivated and extracted.

The Enclosure of the Human Psyche Digitization and computation have made it so that we can be everywhere tracked, measured, monitored, and surveilled—often voluntarily and even gladly so.4 This is the message of the digital medium. And it is so because digitization, by its very nature, makes it possible to track and encode vast swaths of human experience, making multiple dimensions of that experience susceptible to mathematical manipulation and analysis. The urge to measure with a view to optimization was, of course, already manifest in the time studies of late-19th-century factory workers and the emergence of scientific management. Digitization dramatically increased the scope of what it is possible to measure and analyze, fueling the fantasy that we could bring not just observable bodily movements under administration, but also the human psyche.

Even this fantasy, it is worth noting, predates the advent of digitization. It is implicit in the modern drive to operationalize mathematics as a universal key to understanding and manipulating reality—first nature, then society. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is already complaining of the “gentlemen” who believe “human action will automatically be computed according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, reaching to 108,000 and compiled in a directory.” What was missing then was a sufficiently robust data gathering and computational infrastructure. This is what the digitization of society supplied.

But the enclosure of the psyche required one further development. In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan gives us an important clue to what this development might be in language that fits nicely with the enclosure analogy:

“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.”

When we use any given technology, we tend to be most interested in what we will be able to do with that technology. We want to know how a tool will empower us. But we should be at least as concerned with how any tool we use shapes our perception and our experience.5 We should be especially interested in these dynamics given the degree to which our view of reality, both the reality that is before us moment by moment and the larger reality that exceeds our immediate purview, is mediated by digital media, a degree that I suspect McLuhan, far-sighted as he was, could hardly fathom in the early 1960s.

The senses are the gateway to the psyche. To enclose the psyche, it would be necessary to enclose the senses first. So, in this case, the fences and hedgerows become the devices that channel, direct, and colonize our perception of the world.

As a simple experiment, ask yourself a straightforwardly objective question: how much of your waking hours are spent looking at a digital screen?6 Set aside whatever qualitative judgements such a question might entail, don’t worry about justifying the nature of the activities, etc. All that we are interested in just now is the brute fact. To what degree is our attention, which is to say our perception of the world and the ground of our consciousness, mediated by a digital screen?

To this same degree, we are abetting the enclosure of our psyche. And it is not only that our gaze is captured, it is that in that very process our perception is mediated, our consciousness commandeered, and all of this in such a way that empowers political and economic structures of control and extraction.

One reading of AI is to see it precisely as a further development of the enclosure of the psyche, one that is made possible by an earlier stage of enclosure in which the collective human psyche was mined for raw material, the data which feeds the computational processes. In this new stage of enclosure, altogether novel and disturbing possibilities are opened up. Consider, as an example of the darker eventualities on the table, a recent paper by a group of scholars at MIT and the University of California titled “Conversational AI Powered by Large Language Models Amplifies False Memories in Witness Interviews.” Their research showed the heightened susceptibility to false memories induced by introducing a LLM into the interview process.

The Commons of ThoughtAlready in the early 1980s, Ivan Illich, in the essay linked above, was developing this line of analysis. Illich described the issue he was addressing in this way: “how to counter the encroachment of new, electronic devices and systems upon commons that are more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads—commons that are at least as valuable as silence.”

So far, I’ve been mostly interested in analogizing certain developments in digitized society to the process (and motives) of enclosure. But it’s also worth considering whether the analogy to the commons can tell us something about the human psyche. Illich gives us a clue: silence.

The enclosure of the commons subjected the land to more efficient and persistent means of extraction, time was money. Improvement meant activity. So, too, with the psyche. The mind at rest, the psyche in a moment of silence, is like the land lying unused and unproductive. From this vantage point, what we might feel as the problem of distraction is just the logic of enclosure at work. The unceasing stream of notifications and pings, the persistent way even the built environment beyond the screen hails us—all of this is just the necessary operation of the engines of value extraction efficiently at work on the raw material that is the human psyche. When the enclosure of the psyche is complete, we lose the right to wander and roam and loaf about in thought, just as the enclosure of the commons restricted freedom of movement and disdained economically unproductive but life-affirming forms of leisure.

And we lose ourselves, too. For as Illich observed, “silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons.” And in lines that seem as if they could have been written in the era of LLMs and AI chat bots, he adds: “It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.”

Several years ago, Matthew Crawford argued along similar lines. “Lately, our self-appointed disrupters have opened up a new frontier of capitalism,” Crawford wrote, “complete with its own frontier ethic: to boldly dig up and monetize every bit of private head space by appropriating our collective attention. In the process, we’ve sacrificed silence — the condition of not being addressed.” “And just as clean air makes it possible to breathe,” Crawford added, “silence makes it possible to think.”

In Crawford’s framing, the commons is an environment that makes thought possible. In my analogy, the mind itself is the commons to be protected against enclosure, the built environment is the means of enclosure. Close enough, of course. But Crawford does also say that “attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it.” On this point, I’ve written before at some length arguing that we should resist framing our attention as a resource.7

Those arguments against understanding our attention as a resource were inspired by Illich’s writing on the commons. Illich believed that even critics of enclosure were missing a critical element of the transformation enclosure wrought. In his view, they tended to focus on the economic injustice of denying the commoners a share in the wealth generated by working the land, but they ignored a more fundamental reality. “The appropriation of the grassland by the lords was challenged,” Illich noted, “but the more fundamental transformation of grassland (or of roads) from commons to resource has happened, until recently, without being subjected to criticism.”

Illich believed that the transformation of the commons into a resource, regardless of who profited, was itself a great loss. By accepting the logic of resources, extraction, and value, we had surrendered the ground on which an entirely different mode of life could be built.

This is why I began by saying that, in my view, the most important task before us is to resist the enclosure of the human psyche, because even our capacity to imagine an alternative way being in the world, to say nothing of enacting such a vision, depends on it.

There is one final dimension of enclosure that I’ll note briefly before wrapping up. Is there an even more literal form of the commons to which the analogy of enclosure points us? The individual human psyche does not seem like a thing held in common. But, in fact, that presumption may itself be a symptom of the enclosure of the psyche, although there are certainly many other forces leading toward that same conclusion. What if the psyche were a thing held in common? That is to say, what if our purchase on reality and the emergence of the self depended on human relationships and communities? From this perspective, the enclosure of the human psyche deprives us of a common world, which yields an experience of solidarity and belonging.

I’ve elsewhere developed this point at greater length, but here I’ll only note Hannah Arendt’s warning that we are deprived of a “truly human life” when we are “deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things.”

That last bit about a common world of things, a material, not only virtual world, is key. The logic of enclosure seeks to lock us into a private virtual world of “bespoke realities,” thus excluding us from the common world of things that yields as well a public consciousness. As Arendt put it, “Only the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense.”

So friends, resist the enclosure of the human psyche. How exactly we might best do that, I may take up in another post. But for now, I hope this analogy proves helpful.

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1Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example: “But, hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive — the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy men, citizens, from the hot street, who have come to spend a day in a country village, men of business; in short of all unquietness; and no wonder that it gives such a startling shriek, since it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumbrous peace.”

2A study published in late October of this year found that a significant majority of participants surveyed in the U.S., the Netherlands, and Poland reported having ads served to them based on offline conversations. A majority, although not as large, also believed that that happened because their phones were listening to their conversations.

3You can read a more detailed account of the enclosure of the commons in England here.

4See “Luxury Surveillance” by Chris Gilliard and the late David Golumbia.

5Ivan Illich: “I would like to get ... people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we can do with them ... how their use shapes our perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using them.”

6See also Nick Carr’s recent post: “Never in human history has there been an object so looked at as a smartphone. And yet, while we talk all the time about the content that flows through the phone, little research has been done on and little thought has been given to the psychological and ontological effects of the device’s unusual and unnatural form factor. Even as it dominates, and narrows, our field of vision, the phone as an object has become invisible to us. We need a phenomenology of the phone.”

7“Your Attention Is Not a Resource,” The Convivial Society, April 1, 2021.

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. In this installment, I return to a perennial subject for me: attention and its moral dimensions. Because I do come back to this topic more than most, I sometimes feel as if I ought to give it a rest. But I continue to think that it is a vital matter, and a key to so much else. So, once again, some thoughts about attention, enchantment, and, ultimately, love.

Disenchantment is one of the most venerable, and contested, concepts in the vast literature devoted to understanding the state of affairs we call modernity.

The term was popularized by the eminent German sociologist Max Weber in the early 20th century. It is an English translation of a German word, Entzauberung, that means something like “de-magic-ifcation.” To say that the modern world is disenchanted is to say that it is no longer experienced as a realm of magic, mystery, animate spirits, or other non-human forces and agents. According to some accounts, it also means that we inhabit a world bereft of any intrinsic meaning or purpose and which thus generates relations of alienation and exploitation.

I am, of course, glossing a long and multi-faceted tradition of scholarship, which has more recently included arguments to the effect that we have never been disenchanted or that the world remains enchanted (although more like enchanting) if only we’re willing to embrace certain modes of being. The former position is staked out by Jason Josephson-Storm in The Myth of Disenchantment, and the latter claim is argued by Jane Bennett in The Enchantment of Modern Life. And while I do have my own lightly-informed positions on these debates, I certainly don’t intend to adjudicate them here.

Instead, I simply want to posit one idea for your consideration: Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention.1

In other words, what if we experience the world as disenchanted because, in part, enchantment is an effect of a certain kind of attention we bring to bear on the world and we are now generally habituated against this requisite quality of attention?2

In suggesting this correlation between attention and enchantment, I am partially endorsing Bennett’s argument that “the contemporary world retains the power to enchant humans and that humans can cultivate themselves so as to experience more of that effect.” Bennett, a political philosopher interested in the ethical dimensions of enchantment, which she treats more like a state of wonder, believes that enchantment is something “that we encounter, that hits us, but it is also a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies.”

One of these strategies is “to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted.

The Little Owl, Albrecht DürerAs the art historian Jennifer Roberts argued several years ago, “Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness.” Or, as she also puts it, just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it. Seeing, in this sense, is a form of knowledge arising from a way of being that brings a greater measure of the fullness of reality to consciousness. According to Roberts, achieving this kind of knowledge and quality of experience requires “time and strategic patience,” which is a form of “immersive attention.”

To speak of attention in this manner, as a patient waiting on the world to disclose itself, recalls how Simone Weil insisted that attention is a form of active passivity. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them,” she insisted, “but by waiting for them.”3

This form of attention and the knowledge it yields not only elicits more of the world, it elicits more of us. In waiting on the world in this way, applying time and strategic patience in the spirit of invitation, we draw out and are drawn out in turn. As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it, we may also find that we ourselves are also extended, that is to say that our consciousness is stretched and deepened. And this form of knowledge is ultimately relational. It yields a more richly personal rather than clinical or transactional relation with the object known, particularly insofar as affection may be one of its consequences.4

After all, attention can also be understood simply as the name for the contact the mind makes with the world, and, if it is sufficiently attenuated, our capacity and inclination to care, desire, love, and act also suffer. This, too, is one of the concerns animating Bennett’s explorations of enchantment. “You have to love life before you can care about anything,” she writes. “One must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it,” she adds, “in order to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.”

In her view, the story we’ve been told about disenchantment already conditions us against the attention that we must necessarily bring to the world in order to perceive its enchanted quality. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think more than the story of disenchantment is at work here, but she is right to observe that we are trapped in a vicious circle. Habituated against attending to the world with patience and care, we are more likely to experience the world as a mute accumulation of inert things to be merely used or consumed as our needs dictate. And this experience in turn reinforces the disinclination to attend to the world with appropriate patience and care. Looking and failing to see, we mistakenly conclude there was nothing to see.

What is there to do, then, except to look again, and with care, almost as a matter of faith, although a faith encouraged by each fleeting encounter with beauty we have been graced to experience. To stare awkwardly at things in the world until they cease to be mere things. To risk the appearance of foolishness by being prepared to believe that world might yet be enchanted. Or, better yet, to play with the notion that we might cast our attention into the world in the spirit of casting a spell. We may very well conjure up surprising depths of experience, awaken long dormant desires, and rekindle our wonder in the process. What that will avail, only time would tell.

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1I know. The word “just” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. If you pushed me for greater precision, I would drop it. But it has a certain rhetorical force I want to retain, at least initially.

2It is intriguing and suggestive to me that critical scholarship on attention arises, more or less, at the same time, the late 19th and early 20th century, as the sociological literature on disenchantment. Make of that what you will.

3From her reflection on education, attention, and religion: “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.”

4It may seem tangential, but I’ll just tuck this paragraph from one of C. S. Lewis’s letters here for the sake of whoever finds it interesting: “Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when the family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood – they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardised international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.”

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. Basically, I think out loud here about the meaning of technology for anyone who wants to read along. In this post, I’m thinking about how we are starved for personal relationships yet at every point sold impersonal substitutes. I tried to keep this one brief, which means a bit of nuance and background got left behind (although I did tuck some of it into the footnotes). I hope you’ll find it helpful nonetheless.

By many measures, it would seem that we are not okay, and, more specifically, that the kids are not, in fact, alright.1 These measures include rates of isolation, loneliness, unhappiness, self-harm, burnout, anxiety, depression, etc. I am not a social scientist, but, as best as I can judge, the findings are well-attested, and they are certainly corroborated by my own limited window on world. You may have other measures worth considering, or simply your personal experience to go on. There is, after all, much more to our uneasiness than what the official metrics capture.

While there appears to be a consensus about the validity of the situation indexed by these measures, there is less agreement about the causes. I suspect there are many relevant factors rather than one singular cause, although not all factors are equally significant. What follows, then, is just one perspective on our situation that revolves around a single fundamental observation: we are starved for personal relationships but we are simultaneously discouraged from nurturing them, de-skilled in the relevant habits, and sold inadequate substitutes in their place.2

The slightly longer version of that claim goes something like this: It is good to be able to relate to the world in a manner that evokes and engages the various dimensions of our human personhood—embodied, imaginative, intellectual, emotional, moral, spiritual, etc.—particularly in relationship with others. But our techno-economic environment generates an experience of the world that is hostile to this ideal. It operates at a pace, scale, and intensity that undermines our capacity to relate to the world with the fulness of our presence, thought, and care. If affection is kindled by time and attention, the default settings of our techno-economic order undermine our capacity to give either. We are instead encouraged to live as machines rather than creatures, optimizing for all the wrong metrics.3

And these same techno-economic structures instill in us a manufactured neediness so that we might be all the more beholden to the goods and services marketed with the promise of alleviating our plight and addressing the very neediness they cultivate. Social robots, AI assistants, VR, generative AI—each of these, as they are often marketed, can be usefully analyzed from this perspective. They are the system’s answers to the problems the system created and they serve the system not the person.

In his most recent post, “Companionship without companions,” addresses a similar set of concerns regarding chatbots. “Many anticipated AI applications,” Horning observes, “seem predicated on the idea that our experience of the world should require less thought and have better interfaces, that we want to consume the shape and form of conversation, consume simulations of speaking and listening without having to risk direct engagement with other people.”

Back in February of 2023, I put it this way: “I’m stuck on the incongruity of populating the world with non-human agents and interfaces that will mediate human experience in an age of mounting loneliness and isolation.” But, of course, the incongruity is only apparent. Considered from a slightly more cynical perspective, we can see that there is a certain unfortunate logic at work: manufactured neediness prepares the ground for new commodities. The goal is not to alleviate loneliness or isolation by fostering vernacular human relationships, which, of course, cannot be readily monetized, but to insinuate, pejoratively, that such relationships are inefficient and full of friction. As Horning noted, “Chatbots are often marketed as though other people represent the main impediment to solving loneliness, and if you remove the threat of judgment and exclusion and rejection that other people represent, then no one will ever feel lonely again.”

Consider, as an almost farcical example of this, the recent launch of friend. Friend is an always-listening pendant that periodically interacts with you via text message or with which you can enjoy on-demand interactions by pressing the pendant and speaking directly to it. Take a minute and a half to watch the product launch video below, if you’re so inclined.

You can also take a look at the interaction arounds the founder’s post on Twitter announcing the new device. Honestly, I feel a certain reticence in using this example, given that it seems almost to be a parody. In fact, more than a few of the initial responses expressed a measure of incredulity along these lines. Honestly, such incredulity is a testament to good sense and charity of those expressing it. “Surely not, no one would actually …” they would seem to be saying. But it is not a parody, unless those involved with the company are keeping the act up with admirable sustained discipline. More dispiriting are the seemingly earnest and enthusiastic replies.

My reticence also stems from the sense that this product must surely be an outlier that will almost certainly fall flat or command a very small number of sincere users. Nonetheless, we can perhaps take it as an ideal type, a distinctly clear example of a trend that does not ordinarily manifest itself quite so starkly, and make use of it as such.

What better example, then, of the pattern we have been analyzing. Demoralized in the pursuit of friendship, companionship, and solidarity by the social structures that order our experience and deskilled by the same in the requisite habits and virtues, we are offered instead a technological commodity in the place of genuine human connection, a personalized device in the place of a personal relationship.

And while I’ve been rather sardonic in my assessment of this device, we should consider that the choices it symbolizes as an ideal type might be more attractive than we’re willing to grant because it holds out the promise of connection without commitment, companionship without responsibility, a facsimile of friendship without the attendant demands and challenges.

And I don’t even mean to suggest that we’re tempted by those choices because we are selfish, although each of us should soberly consider such things. We’re tempted by these choices because we are, to varying degrees, exhausted by the demands of a world ordered by the imperative to optimize for measurable outcomes, and in such a context we end up cutting out the things that don’t compute.4 The tragedy, however, is that it is in such inefficient yet supremely human things that we find renewal, strength, rest, consolation, and even joy.

Allow me, then, to close with a simple exhortation: we need people in our lives, not the simulation of people.

I think we all know this, but our societies are increasingly designed so as to induce a certain forgetfulness about this fundamental truth. We should resist such forgetfulness, and, to whatever degree possible, we should refuse the temptation to eliminate human interactions from our experience like so many inefficiencies in a system optimized for machine-like functionality.

In his 1961 novel, The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s protagonist, Binx Bolling, makes the following observation: “I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen.” Percy is writing as the first movement of depersonalization I mentioned above was reaching its apex. But Bolling goes on to say that “when it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.”

What there is to see is the look of someone remembering a profound truth about themselves, a vital truth without which we cannot hope to live in full. I suspect, or at least I hope, that we have all been on both ends of such encounters, and we should be intent on making such encounters more, rather than less frequent.

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1“We” is a tricky word to deploy. It is often lazy and implies too much. It can be rhetorical sleight of hand. I once wrote a whole post arguing that there was no “we” there. That said, it can sometimes be tedious to repeatedly specify the antecedent. When it is honest, I’ll simply say “I” and allow readers to include themselves as they see fit. In this case, I’ll simply trust you, the reader, to interpret generously. In any case, the general unwellness, as suggested by the metrics to which I alluded, does seem to make the “we” more justifiable than usual. (Robin, if you’re reading, this footnote is dedicated to you.)

2You can classify this as a corollary of my oft repeated dictum: The human-built world is not built for humans.

3Wendell Berry’s observation that we must decide whether we want to live as creatures or as machines might be helpful here. The personalism toward which I am gesturing might be understood as the creatureliness Berry commends. In other words, to the degree that the social order compels me to live as if I were a machine striving for efficiency, speed, optimization, and productivity, to that same degree I live in a social order that is impersonal, which is to say that it undermines my capacity for relationship.

4A self-conscious allusion to Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer Manifesto, one stanza of which runs as follows:

“So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.”

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter exploring the relationship between technology, culture, and the moral life. This post about LLMs, the labor of articulation, and memory began as what I thought would be a brief installment. As if to prove one of the core claims of the essay, that the labor of articulation is itself generative, it grew in the writing. I hope you’ll find some things of use in it.

Cheers,

Michael

The founding text of technology criticism is found in one of Plato’s better-known dialogues, the Phaedrus.1 During the course of Socrates’s conversation about love and rhetoric, he recounts the legend of an Egyptian king named Thamus and an inventor-god named Theuth. Theuth presents a number of inventions to Thamus for his consideration, touting their benefits for the Egyptian people. Among these was the gift of writing, but, surprisingly to Theuth, Thamus was less than enthused about this particular invention.

Here’s how the relevant portion of the dialogue goes. It begins with Theuth declaring,“Here is an accomplishment, my lord the King, which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and wisdom.”

And here is Thamus’s reply:

“Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.”

There are two typical responses to the critique of writing Plato here expresses through Socrates. The first is to see this as the prototypical “moral panic” about a new technology. If one takes this view, the best use of this text is to demonstrate how all contemporary tech criticism is similarly misguided and short-sighted. Plato was wrong about writing, thus contemporary critics who adopt the same pattern of analysis are likewise wrong about whatever novel technology they happen to be complaining about.2

The second typical response would be, “Yep, Plato was basically right.”

In this way the passage serves as a Rorschach test for fundamental attitudes about technology.

But there is a third way, of course. Neil Postman, for example, began his discussion of this story by explaining the error of Thamus3:

“The error is not in his claim that writing will damage memory and create false wisdom. It is demonstrable that writing has had such an effect. Thamus’ error is in his believing that writing will be a burden to society and nothing but a burden. For all his wisdom, he fails to imagine what writing’s benefits might be, which, as we know, have been considerable.”

Postman refers to Thamus as a “one-eyed prophet,” seeing only the harms and burdens that a new technology brings. In Postman’s view, however, “We are currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo.”

The point, Postman argued, was to see with both eyes. To recognize both the gains and the losses, the benefits and the burdens. Only then would we be able to judge soundly and wisely. This is, as it turns out, easier said than done. Cycles of hype and criti-hype tend to obscure our collective vision, and we seem to have a predilection for one-eyed prophets.4

That said, my purpose in recalling Plato’s critique of writing is to set up a brief consideration of the work that large language models (LLM) like Chat GPT or Gemini promise to do for us, which I take to be, in short, the work of helping us say what we need to say.

I’ve started with Plato because my thesis here is roughly this: the use of LLMs is rendered plausible by the externalization and outsourcing of memory initiated by writing.

Maybe that sounds like an inelegant way of stating something rather obvious, but there are two claims in that thesis, the obvious one and another less obvious, possibly more contentious claim.

First, the obvious one. LLMs work, in part, by mining massive datasets of the written (and then digitized) word and drawing mathematical correlations among the words in these massive datasets in order to make predictions about what words should follow other words in a string. (There are other critical inputs, but this is the relevant bit for now.) Frankly, it is hard not to be impressed by what can be achieved through this method, which I have described inadequately, to be sure. There can be errors of fact, or what are called hallucinations, and the outputs are often soulless. Nonetheless, while breathless agitation about super-intelligence and x-risk is, in my view, misguided, it would be disingenuous to simply shrug a shoulder at the technical achievement. But the key point here is that none of this would have been possible had we not first received the gift of Theuth, the invention of writing, which, as Plato correctly observed, amounts to the externalization of memory.

So, then, in an obvious and uninteresting sense, externalized memory in the form of writing can be understood as the technical precondition of LLMs. But there’s a second, I think more interesting, way of framing externalized memory as a plausibility structure for the use of LLMs.

I’m more interested in what renders the use of LLMs plausible than in what makes them technically possible. The concept of a plausibility structure, drawn from the sociology of religion, is meant to describe social contexts, structures, or conditions that make it easier to hold certain beliefs.5 Apart from such structures, a belief may become implausible or untenable. Relatedly, I sometimes find it useful to ask, “What do I have to believe to adopt this or that new technology?”6 Or, to put it somewhat differently, “What facts about my social world incline me to adopt a new technology?”

So, in the case of LLMs, we might say that the existing soulless and bureaucratic context of much of our writing—the filling out of forms, thoughtless school exercises, endless email—constitutes a plausibility structure for LLMs. Under such conditions, of course, it becomes perfectly reasonable to adopt a new technology that promised to relieve us of such tasks.

I’m less interested in these cases, however, than I am in the use of LLMs to accomplish what, for the lack of a better word, we might call more personal tasks. Consider, for instance, the anecdote recently shared by in an essay for the Hedgehog Review, which explores some of the same terrain I’m traversing here. Crawford tells of a recent conversation with a father who told him about how he had used Chat GPT to craft a toast for his daughter’s wedding. It’s the use of LLMs for this kind of writing that might be worth considering a bit more deeply, especially because it's abundantly clear that tech companies want us to use their products in this way.7

Here too, of course, a relatively straightforward consideration presents itself—writing is hard. Many people find it intimidating, perhaps especially when you’ll be expressing yourself in public as in the case of a wedding toast. As Walter Ong, among others has noted, writing is not natural. While the use of language is natural to the human animal, the emergence of writing was not, strictly speaking, necessary. So if writing does not come easily, why not take up a tool that promises to do it for us, particularly in cases that call for something more personal than inconsequential boilerplate? Part of the response to that question involves showing what might be at stake, which I attempt to do in the next two or three paragraphs. But then I’ll also come back to why I started with Plato and conclude by considering whether there is not also a case of conditioned dependence stemming from our readiness to externalize our memory.

So let’s start with the observation that in these cases LLMs are more than a tool for writing, narrowly understood, because the act of writing is also the more basic act of articulation.8 When we turn to an LLM to write for us, we are also inviting it to undertake the more fundamental task of articulation, and this is no small thing. Indeed, given the centrality of language to the human condition, we should wonder about the degree to which the outsourcing of the labor of articulation is the outsourcing of a fundamentally human activity.

To see this more clearly, consider what is entailed in the labor of articulation, and it often is, quite literally, a laborious activity. It is not simply the case that articulating ourselves in language is a matter of matching a set of words to a set of internal pre-existing feelings or inchoate impressions, as if the work of articulation left untouched and unchanged what it was we sought to articulate. Rather, the labor of articulation itself shapes what we think and feel. Articulation is not dictation, articulation constitutes our perception of the world.9 To search for a word is not merely to search for a label, the search is interwoven with the very capacity to perceive and understand the thing, idea, or feeling. It is, in fact, generative of thought and feeling, and, ultimately, of who we understand ourselves to be. To articulate is also to interpret, thus it also constitutes the experience of meaning. The labor of articulation binds us to our experience and in relationship with others. The labor of articulation always presupposes the other, and is thus an ethical act that relies on candor, honesty, and attention. And while it is, in part, for the sake of the other that I set out to articulate myself, it is in this way that I also come into focus for myself. If I might be forgiven the analogy, it is through the labor of articulation that the self is birthed.

In the essay I mentioned above, Crawford cited remarks from the philosopher Talbot Brewer in an unpublished paper about what he termed “degenerative AI.” As it happens, I’ve also had occasion to hear some unpublished remarks by Brewer through a friend who attended a recent conference. One phrase in particular caught my attention. As I understood it, Brewer argued that dependence on LLMs took the self “out of play.” This is an evocative way of getting at the matter. In the labor of articulation, we put ourselves in play, with all the risks, rewards, burdens, challenges, and consolations that entails. To outsource the labor of articulation is to sideline ourselves.

So much then for what is at stake in the outsourcing of the labor of articulation. It was an important digression establishing the stakes, but now let’s come back to the main point. When we externalized our memory in the form of writing, we began building the databases upon which LLMs rely. But we also, as Plato argued, began emptying ourselves of the resources upon which the labor of articulation works. Plato was ultimately ahead of his time. It took a good long while for writing to be widely adopted. The residue of oral culture, including its valorization of memory, lingered for millennia. But digital technologies brought us across a critical threshold. The scale and ubiquity of digital databases, the vaunted access they provide to information, the promise of having all human knowledge at our fingertips have made it increasingly likely that people will “rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources.”

My contention, then, is that when we are confronted with the opportunity to outsource the labor of articulation, we will find that possibility more tempting to the degree that we experience a sense of incompetency and inadequacy, a sense which may have many sources, not least among which is the failure to stock our mind, heart, and imagination. There was, after all, a reason why memory was one of the five canons of classical rhetoric.10 It was not just a matter of committing to memory what you had planned to say. It was also a matter of having internal resources to draw on in order to say anything at all. Of course, very few of us have any reason to see ourselves as rhetoricians, except that there may simply be something deeply humane and satisfying about the ability to express oneself well.11

And this is to say nothing of how we might distinguish knowledge from the mere aggregation of disparate, readily accessible facts. Others may distinguish the two differently, but I think of knowledge as something more personal, something that emerges within us as we take in the world from our own unique perspective but also as members of particular communities. In doing so, we construct relationships among the things we come to know (and not merely know about), these relationships are shaped by our history and our desires. And this knowledge, carried within, shapes our ongoing encounters with the world, building a cascading experience of “understanding in light of,” a form of poetic knowledge. But this seems hardly possible if we too readily dismiss the need to curate our memory as carefully as we might curate our feeds.

I am reminded, too, of something the avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman observed many years ago12:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.” A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become “pancake people”—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

My modest suggestion in conclusion is this: perhaps we do well to re-evaluate how we think about memory and what I have called the labor of articulation.

New technologies challenge us. If we are up to the challenge, they give us the opportunity to reconsider things we have taken for granted. They invite us to rethink and recalibrate our assumptions about what it means to be human, perhaps even to reclaim some goods we had lost sight of along the way. LLMs confront us with just such a challenge, and in the vital realm of language no less. If we have assented, in large measure, to the promise of outsourcing our memory and now consequently find ourselves tempted to surrender the labor of articulation. Perhaps the best way to respond to the challenge is to consider how we might deliberately re-source our minds so that we might take up the labor of articulation with confidence and enjoy its very human satisfactions and consolations.

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1I say that somewhat facetiously. Some might take issue with the claim. Maybe there’s another earlier text that better fits the bill.

2Even if one grants that Plato was wrong about writing, this is a non-sequitur.

3In Postman’s 1993 book, Technopoly.

4“Criti-hype” is historian Lee Vinsel’s term for criticism of technology that takes the hype for granted and thus appears as an equally unhelpful inversion of the tech boosterism.

5To the best of my knowledge, the term was coined by the late sociologist Peter Berger.

6The relationship can be dialectical. I may adopt certain technologies and find that their use becomes the plausibility structure for the formation of tacit beliefs. In using the tool, I find that I come to believe something about the world or about the self that I would not have otherwise. So it is not simply a matter of what I had to believe to justify my use of a technology, it’s also a question of what I come to believe because of my use of the technology (in order to justify my use, for example).

7Consider the Google Gemini ad that has run during the Olympics. It features a father using Gemini to help his daughter write a fan letter to an Olympic athlete. had a useful discussion of these ads in his latest installment.

8I want to acknowledge that writing is a distinct use of language, one that is already informed by a technology, the alphabet. Writing and articulation are not necessarily co-terminous, and articulation in literate societies is already influenced by writing.

9Some will rightly note echoes of Charles Taylor’s work here.

10Along with invention, arrangement, style, and delivery.

11St. Augustine, who was classically trained, wrote movingly of memory: “I come to fields and vast palaces of memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images of all kinds of objects brought in by sense-perception.”

12These lines were cited by cited by Nicholas Carr near the end of his 2008 essay on some of these very themes of this installment.

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Welcome to a brief installment of the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. I have three drafts in various states of completion, so you may see an uptick in the pace of posts coming to your inbox over the next two or three weeks. Meanwhile, this installment raises the question of the relationship between labor and creativity. In fact, it is just a variation on a question of increasing importance: how do we avoid offloading or automating the kind of work that is critical to our well-being?

Sometime last week, I began to see an image floating around social media featuring the following quotation from sci-fi/fantasy author, Joanna Maciejewska:

“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”1

It’s a perfectly understandable reaction, particularly from an artist, to much of what’s been sold and marketed as AI over the past year and a half. As I wrote last month, Apple’s ill-conceived ad, “Crush,” had the (unintended) consequence of reinforcing the well-grounded fear that the big tech companies have little to no regard for artists and their work.

But I found myself somewhat uncomfortable with the underlying logic of the expressed desire. It is the same logic that has underwritten the marketing of new technologies for more than a century, and, in my view, it is tragically flawed. I’ve written before about the problems with the logic of “time-saving” or “labor-saving” technologies, so I will simply point you to one of those posts, which includes the following observation:

Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying. In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production.

“If the point is to care and to love and to keep faith,” I concluded, “then what is to be gained by outsourcing or eliminating the very ways we may be called upon to do so?”

In that essay, I was not thinking primarily about the artistic endeavor but rather about the moral dimensions of ordinary experience and about the character of a life well lived. Given Maciejewska’s expressed desire in those viral lines, however, I find myself wanting to make a similar more specific argument with regard to the artistic process.

I, however, would not consider myself an artist, so I want to tread with a due measure of humility. I suppose my modest question is whether there is not a more intimate link between the tasks Maciejewska would rather have a machine perform for her and the nature of her work as an artist.

I wonder, in other words, whether the work of doing the laundry or washing the dishes—these are almost always the examples, but they stand in for a host of similar activities—might not provide a certain indispensable grounding to the artistic endeavor, tethering it to the world in a vital rather than stupefying manner. Or, to take another angle, whether a fidelity to such tasks might not yield certain virtues that might also sustain the artist in their labors: attentiveness, patience, perseverance, or humility, for example.2

I think, too, of these lines from the 19th century artist and critic, John Ruskin: “Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”3

This is not exactly what Ruskin is saying, but it seems to me that something like this can be said about creativity as well as it can about thought (perhaps because thought and creativity are linked quite intimately together).

Perhaps the best expression I know of the sentiment I’m trying to convey is from a poem by Marylin Chandler McEntyre, “Artists at Work,” from her collection inspired by Vermeer’s women:

The craftsman who made the rose window at Chartres
rose one morning in the dead of winter,
shivered into what layers of wool he owned,
and went to his bench to boil molten lead.
This was not the day to cut the glass or dye it,
lift it to the sun to see the colors dance
along the walls, or catch one's breath
at peacock shades of blue: only, today,
to lay hot lead in careful lines, circles,
wiping and trimming, making
a perfect space for light.

When Wren designed St. Paul’s, he had to turn away
each day from the vision in his mind's wide eye
to scraps of paper where columns of figures measured
tension and stress, heft and curve, angle and bearing point.
Whole days he spent considering the density
of granite, the weathering of hardwoods,
the thickness of perfect mortar; all
to the greater glory of God.

And Vermeer with his houseful of children
didn't paint some days, didn't even mix
powders or stretch canvasses, or clean palettes,
but hauled in firewood, cleaned out
a flue, repaired a broken cradle, remembering,
as he bent to his task, how light shone gold
on a woman’s flesh, and gathered
in drops on her pearls.

This poem, to my mind, makes the implicit argument that certain forms of labor, tedious and mundane though they may appear, are nonetheless essential to the work of being an artist. But as I mentioned earlier, I am not an artist, so I cannot support this claim with my own experience. Although, I would say that my writing, while at times certainly impeded by other labors, is, on the whole, improved by those same labors, chiefly because they tether my thought to the world and shape me in a manner that is conducive to clarity of thought and purpose.

Whatever you make about my claims regarding mundane labors and the work of the artist—and artists among you please do tell me how you think about this—I am quite confident that we must resist the temptation to imagine that the path to a meaningful or satisfying life is secured by the unquestioning acceptance of the promise of time-and labor-saving technologies. More often than we might realize, those labors themselves work on us, making us the kind of people who can make good art and fashion a good life.

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Detail from Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (c. 1657)1This seems to be the original viral tweet.

2“Fidelity to daily tasks” is Albert Borgmann’s line, quoted in the same post I linked to a few lines up.

3These lines can be found in The Stones of Venice. I’m poking around in Ruskin’s work thanks in part to Alan Jacobs, who first drew Ruskin to my attention some years ago.

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. This is a relatively brief post taking a recent Apple ad as a point of departure. I won’t rehash the criticisms that have already been offered elsewhere, but I did not want to pass on the opportunity to reflect on how we might better conceive of the relationship between our stuff and the good life. If you should reach the end of this essay and find that you’d like to read more on these themes, you can take a look at this 2022 installment: “The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self.” Cheers!

Maybe you’ve seen the ad. Maybe you’ve already read a dozen critical essays about the ad. Maybe you have yourself publicly commented on the ad. Maybe you are among the blessed, and you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. And you would be blessed indeed if you cannot be made to care. Nevertheless, let’s talk briefly about the ad.

The ad in question was for the new Apple iPad, and it was shared on Twitter by the company’s CEO, Tim Cook. You can click that link above, or you can take a look on YouTube. If you’ve not watched it, please, by all means take a look.

Titled “Crush,” the ad features an assortment of creative tools and media artifacts—piano, guitar, metronome, paints, pencils, trumpet, games, television, record player, books, etc.—being crushed by an enormous hydraulic press. When the press retracts, we see in the place of those instruments and artifacts a slim, sleek iPad. We then hear the narrator’s voice telling us that “the most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest.”

An artist’s human figure being crushed in the Apple ad.There are a couple of things we might say for this ad. First, this was truth in advertising, although perhaps the ad spoke better than it intended. The ad conveyed the company’s incipient ideology with exquisite clarity: like the ring of Sauron, the iPad here appears as the one device to rule them all, chiefly by overthrowing and displacing them. Are you worried that digital devices will obsolesce the rich and multifaceted array of analog tools and instruments? Apple wants you to know that, yes, this is what it is aiming at. Are you concerned about the flattening of human experience under digital conditions? Boy does Apple have just the visual metaphor to confirm your suspicions.

Second, the ad brought people together, which is no small thing these days. It was met with almost universal scorn and contempt. I mean, honestly, what a remarkable achievement.

A sampling of headlines related to the ad. I’ll spare you a summary of the various critical perspectives on the ad. You can find them easily enough. As Brian Merchant put it, “The ad was lambasted from so many angles — it failed to read the room, it celebrates the destruction of art and human creation at a time when lots of people feel those very things are in the crosshairs of tech companies, it was just bad, dour marketing — that the tech giant was forced to issue a rare mea culpa.”

I encountered some speculation suggesting that Apple knew precisely how this ad would land and deliberately chose to bring on the outrage for the sake of the attention it would generate. I’m not convinced. I grant that it is hard to believe Apple’s marketing team would miss this badly, but it is easier to account for the misstep as a case of blinding hubris and self-assuredness than as a cynical calculation about how to play the attention economy. Whatever the case, Merchant is right: “Apple came along and handed us a perfect visual metaphor for one of our most potent fears about big tech right now — namely, that it is crushing the arts and transmuting them into dull consumer products.”

Watching the ad, I mostly thought to myself, “I’m glad Albert Borgmann, may he rest in peace, is not around to see this.” (I understand, of course, that this is not what most normal people thought as they watched the ad.) But then I thought, “I don’t know, how good might it have felt to see your whole critical philosophy of technology, first articulated in the mid-1980s, so fully vindicated by both the tech company’s unwitting admission and the negative response it triggered?”

Borgmann, who passed away just over a year ago, was a German-American philosopher of technology. In my view, which you can take with a grain of salt, he was one of the giants of the field, and he has deeply informed my own thinking and writing. On the occasion of his death, I re-published an essay I’d written years ago, which serves as a decent introduction to some of the main themes in his work. The essay was titled, “Why An Easier Life Is Not Necessarily Happier.”1

To keep us moving briskly along and focused on Apple’s implicit vision of human flourishing as conveyed in their recent ad, here are the core relevant concepts from Borgmann’s work.

In an effort to understand the dominant technological patterns of the age, Borgmann identified what he called the device paradigm. The logic of the device paradigm is pretty straightforward. It describes the tendency to hide the complex machinery of a technology below a slick, commodious surface that makes the output of a device available to the user with minimal effort. The goods a device offers its users are “rendered instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.” “A commodity is truly available,” Borgmann writes, “when it can be enjoyed as a mere end, unencumbered by means.” Apple products have long been leading exemplars of the device paradigm.

But this is only part of the picture. Borgmann opposed devices to what he called focal things. Focal things demand something of us. They require a measure of care, practice, and engagement that devices do not. Our use of them induces our focus, which they invite by design. “The experience of a [focal] thing,” Borgmann also notes, “is always and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing’s world.” There are, in other words, embodied and communal dimensions to the use of a focal thing. They involve our bodies, and they involve us in relationships to a degree that devices do not.

Consider just one of many possible examples: musical instruments. To learn how to make music with a guitar, for example, requires time and effort. Mastery of the instrument will take a great deal of time and effort. Your body may literally be marked by the effort with calloused finger tips. But the rewards are great, too. The pleasure of making and not merely consuming music, and of sharing it with others.2 In short, focal things are characterized by the kind of engagement which they invite and sustain. Or as I’ve put elsewhere, in relation to devices we tend to be relegated to the status of user, who may more often than not be the one being used. But no one would describe a musician as a user. Yes, they use the instrument, but the richness of the relationship between the musician and their instrument demands a different term, one that signals the degree to which a skill is cultivated in relation to the focal thing. We speak of musicians, not users of musical instruments because the musician is characterized by a set of skills they have cultivated in order to make something with the instrument.

So, then, one more thing I can say for Apple’s ad is this: when explaining Borgmann’s work, I can now simply say “watch this.” The ad amounts to a compelling, visceral depiction of a device crushing an array of focal things and thus eliminating the corresponding focal practices and their attendant skills and pleasures. It is a visual depiction of the triumph of the device paradigm.

The near universal response to the ad, which was heartening, also demonstrated another of Borgmann’s core claims: our experience tends to be enriched by focal things and diminished by devices. A good life is supported by a diverse array of focal things and practices, which tend to reward us with deeper, more meaningful experiences; a gratifying measure of bodily skill and competence; and possibly even a stronger fabric of relationships. Alternatively, a life characterized merely by the consumption of virtual goods mediated through devices, and the subsequent dependence and isolation such a life necessarily entails, will not be conducive to our well-being.

Granted, it is hard to resist the promise of ease, safety, efficiency, and convenience, particularly when many of us may already be operating with some degree of burnout and exhausted by what is demanded of us to simply get by day to day. This is the trap set for us by our existing social order. When society is built to run like a machine for the optimization of profit and productivity with little regard for the constraints inherent in the embodied human condition, then we are tempted to embrace the device paradigm as a matter of survival or because we have been conditioned by the machine and have internalized its values.

The point, to be clear, is not that you and I must cook every meal from scratch or listen only to music we make for ourselves or never use a device that may facilitate the completion of certain tasks. The point is that we ought to resist any vision of the good life in which we are reduced to mere consumers of readily accessible digitally simulated goods or in which human flourishing is indexed solely to the sheer quantity of our techno-economic system’s outputs without reference to their kind and quality. Implicit in Apple’s ad is the idea that virtually unlimited access to such goods is the summum bonum of human existence.

I have the good fortune of being able to walk to a farmer’s market most Saturday mornings. Usually, some local musicians will be performing. The acts vary from young, solo artists to duos or groups of various styles and compositions. Last Saturday, I listened as an older couple, easily in their seventies if not their eighties, played and sang together. The old man played guitar and his wife played the fiddle as they sang an assortment of classic American folk songs.

I do not know their story, of course, but they appeared to be enjoying themselves and for a few moments they enriched my life. I can imagine the tale their instruments could tell, and I can imagine how much those relatively simple instruments must mean to them. Ordinarily, the user of a device is only all too ready to part with it when a newer model arrives or when it loses its novelty or functionality. The reaction to the Apple ad reminds us that focal things are not so readily parted with. They are deeply valued and even treasured.

If the Apple ad was a graphic depiction of the triumph of the device paradigm and the crushing of focal things along with the forms of life they sustain, then this couple playing their instruments together after many long years embodied the joy and satisfaction focal things and practices bring to our lives.

These appear to be the two paths presented to us: one in which the device paradigm colonizes more and more swaths of our experience and we are increasingly reduced to swiping along a glassy surface of endless content, or one in which we refuse the lure of limitless and meaningless consumption and reclaim focal things and practices along with the skills, satisfactions, and community they generate.

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1For more on Borgmann, you can also read these earlier installments of the newsletter: “What Do Human Beings Need?: Rethinking Technology and the Good Society” and “Baking Bread, Finding Meaning.”

2I say all of this as someone who very much regrets not learning a musical instrument (but who may still do so one day!).

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. In this installment, I’m considering a popular essay Ted Gioia published last month arguing for the rise of what he called “dopamine culture.” I’m uneasy with the argument and the framing. I’ll explain why here, while hopefully offering a wider-ranging set of perspectives on the variety of ways we relate to the internet and internet-enabled devices. Many of you reading will, I think, have found yourself in agreement with Gioia’s argument, so I’ll be curious to know what you make of my reservations. I’m expecting a fair amount of push back! As always, thank you for reading.

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In writing this essay, I’m committing one of the cardinal sins of the digital age. I am going to be commenting at some length on an essay that is now over a month old. You have been warned!

The essay in question is ’s “The State of the Culture, 2024.” There’s a very good chance that this essay came across your screen at some point in the last few weeks. I’m not sure what the most-viewed Substack post has been during the platform’s relatively brief history, but surely Gioia’s piece must be somewhere near the top. And I know that many of you appreciated the post and found it instructive.

I’ve causally followed Gioia’s work for a number of years, and I’ve read his brother Dana’s poetry even longer. Gioia is an accomplished cultural historian whose work has focused on the history of music, with an emphasis on jazz. He is also the author of a popular newsletter on this platform called . I commend it to you. Gioia is an insightful writer, and I’ve especially appreciated his advocacy for artists and his critical insights into workings of the digital culture industry.

In other words, I’m generally sympathetic to and appreciative of Gioia’s work and his perspective. That said, I’ve had some reservations about this particular, quite popular essay. If you have not read the essay, you should do so and, of course, make your own judgments. Gioia’s basic thesis is that we have moved from a culture dominated by entertainment, to one that is dominated by digitally mediated distraction, which in turn generates a culture of addiction, or, as Gioia memorably puts it, Dopamine Culture.

As Gioia himself puts it, “So you need to ditch that simple model of art versus entertainment. And even ‘distraction’ is just a stepping stone toward the real goal nowadays—which is addiction.”

“The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence,” Gioia adds, “or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers. Addiction is the goal.”

My case throughout the rest of this post is this: the dopamine framing, while grappling with real and important dynamics, is inadequate and may ultimately be counter-productive.

Sketchy SchemasGioia crystalized his argument in a chart he created to illustrate “the rise of dopamine culture,” and I suspect the image of the chart made the rounds even more than the essay itself. Here it is:

Some of my reservations with the overall argument and the framing began with my efforts to think through the transitions and distinctions illustrated by this chart. So, I’ll start with a few questions about the chart, and then move on to a series of interrelated observations about Gioia’s dopamine framing. Again, I offer these in the spirit of expanding the conversation about our situation. Gioia draws our attention to important dynamics at work in the world, but I’d like to add a few elements to the mix, which I hope prove helpful in deepening our understanding.

Let’s start with the chart, then. I confess that I am actually a sucker for this kind of thing. By “this kind of thing” I mean a chart or table or schema that attempts to trace in extraordinarily broad strokes the contours of cultural change on a grand historical scale. Of course, one deploys such heuristic devices only while also acknowledging their limitations: they gloss over significant nuance and detail, not all generalizations are equally helpful, they tempt their creators to stretch and fudge a bit in order to fit the facts to the underlying theory, etc. But, like Max Weber’s ideal types, if used circumspectly, such schemas can be illuminating.

Examining Gioia’s chart, however, my initial thought was simply that the three stages—slow traditional culture, fast modern culture, and dopamine—seem to exist chiefly as a-historical abstractions. In other words, I would expect that there would be some rough correlation to actual historical periods and that the shifts would happen somewhat uniformly across all the categories thus suggesting some underlying causal mechanism. Or, alternatively, that the shifts would hinge on epochal technological developments, such as the transition from print to electronic media or the emergence of mass media, but neither does this seem to be the case. Or perhaps I should say, I don’t quite see how it is the case. In other words, if I ask myself “When exactly did we have fast modern culture?” I’m hard pressed to give a time period that would make sense given the situation and artifacts Gioia gives as examples of the category. Maybe the intention is to identify non-concurrent but analogous developments? I’m not sure. Additionally, it’s not altogether clear whether “traditional” and “modern” work well as descriptors or in what exact sense “slow” and “fast” are being used.

Other details also made it hard for me to embrace the implicit argument of the chart for the emergence of dopamine culture. I’m not sure, for example, what work “video” is doing in a category called “video” or how exactly to distinguish it from “film and TV” or what makes it “fast” relative to them. Playing, watching, and gambling on sports all seem to have coexisted for a very long time now, although, of course, the expansion of legalized gambling is no small thing and probably the example that may most clearly fit the “dopamine” framing. I’m also unsure about “film and TV” or even “newspapers” and “albums” classifying as “slow traditional culture.” Moreover, there are only certain kinds of images, and very few of them, that were ever viewed on a gallery wall, and I find it hard to then accept viewing images on a phone as the next stage in any coherent and compelling line of development. Finally, “sexual freedom” seems to exist as a different sort of thing, less temporally oriented, than most of the other examples (although I think there is a hint at something here that might prove useful).

I don’t mean for this to come across as pedantic nitpicking. I tend to want heuristic charts like this to work and I think they can, but I remain uncertain about this one. Gioia, of course, is the professional cultural critic. He knows the history. I’m willing to concede that I’m just not reading the chart well. Whatever the case, these quibbles with the chart are just the prod that got me to thinking a bit more deeply about the “dopamine” framing and its relative usefulness, so let’s move on.

What follows are some more substantive reflections that will clarify my reservations, while offering some additional lines of thought, and, hopefully, suggesting a helpful model of how we relate to our media environment and why.

Addiction or Compulsion? I have been writing about compulsive tech use for some time now. Commenting on neuroscientist David Linden’s work on pleasure and addiction, I observed the following:

Pleasure of some sort—whether benign, problematic, or illicit—is involved in our daily interactions with the Internet. If there is a certain compulsiveness to our online experience, then it is because our internet experience shares in an economy of desire, pleasure, and cycles of stimulation and diminishing return that potentially lead to addictive behavior.

I typed those words in 2011. Thirteen years ago. But subsequently, I tended to avoid the word addiction in connection with internet use writ large. My position has been that one might be on reasonably sound footing speaking of addiction in regard to narrowly defined cases of internet use for certain individuals, but not with regard to internet use generally. I have preferred instead to speak of compulsion and habit rather than addiction.

I don’t think this diminishes the significance of the problem. Habits, for instance, become vices or virtues, and these define our character. This is no small thing. But the framing matters. It matters, as you will have immediately noticed, because it shifts our thinking about what exactly is going on, our degree of agency, and, correspondingly, our degree of responsibility.

The dopamine framing at once tells us too little and also claims too much. Why, for example, do we turn to the media of “dopamine culture” in the first place and what keeps us coming back long enough to get addicted (if that is, in fact, what is happening)? Are there no genuine human desires in play at all? Do we keep coming back because we are addicted or because we imagine that we have no better alternative or no good reason not to? What are the underlying fears and aspirations that might be driving our compulsive relationship to digital media? It seems to me that the dopamine framing is far too blunt an instrument to provide nuanced and adequate answers to these questions, hence it tells us too little.

It claims too much, I think, in painting a picture of hapless individuals at the mercy of large tech companies. While the compulsion and force of habit is strong, I think for most of us it falls short of being usefully called addiction. Consequently, we have more agency over the conduct of our lives than a dopamine culture framing seems to suggest. But if we have more agency than we’re given credit for, then we also have more responsibility. It may be tempting to believe we have less agency than we, in fact, possess precisely because it frees us from the burden of responsibility. I’ll let you be the judge of your own situation. For my part, if I have a disordered relationship with the internet, I know, in the immortal words of Jimmy Buffett, that it’s my own damn fault. Which is not to say that tech companies are benign or faultless. Far from it!1

Take, for example, the case Gioia highlights from Dr. Anna Lembke’s book, Dopamine Nation:

My patient Sophie, a Stanford undergraduate from South Korea, came in seeking help for depression and anxiety. Among the many things we talked about, she told me she spends most of her waking hours plugged into some kind of device: Instagramming, YouTubing, listening to podcasts and playlists.

In session with her I suggested she try walking to class without listening to anything and just letting her own thoughts bubble to the surface.

She looked at me both incredulous and afraid. “Why would I do that?” she asked, openmouthed.

Gioia then adds, quoting Lembke again: “A week later, Sophie returned and reported on the new experience: ‘It was hard at first. But then I got used to it and even kind of liked it. I started noticing the trees.’”

I hesitate to label Sophie’s situation as one of addiction, although, of course, I’m not the clinical expert. It is true, of course, that addictions can be described as ranging on a spectrum from mild to severe. But I suppose part of the issue here is whether what we might call a “mild addiction” is not better described otherwise. As in so many other cases, perhaps we are suffering from what the philosopher Bernard Williams once called a “poverty of concepts.”

But more importantly, Sophie’s response to the suggestion that she try walking without her devices gives us a critical piece of information. “Why would I do that?” she asks. Obviously, I only have access to the snippet of the conversation Lembke chose to include, but that question at least suggests the possibility that part of what is going on is that, having grown up with devices at the ready, many people are now simply unable to imagine how to live apart from the steady stream of stimuli that they supply. Maybe this looks like addiction. But perhaps there’s a richer way of understanding what is happening, and maybe this richer understanding can also push us toward better modes of being with our devices, or just better ways of being.

Endless Diversions It might be helpful to back up a few hundred years and consider a different telling of our compulsive relationship to distraction, and from there to ask some better questions of our current situation. Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, the French polymath Blaise Pascal wrote a series of strikingly relevant observations about distraction, or, as the translations typically put it, diversions. Frankly, these centuries-old observations do more, as I see it, to illuminate the nature of the problem we face than an appeal to dopamine and they do so because they do not reduce human behavior to neuro-chemical process, however helpful that knowledge may sometimes be.2

Pascal argued, for example, that human beings will naturally seek distractions rather than confront their own thoughts in moments of solitude and quiet because those thoughts will eventually lead them to consider unpleasant matters such as their own mortality, the vanity of their endeavors, and the general frailty of the human condition. Even a king, Pascal notes, pursues distractions despite having all the earthly pleasures and honors one could aspire to in this life. “The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self,” Pascal writes. “For he is unhappy, king though he be, if he think of himself.”

We are all of us kings now surrounded by devices whose only purpose is to prevent us from thinking about ourselves.

Pascal even struck a familiar note by commenting directly on the young who do not see the vanity of the world because their lives “are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future.” “But take away their ~~devices~~ diversions,” Pascal observes, “and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.”

I don’t know, you tell me? I wouldn’t limit that description to the “young.” What do you feel when confronted with a sudden unexpected moment of silence and inactivity? Do you grow uneasy? Do you find it difficult to abide the stillness and quiet? Do your thoughts worry you? Solitude, as opposed to loneliness, can be understood as a practice or maybe even a skill. Have we been deskilled in the practice of solitude? Have we grown uncomfortable in our own company and has this amplified the preponderance of loneliness in contemporary society? Recall, for instance, how Hannah Arendt once distinguished solitude from loneliness: “I call this existential state [thinking as an internal conversation] in which I keep myself company ‘solitude’ to distinguish it from ‘loneliness,’ where I am also alone but now deserted not only by human company but also by the possible company of myself.”

It seems to me that these are all now familiar issues and tired questions. As observations about our situation, they now strike me as banal. We all know this, right? But perhaps for that reason we do well to recall them to mind from time to time. After all, Pascal would also tell us that the stakes are high, quite high. “The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries,” he writes. “For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.”

But I think Pascal gives us only part of the story. He helps us understand our compulsive behavior in terms of a turning away from something. We are uneasy with our own thoughts, inactivity and silence bring on existential dread, etc., so we seek to be diverted from such thoughts and we turn to whatever is ready to hand. This condition is not new. It’s just that in ages past, we simply didn’t have a machine for the generation of endless distraction constantly on our person. Now we do.

This analysis can be filled out a bit further by also invoking the notion of acedia, the Latin word for the medieval vice that is usually translated in English as “sloth.” But sloth suggests laziness to most of our ears, and this might be misleading. The nature of the vice is better understood as apathy or a lack of will or discipline to do what we ought to do.3 This may look like lying listless on a couch. But it may also look like incessant busyness, so long as we are busy at everything but what we really ought to be doing. It’s a lack of energy and discipline in pursuit of the good.

So it may be, then, that we are not just turning compulsively to our devices in order to divert ourselves from the threat of existential dread. We might also be turning away from duties, responsibilities, and obligations we ought to be more vigorously pursuing.

What Are We Seeking When We’re Scrolling?But, again, I think that our compulsive relationship to digital media and digital devices is driven by more than a desire to flee from something we’d rather not deal with whether that be some internal state or external circumstances.

There’s another question we could ask. What am I looking for when I scroll?

One answer to this question is simple and obvious—we’re looking for each other. We’re looking, in other words, for human connection. We are social creatures and among our most profound immaterial needs is the need for community.4 We will seek to meet this need by whatever means we have available to us.

In 2016, writing about claims that we are addicted to the internet or to our devices, Alan Jacobs observed,

All of these answers are both right and wrong. They’re right in one really important way: they link distraction with addiction. But they’re wrong in an even more important way: we are not addicted to any of our machines. Those are just contraptions made up of silicon chips, plastic, metal, glass. None of those, even when combined into complex and sometimes beautiful devices, are things that human beings can become addicted to.

So what then are we addicted to?5

“We are addicted to one another,” Jacobs argued, “to the affirmation of our value—our very being—that comes from other human beings. We are addicted to being validated by our peers.”

This gets us closer to the truth. I think validation may be too narrow a category for what we seek from one another, but the crucial point still stands. It is true, of course, that social media platforms attempt to hijack this desire and put it to their own uses through both their design and the ideologies they promote, but this is part of the problem, as I see it, with the dopamine framing—it tends to diminish the more powerful moral critique we should be making. The problem with social media platforms is not just that they seek to hook us on their products, it’s also that they offer themselves as the answer to profound human desires, which they are ultimately unable to satisfy. We are promised well-being and even joy, but are instead enlisted into a form of life that yields burnout, unhappiness, loneliness, and cynicism. I would quickly add that this is a problem is not limited to tech companies, it is the problem at the root of our entire economic order. But one thing at a time.

In any case, I’d go so far as to argue that the dopamine framing actually subsidizes the social imaginary that reduces the human being to the status of a machine, readily programmable by the manipulation of stimuli, which may itself be the deeper and more malignant problem.

There is, of course, more to be said in response to the question, “What am I looking for when I am scrolling?” We are looking for social connection, yes, but we are also looking for intellectual connection, which is just another way of saying that we long to know. We desire an understanding of things and take pleasure in learning. Just as with our desire for community, the desire for knowledge is itself both deeply rooted in us and deeply good. Both can orient us toward the path of human flourishing. Indeed, I’m tempted to say that the whole of the human condition could be summed up this way: we desire to know and to be known.

And just as with our desire to connect with others, so likewise with our desire for intellectual connection: the internet offers a seemingly endless supply of what we need. But here again, the reality is misleading. What we are offered is not, ultimately, what will satisfy our desire. Information is not knowledge and connection is not quite relationship, although both may become so. Unfortunately, the scale and pace of the internet, along with a host of other techno-social factors, discourage the labor that would transform information into knowledge and connection into relationship, which brings us to the next and final point.

Coping With Super-Abundance In an Anti-CultureThere’s one additional perspective on “dopamine culture” that I think is worth taking. It will combine the claim that the most notable feature of our media environment is that we live under the condition of information superabundance with an element of the late Philip Rieff’s analysis of therapeutic culture, the idea that we inhabit an anti-culture. It is an anti-culture in the sense that it does the opposite of what Rieff understood the role of most traditional cultures to be: impressing upon individuals a set of proscriptions to channel their desires.

Let’s start with information super-abundance. Had Gioia’s chart extended a bit further back in time or had it been organized around writing/print and electronic media as the critical inflection points preceding the rise of digital media, we would notice another set of important dynamics. While there are examples of those who in the aftermath of the print revolution were already clamoring about what we today would call “information overload,” for most people the experience might be better classified as one of relative information abundance as opposed to the information scarcity that characterized the human media environments before the advent of printing.6 Today we live under conditions of information super-abundance, but we sometimes still operate under the presumption of information scarcity. For example, we are tempted to ravenously consume information as if we might somehow miss out on something of value or else find that the information has somehow run out before we’ve had a chance to take some for ourselves.

Now hold that thought for a moment and consider Philip Rieff’s claim, circa 1966, that modern, post-Freudian culture, was, in fact, an anti-culture. When we think of culture, we tend to think of cultural artifacts: music, dress, food, rituals, literature, language, etc. These, however, can be thought of as the epiphenomena of culture or the visible flowering out of deep culture, which exists primarily out of sight in the realm of the taken-for-granted. In this realm resides tacit ways of understanding place, time, community, the good, the nature of reality, etc.

So if we are looking beyond the artifacts of culture—the songs, the films, the clothing, etc.—to the deeply-rooted assumptions that shape our perceptions and our values, Rieff would say that traditionally we would have encountered a series of proscriptions channeling our desires and our will, beyond ourselves to some larger purpose or goal. All traditional cultures functioned in this manner, generating a set of intuited prohibitions and permissions. Modern culture after the therapeutic turn does not.

Accordingly, Rieff writes that “a culture survives principally … by the power of institutions to bind and to loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood.” “Culture,” Rieff adds, “is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.”

But modern culture is different. “The systematic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized,” Rieff argued. This new anti-culture, he explained, “aims merely at an eternal interim ethic of release from the inherited controls.” Permissions all the way down. Which, it is absolutely worth noting, happens to correlate remarkably well with the demands of a consumer economy.7

This situation is compounded by yet another social dynamic analyzed by sociologist Hartmut Rosa. “A modern society,” Rosa argued, “is one that can stabilize itself only dynamically, in other words one that requires constant economic growth, technological acceleration, and cultural innovation in order to maintain its institutional status quo.” The ideal subject of such a society is one who is schooled to be a perpetual and indiscriminate consumer, and digital media is uniquely suited to be the everlasting commodity.

Although I’m sure it’s obvious, let me try to articulate what I take to be the significance of living under conditions of information super-abundance in the wake of the emergence of an anti-culture in Rieff’s sense. In a culture of information superabundance, we need above all else the discipline to say “no” or to set limits upon our engagement with the vast proliferation of digital media. But the anti-cultural spirit has left us ill-prepared to say “no” to anything.

“The wisdom of the next social order,” Rieff predicted, “would not reside in right doctrine, administered by the right men … but rather in doctrines amounting to permission for each man to live an experimental life.” Could there be conceived a medium better suited to the experimental life than the internet.8

ConclusionBut what has this to do with so-called “dopamine culture”?

The organizing principle of this essay has been this: the “dopamine culture” frame is too simplistic and tacitly9 encourages an impoverished view of human personhood. To reduce a discussion of this significance to the operations of dopamine already sets us off on the wrong path. We need a fuller account of our relationship with digital media as well as a richer story of human desire in order to see our way through the challenges we face. Interestingly, the dopamine framing is also an artifact of the condition it tries to explain: it is a powerful and catchy meme, although one that is offered in the best spirit. For these reasons, I fear that it may trap us in the very patterns that it seeks to overcome.

What I have attempted to offer in its place is a wider and more substantive array of explanations for the dynamics of digital culture, grounded in a specific understanding of our media environment and of the human condition. Take these for whatever they may be worth. At the very least, I hope they prompt thoughtful conversation and reflection.

Finally, coming back to the question Sophie posed when asked to consider setting aside her smartphone for a period of time: “Why would I do that?” Why might any of us seek to better order our relationship to digital media?

This is the question we need to be asking and attempting to answer, for ourselves and for others. We need a compelling account of silence, solitude, attention, disciplined engagement, well-considered restraint, vulnerability, and risk. But not for their own sake or for the sake of nebulously resisting the lure of digital technologies, and much less out of a misguided reactionary impulse. Rather, we must come to see these as the necessary skills and requisite virtues for the pursuit of our well-being and that of our neighbors.

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1Gioia’s account also supplies a convenient villain, the tech companies. Look, I obviously have no objections to holding tech companies to account. They don’t care about your well-being or mine, much less the health of the arts or the public sphere. But I’m less certain that they wield as much power as the dopamine framing grants them, (although if they did, they would have no scruples about using it, of course). I’m also not sure that they have as much control and mastery of the underlying human dynamics or clear-sighted knowledge of the opportunities and risks their own technologies create. As was the case with the power of Facebook ads a few years back, companies are not keen to tell you or their investors that “actually” their tech doesn’t work as well as some people fear.

2As I noted in my 2011 post, it was revealing to hear Linden say in an interview that he actually tries not to allow his research to inform his practice:

“NPR: Since you have studied pleasure and the pleasure circuitry of the brain, has that affected your own relationship with pleasure and the things that you seek or try not to get pleasure from?

Linden: Well, I try deeply not to let it do that. I certainly — when I’m enjoying a glass of wine I don’t want to be thinking about dopamine levels and, for the most part, fortunately I have been able to avoid doing that.”

I’m not a strict pragmatist, but I’m incline to be suspicious of “knowledge” that we find to be somehow out of accord with our experience in the way Linden here admits to.

3I once described doomscrolling as “structurally induced acedia.”

4Simone Weil, in The Need for Roots, argued that alongside obvious material needs, humans also have profound immaterial needs, which, when they go unmet, occasion genuine suffering.

5For the record, I don’t like the use of “addicted” here either.

6I feel compelled to make all sorts of qualifications here (I told you I was a sucker for broad generalizations!). First, the word “relative” is doing a lot of work here. Also I’m not suggesting that before the era of print there were no rich and meaningful experiences to be had with cultural artifacts and texts, or with the natural world. These were information-rich environments if you choose to use the word information to describe what was readily available to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, etc. I have in mind here encoded information (in text) which tends to become far more available because of printing and, later, cheap paper. This would also come to include the proliferation of images in print (books, manuals, posters, etc.) in the mid- to late-19th-century.

7Rieff understood this. “Psychological man is likely to be indifferent to the ancient question of legitimate authority, of sharing in government, so long as the powers that be preserver social order and manage an economy of abundance.”

8Some caveats may be in order. It may be argued that this might have been true in the early years of the internet before the turn to social media, which in its own way imposed a series of proscriptions on the experimental life. That’s a discussion worth having but beyond the scope of this already long post.

9I say “tacitly” because I do not believe Gioia himself would endorse a reductionistic view of human personhood.

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Friends,

It feels good to be writing more frequently the past couple of months. Five new essays over the last ten weeks feels like a decent pace, and I look forward to keeping it up. Thanks again for your patience and encouragement.

I’m also glad to report that I’ve been posting audio versions of these recent essays. I know there are many of you who appreciate having the audio versions and have missed them over the past year. If you’re wondering why you haven’t seen them in your inbox, however, it’s because I’ve opted not to send out via email, especially since I’ve just uploaded a three installments over the past four days.

If you’d like to listen to them on Substack, you can follow each of these links to the respective posts:

1. Learning to Receive the Day (Audio Version)
2. Vision Con (Audio Version)
3. Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology (Audio Version)

You can also find them on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can subscribe to the podcast feed on either platform to get notified when new audio versions post.

I’ll have the audio for “The Art of Living” up early next week, and I'll then start back at “The Thing That Is Silence” and work backwards from there recording the audio versions of past essays.

Briefly, let me also remind readers that the Convivial Society runs on a patronage model. The writing is and will always remain public—there are no paywalls for the essays—however readers who value the writing and have the means to do so are encouraged to support my work. This newsletter is an important part of how make my living, so I’m grateful for the generosity of those who do become paid subscribers.

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Thirdly, a permanent 20% discount option for those who would like to support my writing but can’t afford the standard rates.

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Okay, thanks for considering. Before parting, I’ll leave you with a few random items I’ve come upon recently.

1. I’ve been reading Tolkien again lately, and I’ve been struck by how easily one can substitute “smartphone” for “the Ring.” Take, for instance, this paragraph early on in which Gandalf invites Frodo to rid himself of the ring.

2. Here’s a lovely line from Yeats that would’ve worked beautifully in my recent essay on Vision Pro, but which, alas, came to me too late: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

3. This is Kierkegaard writing on the power of walking: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk … every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

4. Finally, here is a picture I recently took of a gorgeous species of saucer magnolia known as 'Rustica Rubra.’

Be well friends. More to come soon.

Cheers,

Michael

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Hello all,

The audio version keep coming. Here you have the audio for Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology.

Below you’ll find a couple of paintings that I cite in the essay.

Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoy it.

Cheers,

Michael

Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

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I continue to catch up on supplying audio versions of past essays. Here you have the audio for “Vision Con,” an essay about Apple’s mixed reality headset originally published in early February.

The aim is to get caught up and then post the audio version either the same day as or very shortly after I publish new written essays.

Thanks for listening!

Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

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Just before my unexpected hiatus during the latter part of last year, I had gotten back to the practice of recording audio version of my essays. Now that we’re up and running again, I wanted to get back to these recordings as well, beginning with this recording of the first essay of this year. Others will follow shortly, and as time allows I will record some of the essay from the previous year as well.

You can sign up for the audio feed at Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

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At long last, the audio version of the Convivial Society returns.

It’s been a long time, which I do regret. Going back to 2020, it had been my practice to include an audio version of the essay with the newsletter. The production value left a lot to be desired, unless simplicity is your measure, but I know many of you appreciated the ability to listen to the essays. The practice became a somewhat inconsistent in mid-2022, and then fell off altogether this year. More than a few of you have inquired about the matter over the past few months. Some of you graciously assumed there must have been some kind of technical problem. The truth, however, was simply that this was a ball I could drop without many more things falling apart, so I did. But I was sorry to do so and have always intended to bring the feature back.

So, finally, here it is, and I aim to keep it up.

I’m sending this one out via email to all of you on the mailing list in order to get us all on the same page, but moving forward I will simply post the the audio to the site, which will also publish the episode to Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

So if you’d like to keep up with the audio essays, you can subscribe to the feed at either service to be notified when new audio posts. Otherwise just keep an eye on the newsletter’s website for the audio versions that will accompany the text essays. The main newsletter will, of course, still come straight to your inbox.

One last thing. I intend, over the coming weeks, to post audio versions of the past dozen or so essays for which no audio version was ever recorded. If that’s of interest to you, stay tuned.

Thanks for reading and now, once again, for listening.

Cheers,

Michael

The newsletter is public and free to all, but sustained by readers who value the writing and have the means to support it.

Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

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"Is This Anything?"

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. This installment takes up complementary themes to the last but from a different perspective and with the work of Jacques Ellul as a guide. The premise is straightforward: the pursuit of relentless optimization entails a crisis of mental health and human well-being.

The newsletter is public, but is sustained by patrons who believe in the work and have the means to support it.

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The 20th century French polymath, Jacques Ellul, wrote around 50 books, but he is best remembered for The Technological Society.1 And this fat book, stuffed with countless examples, basically conveys a single overarching idea: modern society is ordered by one master principle, which Ellul, in French, called la technique.

The standard definition of technique from Ellul goes like this: “Technique is the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.”

That may not be the most elegant or memorable formulation. Lately, I’ve been summing up Ellul’s technique by describing it as the relentless drive to optimize all human experience for efficiency.

But Ellul also helped us out with another more felicitous phrasing. He referred to technique as the search for the “one best way.”

So, for example, in The Technological Society Ellul wrote, “This ‘one best way’ becomes a dogma that applies to increasingly more aspects of life. This destroys choice. Nothing can compete with technique.”

There’s much that could be said about a society, or a life, ordered by the relentless drive to optimize everything. Just now I want to hone in on one particular consequence that I don’t think we’ve reckoned with adequately.

One under-appreciated consequence of believing there is such a thing as the “one best way” in every aspect of life is subsequently living with the unyielding pressure to discover it and the inevitable and perpetual frustration of failing to achieve it.

And not only frustration. It produces anxiety, fear, compulsiveness, resignation, and, ultimately, self-loathing. If there is “one best way,” how will I know it? If I have not found it, have I failed? And is it my fault?

As Ellul already knew in the 1950s, a society ordered by technique is necessarily inhospitable to the human person.

“The human being is ill at ease in this strange new environment,” Ellul observed, “and the tension demanded of him weighs heavily on his life and being.”

Ellul painted a bleak picture of the available coping strategies for the person: “He seeks to flee—and tumbles into the snare of dreams; he tries to comply—and falls into the life of organizations; he feels maladjusted—and becomes a hypochondriac.”

In an especially compelling phrase related specifically to modern warfare but, I think, more widely applicable, Ellul writes that the human person becomes “prey to a permanent panic that he is unable to translate into personal action.”

The demoralizing combination of anxiety and futility captured by Ellul’s formulation seems to describe much of the human condition as we’ve come to experience it.

So, in brief, here is the point I’m driving at. Perhaps it is simply the case that a society ordered by technique, by the relentless pursuit of optimization, by a compulsive search for the “one best way,” necessarily yields a mental health crisis by generating unattainable goals and unsustainable pressures to, quite literally, measure up.

As it turns out, Ellul believed that the technological society was, in fact, very savvy about anticipating this failure mode of the human component of the system. It was already deploying perhaps the most critical layer of techniques, what Ellul called human techniques. In short, these were techniques designed to assure the survival and suitable functioning of the human being in a milieu ordered by technique. They included, for example, pharmacological interventions and a regime of diversion and entertainment as well as an attempt to “humanize” the base layer of techniques.

What is striking from our vantage point is the degree to which even these compensatory techniques, those which ostensibly afforded some relief from the logic of technique, have themselves yielded to its imperatives. I think, for example, of how social media, in its form and content, became just another way to optimize the self and its relations. We were subjected to techniques designed to optimize for compulsive engagement and we ourselves internalized the logic in the way we learned to conduct ourselves online. And is there any more dispiriting word in the English tongue than “gamification.”

More troubling still is the way that digital technology more broadly has been deployed in the service of an ever-expanding regime of technique.

“Our interest here is the convergence on man of a plurality, not of techniques, but of systems or complexes of techniques,” Ellul explained. “The result is an operational totalitarianism; no longer is any part of man free and independent of these techniques.” And these disparate systems of techniques have the human person as their “point of convergence.”

However, in the 1950s, Ellul could still say that “the technical operations involved do not appear to fit well together, and only by means of a new technique of organization will it be possible to unite the different pieces into a whole.” But … “When this has finally been accomplished, however, human techniques will develop very fast. As yet unrecognized potentialities for influencing the individual will appear. At the moment such possibilities are only dimly discerned in the penumbra of totalitarian regimes still in their infancy.”

I would submit that digital technology, broadly speaking, has been the “new technique of organization” that has brought the different pieces together and enabled the very fast development of human techniques about which Ellul warned. Digital tools have made it possible to measure, quantify, analyze, and regiment ever larger swaths of human experience, and so often with the implicit promise of disclosing the “one best way.” As Ellul put it, a society ordered by technique “can only act on man by lessening him and putting him in the way of the quantitative.” And digital technologies excel at putting us in the way of the quantitative.

(Interestingly, given the way “AI” is often marketed, we might understand it as digital technology’s compensatory complement to the more relentless forms of technique it has enabled. It promises to humanize the techniques by relieving us of some of the most tedious forms of work, personalizing the coping mechanisms, or giving us new tools for “creativity,” but without ever questioning the logic of the system.)

But as Ellul made clear, finding the “one best way,” should we grant for argument’s sake that such a thing even exists, is just a way of eliminating our freedom of action. And the very tools that promise to disclose the “one best way” are like two-way mirrors, they allow us to see but also to be seen. They promise to empower us to optimize our lives for the sake of our self-chosen goals, while empowering those who would condition and optimize us for their profit.

So, once again I invite us to ask a simple question: Is there, in fact, “one best way” in every realm of experience? And even if there were, at what cost would we discover it? And what would we gain? Might it be that in the course of pursuing the “one best way,” we would lose our way in a more profound sense?

Ellul was not quite the pessimist he is often made out to be. He just believed that freedom required us to understand the depth of our conditioning. Only then would we be in the position to choose otherwise. He also wrote, as Phil Christman reminded us recently, that “fate operates when people give up.” But we must understand these two imperatives in light of one another. We must make sure that even our “not giving up” is not itself framed by technique and that it is not for the sake of technique, which will in turn require us to abide, or maybe even relish, the appearance of a certain folly in the conduct of our lives.

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1Ellul wrote about technology, of course, but technique is not reducible to technology. It drives the development and deployment of technology, to be sure, but also encompasses all aspects of society. It is a principle we end up internalizing simply by being a participant in modern society. A better title, it has been suggested, might have been “A Society of Efficient Techniques.” Samuel Matlack offers an excellent introduction to Ellul’s work here.

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. Welcome, especially, to recent subscribers. I’m not sure what you all are expecting, but the focus and approach can vary a bit from one installment to the other. I think, though, that if you hang around for a while, a relatively consistent set of questions, as well as an approach to thinking about them, will be evident enough. In any case, today you have a brief and loosely structured meditation on dusk, darkness, rhythms, and well-being. As always, I hope it is helpful. In the wings is a post titled “AI Apocalypse,” premised on the idea that AI is apocalyptic in the literal sense: it is not causing, but rather revealing the end of a world. Also on tap are some further reflections on language under digital conditions. Cheers!

My special thanks to Anna Cabrera and Ángel Albarrán, the artists who generously granted me permission to use the image that accompanies this essay. It immediately captivated me, and I thought it would be, in its tones and composition, a fitting complement to the themes I explore here. Consider yourself duly encouraged to visit their site and explore their work. Gracias, Anna y Ángel!

“It is at Dusk that the most interesting things occur, for that is when simple differences fade away. I could live in everlasting Dusk.”

— Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

1. Several months ago I was taking a walk with my daughters through one of the paths around our home. I live in the suburbs of a small city, but I’m fortunate to be in a relatively wooded area and to have a number of short paths and trails to walk. On this occasion, we were heading back home just as the sun was dropping below the horizon. The first thing I noticed in those moments was not the sunset itself; the canopy of trees made that impossible to see. Nor was it how the quality of the soundscape became pleasantly muted and noise-absorbent. Instead, the first thing I noticed was that my shoulders relaxed as if in response to some subtle cue which escaped my conscious attention but which my body nonetheless perceived. Only then did I realize how tense my muscles had been and how much stress I was carrying around with me.

This moment has lingered with me in the months since. I’ve kept thinking about how my body responded to the gradually diminishing light and how rare such an experience of a measured, unhurried transition had become. Ordinarily, I would pass from the glaring light of the sun during the day to the glaring light of the electric lamp during the evening. Then, when it came time to sleep, the flip of a switch would abruptly take me from light to dark, excepting perhaps the harsh glow of the backlit screen. No gradual transition, no soft, fading light to modulate my stress levels, relax my muscles, and prime me for a night of rest.

If we are perpetually anxious, depleted, and exhausted, perhaps this was one of the reasons why. The impulse to banish the darkness has had the unintended consequence of creating an artificial environment whose rhythms are not calibrated for human health and well-being. Of course, that the human-built world is not built for humans is a recurring theme around here, but it seems to me that this particular aspect of the problem tends to escape our notice even though there is mounting evidence that artificial illumination has significant deleterious consequences not only for human beings but perhaps even more so for other animals.

This thread by astrophysicist Alejandro Sánchez collects a number of studies aimed at understanding some of those deleterious consequences—I was particularly struck by the purported link between light at night (LAN) and certain cancers—but I’m going to set off on some slightly different paths, reflecting on passages, rhythms, and the temporal orders which structure our lives.

“… from candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.”

— Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

2. If I think about the character of contemporary life taken whole, the loss of gradual passages strikes me as a more general condition of which the loss of the experience of dusk is but one instance. It is possible, for example, to lament the conquest of the night and what that might entail, but my focus here is not merely on the loss of deep darkness. Rather, my thinking began with the absence of transitions that are rhythmic and gradual rather than sudden and arbitrary. As I’ve thought about this, this may just be a function of a society ordered by precision time-keeping.

Consider, for example, the difference between social gatherings arranged by the clock and those which are not. It is the difference between being on time and knowing when the time is right. When does a gathering of friends begin? Does it begin at 6:00 p.m., or does it begin when everyone is present, meaning both there in body and also in spirit. I understand, of course, that in order to organize such gatherings there must be some general agreement on timing. But it seems to matter a great deal to the nature of the experience whether one is waiting for the arrival of an arbitrary moment in a succession of indistinguishable moments or whether one is waiting for a moment that answers to qualitative conditions. It is the ubiquity of precision time-keeping that makes it possible to imagine an activity beginning when one second of time gives way to another and concluding when a later second in time yields to the next. In this way, our default mode of time-keeping generates a temporal order that is stacked against a mode of life in which activities begin and end when the time is right.

Perhaps we can go a bit further. The word stochastic is one of the key words of our cultural moment. Perhaps this is a function of the peculiar shape of my own streams of information, but this adjective has appeared with increasing frequency over the last few years to describe a variety of phenomena. Most recently it has appeared in the phrase “stochastic parrots,” a popular way of critically describing large language models. “Stochastic terrorism” is another phrase that has been frequently invoked in recent years. You may be able to supply your own examples.

The term has heretofore been most commonly invoked in the technical literature of various disciplines. It describes, simply enough, something that is randomly occurring or, in an older formulation, occurring without rhyme or reason. Maybe the fact that this term has seeped into popular discourse tells us something of consequence. Perhaps it discloses an inchoate apprehension about the character of contemporary society: ours is a stochastic age. Very little is predictable, consistent, regular, or rhythmic. More of our experience seems contingent, beyond our capacity to manage, subject to irregular patterns.

I’m tempted, as I often am, by the grand generalization, and I will yield. Pre-industrial culture was synchronized by the rhythms of nature, rhythms which were often imbued with sacral significance (a unity suggested by the shared root of cult, culture, and cultivate). Industrial culture was, as Lewis Mumford observed, driven not by the steam-engine but by the clock. Industrial time overthrew pre-industrial time—agricultural time, if you like—but yielded a new set of rhythms and patterns, with the 9-5 workday perhaps at its heart. Mass media, which is to say industrialized media, supplied its own public temporalities to the industrial age, a new quasi-sacral calendar with daily, seasonal, and yearly rituals, some of which were artificial simulations of the old pre-industrial rituals.

What we have now is a new temporal order. It is not a negation of industrial time, but a further development built upon the precision of mechanical time. Industrial time enabled the mass synchronizations industrial culture required. But now digital technology enables a new desynchronized society through even more refined timekeeping coupled with the computational capacity to mobilize and organize society along more fluid, just-in-time, and, yes, from a human perspective, stochastic patterns.

To put this another way, a culture ordered in its patterns, language, ethics, and imagination by the rhythms of the natural world gave way to a culture ordered in its patterns, language, ethics, and imagination by the rhythms of industrialized labor and mass media. While we might disagree as to the timing of the transition, it seems safe to say that we now inhabit yet another cultural configuration. To put it this way may seem like a banal restatement of the well-worn and contested pre-modern/modern/post-modern sequence. But I think it is useful to draw out the temporal dimension of these social dynamics. If we press into each of these four categories—patterns, language, ethics, and imagination—we will find surprising and profound links to the temporal heart beating out the dominant cultural rhythms, whether it be nature or the machine.

So how then do we understand the temporal heart beating out the rhythm of digital culture? I’d hazard the following thesis for disputation: digital culture is defined precisely by the fact that it exhibits no discernible temporal rhythm, and many of our social disorders, from the deprivations of private life to the disintegration of public life and the apparent stagnation of culture, stem from this fact.

“On an infinite line of uniform numbered moments, however, the very notion of a ‘right’ time becomes wholly unintelligible.”

— Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars

3. As I continued to think about the passage from day to night, I recalled the work of the Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák (1933-2020). I’ve found Kohák’s The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Moral Sense of Nature to be a wise, moving, and yet wholly unsentimental attempt to understand the consequences of our alienation from nature in the context of Western modernity.1

Writing in the 1980s, Kohák observed that “the world of artifacts and constructs with which we have surrounded ourselves knows neither a law nor a rhythm: in its context, even rising and resting come to seem arbitrary.”

“We ourselves have constructed that world for our dwelling place,” Kohák acknowledges, “replacing rude nature with the artifices of technē, yet increasingly we confess ourselves bewildered strangers within it, ‘alienated,’ ‘contingently thrown’ into its anonymous machinery, and tempted to abolish the conflict between our meaningful humanity and our mechanical life-world by convincing ourselves … that we, too, are but machines.”2

Kohák’s account is grounded by a sustained phenomenological reflection on the experience of living “beyond the power line and the blacktop,” and the early part of the book reflects explicitly on the passage from day to night.3 “The night comes softly,” he writes. “It does not crowd the lingering day.” “Quietly, the darkness grows in the forest,” he adds, “seeping into the clearing and penetrating the soul, all-healing, all-reconciling, renewing the world for a new day.”

This experience, however, is not a given for most of us. As I described earlier, we tend to transition from one fully lit space to another until suddenly, harshly even, we turn off the lights for the night. Consequently, as Kohák observed, “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 seasons, of the life of the cosmos and of our place therein.”

It occurs to me, as a passing thought just now, that perhaps the urge to manage, master, or control as much of our experience as possible, and the unwelcome attendant consequences of such efforts, such as anxiety, fear, frustration, exhaustion—perhaps that urge arises in us because we have been insulated from the rhythms, phases, and changes of the non-human world. What I mean is this: to sit and observe the patterns of the non-human world—day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year—is to be reminded of how little depends on us, how much goes on without us, and how the world will carry on after us.4 Perhaps the anxiety of control emerges in us to the same degree that we blind ourselves to the rhythms and patterns of the non-human world, the same world, of course, to which we all belong.

Returning to Kohák, he recognized that “the technical reason which produces the machine cannot teach us its human use.” As an example, Kohák observed that “we can speak of a right time only in the matrix of natural time, the rhythm of human life and the cycle of the seasons. Here there is a time to be born, a time to rejoice and a time to mourn; there is also a time to die. On an infinite line of uniform numbered moments, however, the very notion of a ‘right’ time becomes wholly unintelligible.” To take the measure of something does not guarantee that we will understand its meaning, in fact, it may very well prevent us from doing so.

Inhabiting the order of measured, quantified time, as most of us do, already inhibits our capacity to imagine another way of being in time. Our enclosure within the human-built world, in both its analog and digital dimensions, obscures the markers of alternative temporal orders. It is possible, of course, to frame this as a liberation from the limits of time just as it is possible to frame our uprootedness as a liberation from the constraints of place. And, indeed, it sometimes is just that. But it is also possible that our liberation from older cultural forms, forms which were more directly informed by a place and its time, has been used against us. To be disembedded and desynchronized is also to become subject to the stochastic order of the digital economy.

The computer, after all, is, among other things, an agent of social organization and an instrument of control. But what forms of social organization does it enable and what forms of control does it make possible?

In her 2014 book, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics, Sarah Sharma wrote, “I found that what most populations encounter is not the fast pace of life but the structural demand that they must recalibrate in order to fit into the temporal expectations demanded by various institutions, social relationships, and labor arrangements.” I think she is right to encourage us to look not only at the speed of modern society, but at the competing demands to sync our lives to various temporal regimes. And at each point—institutions, relationships, labor arrangements—we do well to explore what technologies make possible the particular demands to recalibrate our own experience.

“There is a looming expectation,” Sharma goes on to say, “that everyone must become an entrepreneur of time control within highly differential relationships to time. It is not technological speed that determines one’s temporality; instead it results from where one fits within the biopolitical economy of time.” Of course, as Sharma notes, only workers of a certain class are encouraged in their “search for a meaningfulness of time” by an “expansive and exclusive temporal architecture of time maintenance.” This temporal architecture supporting the search for the meaningfulness of time consists of “technologies, commodities, policies, plans, and programs as well as the labor of others.” This architecture “continuously confirms and maintains the same structures of power that drain, tire, and exploit other people’s time, while elevating one group’s sense of temporal importance.”

I would only add that even for the majority of those in this more privileged group, this temporal architecture—let us call it the temporal architecture of consumerist productivity—drains, tires, and exploits. This is so because this elaborate temporal architecture is still synced either to the rhythms of the machine or to the rhythmless effusions of digital culture. To put it another way, the temporal architecture of consumerist productivity is an example of what Jacques Ellul long ago called “human techniques.” These were the techniques (therapy, pharmacology, entertainment, etc.) that became necessary to apply to human beings when the human lifeworld was turned into a machine for the production of efficiency. But the techniques ultimately fail because they are not, in fact, ordered to the good of the human being or human communities. They are applied for the sake of the larger techno-economic system within which the human is but one component.

The temporal architecture of consumerist productivity also fails because it is almost always individualist. It carves out a temporal oasis for one within the otherwise inhuman or chaotic temporalities which make their demands of us. They tend not to create a communal time within which friendships may form and flourish. Neither do they generate public time within which political action may unfold.5 Indeed, I'd put it more starkly. It is not simply that they do not provide for communal time or public time, they actively inhibit the emergence of such times.

“It is good, deeply good, to kindle a light in the darkness, though not against it.”

— Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars

ALBARRAN CABRERA, The Mouth of Krishna #609084. Regarding the electric lights that allow the work of a local hospital to go on when the light of day has failed, Erazim Kohák wrote, “Those lights are deeply good, as good as the labor of all who keep vigil by their glow.”

But Kohák adds that “to think of them as a triumph over the darkness, however, is far more problematic.” The emphasis for Kohák is on the word triumph suggesting conquest or vanquishment. “We have thought in those terms for so long,” he adds, “that night has come to appear alien and threatening, an enemy to be banished, no longer a place of our being.”

In this same spirit, he offers the following counsel: “It is good, deeply good, to kindle a light in the darkness, though not against it.”

That is, I think, a profoundly wise admonition. The devil is always, always, in the details, of course. But in this image, I think we can find a way of thinking through the whole of our relationship to technology, particularly with respect to how we imagine our standing in the world as it is mediated through technology.6 It gestures toward a path marked by humility, acknowledged dependence, and participation.

As quaint as they may seem, consider, by way of illustration, the candle.

“The house is still dark and at peace,” Kohák notes somewhere along the way, “only over the table a golden circle of light inserts a sphere of human doing, at peace with the enfolding darkness.” “The lights of recent years, gas lights and electric lights, are qualitatively different,” he notes by contrast. “They flood the room, giving us the godlike power of banishing the night.”

One vanquishes, the other harmonizes; one disperses, the other gathers.

These reflections reminded me of a passing observation Bradbury’s narrator makes in Fahrenheit 451. As he searches for a way to describe a certain light in a character’s face, we read the following:

“… not the hysterical light of electricity but—what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle. One time, when he was a child, in a power-failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon ….”

I don’t know how any of this strikes you. Perhaps it smacks of a certain impractical romanticism. I certainly don’t light candles on the regular. But there is something here, I think. Some small token of another way to be and to feel and to think. And, of course, this is just an illustration of a deeper principle that might be realized in countless other practices.

The most tempting thing is to go back to the kind of empirically verifiable harms which I mentioned in passing at the outset. That’s the surest way to make the case for a different set of practices, but, of course, that is itself part of the problem. Yes, there’s a case to be made on the grounds of basic health and well-being, ours and our fellow creatures, for seeking another way of ordering our material environment.

But I find myself reaching beyond such concerns to something more ambivalent and amorphous, toward not just the healthy but the good, toward a deep recalibration of our being in the world according to a different order of time. And perhaps in thinking again about the meaning of our experience of light and dark and, perhaps especially, the transitions between the two, we can discern a different set of rhythms. “We are not only creatures of the light,” Kohák reminds us. “We are creatures of the rhythm of day and night, and the night, too, is our dwelling place.”

For my part, I decided at the start of this year that I would make an effort to get outside, even if only for a few moments, during dusk as the day slowly yields to the night. It’s been a good practice. I commend it to you, not that you may thereby be better prepared to resolve the conflicting claims laid upon you by industrial and digital time, but so that you may begin to feel another time altogether.

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1Kohák writes of his philosophical mentors, especially Husserl and Riceour: “Their stance was one of wonder, not of sophistication; the task they undertook was one of articulation—and their virtue was naïveté, a willingness to see before theorizing, to encounter the wonder of being rather than enclose themselves in cunningly devised theories.”

2That last line about how we cope with the mismatch between the human and the human-made world by convincing ourselves that we too are but machines took on a new significance for me in light of some of the recent responses to artificial intelligence.

3With a greater degree of self-awareness than Thoreau, and I actually think Thoreau is fine, Kohák set out to live in a forest clearing in rural Connecticut.

4I think this applies as well to the spirit we bring to sleep. I sense, at times, that sound sleep has become unattainable not, as in a different age, because of guilty consciences but because we imagine the world, our world, depends on our effort and management. Seen from a certain perspective, to sleep soundly is to make peace with the fact that the world goes on without us.

5Hannah Arendt’s schema of labor, work, and action is lurking in the background of my thinking here. It hasn’t been deeply integrated into my thinking in this essay, but I think it may be worth pursuing something like an analysis of the time of labor (ordered by the needs of the body), the time of work (ordered by the needs of culture), and the time of action (ordered by the needs of politics).

6I recognize the limits of the plural pronoun. Who is the “we,” and what agency do these various configurations of “we” possess to structure their relationship to technology and the world through it? Bearing those limitations in mind, I continue to labor under the assumption that it is good, regardless of measurable outcomes, to explore alternative and better modes of being in the world.

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Welcome back to the Convivial Society. Given the usually more deliberate pacing of this newsletter, sending out two installments within 72 hours makes me feel like I’m starting to spam you. This is a relatively short installment, however, written to bring together in one place a few strands of analysis about the nature of our information environment, which I first presented in a series of essays back in 2020. Most of the material beyond the introductory paragraphs is drawn from those essays. I’ve assembled them here in this way because I think the approach remains helpful.

“What is going on?”

Depending on the particular shape of your digital media ecosystem, you have likely seen or heard some version of that question being asked quite a bit in the last week or two. I found the question raised most often, and understandably so, in connection with the Chinese spy balloon fiasco and the three subsequent incidents in which an unidentified object was shot down by the American military. The question was also asked in connection with the train derailment and chemical fire in East Palestine, Ohio and a series of smaller scale incidents of a similar sort in Arizona, Oklahoma, and Florida.

Sometimes all of these incidents where connected by those asking “What is going on?” The purported link between the aerial incidents and those on the ground has been expressed as a matter of the former being a government-contrived distraction from the latter. And, of course, there are many other interesting and diverse combinations of all of the above on offer.

Naturally, at some point along the way certain outlets began to report on how these incidents were generating a flood of online disinformation. One headline described the train derailment as a “disaster of misinformation,” which, I don’t know, struck me as a touch too clever given the circumstances.

Obviously there is a great deal of misinformation/disinformation floating around. And, of course, there are those, as there have always been, who set out to maliciously distort the information ecosystem to their advantage. But I’m not sure the disinformation frame is the most helpful way of understanding the phenomena in question. In my view, it mostly misses the underlying conditions and consequently becomes far too blunt as an analytical instrument. Within this perspective, there tend to be only two principle actors: the malicious agents sowing disinformation and the unfortunate rubes who fall for it. That there are those who fit into those two categories is not in doubt. What is in doubt, as far as I’m concerned, is whether that is an adequate account of the experience of most people. It is telling, I think, that no one ever imagines themselves fitting into those categories, suggesting a rather impressive but also dubious degree of immunity from the dynamics of the media environment to which we are all subject, albeit to varying degrees.

So, you may be wondering, what would I propose instead?

In a series of essays around 2020, I arrived at a way of thinking about the these dynamics—the experience of a digital media environment of information superabundance—that some have found helpful, so I thought it might be worthwhile to briefly restate this approach in five statements.

The first is the more straightforward, although it takes some unpacking. The next three flow from the first and, as you will clearly see, are stated a bit less circumspectly. I’ve tried to keep the elaboration brief in each case, and I’ve deliberately lifted and adapted paragraphs from previous essays. I’ll provide links to those posts at the conclusion.

“When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition."

—Marshall McLuhan

1. The Database has displaced the Narrative. Narrative is our primordial tool for sense-making, but in digital information environments narratives are framed by a more immediate experience of the Database. I’m using the term Database loosely to capture how, especially when an event is unfolding, we confront a cacophony of data points (videos, statements, claims, images, etc.) before we encounter anything like a compelling narrative of the event from a source with broad cultural authority.

It’s not that we are literally presented with a relational database, but that we are confronted with what amounts to a loosely arranged set of data points, whose significance and meaning has not been baked into the form itself (as is the case with information encased in narrative). One effect of our digital media environment, then, is to immerse us in searchable databases of information rather than present us with comprehensive, integrated, and broadly compelling narratives.

It is impossible to overstate the speed with which any phenomena, however slight it may seem, gets entered, irrevocably, into the Database for the generation of narratives, which is to say for the curation of competing realities. The “realtime” nature of this dynamic is critical as is the easily manipulable nature of digital media.

And consider that this is not merely a function of willful ignorance or intentional deceit. Under these conditions, it is entirely possible for serious, educated people to arrive at disparate understandings of reality. The grifters and manipulators don’t help mind you, but I think it’s too facile, and falsely comforting, to say that they alone are the source of the problem.

In a previous essay, I enumerated 15 provisional consequences of this development. Here are the first three, you can click through to read the rest:

1. The Database tolerates, indeed encourages small-n narratives, but it cannot sustain and actively discourages [broadly compelling and comprehensive] Narratives.
2. All narratives generated from the Database are tenuous and subject to constant revision. They are but one possible path through the database. Everyone knows alternative paths are possible. We are all just pinning red string on the board to connect the data points.
3. Narratives seek closure (the story must end). The Database is open-ended (it assimilates new data indefinitely). The Database resists the Narrative impulse to control and stabilize meaning.

1. All information is disinformation. The point here is that the problem isn’t the circulation of certain discrete bits of false or misleading information. The problem is that under conditions of information superabundance, any bit of data, even if it is reasonable and accurate (perhaps especially if it is so), can be incorporated into wildly disparate and competing runs through the Database. It’s the total effect that matters most. The sum of our daily bombardment with information is to overwhelm and deplete our cognitive resources.

I first formulated the line “all information is disinformation” while thinking about the inadequacies of fact-checking as an antidote to mis/disinformation online. It’s a tactic best suited for another age. In the context of digital media it may simply make the problem worse. The fact check, like the narrative, is already framed by the Database. It cannot rise above it. As is the case with many of the issues arising in digital contexts, the underlying dynamic is abundance rather than scarcity. Under those circumstances, simply adding more information compounds the problem.

1. We are all conspiracy theorists now. When we have a superabundance of information and/consequently a failure of trusted institutions, any effort to make sense of a situation, to connect the dots, will seem to others making a different run through the Database (and perhaps even feel to us) not unlike conspiracy theorizing. The materials are there in the Database, which is to say the massive digital archives we all dip into constantly. The urge to make sense of things is more or less a given. All we need is a provocation … [and] within minutes, we’ve all got our dark-rimmed-Kevin-Costner-in-JFK glasses on.

It’s not just that there is widespread disagreement about how to interpret the meaning of an event. It is also that there can be widespread disagreement about the basic facts of the event in question. It is one thing to argue the meaning of the moon landing for human affairs, it is another to incessantly debate whether the moon landing happened. Which is why, from someone’s perspective, we are all conspiracy theorizers now. We are all in the position of holding beliefs, however sure we may be of them, that some non-trivial portion of the population considers not just mistaken but preposterous and paranoid.

1. Actually, we’re all cultists now. The conspiracy theorist is ordinarily imagined as a lone, troubled individual convinced of things hardly anyone else believes. Under the conditions of digitized relations within the Database, this is no longer the case. We can readily find others that share our view of the world, which is to say that they have run through the Database and discovered the same patterns. This naturally reinforces what might otherwise have been a tenuously held belief or suspicion. We are not alone, there are others. So rather than saying that we are all conspiracy theorizers now, I should say that we are all, from someone’s perspective, cult members now.

In this light, polarization and group loyalty may also be understood as a psychic/epistemic defense mechanism, demanded by the experience of the Database. So, too, apathy, indifference, and varieties of ironic detachment.

1. The answer is not more information. Although, of course, one always does need some baseline of good information. That said … maybe you and I don’t need more information. And, if we think that the key to navigating uncertainty and mitigating anxiety is simply more information, then we may very well make matters worse for ourselves.

Believing that everything will be better if only we gather more information commits us to endless searching and casting about, to one more swipe of the screen in the hope that the elusive bit of data, which will make everything clear, will suddenly present itself. In this mode, what we need seems always to lie just beyond the realm of the actual, hidden beyond the horizon of the possible. The paradoxical effect is to sink us ever deeper into indecision and anxiety because the abundance of information, especially if it is encountered as discrete bits of under-interpreted data, will only generate more uncertainty and frustration.

Even in cases where more information might be genuinely helpful, it may not be forthcoming when we need it. More importantly, some matters cannot be adequately adjudicated simply by gathering more information and plugging it into some sort of value-neutral formula. Indeed, we might even say that what we need to make is not a merely a decision but more like a commitment with all the risk, responsibility, and promise that this entails. What we might truly need, then, is not information but something else altogether: courage, patience, practical wisdom, and, perhaps most importantly, friendship. Of course, these can be harder to come by than mere information, however valuable it may be.

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Sources and Further Reading “Narrative Collapse” ← This is the key text. Read this one and some of my claims above may seem a bit less intemperate. * “We're All Conspiracy Theorists Now” * “The Insurrection Will Be Live Streamed” * “The Answer is Not More Information” * In The New Atlantis: “The Analog City and the Digital City.” * Of interest possibly only to myself, it seems that this way of thinking was taking nascent form as early as 2011 on the old blog. * Also in The New Atlantis*, Jon Askonas has been working on a complimentary line of analysis: “Reality Is Just a Game Now.”

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Welcome to another installment of The Convivial Society. It has been longer than usual since the last one, and many of you have come to the newsletter in recent weeks through the generous recommendations of other writers as you signed up for their work. So if you’re wondering what this is that has landed in your inbox, it is a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life in which I try to think carefully, and one hopes helpfully, about the state of our techno-social environment. I’d like to think that you’ll find The Convivial Society worth your time. If not, you can easily unsubscribe. If you do find it useful, though, please feel free to share the work with others and consider becoming a paid subscribers. Cheers!

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Programming note: This newsletter almost always features stand-alone essays, but I’m deviating slightly from that norm in this installment. As I worked on this draft, I realized that it was becoming rather unwieldy. So, I’ve decided to split things up into a handful of installments gathered around the theme of language under digital conditions.

Introductions I’d like to talk about “free speech,” but it is impossible, or at least exceedingly difficult to do so.

Right now, you probably have two or three guesses as to what I might have in mind. Another reader may have two or three guesses of their own, but there’s a good chance that they will be quite different from yours. That much is to be expected; “free speech” has long been a contested term, although, of course, the form and terms of the debate have shifted over the years.

But the reason I think it is well nigh impossible to talk about “free speech,” except under very specific circumstances, has very little to do with the heated and acrimonious debates, past or present, about the nature and extent of “free speech.” The phrase “free speech” is not just contested in a challenging but familiar way, but seems somehow empty of meaning altogether, which seems like a different sort of problem. And “free speech” is, of course, just one such example. So my concerns are not about “free speech” in the conventional sense at all, they are about speech itself, and they arise from the sense that something of consequence is happening to ordinary language, the lifeblood of human thought and action, under digital conditions.

I hesitated to put the matter in those rather ominous terms. It seems foolish to suggest, for example, that language is breaking down. After all, here I am using language to communicate with you and, I trust, having at least some modest success in making myself understood. But I do think something is going on, and I want to explore in a bit more detail this sense that language has gotten somehow out of joint. If it helps, perhaps we might reframe these concerns as a question: What are the conditions under which language can properly function as the ground of meaning, communication, and action? And, then: To what degree do these conditions obtain in digitally mediated environments? I have in mind both the power of language as a tool of comprehension and as a tool of action—as a tool of ordering human experience and organizing human action.

Now, if I can count on your patience, I’d like to give this essay a double introduction and allow both of them to loosely frame what follows. So here’s another opening, quite literally, in the sense of opening up a second path through the tangle of issues related to speech, to language itself, under digital conditions.

In the most recent episode of his podcast, The Gray Area, Sean Illing interviewed Alana Newhouse, the editor-in-chief of Tablet magazine. The focus of their conversation was an essay Newhouse wrote back in November, which argued that the most salient divide in American society was between those who believed that America’s institutions were irreparably broken and those who believed that they were fundamentally sound but in need of reform, repair, or renewal. She termed these two groups the brokenists and the status-quoists. Tablet is a Jewish publication, so the essay includes interesting reflections drawn from the tradition of Jewish thought and the experience of Jews in America. You can read the whole thing and listen to her conversation with Illing to decide what you think about this framing.

I think there’s something to it, partly because of how the history of human institutions and the history of technology are interwoven. Neil Postman put this as succinctly as possible in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992):

Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organization–not to mention their reason for being–reflects the world-view promoted by the technology. Therefore, when an old technology is assaulted by a new one, institutions are threatened. When institutions are threatened, a culture finds itself in crisis.

So, yes, it would make sense that the advent of digital media would precipitate a crisis of institutions and that this crisis would generate significant societal fault lines. Of course, there is more to say about why exactly, or how, new technologies challenge existing institutions. Three years ago, I made my own effort to map an analogous divide between what I called the Digital City and the Analog City. More recently, I attempted to make a narrower argument focused on the challenge to the myth of machine-like neutrality that undergirded modern institutions. With that myth dissolving under digital conditions, it’s not surprising that a divide of the sort that Newhouse described has appeared in American society.

In what follows, though, I want to take another angle on the same basic problem, one that considers, in an admittedly cursory and speculative fashion, the possibility that having built our political structures on the assumption that human experience and human society can be ordered by human language and speech, we may now be suffering through the discovery that the world we have built is no longer responsive to either.

In this first essay and the one that follows, I’ll consider how some mid-twentieth century thinkers conceived of the problem of language, politics, and technology. In subsequent installments, I plan to take up a related set of questions and themes: the paradoxes of language online, the relationship between silence and meaning and between metaphor and thought. I’m sure there may be some other detours along the way.

Language, Sense, and ActionThe fear that human action and human language are parting ways has been expressed before. Notably, a number of mid-20th century writers took up the theme. Consider Hannah Arendt’s Prologue to The Human Condition first published in 1958. The Prologue is a brief but rewarding meditation on the challenges posed by mid-20th century developments in science and technology. The first fear Arendt considers at length is that “the ‘truths’ of the modern scientific worldview, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought.” In other words, Arendt feared that a gap had opened up between what science had come to know about the world and the capacity of human language to adequately express those truths.

This leads her to wonder whether “we, who are earthbound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do.”

The sentiment, interestingly, is echoed in W.H. Auden’s poem, “Friday’s Child”1:

The self-observed observing Mind
We meet when we observe at all
Is not alariming or unkind
But utterly banal.

Though instruments at Its command
Make wish and counterwish come true,
It clearly cannot understand
What It can clearly do.

In a line that seems even more striking today, Arendt went on to write that “it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.”

Arendt also warns us against following the oft-repeated counsel “to adjust our cultural attitudes to the present status of scientific achievement.” She believed that if we were to do so, “we would in all earnest adopt a way of life in which speech is no longer meaningful.” As she explains, this is because “the sciences today have been forced to adopt a ‘language’ of mathematical symbols which […] now contains statements that in no way can be translated back into speech.”

But why does this matter? The problem, as Arendt put it, is that “wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.” In her view, “whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about.” While “truths beyond speech” may be important to a person considered individually, “men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.”

In short, the political community cannot exist without language. As she explains elsewhere, for Aristotle the human being is a “political animal” because we are, first, “a living being capable of speech.” Speech creates the possibility of a society ordered by a principle other than force or violence. Should speech no longer be able to sustain the political community or should human action reach beyond what can be adequately represented with human speech, then the consequences could be grave.

At the expense of belaboring the point needlessly, allow me to briefly mention George Steiner’s similar line of thought from his 1963 essay, “The Retreat of the Word.” Steiner’s concern is principally with the state of literature, but along the way he also argues that the startling advances of modern science depended on its turn to the “language” of advanced mathematics, and, as he puts it, “the history of that language is one of progressive untranslatability.”

He goes on to call this progressive untranslatability “a fact of tremendous implication.” “It has divided the experience and perception of reality into separate domains,” he writes. “The most decisive change in the tenor of Western intellectual life since the seventeenth century,” Steiner argues, “is the submission of successively larger areas of knowledge to the modes and proceedings of mathematics.”

And, to be clear, Steiner is rather hard on his fellow humanists on this point. According to Steiner, “Those of us who are compelled by our ignorance of exact science to imagine the universe through a veil of non-mathematical language inhabit an animate fiction.” (I think much depends on whether Steiner is right about this. I’m not sure that he is, but am less certain about how he might be wrong.)

Steiner goes on to detail how the language of mathematics gradually captured one field or discipline after another: history, economics, philosophy, and even strands of modern music and art. He then sums up his argument in this way:

Until the seventeenth century, the sphere of language encompassed nearly the whole of experience and reality; today it comprises a narrower domain. It no longer articulates, or is relevant to, all major modes of action, thought, and sensibility. Large areas of meaning and praxis now belong to such non-verbal languages as mathematics, symbolic logic, and formulas of chemical or electronic relation.”

“The world of words,” Steiner concludes, “has shrunk.”

Where do things stand sixty years later? Were these mid-20th century fears about the rupture between a scientific, which is to say mathematical, understanding of the world and ordinary language overstated? From one perspective, I suppose so. Political life went on, of course. But, upon closer examination, maybe not. Did political life go on as before, or is it possible to trace our present disaffections to this turn toward the inexpressible in our understanding of the world? Has there been since then a steady erosion of the space for political action grounded in speech? Does this parting of ways between ordinary language and understanding—perhaps dating back to the discovery of telescopic and microscopic reality, as Arendt suggests in The Human Condition—account, at least in part, for the evident and felt brokenness of our institutions and the alienated quality of human experience? In other words, if language has been the foundation of human culture and experience, are we now registering above ground, as it were, cracks that have long been winding their way through that foundation?

Perhaps we can tell the story this way: While Arendt and Steiner (among others) were largely correct about the shrinking sphere and power of language, it would be some time before ordinary citizens felt the consequences acutely. Already by the mid-twentieth century and certainly thereafter, ordinary citizens were all too familiar with the exasperating opaqueness and unresponsiveness of bureaucratic society and already experienced a vague discomfort with the scale and scope of modern technological systems. But it was not until the advent of algorithmic society that large swaths of everyday experience became similarly opaque and unresponsive to ordinary language. Now we are all increasingly confronted by the dynamics Arendt and Steiner described. The sources of our malaise might be many, but surely one of them is the apparent failure of our most basic tool for making sense, deriving meaning, and acting in the world.

It is not just that the language of the average citizen is no longer adequate to give an account of the natural world that accords with the esoteric realities discovered by modern science. Nor is it merely the case that we all now confront problems whose scale makes them resistant to human understanding and human action. It is that our lives are increasingly structured by systems and devices which operate according to mathematical, statistical, and algorithmic logic, a logic that often escapes the understanding not only of those whose lives are subject to the systems and devices but even that of those who create and deploy the systems and devices. And one suspects that these systems are resistant to political control not only because of the fecklessness of politicians or the corrupting influences of wealth but precisely because they themselves have become the true governing principle of modern society.

Thinking about large language models like GPT-3 from this perspective, it seems as if they represent a final triumph of mathematical representations over language. If writing amounted to, as Walter Ong once put it, the technologizing of the word (and print its mechanization), then large language models amount to the mathematization of the word. Time will tell what this will mean. I will venture no predictions. I will only say that for Arendt, speech was bound up with natality—the promise of new beginnings, the realm of actions which yield unpredictable consequences. To render speech the outcome of prediction seems to bind it up with mortality instead, with the expected end rather than the unexpected beginning.

According to Arendt, “What first undermines and then kills political communities is loss of power2 and final impotence.” She then goes on to issue this somber warning: “Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.”

Word and deed have parted company, partly for the reasons Arendt described, but as the following installments will show, I think there’s more to the story of language under digital conditions than what this line of analysis offers us. But it is a start. And to be pointed in the direction of language, and its relation to thought, meaning, and action makes it a very good start. I do think it’s here that we will find the deep sources of many of our frustrations, but perhaps also the sources of a new beginning.

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1This is unlikely to be a coincidence. Auden read and admired The Human Condition.

2Power here is the potential for action that emerges among people in their plurality. It can be activated by speech and generate action in the world. “While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.”

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Welcome back to the Convivial Society. In this installment, you’ll find the audio version of the latest essay, “What You Get Is the World.” I try to record an audio version of most installments, but I send them out separately from the text version for reasons I won’t bore you with here. Incidentally, you can also subscribe to the newsletter’s podcast feed on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Just look up The Convivial Society.

Aside from the audio essay, you’ll find an assortment of year-end miscellany below.

I trust you are all well as we enter a new year. All the best to you and yours!

A Few Notable Posts

Here are six installments from this past year that seemed to garner a bit of interest. Especially if you’ve just signed up in recent weeks, you might appreciate some of these earlier posts.

Incidentally, if you have appreciated the writing and would like to become a paid supporter at a discounted rate, here’s the last call for this offer. To be clear, the model here is that all the writing is public but I welcome the patronage of those who are able and willing. Cheers!

Podcast Appearances

I’ve not done the best job of keeping you all in loop on these, but I did show up in a few podcasts this year. Here are some of those:

With Sean Illing on attention

With Charlie Warzel on how being online traps us in the past

With Georgie Powell on reframing our experience

Year’s End

It is something of a tradition at the end of the year for me to share Richard Wilbur’s poem, “Year’s End.” So, once again I’ll leave you with it.

Now winter downs the dying of the year, And night is all a settlement of snow;From the soft street the rooms of houses show A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shakeThe late leaves down, which frozen where they fell And held in ice as dancers in a spell Fluttered all winter long into a lake; Graved on the dark in gestures of descent, They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone A million years. Great mammoths overthrown Composedly have made their long sojourns, Like palaces of patience, in the grayAnd changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise But slept the deeper as the ashes roseAnd found the people incomplete, and froze The random hands, the loose unready eyes Of men expecting yet another sunTo do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause. We fray into the future, rarely wroughtSave in the tapestries of afterthought.More time, more time. Barrages of applause Come muffled from a buried radio.The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

Thank you all for reading along in 2022. We survived, and I’m looking forward to another year of the Convivial Society in 2023.

Cheers, Michael

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Welcome again to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. This post features the audio version of the essay that went out in the last installment: “Lonely Surfaces: On AI-generated Images.”

For the sake of recent subscribers, I’ll mention that I ordinarily post audio of the main essays (although a bit less regularly than I’d like over the past few months). For a variety of reasons that I won’t bore you with here, I’ve settled on doing this by sending a supplement with the audio separately from the text version of the essay. That’s what you have here.

The newsletter is public but reader supported. So no customers, only patrons. This month if you’d like to support my work at a reduced rate from the usual $45/year, you can click here:

You can go back to the original essay for links to articles, essays, etc. You can find the images and paintings I cite in the post below.

Jason Allen’s “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial”

Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp”

Detail from Pieter Bruegel’s “Harvesters”

The whole of Bruegel’s “Harvesters”

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. Many of you are receiving your first installment after finding your way here from my conversation with Sean Illing about attention. Welcome aboard. I was grateful for the invitation, and I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. You can listen to it here or here. While you’re there, check out the recent interviews with Dr. Gabor Maté and Ian Bogost.

In this installment, I offer some thoughts on AI generated images … finally. I think it was about a month ago that I first mentioned I was working on this post. It took awhile to come together. As per usual, no hot takes contained within. This will be me thinking about what we’re looking at when we’re looking at AI-generated images and how this looking trains our imagination. Or something like that.

If you read this and find yourself appreciating this kind of work, please feel free to share it with others and consider supporting my writing. Through the end of the month, you can do so at a 30% discount.

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This past summer, the image above, titled “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” took first prize at the Colorado State Fair. It was created by Jason Allen with Midjourney, an impressive AI tool used to generate images from text prompts. The image won in the division for “digital art/digitally manipulated photography.” It also prompted a round of online debate about the nature of art and its future. Since then you’ve almost certainly seen a myriad of similar AI generated images come across your feed as more and more people gain access to Midjourney and other similar tools such as DALL-E or Stable Diffusion.1 About about month or two ago, on my little corner of the internet, the proliferation of these images seemed to plateau as their novelty wore off. But this does not mean that such tools are merely a passing fad, only that they may already be settling into more mundane roles and functions: as generators of images for marketing campaigns, for example.

The debate about the nature and future of art might have happened anyway, but it was undoubtedly encouraged by Allen’s own provocative claims in interviews about his win at the State Fair. They are perhaps best summed up in this line: “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. AI won. Humans lost.”

I’m not sure we need to necessarily defend art from such claims. And if we were so inclined, I don’t think it would be of much use to perform the tired litany of rehearsing similar claims about earlier technologies, such as photography or film. Such litanies tend to imply, whether intentionally or not, that nothing changes. Or, better, that all change is merely additive. In other words, that we have simply added something to the complex assemblage of skills, practices, artifacts, tools, communities, techniques, values, and economic structures that constitute what we tend to call art. They fail to understand, as Neil Postman once put it, that technological change is ecological rather than additive. Powerful new tools can restructure the complex techno-social ecosystem we call art in sometimes striking and often unpredictable ways. Even if we don’t think a new tool “kills” art, we should be curious about how it might transform art, or at least some of the skills and practice we have called art.

Others might argue in reply to Allen’s rash declaration that this new form is art, or maybe that there is an art to the construction and refinement of prompts that yield the desired images. Alternatively, they may argue that this present form of the technology is only one possible application of the underlying capacities, which might be harnessed more cooperatively by human artists. For example, Ethan Zuckerman wrote, “Jason Allen is trolling us by declaring art is dead. Instead, a new way of making art, at the intersection of AI and human skill, is being born.” Some others might even insist, less convincingly in my view, that, in fact, humans win because there is more stuff to go around. If some images are good, then more images are better. If only certain people could develop the skills to draw, paint, or design with digital tools, better to empower everyone with the machine-aided capacity to produce similar work. I’m not sure about any of that. Maybe the proliferation of images will prove alienating. Maybe the alien or hybrid quality of this work will fail to yield the same subjective experience for those who encounter it. Maybe doodling anonymously in notebooks no one will ever see turns out to be more satisfying for some people.

Back in September, John Herrman noted that the “flood of machine-generated media” had at least raised the caliber of the discourse around AI:

In contrast with the glib intra-VC debate about avoiding human enslavement by a future superintelligence, discussions about image-generation technology have been driven by users and artists and focus on labor, intellectual property, AI bias, and the ethics of artistic borrowing and reproduction.

As Herrman approvingly observed, most of the debates about the ethics of AI-generated art have thus far focused on justice for the artists, both living and dead, on whose work these models are trained and those whose labor might be displaced because of their success. These are legitimate and significant areas of concern. You can follow some of the links in the Herrman block quote above to read more about such matters.

I find that my own questions, as they have gradually come to me, are a bit different. I’ve been thinking about matters of depth and also about how these images might train our imagination. Along these lines, I appreciated the reflections of another digital artist, Annie Dorsen.2

“When tinkerers and hobbyists, doodlers and scribblers—not to mention kids just starting to perceive and explore the world—have this kind of instant gratification at their disposal,” Dorsen argues, “their curiosity is hijacked and extracted.” “For all the surrealism of these tools’ outputs,” she adds, “there’s a banal uniformity to the results.” She went on to write that “when people’s imaginative energy is replaced by the drop-down menu ‘creativity’ of big tech platforms, on a mass scale, we are facing a particularly dire form of immiseration.”

What exactly does such immiseration entail? Allow me to quote Dorsen at length:

By immiseration, I’m thinking of the late philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s coinage, “symbolic misery”—the disaffection produced by a life that has been packaged for, and sold to, us by commercial superpowers. When industrial technology is applied to aesthetics, “conditioning,” as Stiegler writes, “substitutes for experience.” That’s bad not just because of the dulling sameness of a world of infinite but meaningless variety (in shades of teal and orange). It’s bad because a person who lives in the malaise of symbolic misery is, like political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s lonely subject who has forgotten how to think, incapable of forming an inner life. Loneliness, Arendt writes, feels like “not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” Art should be a bulwark against that loneliness, nourishing and cultivating our connections to each other and to ourselves—both for those who experience it and those who make it.

Not surprisingly, I was struck by the reference to Arendt. The world for Arendt is not simply coterminous with the earth. It is rather the relatively stable realm of human things that welcome and outlive each generation. It mediates human relationships and anchors our sense of self. Through our participation in the plurality of the common world of things, we enjoy the consolations community. To be alienated from the world is to find ourselves lonely and isolated—and it is to lose ourselves, too.

I’m not sure if this is exactly what Dorsen had in mind, but here’s how I would apply this strand of Arendt’s thinking. (Stay with me, it will seem as if I forgot about Arendt, but we’ll get back to her!) I’ll begin by noting that when I first glanced at Allen’s “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” I was taken in by the image, which struck me as evocative and intriguing. But as I came back to the image and sat with it for a while, I found that my efforts to engage it at depth were thwarted. This happened when I began to inspect the image more closely. As I did so, my experience of the image began to devolve rather than deepen. When taken whole and at a glance, the image invited closer consideration, but it did not ultimately sustain or reward such attention.

This is not only because the image appeared to fail in some technical sense—hands, for example, seem to give these models trouble—it is that these errors, aberrations, or incongruities are, in a literal sense, insignificant—they signify nothing. They may startle or surprise, which is something, but they do not then go on to capitalize on that initial surprise to lead me on to some deeper insight or aesthetic experience.

Rob Horning has made a similar observation in his recent comments about generative AI focused on ChatGPT. “AI models,” Horning observes,

presume that thought is entirely a matter of pattern recognition, and these patterns, already inscribed in the corpus of the internet, can [be] mapped once and for all, with human ‘thinkers’ always already trapped within them. The possibility that thought could consist of pattern breaking is eliminated.

This also hints at how, as I wrote last summer, we seem to be increasingly trapped in the past by what are essentially machines for the storage and manipulation of memory. The past has always fed our capacity to create what is new, of course, but the success of these tools depends on their ability to fit existing patterns as predictably as possible. The point is to smooth out the uncanny aberrations and to eliminate what surprises us.

“The best art isn’t about pleasing or meeting expectations,” as Dan Cohen has put it in a recent essay about generative AI. “Instead, it often confronts us with nuance, contradictions, and complexity. It has layers that reveal themselves over time. True art is resistant to easy consumption, and rewards repeated encounters.”

On the contrary, Cohen concluded, “The desire of AI tools to meet expectations, to align with genres and familiar usage as their machine-learning array informs pixels and characters, is in tension with the human ability to coax new perspectives and meaning from the unusual, unique lives we each live.”

Consider how, in The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald interprets Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp.”

The dissected arm is all wrong, but this “error,” if we attend to it, leads us on to something vital. It invites a closer consideration of the significance of the scene being depicted, and it rewards such attention with critical insight and depth of meaning. Rather than straightforwardly depicting a step in the grand advance of scientific knowledge, Rembrandt appears to raise a series of questions about the moral standing of the body, the ethics of the procedure, and the nature of vision—the participants have lost sight of the body before them because they have become dependent on its representation in the medical textbook that commands their attention.3

As we are in the midst of what amounts to a series of digressions before we get back to Arendt and loneliness, so let us take one more. In “The Idea of Perfection,” philosopher Iris Murdoch described “uses of words by persons groups round a common object” as a “central and vital human activity.” What she is aiming at is the importance of developing a wide and diverse vocabulary to support sound moral judgment and showing how that vocabulary depends on a context of common objects of attention, but she gets us there by analogy to the art critic.

“The art critic,” she explains, “can help us if we are in the presence of the same object and if we know something about his scheme of concepts. Both contexts are relevant to our ability to move towards ‘seeing more’, towards ‘seeing what he sees’.” And so there is a place for the critic or historian who can, as we gather around “The Anatomy Lesson,” help us see what is before us. Along with the formal aesthetic features of the painting, there are historical, legal, and social dynamics in play that we may not be able to perceive. While there is room for errors of judgment with regard to interpretation, it is meaningful to say that we can be moved by such conversations toward a deeper understanding of the meaning and significance of the painting. It would be difficult for me to imagine such a conversation taking shape around “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial.”

Now, I am prepared to grant that it is I who am missing something of consequence or that this conclusion merely reflects a failure of my imagination. If so, please correct me. It seems to me that one may discuss the technical aspects of the technologies that are yielding these images or how certain features of the image might have appeared or for the artist to explain the process by which they arrived at the prompts that yielded the image. This would be not unlike talking exclusively about the shape of the brush or the chemical composition of the paint. It does not seem to me that we can talk about the image in the way that we could talk about “The Anatomy Lesson” and find that we are moving toward a deeper understanding of the image in the same way. In part, this is because we cannot properly speak about the intentions of the artist or seek to make sense of an embedded order of meanings without making what I think would be a category error.

I think I can begin to tie these threads together by reference to a few lines from Eva Brann, a long-time tutor at St. John’s College, who, in a talk to incoming freshman introducing the program of great books, observed the following:

To my mind texts, like people, are serious when they have a surface that arouses the desire to know them and the depth to fulfill that desire. I think that for us human beings only depths and mysteries induce viable desire. Many a failure of love follows on the—usually false—opinion that we have exhausted the other person’s inside, that there is no further promise of depth.

I left the last sentence in because it’s worth thinking about independently of our present subject, but it’s this line that I’d like us to consider: “A surface that arouses the desire to know them and the depth to fulfill that desire.” That line has stuck with me over the years. And I thought about it again as AI-generated images proliferated on my screens, and especially as I thought about Allen’s work and his rash pronouncements about art.

By contrast, I recently found myself looking again at Pieter Bruegel’s “Harvesters” on Google’s Arts and Culture site. You will recognize the image as the one that I use as the header art for this newsletter. Bruegel is one of my favorite painters, chiefly for what I take to be his extraordinarily humane and earthy vision. The resolution of the image on Arts and Culture is extremely high, and you can zoom in to see minute details in the painting. When doing so, I was struck by this scene from the deep background of the image:

The detail is remarkable. This scene appears in the field slightly to the left of the painting’s center. You could look at this painting for a long time without noticing it. And, of course, that’s much easier to do when looking at a lower resolution image appearing on your screen than it would be were we to be standing in front of the painting itself, although even these fine details would only begin to emerge over time.4

This is one way of thinking about what it means for a work of art to have depth. You can press in, and it won’t dissolve under a more attentive gaze. Naturally, what it means to “press in,” as I put it, varies depending on the medium under consideration. In this case, it means looking intently until our looking is transformed into seeing. But I can imagine analogous modes of pressing in that would apply for music and text, for example, or in the case of taste and texture. Whatever mode these engagements take, they involve attention—Iris Murdoch’s “just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.”

I suppose, then, that these are the sorts of questions I have for us just now as we navigate the flood of machine-generated media: How will AI-generated images train our vision? What habit of attention does it encourage? What modes of engagement do they sustain?

The most important thing about a technology is not necessarily what can be done with it in singular instances, it is rather what habits its use instills in us and how these habits shape us over time. I recently wrote about how the skimming sort of reading that characterizes so much of our engagement with digital texts (and which often gets transferred to our engagement with analog texts) arises as a coping mechanism for the overwhelming volume of text we typically encounter on any given day. So, likewise, might we settle for a scanning sort of looking, one that is content to bounce from point to point searching but never delving thus never quite seeing.

We are, it seems, offered an exchange. Brann wrote about works that have a “a surface that arouses the desire to know them and the depth to fulfill that desire.” This suggests that there are surfaces that may arouse a desire to know more deeply but which do not have the depth to satisfy that desire. I think this is where we find ourselves with AI-generated art. And, at one level, this is fine, unless we find ourselves conditioned to never expect depth at all or unable to perceive it when we do encounter it. The problem, as I see it, is that we need these encounters with depth of meaning to sustain us, indeed, to do more than sustain us, to elevate our thinking, judgment, and imagination. So the exchange we are offered is this: in place of occasional experiences of depth that renew and satisfy us, we are simply given an infinite surface upon which to skim indefinitely.

But let us not forget Arendt! Dorsen, you’ll recall, argued that “when people’s imaginative energy is replaced by the drop-down menu ‘creativity’ of big tech platforms” they suffer a form of symbolic immiseration. Loneliness for Arendt, she noted, “feels like ‘not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.’ Art should be a bulwark against that loneliness, nourishing and cultivating our connections to each other and to ourselves—both for those who experience it and those who make it.”

The lack of depth, as I’ve called it following Brann, ultimately issues forth in a kind of loneliness. When I turn to Bruegel or Rembrandt, what I find, whether or not I am fully conscious of it, is not merely technical virtuosity, it is another mind. To encounter a painting or a piece of music or poem is to encounter another person, although it is sometimes easy to lose sight of this fact. I can ask about the meaning of a work of art because it was composed by someone with whom I have shared a world and whose experience is at least partly intelligible to me. Without reducing the meaning of a work of art to the intention of its creator, I can nonetheless ask and think about such intentions. In putting a question to a painting, I am also putting a question to another person. It is for this reason, I think, that Dorsen argues that art can be a bulwark against the loneliness of finding that we do not belong to the world at all. “Friendship,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’” That moment, I’d argue, can happen through the mediation of a work of art just as surely as it can in conversation with my neighbor. At least as long as the ratio of human to machine intentionality, perhaps difficult to ascertain in practice, is not such that the human is altogether obscured.

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1For what it’s worth, one of the better descriptions I’ve encountered of how these applications work was provided by Marco Donnarumma, who is himself a digital artist and a machine learning researcher. “Figuratively speaking,” Donnarumma explained, “AI image generators create a cartography of a dataset, where features of images and texts (in the form of mathematical abstractions) are distributed at particular locations according to probability calculations.” “The cartography,” he goes on to say, “is called a ‘manifold’ and it contains all the image combinations that are possible with the data at hand. When a user prompts a generator, this navigates the manifold in order to find the location where the relevant sampling features lie.”

2Thanks to Neil Turkewitz for bringing this piece to my attention.

3I don’t think he ever cites this painting, but this is a striking illustration of Ivan Illich’s argument about a regime of vision in thrall of what he called “the show.” He traced its origins back to “the anatomists looked for new drawing methods to eliminate from their tables the perspectival ‘distortion’ that the natural gaze inevitably introduces into the view of reality.” You can read more on Illich and “the show” in this older installment.

4I’ve cited her essay before, but I’ll mention it here again. In 2013, art historian Jennifer Roberts wrote about helping her students more wisely deploy their attention: “An awareness of time and patience as a productive medium of learning is something that I feel is urgent to model for—and expect of—my students.” And, as she observed, “in any work of art there are details and orders and relationships that take time to perceive.”

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Welcome back to the Convivial Society. In this installment, you’ll find the audio version of two recent posts: “The Pathologies of the Attention Economy” and “Impoverished Emotional Lives.” I’ve not combined audio from two separate installments before, but the second is a short “Is this anything?” post, so I thought it would be fine to include it here. (By the way, I realized after the fact that I thoughtlessly mispronounced Herbert Simon’s name as Simone. I’m not, however, sufficiently embarrassed to go back and re-record or edit the audio. So there you have it.)

If you’ve been reading over the past few months, you know that I’ve gone back and forth on how best to deliver the audio version of the essays. I’ve settled for now on this method, which is to send out a supplement to the text version of the essay. Because not all of you listen to the audio version, I’ll include some additional materials (links, resources, etc.) so that this email is not without potential value to those who do not listen to the audio.

Farewell Real Life

I noted in a footnote recently that Real Life Magazine had lost its funding and would be shutting down. This is a shame. Real Life consistently published smart and thoughtful essays exploring various dimensions of internet culture. I had the pleasure of writing three pieces for the magazine between 2018 and 2019: ”The Easy Way Out,” “Always On,” and “Personal Panopticons.”

I was also pleasantly surprised to encounter essays in the past year or two drawing on the work of Ivan Illich: “Labors of Love” and “Appropriate Measures,” each co-authored by Jackie Brown and Philippe Mesly, as well as “Doctor’s Orders” by Aimee Walleston.

And at any given time I’ve usually had a handful of Real Life essays open in tabs waiting to be read or shared. Here are some more recent pieces that are worth your time: “Our Friend the Atom The aesthetics of the Atomic Age helped whitewash the threat of nuclear disaster,” “Hard to See How trauma became synonymous with authenticity,” and “Life’s a Glitch The non-apocalypse of Y2K obscures the lessons it has for the present.”

Links

The latest installment in Jon Askonas’s ongoing series in The New Atlantis is out from behind the paywall today. In “How Stewart Made Tucker,” Askonas weaves a compelling account of how Jon Stewart prepared the way for Tucker Carlson and others:

In his quest to turn real news from the exception into the norm, he pioneered a business model that made it nearly impossible. It’s a model of content production and audience catering perfectly suited to monetize alternate realities delivered to fragmented audiences. It tells us what we want to hear and leaves us with the sense that “they” have departed for fantasy worlds while “we” have our heads on straight. Americans finally have what they didn’t before. The phony theatrics have been destroyed — and replaced not by an earnest new above-the-fray centrism but a more authentic fanaticism.

You can find earlier installments in the series here: Reality — A post-mortem. Reading through the essay, I was struck again and again by how foreign and distant the world of late 90s and early aughts. In any case, the Jon’s work in this series is worth your time.

Kashmir Hill spent a lot of time in Meta’s Horizons to tell us about life in the metaverse:

My goal was to visit at every hour of the day and night, all 24 of them at least once, to learn the ebbs and flows of Horizon and to meet the metaverse’s earliest adopters. I gave up television, books and a lot of sleep over the past few months to spend dozens of hours as an animated, floating, legless version of myself.

I wanted to understand who was currently there and why, and whether the rest of us would ever want to join them.

Ian Bogost on smart thermostats and the claims made on their behalf:

After looking into the matter, I’m less confused but more distressed: Smart heating and cooling is even more knotted up than I thought. Ultimately, your smart thermostat isn’t made to help you. It’s there to help others—for reasons that might or might not benefit you directly, or ever.

Sun-ha Hong’s paper on predictions without futures. From the abstract:

… the growing emphasis on prediction as AI's skeleton key to all social problems constitutes what religious studies calls cosmograms: universalizing models that govern how facts and values relate to each other, providing a common and normative point of reference. In a predictive paradigm, social problems are made conceivable only as objects of calculative control—control that can never be fulfilled but that persists as an eternally deferred and recycled horizon. I show how this technofuture is maintained not so much by producing literally accurate predictions of future events but through ritualized demonstrations of predictive time.

Miscellany

As I wrote about the possibility that the structure of online experience might impoverish our emotional lives, I recalled the opening paragraph of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages. I can’t say that I have a straightforward connection to make between “the passionate intensity of life” Huizinga describes and my own speculations the affective consequences of digital media, but I think there may be something worth getting at.

When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child. Every even, every deed was defined in given and expressive forms and was in accord with the solemnity of a tight, invariable life style. The great events of human life—birth, marriage, death—by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of divine mystery. But even the lesser events—a journey, labor, a visit—were accompanied by a multitude of blessings, ceremonies, sayings, and conventions.

From the perspective of media ecology, the shift to print as the dominant cultural medium is interpreted as having the effect of tempering the emotional intensity of oral culture and tending instead toward an ironizing effect as it generates a distance between an emotion and its experssion. Digital media curiously scrambles these dynamics by generating an instantaneity of delivery that mimics the immediacy of physical presence. In 2019, I wrote in The New Atlantis about how digital media scrambles the pscyhodynamics (Walter Ong’s phrase) of orality and literacy in often unhelpful ways: “The Inescapable Town Square.” Here’s a bit from that piece:

The result is that we combine the weaknesses of each medium while losing their strengths. We are thrust once more into a live, immediate, and active communicative context — the moment regains its heat — but we remain without the non-verbal cues that sustain meaning-making in such contexts. We lose whatever moderating influence the full presence of another human being before us might cast on the passions the moment engendered. This not-altogether-present and not-altogether-absent audience encourages a kind of performative pugilism.

To my knowledge, Ivan Illich never met nor corresponded with Hannah Arendt. However, in my efforts to “break bread with the dead,” as Auden once put it, they’re often seated together at the table. In a similarly convivial spirit, here is an excerpt from a recent book by Alissa Wilkinson:

I learn from Hannah Arendt that a feast is only possible among friends, or people whose hearts are open to becoming friends. Or you could put it another way: any meal can become a feast when shared with friends engaged in the activity of thinking their way through the world and loving it together. A mere meal is a necessity for life, a fact of being human. But it is transformed into something much more important, something vital to the life of the world, when the people who share the table are engaging in the practices of love and of thinking.

Finally, here’s a paragraph from Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda recently highlighted by Jeffrey Bilbro:

In individualist theory the individual has eminent value, man himself is the master of his life; in individualist reality each human being is subject to innumerable forces and influences, and is not at all master of his own life. As long as solidly constituted groups exist, those who are integrated into them are subject to them. But at the same time they are protected by them against such external influences as propaganda. An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups. Because such groups are organic and have a well-structured material, spiritual, and emotional life, they are not easily penetrated by propaganda.

Cheers! Hope you are all well,

Michael

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The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 16

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. In this installment, I explore a somewhat eccentric frame by which to consider how we relate to our technologies, particularly those we hold close to our bodies. You’ll have to bear through a few paragraphs setting up that frame, but I hope you find it to be a useful exercise. And I welcome your comments below. Ordinarily only paid subscribers can leave comments, but this time around I’m leaving the comments open for all readers. Feel free to chime in. I will say, though, that I may not be able to respond directly to each one. Cheers!

Pardon what to some of you will seem like a rather arcane opening to this installment. We’ll be back on more familiar ground soon enough, but I will start us off with a few observations about liturgical practices in religious traditions.

A liturgy, incidentally, is a formal and relatively stable set of rites, rituals, and forms that order the public worship of a religious community. There are, for example, many ways to distinguish among the varieties of Christianity in the United States (or globally, for that matter). One might distinguish by region, by doctrine, by ecclesial structure, by the socioeconomic status its members, etc. But one might also place the various strands of the tradition along a liturgical spectrum, a spectrum whose poles are sometimes labeled low church and high church.

High church congregations, generally speaking, are characterized by their adherence to formal patterns and rituals. At high church services you would be more likely to observe ritual gestures, such as kneeling, bowing, or crossing oneself as well as ritual speech, such as set prayers, invocations, and responses. High church congregations are also more likely to observe a traditional church calendar and employ traditional vestments and ornamentation. Rituals and formalities of this sort would be mostly absent in low church congregations, which tend to place a higher premium on informality, emotion, and spontaneity of expression. I am painting with a broad brush, but it will serve well enough to set up the point I’m driving at.

But one more thing before we get there. What strikes me about certain low church communities is that they sometimes imagine themselves to have no liturgy at all. In some cases, they might even be overtly hostile to the very idea of a liturgy. This is interesting to me because, in practice, it is not that they have no liturgy at all as they imagine—they simply end up with an unacknowledged liturgy of a different sort. Their services also feature predictable patterns and rhythms, as well as common cadences and formulations, even if they are not formally expressed or delineated and although they differ from the patterns and rhythms of high church congregations. It’s not that you get no church calendar, for example, it’s that you end up trading the old ecclesial calendar of holy days and seasons, such as Advent, Epiphany, and Lent, for a more contemporary calendar of national and sentimental holidays, which is to say those that have been most thoroughly commercialized.

Now that you’ve borne with this eccentric opening, let me get us to what I hope will be the payoff. In the ecclesial context, this matters because the regular patterns and rhythms of worship, whether recognized as a liturgy or not, are at least as formative (if not more so) as the overt messages presented in a homily, sermon, or lesson, which is where most people assume the real action is. This is so because, as you may have heard it said, the medium is the message. In this case, I take the relevant media to be the embodied ritual forms, the habitual practices, and the material layers of the service of worship. These liturgical forms, acknowledged or unacknowledged, exert a powerful formative influence over time as they write themselves not only upon the mind of the worshipper but upon their bodies and, some might say, hearts.

With all of this in mind, then, I would propose that we take a liturgical perspective on our use of technology. (You can imagine the word “liturgical” in quotation marks, if you like.) The point of taking such a perspective is to perceive the formative power of the practices, habits, and rhythms that emerge from our use of certain technologies, hour by hour, day by day, month after month, year in and year out. The underlying idea here is relatively simple but perhaps for that reason easy to forget. We all have certain aspirations about the kind of person we want to be, the kind of relationships we want to enjoy, how we would like our days to be ordered, the sort of society we want to inhabit. These aspirations can be thwarted in any number of ways, of course, and often by forces outside of our control. But I suspect that on occasion our aspirations might also be thwarted by the unnoticed patterns of thought, perception, and action that arise from our technologically mediated liturgies. I don’t call them liturgies as a gimmick, but rather to cast a different, hopefully revealing light on the mundane and commonplace. The image to bear in mind is that of the person who finds themselves handling their smartphone as others might their rosary beads.

To properly inventory our technologically mediated liturgies we need to become especially attentive to what our bodies want. After all, the power of a liturgy is that it inscribes itself not only on the mind, but also on the body. In that liminal moment before we have thought about what we are doing but find our bodies already in motion, we can begin to discern the shape of our liturgies. In my waking moments, do I find myself reaching for a device before my eyes have had a chance to open? When I sit down to work, what routines do I find myself engaging? In the company of others, to what is my attention directed? When I as a writer, for example, notice that my hands have moved to open Twitter the very moment I begin to feel my sentence getting stuck, I am under the sway of a technological liturgy. In such moments, I might be tempted to think that my will power has failed me. But from the liturgical perspective I’m exploring here, the problem is not a failure of willpower. Rather, it’s that I’ve trained my will—or, more to the point, I have allowed my will to be trained—to want something contrary to my expressed desire in the moment. One might even argue that this is, in fact, a testament to the power of the will, which is acting in keeping with its training. By what we unthinkingly do, we undermine what we say we want.

Say, for example, that I desire to be a more patient person. This is a fine and noble desire. I suspect some of you have desired the same for yourselves at various points. But patience is hard to come by. I find myself lacking patience in the crucial moments regardless of how ardently I have desired it. Why might this be the case? I’m sure there’s more than one answer to this question, but we should at least consider the possibility that my failure to cultivate patience stems from the nature of the technological liturgies that structure my experience. Because speed and efficiency are so often the very reason why I turn to technologies of various sorts, I have been conditioning myself to expect something approaching instantaneity in the way the world responds to my demands. If at every possible point I have adopted tools and devices which promise to make things faster and more efficient, I should not be surprised that I have come to be the sort of person who cannot abide delay and frustration.

“The cunning of pedagogic reason,” sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once observed, “lies precisely in the fact that it manages to extort what is essential while seeming to demand the insignificant.” Bourdieu had in mind “the respect for forms and forms of respect which are the most visible and most ‘natural’ manifestation of respect for the established order, or the concessions of politeness, which always contain political concessions.”

What I am suggesting is that our technological liturgies function similarly. They, too, manage to extort what is essential while seeming to demand the insignificant. Our technological micro-practices, the movements of our fingers, the gestures of our hands, the posture of our bodies—these seem insignificant until we realize that we are in fact etching the grooves along which our future actions will tend to habitually flow.

The point of the exercise is not to divest ourselves of such liturgies altogether. Like certain low church congregations that claim they have no liturgies, we would only deepen the power of the unnoticed patterns shaping our thought and actions. And, more to the point, we would be ceding this power not to the liturgies themselves, but to the interests served by those who have crafted and designed those liturgies. My loneliness is not assuaged by my habitual use of social media. My anxiety is not meaningfully relieved by the habit of consumption engendered by the liturgies crafted for me by Amazon. My health is not necessarily improved by compulsive use of health tracking apps. Indeed, in the latter case, the relevant liturgies will tempt me to reduce health and flourishing to what the apps can measure and quantify.

Hannah Arendt once argued that totalitarian regimes succeed, in part, by dislodging or disemedding individuals from their traditional and customary milieus. Individuals who have been so “liberated” are more malleable and subject to new forms of management and control. The consequences of many modern technologies can play out in much the same way. They promise some form of liberation—from the constraints of place, time, community, or even the body itself. Such liberation is often framed as a matter of greater efficiency, convenience, or flexibility. But, to take one example, when someone is freed to work from home, they may find that they can now be expected to work anywhere and at anytime. When older patterns and rhythms are overthrown, new patterns and rhythms are imposed and these are often far less humane because they are not designed to serve human ends.

So I leave you with a set of questions and a comment section open to all readers. I’ve given you a few examples of what I have in mind, but what technological liturgies do you find shaping your days? What are their sources or whose interests do they serve? How much power do you have to resist these liturgies or subvert them if you find that they do, in fact, undermine your own aims and goals? Finally, what liturgies do you seek to implement for yourselves (these may be explicitly religious or not)? After all, as the philosopher Albert Borgmann once put it, we must “meet the rule of technology with a deliberate and regular counterpractice.”

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Listen now | The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 15

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This is the audio version of the last essay posted a couple of days ago, “What Is To Be Done? — Fragments.”

It was a long time between installments of the newsletter, and it has been an even longer stretch since the last audio version. As I note in the audio, my apologies to those of you who primarily rely on the audio version of the essays. I hope to be more consistent on this score moving forward!

Incidentally, in recording this installment I noticed a handful of typos in the original essay. I’ve edited these in the web version, but I'm sorry those of you who read the emailed version had to endure them. Obviously, my self-editing was also a bit rusty!

One last note, I’ve experimented with a paid-subscribers* discussion thread for this essay. It’s turned out rather well, I think. There’ve been some really insightful comments and questions. So, if you are a paid subscriber, you might want to check that out: Discussion Thread.

Cheers,

Michael

• Note to recent sign-ups: I follow a patronage model. All of the writing is public, there is no paywall for the essays. But I do invite those who value this work to support it as they are able with paid subscriptions. Those who do so, will from time to time have some additional community features come their way.

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Listen now (20 min) | The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 14 (supplement)

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Friday, July 22nd

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The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 13

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. This is the audio version of the last installment, which focused on the Blake Lemoine/LaMDA affair. I argued that while LaMDA is not sentient, applications like it will push us further along toward a digitally re-enchanted world. Also: to keep the essay to a reasonable length I resorted to some longish footnotes in the prior text version. That version also contains links to the various articles and essays I cited throughout the piece.

I continue to be somewhat flummoxed about the best way to incorporate the audio and text versions. This is mostly because of how Substack has designed the podcast template. Naturally, it is designed to deliver a podcast rather than text, but I don’t really think of what I do as a podcast. Ordinarily, it is simply an audio version of a textual essay. Interestingly, Substack just launched what, in theory, is an ideal solution: the option to include a simple voiceover of the text, within the text post template. Unfortunately, I don’t think this automatically feeds the audio to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. And, while I don’t think of myself as having a podcast, some of you do access the audio through those services. So, at present, I’ll keep to this somewhat awkward pattern of sending out the text and audio versions separately.

Thanks as always to all of you who read, listen, share, and support the newsletter. Nearly three years into this latest iteration of my online work, I am humbled by and grateful for the audience that has gathered around it.

Cheers,

Michael

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The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 10

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The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 9

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Listen now (13 min) | The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 8

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Listen now | The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 7

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. In this installment you’ll find the audio version of the previous essay, “The Face Stares Back.” And along with the audio version you’ll also find an assortment of links and resources. Some of you will remember that such links used to be a regular feature of the newsletter. I’ve prioritized the essays, in part because of the information I have on click rates, but I know the links and resources are useful to more than a few of you. Moving forward, I think it makes sense to put out an occasional installment that contains just links and resources (with varying amounts of commentary from me). As always, thanks for reading and/or listening.

Links and Resources

Let’s start with a classic paper from 1965 by philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence.” The paper, prepared for the RAND Corporation, opens with a long epigraph from the 17th-century polymath Blaise Pascal on the difference between the mathematical mind and the perceptive mind.

On “The Tyranny of Time”: “The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.” More: “The Western separation of clock time from the rhythms of nature helped imperialists establish superiority over other cultures.”

Relatedly, a well-documented case against Daylight Saving Time: “Farmers, Physiologists, and Daylight Saving Time”: “Fundamentally, their perspective is that we tend to do well when our body clock and social clock—the official time in our time zone—are in synch. That is, when noon on the social clock coincides with solar noon, the moment when the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky where we are. If the two clocks diverge, trouble ensues. Startling evidence for this has come from recent findings in geographical epidemiology—specifically, from mapping health outcomes within time zones.”

Jasmine McNealy on “Framing and Language of Ethics: Technology, Persuasion, and Cultural Context.”

Interesting forthcoming book by Kevin Driscoll: The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media.

Great piece on Jacques Ellul by Samuel Matlack at The New Atlantis, “How Tech Despair Can Set You Free”: “But Ellul rejects it. He refuses to offer a prescription for social reform. He meticulously and often tediously presents a problem — but not a solution of the kind we expect. This is because he believed that the usual approach offers a false picture of human agency. It exaggerates our ability to plan and execute change to our fundamental social structures. It is utopian. To arrive at an honest view of human freedom, responsibility, and action, he believed, we must confront the fact that we are constrained in more ways than we like to think. Technique, says Ellul, is society’s tightest constraint on us, and we must feel the totality of its grip in order to find the freedom to act.”

Evan Selinger on “The Gospel of the Metaverse.”

Ryan Calo on “Modeling Through”: “The prospect that economic, physical, and even social forces could be modeled by machines confronts policymakers with a paradox. Society may expect policymakers to avail themselves of techniques already usefully deployed in other sectors, especially where statutes or executive orders require the agency to anticipate the impact of new rules on particular values. At the same time, “modeling through” holds novel perils that policymakers may be ill equipped to address. Concerns include privacy, brittleness, and automation bias, all of which law and technology scholars are keenly aware. They also include the extension and deepening of the quantifying turn in governance, a process that obscures normative judgments and recognizes only that which the machines can see. The water may be warm, but there are sharks in it.”

“Why Christopher Alexander Still Matters”: “The places we love, the places that are most successful and most alive, have a wholeness about them that is lacking in too many contemporary environments, Alexander observed. This problem stems, he thought, from a deep misconception of what design really is, and what planning is. It is not “creating from nothing”—or from our own mental abstractions—but rather, transforming existing wholes into new ones, and using our mental processes and our abstractions to guide this natural life-supporting process.”

An interview with philosopher Shannon Vallor: “Re-envisioning Ethics in the Information Age”: “Instead of using the machines to liberate and enlarge our own lives, we are increasingly being asked to twist, to transform, and to constrain ourselves in order to strengthen the reach and power of the machines that we increasingly use to deliver our public services, to make the large-scale decisions that are needed in the financial realm, in health care, or in transportation. We are building a society where the control surfaces are increasingly automated systems and then we are asking humans to restrict their thinking patterns and to reshape their thinking patterns in ways that are amenable to this system. So what I wanted to do was to really reclaim some of the literature that described that process in the 20th century—from folks like Jacques Ellul, for example, or Herbert Marcuse—and then really talk about how this is happening to us today in the era of artificial intelligence and what we can do about it.”

From Lance Strate in 2008: “Studying Media AS Media: McLuhan and the Media Ecology Approach.”

Japan’s museum of rocks that look like faces.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Katherine Dee for her podcast, which you can listen to here.

I’ll leave you with an arresting line from Simone Weil’s notebooks: “You could not have wished to be born at a better time than this, when everything is lost.”

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The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 5

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Listen now | The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 4

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The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 3

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The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 2

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Listen now | The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 1 (supplement)

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The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 1

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Welcome to a special installment of the Convivial Society featuring my conversation with Andrew McLuhan. I can’t recall how or when I first encountered the work of Marshall McLuhan, I think it might’ve been through the writing of one of his most notable students, Neil Postman. I do know, however, that McLuhan, and others like Postman and Walter Ong who built on his work, became a cornerstone of my own thinking about media and technology. So it was a great pleasure to speak with his grandson Andrew, who is now stewarding and expanding the work of his grandfather and his father, Eric McLuhan, through the McLuhan Institute, of which he is the founder and director.

I learned a lot about McLuhan through this conversation and I think you’ll find it worth your time. A variety of resources and sites were mentioned throughout the conversation, and I’ve tried to provide links to all of those below. Above all, make sure you check out the McLuhan Institute and consider supporting Andrew’s work through his Patreon page.

Links

McLuhan Institute’s Twitter account and Instagram account

Andrew McLuhan’s Twitter account

The image of McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter on the beach which Andrew mentions can be seen at the :30 mark of this YouTube video featuring audio of Carpenter describing his friendship with McLuhan

Eric McLuhan’s speech, “Media Ecology in the 21st Century,” on the McLuhan Institute’s YouTube page (the setting is a conference in Bogota, Columbia, so McLuhan is introduced in Spanish, but he delivers his talk in English)

Laws of Media: The New Science by Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan/Norman Mailer exchange

Marshall McLuhan/W.H. Auden/Buckminster Fuller exchange

Jeet Heer’s essay on McLuhan from 2011

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Critical Edition)

Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews

Marshall McLuhan Speaks

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As the year draws to a close, I wanted to note with gratitude that it has been a good year for the Convivial Society. There are three times as may of you signed up for the newsletter as there were this time last year. I owe much of that growth, of course, to my mid-summer appearance on the Ezra Klein Show, but I’m also grateful to all of you who’ve taken the time to recommend the Convivial Society to others. As far as I can tell, the majority of new subscribers ordinarily come from readers sharing the newsletter directly with others. So thank you. It’s continued to be a pleasure to write the newsletter, and I look forward to continuing to do so in the year ahead.

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Listen now | The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 21

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The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 20

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The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 19

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The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 18

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The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 17

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A week after the fact, here is the audio version of the last installment: “Notes from the Metaverse.” Ordinarily, the audio version accompanies the essay, but in this case you’re getting it a bit later. Nothing new in this version, so if you’ve already read the essay, feel free to disregard. But for those of you who do prefer listening, here you go, with my apologies for not getting this out sooner.

I will add in this short note that since I posted “Notes from the Metaverse” last week, Facebook and Ray-Ban announced the release of a set of smart-glasses. They don’t do much, at least they appear to have disappointed some. The camera might appear to be their main feature, but, in fact, I’d argue that their main feature is that they manage to look pretty normal and perhaps even stylish depending on your tastes. This, it seems to me, is the point at this juncture. Smart glasses, especially their camera, need to be normalized before they can become critical metaverse infrastructure. In that light, it’s worth noting, too, that the glasses bear absolutely no Facebook branding. We’ll see if they fare any better with the pubic than Google Glass did several years ago. Needless to say, much of the same criticism about the way that a camera enables surreptitious recording, thus more completely objectifying others as fodder for the digital spectacle, applies here as well.

Cheers,

Michael

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Hello all, I’m returning to the open discussion thread format, this time on the question of automation and outsourced judgment. All are welcome to comment. 

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On images, pseudo-events, and digital media.

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The dream of systems so perfect no one will need to be good remains explicitly compelling in many quarters. It is also tacitly embedded in the practices fostered by many of our devices, tools, and institutions. So it’s worth thinking about how this dream manifests itself today and why it can so easily take on a nightmarish quality. 

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Listen now | An installment titled “Ill With Want” went out a couple of days ago without the audio version. I know that many of you find the audio useful, so, now that I’ve been able to record it, I wanted to get that to you. 

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The story of a human retreat from this world, either to the stars above or the virtual realm within, can mask a disregard for or resignation about what is done with the world we do have, both in terms of the structures of human societies and the non-human world within which they are rooted.

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A set of 41 questions drafted with a view to helping us draw out the moral or ethical implications of our tools.

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Attending to the world is an embodied practice involving our senses, and how we experience our senses has a history. The upshot is that we might be able to meet the some of the challenges of the age by cultivating an askesis of perception. 

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My point turns out to be relatively straightforward: may be you and I don’t need more information. And, if we think that the key to navigating uncertainty and mitigating anxiety is simply more information, then we are probably going to make matters worse for ourselves. 

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Here is a proposition for you to consider: you and I have exactly as much attention as we need. In fact, I’d invite you to do more than consider it. Take it out for a spin in the world. See if proceeding on this assumption doesn’t change how you experience life, maybe not radically, but perhaps for the better.

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In this installment, I reflect on the challenge of speaking online in the absence of meaningful silences. The point is not, in this case, to complain about social media but rather to speak a good word for silence and its place in human communication. 

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Exploring the paradox of control, which is the subject of German sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s recent book, The Uncontrollability of the World. It’s a short book, coming in at just over 100 pages, but it develops what is, in my view, an essential insight into one of the key assumptions structuring modern society. 

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This installment is the latest in a series of conversations with colleagues and friends of Ivan Illich. For over thirty years, David Cayley worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, producing numerous interview and documentary programs, including two programs devoted to Illich’s work. 

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Just as for Peter Berger the sociological structures of modern society generated the heretical imperative, so, too, I would like to propose, the technological structures of digital media generate the hermeneutical imperative. 

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Starlink is a point of departure to consider the costs of the unrelenting drive toward artificial illumination, a technological development most of us now take for granted. 

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It’s hard to know where to begin, of course; the situation has many interlocking layers. The most notable and disturbing elements have been well covered, and we continue to learn more about the event each day. The picture, it seems, only grows darker. For my part, I’ve been especially interested in thinking through the role of digital media in these events and what it portends for the future. Here, then, are a few reflections for your consideration along those lines. 

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“Existence in a society that has become a system finds the senses useless precisely because of the very instruments designed for their extension. One is prevented from touching and embracing reality. Further, one is programmed for interactive communication, one's whole being is sucked into the system. It is this radical subversion of sensation that humiliates and then replaces perception.”

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“All technical progress exacts a price. We cannot believe that Technique brings us nothing; but we must not think that what it brings it brings free of charge.”— Jacques Ellul

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Reflections on Jane Jacobs, sidewalks, digital media, and our common civic life.

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Tending to our information ecosystem, if we attempt it at all, requires a striking degree of vigilance and discipline. There is no given balance between place and speed, no natural context of relative meaningfulness to regulate the pace and quality of information for us. It’s on us to do so, daily, often minute by minute. We exist in a state of continuous and conscious attention triage, which can be exhausting, disorienting, and demoralizing.

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I’ve been thinking about tables of late, literally and figuratively. Chiefly, what I’ve had in mind is the table as an emblem of hospitality, and, relatedly, as an example of the material infrastructure of our social lives or the stuff of life that sustains and mediates human relationships ... Thinking about the table has drawn me back to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, first published in 1958. 

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Listen now | Gov. Jerry Brown, a longtime friend of Ivan Illich's and student of his work sat down to talk to me about his friendship with Illich and the value of his work. 

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We have an opportunity to examine more carefully some of the assumptions that have informed the way we think about the nature of a good life. And I would suggest that we do well to start, as Simone Weil did, with a consideration of the full range of human needs, clarified by Ivan Illich’s searching critique of the needs engendered in us by industrial (and now digital) institutions, and oriented toward a more robust vision of a good society as Albert Borgmann urged us to imagine. 

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It was my pleasure back in June to enjoy a conversation with Carl Mitcham about the life and work of Ivan Illich. A couple of weeks ago, I had the similar pleasure of speaking with Gustavo Esteva, an activist and scholar who, despite having earlier rejected Illich as a “reactionary priest,” went on to become Illich’s close friend and collaborator in the early 1980s. Gustavo is also the founder of the Universidad del la Tierra in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico.

My thanks to Dana Stuchul and Madhu Suri Prakash for their encouragement and for introducing me to Gustavo. I’ve been deeply appreciative of the warm support I’ve received from those who knew Illich. I’ve experienced it as a genuine extension of the hospitality that was so central to Illich’s practice.

On a separate but related note, those of you who indicated an interest in a Zoom discussion of In the Vineyard of the Text will be seeing a note from me soon beginning the task of co-ordinating a time that works for everyone. Also, not too late if you wanted to jump in but hadn’t contacted me yet. Please feel free to do so in the next day or two.

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When a system becomes sufficiently complex, the human element more often than not becomes a problem to be solved. The solution is to either remove the human element or otherwise re-train the person to conform and recalibrate their behavior to the specifications of the machine.

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Over the past couple of months, believing that Ivan Illich’s thought indeed spoke with renewed urgency to our moment, I’ve revisited two of his earliest and best known books, Tools for Conviviality and Deschooling Society. Three key themes caught my attention this time around and I thought it might be useful to discuss them here, even if only briefly. 

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The Convivial Society: Vol. 1, No. 13: The advent of digital media has been to the culture wars what the advent of industrialized weaponry was to conventional warfare.

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The Convivial Society, Dispatch No. 9

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The Convivial Society: Dispatch, No. 8

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Does it feel to you as if you are free in the deployment of your attention throughout any given day? Allow me here to speak out of my own experience: I know that it often doesn’t feel that way to me.

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Hello everyone,

First off, that was a great first thread on Tools for Conviviality.

Secondly, for session two, we’ll have our synchronous discussion tomorrow night (Monday, June 29th) at 8 PM (EST). I’ll post another thread that should arrive in your inbox around 7:30 PM.

Thirdly, here is audio of a conversation I was honored to have with Carl Mitcham, a philosopher of technology and close associate of Ivan Illich’s going back to the 1970s. I should note that this is my first venture into podcast-like interview territory, which I readily admit is not exact something I’m naturally gifted for. That said, Carl relates some great anecdotes about Illich and sheds a little light on some questions that arose in the first thread (e.g., Illich was a bit naive and ill-informed in his praise of China in Tools). Carl closes with some reflections on his own experience teaching a semester a year in China.

Anyway, enjoy that. Also, I’m thinking of offering the main newsletter essay in this same audio format with accompanying text, of course. If you have any thoughts on that, let me know!

Looking forward to chatting with all who are able tomorrow evening,

Michael

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