Podcasts about convivial society

Send us a textMichael Sacasas writes about technology and human flourishing through his wildly popular newsletter The Convivial Society. I have been reading his work for a number of years and find it both winsome and wise. It was delight to have the opportunity to speak to him about a question he thinks we should be asking ourselves.In this conversation we explore the question of what humans should still do for themselves even when technology can do it better or more efficiently. This conversation challenges our assumptions about technological progress and asks us to consider what makes for a truly good human life.• Technology often promises efficiency but requires us to question what we might be losing in the process• Albert Borgman's concept of "focal things" versus "devices" helps us understand what's lost when we automate tasks• Central heating removed family participation and togetherness that came with maintaining a hearth• Writing by hand or thinking through drafts teaches us what we think in ways AI writing can't replace• Even mundane tasks like washing dishes can provide valuable moments for reflection and conversation• The Amish demonstrate thoughtful technology adoption by evaluating each innovation against community values• Getting outdoors, learning names of plants and animals, and cooking together builds connection with the world• Leading with positive practices rather than just limiting technology helps children understand family values• Face-to-face encounters and "weak ties" with neighbors become increasingly important in our mediated worldIf you've found this episode valuable, please subscribe to the podcast and newsletter,  to stay up to date with forthcoming episodes, and read regular reflections on these interviews.Support the show

This special episode features a discussion between Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and Michael Sacasas, author of The Convivial Society substack newsletter and Executive Director of the Christian Studies Center of Gainesville, Florida. In the first part, Sacasas gives a presentation - riffing on the title of Martin Heidegger's famous essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” - on the question of the human, which may be more interesting than endless debates about the definition of “technology.” Then Vinsel gives his own presentation before the pair discuss the similarities and differences of their views. The episode includes a live Q&A with audience members. This episode was recorded as a live event at the Bradley Study Center, a Christian studies center at Virginia Tech. Special thanks to Bradley Study Center for making the event possible, especially to its Executive Director Mike Weaver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

This special episode features a discussion between Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and Michael Sacasas, author of The Convivial Society substack newsletter and Executive Director of the Christian Studies Center of Gainesville, Florida. In the first part, Sacasas gives a presentation - riffing on the title of Martin Heidegger's famous essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” - on the question of the human, which may be more interesting than endless debates about the definition of “technology.” Then Vinsel gives his own presentation before the pair discuss the similarities and differences of their views. The episode includes a live Q&A with audience members. This episode was recorded as a live event at the Bradley Study Center, a Christian studies center at Virginia Tech. Special thanks to Bradley Study Center for making the event possible, especially to its Executive Director Mike Weaver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

This special episode features a discussion between Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and Michael Sacasas, author of The Convivial Society substack newsletter and Executive Director of the Christian Studies Center of Gainesville, Florida. In the first part, Sacasas gives a presentation - riffing on the title of Martin Heidegger's famous essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” - on the question of the human, which may be more interesting than endless debates about the definition of “technology.” Then Vinsel gives his own presentation before the pair discuss the similarities and differences of their views. The episode includes a live Q&A with audience members. This episode was recorded as a live event at the Bradley Study Center, a Christian studies center at Virginia Tech. Special thanks to Bradley Study Center for making the event possible, especially to its Executive Director Mike Weaver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Episode 135I spoke with L. M. Sacasas about:* His writing and intellectual influences* The value of asking hard questions about technology and our relationship to it* What happens when we decide to outsource skills and competency* Evolving notions of what it means to be human and questions about how to live a good lifeEnjoy—and let me know what you think!Michael is Executive Director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, Florida and author of The Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and society. He does some of the best writing on technology I've had the pleasure to read, and I highly recommend his newsletter.Find me on Twitter for updates on new episodes, and reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions. I spend a lot of time on this podcast—if you like my work, you can support me on Patreon :) You can also support upkeep for the full Gradient team/project through a paid subscription on Substack!Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast:  Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (01:12) On podcasts as a medium* (06:12) Michael's writing* (12:38) Michael's intellectual influences, contingency* (18:48) Moral seriousness* (22:00) Michael's ambitions for his work* (26:17) The value of asking the right questions (about technology)* (34:18) Technology use and the “natural” pace of human life* (46:40) Outsourcing of skills and competency, engagement with others* (55:33) Inevitability narratives and technological determinism, the “Borg Complex”* (1:05:10) Notions of what it is to be human, embodiment* (1:12:37) Higher cognition vs. the body, dichotomies* (1:22:10) The body as a starting point for philosophy, questions about the adoption of new technologies* (1:30:01) Enthusiasm about technology and the cultural milieu* (1:35:30) Projectivism, desire for knowledge about and control of the world* (1:41:22) Positive visions for the future* (1:47:11) OutroLinks:* Michael's Substack: The Convivial Society and his book, The Frailest Thing: Ten Years of Thinking about the Meaning of Technology* Michael's Twitter* Essays* Humanist Technology Criticism* What Does the Critic Love?* The Ambling Mind* Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend On It* The Work of Art* The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe

In 2022, an AI generated work of art won a US state art competition. The artist used Midjourney, one of the popular AI systems that also include Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. They are trained on the millions of images scattered through the internet, using a deep learning program called a ‘generative adversarial network', or GAN for short. It works by taking in text prompts, where you type in what you want the artwork to look like, and the AI then draws on the huge database of artworks, to generate a new work that conforms to the prompts. But to create a great AI work, it's not as simple as typing ‘create some great art'. The artist who won that competition put in lengthy complex prompts, working up hundreds of iterations before he arrived at the final work. So, is this really art? When we see an AI art creation, it genuinely feels ‘creative'. But is there something humans do when we create which is qualitatively different to AI? Like AI in every domain it has touched, AI art is challenging us to rethink our categories and even to ask us to question what it means to be human.Our guests for this conversation are both experts in the intersection between art and technology. Professor Ahmed Elgammal has actually constructed AI systems that have created artworks that are so good, a majority of people believe they are truly original human creations. Michael Sacasas,on the other hand, sees AI art as missing an essential ingredient, no matter how good its style is. It'll never convey the deep connection between artist and viewer that we all crave.GuestsAhmed ElgammalDr. Ahmed Elgammal is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and an Executive Council Faculty at the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He is the founder and director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers. He is also the founder and CEO of Playform AI, a platform that is dedicated to give artist access to the latest generative AI tech. In 2017, he developed AICAN, an autonomous AI artist and collaborative creative partner, which was acclaimed in an Artsy editorial as “the biggest artistic achievement of the year.” In 2021, he led the AI team that completed Beethoven's 10th symphony, which received worldwide media coverage. He received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park.Michael SacasasMichael writes The Convivial Society, a popular newsletter on technology, culture, and the moral life. Michael has written for The New Atlantis, Comment, Plough, The New Inquiry, Real Life Magazine, Mere Orthodoxy, The American, and Second Nature Journal. His work has also been featured in The Atlantic, Vox, and the New York Times. He is the Executive Director, Christian Study Centre in Florida, and earned his MA in Theological Studies from Reformed Theological Seminary in 2002. He was later a doctoral candidate at the University of Central Florida studying the relationship between technology and society with a focus on the work of Hannah Arendt. He is an Associate Fellow in Ethics and Culture at the Greystone Theological Institute.Your hosts are Lloyd Vogelman and Emile Sherman. Find Lloyd @LloydVogelman on Linked in Find Emile @EmileSherman on Linked In and Twitter. This Podcast is Produced by Jonah Primo and Bronwen Reid Find Jonah at jonahprimo.com or @JonahPrimo on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Most of us probably don't stop to reflect on our use of technology and how the devices and apps we use affect our lives and society as a whole. What is it doing to our brains and our souls that we reach for our smartphones mindlessly hundreds of times a day? What do we say on social media that I wouldn't say in real life, and how does our behavior online make the world better – or, more likely, worse? Today's guest, L.M. Sacasas, is an incredible thinker and writer who has devoted his career to asking big questions of our technology and what it's doing to our communal life and individual lives. Sacasas has a great Substack newsletter called “The Convivial Society” that is host Mike Jordan Laskey's favorite thing to read these days. Sacasas has this amazing ability to read and absorb scholars from the past like Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Hannah Arendt and the Jesuit literary theorist Walter Ong and apply their arguments to our very different media environment today. In this conversation, Sacasas shares his thoughts on AI chat-bots like ChatGPT and Microsoft's new Bing and Google Bard. He and Mike also talk about social media and smartphones and artificial light and time and what countercultural roles faith communities might play in offering venues for incarnational, authentic community. Subscribe to “The Convivial Society”: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/ Read L.M. Sacasas on Fr. Walter Ong, SJ: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-inescapable-town-square Listen to L.M. Sacasas' interview on the Ezra Klein Show: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-lm-sacasas.html AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. www.jesuits.org/ www.beajesuit.org/ twitter.com/jesuitnews facebook.com/Jesuits instagram.com/wearethejesuits youtube.com/societyofjesus

A philosopher reflects on human uniqueness. Peter and Susannah speak with L. M. Sacasas, the philosopher behind The Convivial Society newsletter, about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and what it means to be human. What are the new ChatGPT large language models? Is this AI? What's the relationship between the philosophical questions regarding AI and other philosophical questions about whether human consciousness requires the immateriality of the intellect? What are the dangers of AI? Leaving aside the question of physical danger to humans, what will the increasing ubiquity of AIs do to human civilization and self-conception? Finally, what's the relationship between AIs and the human tendency towards idolatry?

In Episode 306 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Michael Sacasas. Michael is the executive director of the Christian Study Center in Gainesville Florida and the author of The Convivial Society, a widely read newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. Demetri and Michael discuss how we are engineering society and the human experience in ways that could have irreversible effects on humanity's future. Many of you may be wondering if this conversation is about A.I. Not necessarily. Advancements in artificial intelligence may very well prove to be the catalysts, but if so then A.I. is just the apotheosis of trends that have been in place for decades if not longer, and which are changing the nature of our lives, our societies, and our politics in ways that are not necessarily desirable. Some of these trends threaten the values and traditions that we associate most strongly with human civilization and the flourishing of the natural world. And many of us feel the urge to “do something” to alter our trajectory, but what is to be done? Besides understanding the nature of these trends and the technological and social structures bringing them about what can we do to effectuate positive change and on what scale we can hope to make a difference? This is the central focus of today's conversation. You can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports (or Key Takeaways) at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you. If you enjoyed listening to today's episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 04/03/2023

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 PostsHere 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 AppearancesI'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 attentionWith Charlie Warzel on how being online traps us in the pastWith Georgie Powell on reframing our experience Year's EndIt 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 PompeiiThe 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 Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

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

Sean Illing talks with Michael Sacasas, an author and teacher exploring the relationship between technology and society in his newsletter, The Convivial Society. This conversation is all about attention: what it exactly is, what its purpose is, and how it is under threat by the technology of modern society and its ubiquitous distractions. Michael calls upon venerated philosophers (like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch) as well as contemporary writers (like Nicholas Carr and Jenny Odell) to make the case that figuring out how to command our attention is a matter of great moral significance, and is a crucial component of living a good life. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area Guest: L. Michael Sacasas (@LMSacasas), author of the newsletter The Convivial Society on Substack; associate director, Christian Study Center of Gainesville References:  The Frailest Thing: Ten Years of Thinking About the Meaning of Technology by L.M. Sacasas (Gumroad; 2019) "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut (1961) "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr (The Atlantic; July/August 2008) Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan (1964) Blaise Pascal on Diversion, from the Pensées (1670) "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God" by Simone Weil (1942) "The idea of perfection" by Iris Murdoch (1964) "Against Dryness" by Iris Murdoch (1961) Simone Weil, letter to Joë Bousquet, Apr. 13, 1942: "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." "On Two Ways of Relating to the World" by L.M. Sacasas (The Convivial Society, Nov. 22) How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell (Melville House; 2019)   Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear the next episode of The Gray Area. Subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Support The Gray Area by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts This episode was made by:  Producer: Erikk Geannikis Editor: Amy Drozdowska Engineer: Patrick Boyd Senior Producer: Katelyn Bogucki Editorial Director, Vox Talk: A.M. Hall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ashley sits down with Michael Sacasas to discuss institutions, technology, conviviality, education and sitting around a table for a nice meal! Michael (LM) Sacasas @lmsacasas Writes a newsletter, The Convivial Society, where he thinks about technology and culture. http://theconvivialsociety.substack.com His book: http://gum.co/CWRfq his website: https://thefrailestthing.com/ Ashley Colby is an Environmental Sociologist who studied at Washington State University, the department that founded the subdiscipline. She's interested in and passionate about the myriad creative ways in which people are forming new social worlds in resistance to collapse. She's the founder of Rizoma Field School in Colonia Uruguay.

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 LifeI 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.” LinksThe 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.MiscellanyAs 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 Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

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

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

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

On this episode, Kris and I recap the strange incident of the "lost" episode. Last week, we had a real banger recorded...but something had other plans. We go on to discuss this essay by The Convivial Society, "We are Not Living in a Simulation, We are Living in the Past." Is it accurate to say that the transparent, false nature of the internet is a function of it being a large archive? Can you be in the present while constantly reinterpreting the past? What does that even look like? I am tasked with inventing a new holiday, and Kris recounts a dream about lies.

This week we welcome Michael Sacasas, author of The Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and society. Michael is the associate director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville and has written for The New Atlantis, The New Inquiry, Comment Magazine, and Real Life Magazine. He is also the author of a forthcoming book 41 Questions: Technology and the Moral Life (Avid Reader Press). In this thought provoking episode we invite all our listeners to reconsider the place of technology in their own lives. We discuss: the role of technology in our lives and how the way that we use tools shapes our experience of the world, and by extension our existence attention, it's importance and its various forms why Twitter for Michael is a deal with the devil how, even out of the Metaverse, technology reframes our reality the three most important questions everyone should ask of the way that they use technology If you enjoyed our previous conversations with Oliver Burkeman, Nicholas Carr and Krista Tippett, then this episode is for you. This episode is part of our series on "Self", where we explore how our technology impacts some of the most important aspects of being human. Recent episodes include Krista Tippett, creator on On Being, Susie Alegre, human rights lawyer and author of 'Freedom to Think' and upcoming episdoes include Jillian Horton MD, and author of 'We are All Perfectly Fine', Casey Swartz, author of "Attention, A Love Story" and Sharath Jeevan OBE, motivation expert and author of "Intrinsic". Our goal: to help all our listeners to think more critically about the role of technology in our lives, and how it shapes who we are. More from Michael: The Convivial Society https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/ Host and Producer: Georgie Powell https://www.sentientdigitalconsulting.com/ Music and audio production: Toccare https://spoti.fi/3bN4eqO

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter exploring the relationship between technology and culture. This is what counts as a relatively short post around here, 1800 words or so, about a certain habit of mind that online spaces seem to foster. Almost one year ago, this exchange on Twitter caught my attention, enough so that I took a moment to capture it with a screen shot, thinking I’d go on to write about it at some point. Set aside for a moment whatever your particular thoughts might be on the public debate, if we can call it that, over vaccines, vaccine messaging, vaccine mandates, etc. Instead, consider the form of the claim, specifically the “anti-anti-” framing. I think I first noticed this peculiar way of talking about (or around) an issue circa 2016. In 2020, contemplating the same dynamics, I observed that “social media, perhaps Twitter especially, accelerates both the rate at which we consume information and the rate at which ensuing discussion detaches from the issue at hand, turning into meta-debates about how we respond to the responses of others, etc.” So by the time the Nyhan quote-tweeted Rosen last summer, the “anti-anti-” framing, to my mind, had already entered its mannerist phase. The use of “anti-anti-ad infinitum” is easy to spot, and I’m sure you’ve seen the phrasing deployed on numerous occasions. But the overt use of the “anti-anti-” formulation is just the most obvious manifestation of a more common style of thought, one that I’ve come to refer to as meta-positioning. In the meta-positioning frame of mind, thinking and judgment are displaced by a complex, ever-shifting, and often fraught triangulation based on who holds certain views and how one might be perceived for advocating or failing to advocate for certain views. In one sense, this is not a terribly complex or particularly novel dynamic. Our pursuit of understanding is often an uneasy admixture of the desire to know and the desire to be known as one who knows by those we admire. Unfortunately, social media probably tips the scale in favor of the desire for approval given its rapid fire feedback mechanisms. Earlier this month, Kevin Baker commented on this same tendency in a recent thread that opened with the following observation, “A lot of irritating, mostly vapid people and ideas were able to build huge followings in 2010s because the people criticizing them were even worse.” Baker goes on to call this “the decade of being anti-anti-” and explains that he felt like he spent “the better part of the decade being enrolled into political and discursive projects that I had serious reservations about because I disagreed [with] their critics more and because I found their behavior reprehensible.” In his view, this is a symptom of the unchecked expansion of the culture wars. Baker again: “This isn't censorship. There weren't really censors. It's more a structural consequence of what happens when an issue gets metabolized by the culture war. There are only two sides and you just have to pick the least bad one.” I’m sympathetic to this view, and would only add that perhaps it is more specifically a symptom of what happens when the digitized culture wars colonize ever greater swaths of our experience. I argued a couple of years ago that just as industrialization gave us industrial warfare, so digitization has given us digitized culture warfare. My argument was pretty straightforward: “Digital media has dramatically enhanced the speed, scale, and power of the tools by which the culture wars are waged and thus transformed their norms, tactics, strategies, psychology, and consequences.” Take a look at the piece if you missed it. I’d say, too, that the meta-positioning habit of mind might also be explained as a consequence of the digitally re-enchanted discursive field. I won’t bog down this post, which I’m hoping to keep relatively brief, with the details of that argument, but here’s the most relevant bit:For my purposes, I’m especially interested in the way that philosopher Charles Taylor incorporates disenchantment theory into his account of modern selfhood. The enchanted world, in Taylor’s view, yielded the experience of a porous, and thus vulnerable self. The disenchanted world yielded an experience of a buffered self, which was sealed off, as the term implies, from beneficent and malignant forces beyond its ken. The porous self depended upon the liturgical and ritual health of the social body for protection against such forces. Heresy was not merely an intellectual problem, but a ritual problem that compromised what we might think of, in these times, as herd immunity to magical and spiritual forces by introducing a dangerous contagion into the social body. The answer to this was not simply reasoned debate but expulsion or perhaps a fiery purgation.Under digitally re-enchanted conditions, policing the bounds of the community appears to overshadow the value of ostensibly objective, civil discourse. In other words, meta-positioning, from this perspective, might just a matter of making sure you are always playing for the right team, or at least not perceived to be playing for the wrong one. It’s not so much that we have something to say but that we have a social space we want to be seen to occupy. But as I thought about the meta-positioning habit of mind recently, another related set of considerations came to mind, one that is also connected to the digital media ecosystem. As a point of departure, I’d invite you to consider a recent post from Venkatesh Rao about “crisis mindsets.” “As the world has gotten more crisis prone at all levels from personal to geopolitical in the last few years,” Rao explained, “the importance of consciously cultivating a more effective crisis mindset has been increasingly sinking in for me.” I commend the whole post to you, it offers a series of wise and humane observations about how we navigate crisis situations. Rao’s essay crossed my feed while I was drafting this post about meta-positioning, and these lines near the end of the essay caught my attention: “We seem to be entering a historical period where crisis circumstances are more common than normalcy. This means crisis mindsets will increasingly be the default, not flourishing mindsets.”I think this is right, but it also has a curious relationship to the digital media ecosystem. I can imagine someone arguing that genuine crisis circumstances are no more common now than they have ever been but that digital media feeds heighten our awareness of all that is broken in the world and also inaccurately create a sense of ambient crisis. This argument is not altogether wrong. In the digital media ecosystem, we are enveloped by an unprecedented field of near-constant information emanating from the world far and near, and the dynamics of the attention economy also encourage the generation of ambient crisis. But two things can both be true at the same time. It is true, I think, that we are living through a period during which crisis circumstances have become more frequent. This is, in part, because the structures, both social and technological, of the modern world do appear increasingly fragile if not wholly decrepit. It is also true that our media ecosystem heightens our awareness of these crisis circumstances (generating, in turn, a further crisis of the psyche) and that it also generates a field of faux crisis circumstances. Consequently, learning to distinguish between a genuine crisis and a faux crisis will certainly be an essential skill. I would add that it is also critical to distinguish among the array of genuine crisis circumstances that we encounter. Clearly, some will bear directly and unambiguously upon us—a health crisis, say, or a weather emergency. Others will bear on us less directly or acutely, and others still will not bear on us at all. Furthermore, there are those we will be able to address meaningfully through our actions and those we cannot. We should, therefore, learn to apportion our attention and our labors wisely and judiciously. But let’s come back to the habit of mind with which we began. If we are, in fact, inhabiting a media ecosystem that, through sheer scale and ubiquity, heightens our awareness of all that is wrong with the world and overwhelms pre-digital habits of sense-making and crisis-management, then meta-positioning might be more charitably framed as a survival mechanism. As Rao noted, “I have realized there is no such thing as being individually good or bad in a crisis. Humans either deal with crises in effective groups, or not at all.” Just as digital re-enchantment retrieves the communal instinct, so too, perhaps, does the perma-crisis mindset. Recalling, Baker’s analysis, we might even say that the digitized culture war layered over the crisis circumstances intensifies the stigma of breaking ranks. There’s one last perspective I’d like to offer on the meta-positioning habit of mind. It also seems to suggest something like a lack of grounding or a certain aimlessness. There is a picture that is informing my thinking here. It is the picture of being adrift in the middle of the ocean with no way to get our bearings. Under these circumstances the best we can ever do is navigate away from some imminent danger, but we can never purposefully aim at a destination. So we find ourselves adrift in the vast digital ocean, and we have no idea what we are doing there or what we should be doing. All we know is that we are caught up in wave after wave of the discourse and the best we can do is to make sure we steer clear of obvious perils and keep our seat on whatever raft we find ourselves in, which may be in shambles but, nonetheless, affords us the best chance of staying afloat. So, maybe the meta-positioning habit of mind is what happens when I have clearer sense of what I am against than what I am for. Or maybe it is better to say that meta-positioning is what happens when we lack meaningful degrees of agency and are instead offered the simulacra of action in digitally mediated spheres, which generally means saying things about things and about the things other people are saying about the things—the “internet of beefs,” as Rao memorably called it. The best we can do is survive the beefs by making sure we’re properly aligned. To give it yet another turn, perhaps the digital sea through which we navigate takes the form of a whirlpool sucking us into the present. The whirlpool is a temporal maelstrom, keeping us focused on immediate circumstances, unable to distinguish, without sufficient perspective, between the genuine and the faux crisis. Under such circumstances, we lack what Alan Jacobs, borrowing the phrase from novelist Thomas Pynchon, has called “temporal bandwidth.” In Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), a character explains the concept: “temporal bandwidth is the width of your present, your now … The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.” Paradoxically, then, the more focused we are on the present, the less of a grip we’re able to get on it. As Jacobs notes, the same character went on to say, “It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago.” Indeed, so. Jacobs recommends extending our temporal bandwidth through a deliberate engagement with the past through our reading as well as a deliberate effort to bring the more distant future into our reckoning. As the philosopher Hans Jonas, whom Jacobs cites, encouraged us to ask, “What force shall represent the future in the present?” The point is that we must make an effort to wrest our gaze away from the temporal maelstrom, and to do so not only in the moment but as a matter of sustained counter-practice. Perhaps then we’ll be better equipped to avoid the meta-positioning habit of mind, which undoubtedly constrains our ability to think clearly, and to find better ways of navigating the choppy, uncertain waters before us. Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. I tend to think of my writing as way of clarify my thinking, or, alternatively, of thinking out loud. Often I’m just asking myself, What is going on? That’s the case in this post. There was a techno-cultural pattern I wanted to capture in what follows, but I’m not sure that I’ve done it well enough. So, I’ll submit this for your consideration and critique. You can tell me, if you’re so inclined, whether there’s at least the grain of something helpful here or not. Also, you’ll note that my voice suggests a lingering cold that’s done a bit of a number on me over the past few days, but I hope this is offset by the fact that I’ve finally upgraded my mic and, hopefully, improved the sound quality. Cheers!If asked to define modernity or give its distinctive characteristics, what comes to mind? Maybe the first thing that comes to mind is that such a task is a fool’s errand, and you wouldn’t be wrong. There’s a mountain of books addressing the question, What is or was modernity? And another not insignificant hill of books arguing that, actually, there is or was no such thing, or at least not in the way it has been traditionally understood. Acknowledging as much, perhaps we’d still offer some suggestions. Maybe we’d mention a set of institutions or practices such as representative government or democratic liberalism, scientific inquiry or the authority of reason, the modern university or the free press. Perhaps a set of values comes to mind: individualism, free speech, rule of law, or religious freedom. Or perhaps some more abstract principles, such as instrumental rationality or belief in progress and the superiority of the present over the past. And surely some reference to secularization, markets, and technology would also be made, not to mention colonization and economic exploitation. I won’t attempt to adjudicate those claims or rank them. Also, you’ll have to forgive me if I failed to include you preferred account of modernity; they are many. But I will venture my own tentative and partial theory of the case with a view to possibly illuminating elements of the present state affairs. I’ve been particularly struck of late by the degree to which what I’ll call the myth of the machine became an essential element of the modern or, maybe better, the late modern world. Two clarifications before we proceed. First, I was initially calling this the “myth of neutrality” because I was trying to get at the importance of something like neutral or disinterested or value-free automaticity in various cultural settings. I wasn’t quite happy with neutrality as a way of capturing this pattern, though, and I’ve settled on the myth of the machine because it captures what may be the underlying template that manifests differently across various social spheres. And part of my argument will be that this template takes the automatic, ostensibly value-free operation of a machine as its model. Second, I use the term myth not to suggest something false or duplicitous, but rather to get at the normative and generative power of this template across the social order. That said, let’s move on, starting with some examples of how I see this myth manifesting itself. Objectivity, Impartiality, NeutralityThe myth of the machine underlies a set of three related and interlocking presumptions which characterized modernity: objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality. More specifically, the presumptions that we could have objectively secured knowledge, impartial political and legal institutions, and technologies that were essentially neutral tools but which were ordinarily beneficent. The last of these appears to stand somewhat apart from the first two in that it refers to material culture rather than to what might be taken as more abstract intellectual or moral stances. In truth, however, they are closely related. The more abstract intellectual and institutional pursuits were always sustained by a material infrastructure, and, more importantly, the machine supplied a master template for the organization of human affairs. There are any number of caveats to be made here. This post obviously paints with very broad strokes and deals in generalizations which may not prove useful or hold up under closer scrutiny. Also, I would stress that I take these three manifestations of the myth of the machine to be presumptions, by which I mean that this objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality were never genuinely achieved. The historical reality was always more complicated and, at points, tragic. I suppose the question is whether or not these ideals appeared plausible and desirable to a critical mass of the population, so that they could compel assent and supply some measure of societal cohesion. Additionally, it is obviously true that there were competing metaphors and models on offer, as well as critics of the machine, specifically the industrial machine. The emergence of large industrial technologies certainly strained the social capital of the myth. Furthermore, it is true that by the mid-20th century, a new kind of machine—the cybernetic machine, if you like, or system—comes into the picture. Part of my argument will be that digital technologies seemingly break the myth of the machine, yet not until fairly recently. But the cybernetic machine was still a machine, and it could continue to serve as an exemplar of the underlying pattern: automatic, value-free, self-regulating operation. Now, let me suggest a historical sequence that’s worth noting, although this may be an artifact of my own limited knowledge. The sequence, as I see it, begins in the 17th century with the quest for objectively secured knowledge animating modern philosophy as well as the developments we often gloss as the scientific revolution. Hannah Arendt characterized this quest as the search for an Archimedean point from which to understand the world, an abstract universal position rather than a situated human position. Later in the 18th century, we encounter the emergence of political liberalism, which is to say the pursuit of impartial political and legal institutions or, to put it otherwise, “a ‘machine’ for the adjudication of political differences and conflicts, independently of any faith, creed, or otherwise substantive account of the human good.” Finally, in the 19th century, the hopes associated with these pursuits became explicitly entangled with the development of technology, which was presumed to be a neutral tool easily directed toward the common good. I’m thinking, for example, of the late Leo Marx’s argument about the evolving relationship between progress and technology through the 19th century. “The simple republican formula for generating progress by directing improved technical means to societal ends,” Marx argued, “was imperceptibly transformed into a quite different technocratic commitment to improving ‘technology’ as the basis and the measure of — as all but constituting — the progress of society.”I wrote “explicitly entangled” above because, as I suggested at the outset, I think the entanglement was always implicit. This entanglement is evident in the power of the machine metaphor. The machine becomes the template for a mechanistic view of nature and the human being with attendant developments in a variety of spheres: deism in religion, for example, and the theory of the invisible hand in economics. In both cases, the master metaphor is that of self-regulating machinery. Furthermore, contrasted to the human, the machine appears dispassionate, rational, consistent, efficient, etc. The human was subject to the passions, base motives, errors of judgement, bias, superstition, provincialism, and the like. The more machine-like a person became, the more likely they were to secure objectivity and impartiality. The presumed neutrality of what we today call technology was a material model of these intellectual and moral aspirations. The trajectory of these assumptions leads to technocracy. The technocratic spirit triumphed through at least the mid-twentieth century, and it has remained a powerful force in western culture. I’m tempted to argue, however, that, in the United States at least, the Obama years may come to be seen as its last confident flourish. In any case, the machine supplied a powerful metaphor that worked its way throughout western culture. Another way to frame all of this, of course, is by reference to Jacques Ellul’s preoccupation with what he termed la technique, the imperative to optimize all areas of human experience for efficiency, which he saw as the defining characteristic of modern society. Technique manifests itself in a variety of ways, but one key symptom is the displacement of ends by a fixation on means, so much so that means themselves become ends. The smooth and efficient operation of the system becomes more important than reckoning with which substantive goods should be pursued. Why something ought to be done comes to matter less than that it can be done and faster. The focus drifts toward a consideration of methods, procedures, techniques, and tools and away from a discussion of the goals that ought to be pursued. The Myth of the Machine Breaks DownLet’s revisit the progression I described earlier to see how the myth of the machine begins to break down, and why this is may illuminate the strangeness of our moment. Just as the modern story began with the quest for objectively secured knowledge, this ideal may have been the first to lose its implicit plausibility. Since the late 19th century onward, philosophers, physicists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and historians have, among others, proposed a more complex picture that emphasized the subjective, limited, contingent, situated, and even irrational dimensions of how humans come to know the world. The ideal of objectively secured knowledge became increasingly questionable throughout the 20th century. Some of these trends get folded under the label “postmodernism,” but I found the term unhelpful at best a decade ago—now find it altogether useless. We can similarly trace a growing disillusionment with the ostensible impartiality of modern institutions. This takes at least two forms. On the one hand, we might consider the frustrating and demoralizing character of modern bureaucracies, which we can describe as rule-based machines designed to outsource judgement and enhance efficiency. On the other, we can note the heightened awareness of the actual failures of modern institutions to live up to the ideals of impartiality, which has been, in part, a function of the digital information ecosystem. But while faith in the possibility of objectively secured knowledge and impartial institutions faltered, the myth of the machine persisted in the presumption that technology itself was fundamentally neutral. Until very recently, that is. Or so it seems. And my thesis (always for disputation) is that the collapse of this last manifestation of the myth brings the whole house down. This in part because of how much work the presumption of technological neutrality was doing all along to hold American society together. (International readers: as always read with a view to your own setting. I suspect there are some areas of broad overlap and other instances when my analysis won’t travel well). Already by the late 19th century, progress had become synonymous with technological advancements, as Leo Marx argued. If social, political, or moral progress stalled, then at least the advance of technology could be counted on. The story historian David Nye tells in American Technological Sublime is also instructive here. Nye convincingly argued that technology became an essential element of America’s civil religion (that’s my characterization) functionally serving through its promise and ritual civic commemoration as a source of cultural vitality and cohesion. It’s hard to imagine this today, but Nye documents how through the 19th and early to mid-20th century, new technologies of significant scale and power were greeted with what can only be described as religious reverence and their appearance heralded in civic ceremonies. But over the last several years, the plausibility of this last and also archetypal manifestation of the myth of the machine has also waned. Not altogether, to be sure, but in important and influential segments of society and throughout a wide cross-section of society, too. One can perhaps see the shift most clearly in the public discourse about social media and smart phones, but this may be a symptom of a larger disillusionment with technology. And not only technological artifacts and systems, but also with the technocratic ethos and the public role of expertise. After the Myth of the MachineIf the myth of the machine in these three manifestations, was, in fact, a critical element of the culture of modernity, underpinning its aspirations, then when each in turn becomes increasingly implausible the modern world order comes apart. I’d say that this is more or less where we’re at. You could usefully analyze any number of cultural fault lines through this lens. The center, which may not in fact hold, is where you find those who still operate as if the presumptions of objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality still compelled broad cultural assent, and they are now assailed from both the left and the right by those who have grown suspicious or altogether scornful of such presumptions. Indeed, the left/right distinction may be less helpful than the distinction between those who uphold some combination of the values of objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality and those who no longer find them compelling or desirable.At present, contemporary technologies are playing a dual role in these developments. On the one hand, I would argue that the way the technologies classified, accurately or not, as A.I. are framed suggests an effort to save the appearances of modernity, which is to say to aim at the same ideals of objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality while acknowledging that human institutions failed to consistently achieve them. Strikingly, they also retrieve the most pernicious fixations of modern science, such as phrenology. The implicit idea is that rather than make human judgement, for example, more machine-like, we simply hand judgment over to the machines altogether. Maybe the algorithm can be thoroughly objective even though the human being cannot. Or we might characterize it as a different approach to the problem of situated knowledge. It seeks to solve the problem by scale rather than detachment, abstraction, or perspective. The accumulation of massive amounts of data about the world can yield new insights and correlations which, while not subject to human understanding, will nonetheless prove useful. Notice how in these cases, the neutrality of the technology involved is taken for granted. When it becomes clear, however, that the relevant technologies are not and cannot, in fact, be neutral in this way, then this last ditch effort to double down on the old modern ideals stalls out. It is also the case that digital media has played a key role in weakening the plausibility of claims to objectively secured knowledge and impartial institutions. The deluge of information through which we all slog everyday is not hospitable to the ideals of objectivity and impartiality, which to some degree were artifacts of print and mass media ecosystems. The present condition of information super-abundance and troves of easily searchable memory databases makes it trivially easy to either expose actual instances of bias, self-interest, inconsistency, and outright hypocrisy or to generate (unwittingly for yourself or intentionally for others) the appearance of such. In the age of the Database, no one controls the Narrative. And while narratives proliferate and consolidate along a predictable array of partisan and factional lines, the notion that the competing claims could be adjudicated objectively or impartially is defeated by exhaustion.The dark side of this thesis involves the realization that the ideals of objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality, animated by the myth of the machine, were strategies to diffuse violent and perpetual conflict over competing visions of the true, the good, and the just during the early modern period in Europe. I’ve been influenced in this line of thought by the late Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Toulmin argued that modernity experienced a false start in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, one characterized by a more playful, modest, and humane spirit, which was overwhelmed by the more domineering spirit of the seventeenth century and the emergence of the modern order in the work of Descartes, Newton, and company, a spirit that was, in fairness, animated by a desperate desire to quell the violence that engulfed post-Reformation Europe. As I summarized Toulmin’s argument in 2019, the quest for certainty “took objectivity, abstraction, and neutrality as methodological pre-conditions for both the progress of science and politics, that is for re-emergence of public knowledge. The right method, the proper degree of alienation from the particulars of our situation, translations of observable phenomena into the realm mathematical abstraction—these would lead us away from the uncertainty and often violent contentiousness that characterized the dissolution of the premodern world picture. The idea was to reconstitute the conditions for the emergence of public truth and, hence, public order.”In that same essay three years ago, I wrote, “The general progression has been to increasingly turn to technologies in order to better achieve the conditions under which we came to believe public knowledge could exist [i.e., objectivity, disinterestedness, impartiality, etc]. Our crisis stems from the growing realization that our technologies themselves are not neutral or objective arbiters of public knowledge and, what’s more, that they may now actually be used to undermine the possibility of public knowledge.” Is it fair to say that these lines have aged well? Of course, the reason I characterize this as the dark side of the argument is that it raises the following question: What happens when the systems and strategies deployed to channel often violent clashes within a population deeply, possibly intractably divided about substantive moral goods and now even about what Arendt characterized as the publicly accessible facts upon which competing opinions could be grounded—what happens when these systems and strategies fail? It is possible to argue that they failed long ago, but the failure was veiled by an unevenly distributed wave of material abundance. Citizens became consumers and, by and large, made peace with the exchange. After all, if the machinery of government could run of its own accord, what was their left to do but enjoy the fruits of prosperity. But what if abundance was an unsustainable solution, either because it taxed the earth at too high a rate or because it was purchased at the cost of other values such as rootedness, meaningful work and involvement in civic life, abiding friendships, personal autonomy, and participation in rich communities of mutual care and support? Perhaps in the framing of that question, I’ve tipped my hand about what might be the path forward. At the heart of technological modernity there was the desire—sometimes veiled, often explicit—to overcome the human condition. The myth of the machine concealed an anti-human logic: if the problem is the failure of the human to conform to the pattern of the machine, then bend the human to the shape of the machine or eliminate the human altogether. The slogan of the one of the high-modernist world’s fairs of the 1930s comes to mind: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.” What is now being discovered in some quarters, however, is that the human is never quite eliminated, only diminished. Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

Michael Sacasas is the associate director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville and the author of The Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, society, and the moral life. He is also an Associate Fellow in Ethics and Culture at the Greystone Theological Institute and, for three years, directed Greystone's Center for the Study of Ethics and Technology. Michael has written for The New Atlantis, The New Inquiry, Comment Magazine, Real Life Magazine, and Mere Orthodoxy. The Convivial Society: theconvivialsociety.substack.comEssay: Children and Technology: theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/children-and-technology?s=r#detailstwitter: @LMSacasas christianstudycenter.org

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

Listen now | The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 4 Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

Christopher Hobson speaks with L.M. Sacasas, who has become a leading voice in examining the ethical, social and cultural consequences of technologies. His prior blog, The Frailest Thing, and current Substack newsletter, The Convivial Society, offer a wealth of insight, encouraging a greater awareness of the ways that technologies shape the conditions within which we live and act. In this rich and broad ranging conversation, Hobson and Sacasas reflect on the challenges of pursuing the good life in a world increasingly dominated by digital technologies, the importance of thinking and judgement, and explore powerful points of overlap and contrast between different traditions and cultures.  For more information, visit imperfectnotes.substack.com and christopherhobson.net. This episode has been produced with support from a grant by the Toshiba International Foundation.

The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 2 Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

What does it mean to create convivial organisations and platforms? Today we explore the relationship between technology and society with L. M. Sacasas – and what we can learn from the philosopher Ivan Illich (1926-2002).  L. M. Sacasas is the associate director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, Florida and author of The Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and society. Michael has written for The New Atlantis, The New Inquiry, Real Life Magazine, Mere Orthodoxy, Rhizomes, The American, and Second Nature Journal.    Ivan Illich was a philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and critic of the institutions of modern Western culture, who addressed contemporary practices in education, medicine, work, energy use, transportation, and economic development.    In this episode, we explore what we mean by conviviality, having tools to empower – not de-skill – humans, the necessity of limits, re-envisioning the good life, and how Ivan Illich has such a big global following in today's society.      A full transcript of the episode can be found on our website: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/l-m-sacasas/   Key highlights we discussed: > The meaning of conviviality and the influence of Ivan Illich on L. M. Sacasas' work > The accuracy of Ivan Illich's predictions on mental health, education and work > Examples of convivial tools  > Identifying how to measure progress and where to aim better > Why the real world needs to embrace virtual reality      To find out more about Michael's work:   > Twitter: https://twitter.com/LMSacasas   >  The Convivial Society newsletter: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/      Other references and mentions:   > The Abolition of Institutions: On Ivan Illich with LM Sacasas and Nina Power: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast-episode/podcast//id1195362330?i=1000528978020 > Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 1973: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1842300113 > Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1971: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society > Thinking After Ivan Illich: https://thinkingafterivanillich.net/ > David Chalmers, Reality+, 2022: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393635805 > PD Smith, Reality+ by David J Chalmers review – are we living in a simulation?, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/19/reality-by-david-j-chalmers-review-are-we-living-in-a-simulation > Boundaryless Whitepaper, New Foundations of Platform-Ecosystem Thinking — Designing Products and Organizations for a changing world, 2020: https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/DOWNLOAD-NF Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/   Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://boundaryless.io/podcast-music   Recorded on 20 January 2022.

Listen now | The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 1 (supplement) Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

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. LinksMcLuhan Institute’s Twitter account and Instagram accountAndrew McLuhan’s Twitter accountThe 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 McLuhanEric 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 McLuhanMarshall McLuhan/Norman Mailer exchangeMarshall McLuhan/W.H. Auden/Buckminster Fuller exchangeJeet Heer’s essay on McLuhan from 2011Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Critical Edition)Understanding Me: Lectures and InterviewsMarshall McLuhan Speaks Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now | The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 21 Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 18 Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 17 Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

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

On images, pseudo-events, and digital media. Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

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

We all know by now that Zoom causes fatigue, social media spreads misinformation and Google Maps is wiping out our sense of direction. We also know, of course, that Zoom allows us to cooperate across continents, that social media connects us to our families and Google Maps keeps us from being lost. A lot of technological criticism today is about weighing whether a technology is good or bad, or judging its various uses. But there's an older tradition of criticism that asks a more fundamental and nuanced question: How do these technologies change the people who use them, both for good and for bad? And what do the people who use them — all of us, in other words — actually want? Do we even know?L.M. Sacasas explores these questions in his great newsletter, “The Convivial Society.” His work is marrying the theorists of the 20th century — Hannah Arendt, C.S. Lewis, Ivan Illich, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman and more — to the technologies of the present day. I've found this merging of past thinkers and contemporary concerns revelatory in an era when we tend to take the shape of our world for granted and forget how it would look to those who stood outside it, or how it looked to those who were there at the inception of these tools and mediums.Sacasas recently published a list of 41 questions we should ask of the technologies and tools that shape our lives. What I loved about these questions is how they invite us to think not just about technologies, but about ourselves, and how we act and what we want and what, in the end, we truly value. So I asked him on the show to talk through some of them, and to see what light they shed on the lives we live.Mentioned: "The Questions Concerning Technology" by L. M. Sacasas"A Theory of Zoom Fatigue" by L. M. Sacasas"Do Artifacts Have Ethics?" by L. M. SacasasTechnics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford"Before We Make Out, Wanna Dismantle Capitalism?" by Emilia Petrarca"The Analog City and the Digital City" by L. M. Sacasas"The Materiality of Digital Culture" by L. M. Sacasas"When Silence Is Power" by L. M. SacasasBook recommendations: Tools for Conviviality by Ivan IllichThe Human Condition by Hannah ArendtTechnology and the Character of Contemporary Life by Albert BorgmannYou can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein.Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

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

LM Sacasas is a theorist of technology and expert on Ivan Illich. He writes a popular Substack called the The Convivial Society, and recently published a book entitled The Frailest Thing. We're joined by friend of the show Nina Power to discuss Ivan Illich's prescient theories of technology, institutions, and the senses.Learn more about LM Sacasas✦ Subscribe to LM's newsletter, The Convivial Society.✦ Read LM's book of collected essays, The Frailest Thing.Learn more about Ivan Illich✦ Download our free Ivan Illich reading list at https://IllichCourse.com✦ Apply to Nina Power's 8-week course on Ivan Illich at https://IllichCourse.comAre you working on a long-term creative project outside of institutions?✦ Request an invitation to https://IndieThinkers.org

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

A set of 41 questions drafted with a view to helping us draw out the moral or ethical implications of our tools. Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections on Jane Jacobs, sidewalks, digital media, and our common civic life. Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Convivial Society, Dispatch No. 9 Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

The Convivial Society: Dispatch, No. 8 Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

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

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