Back in 2019, Colin Horgan published an essay discussing the role of convenience in shaping our techno-social order. “It’s convenience, and the way convenience is currently created by tech companies and accepted by most of us,” Horgan argued, “that is key to why we’ve ended up living in a world we all chose, but that nobody seems to want.” While I’m inclined to qualify the “we all chose” element of this claim, particularly under pandemic conditions, the line nonetheless aptly captures what I suspect may be a familiar feeling, the feeling, that is, that we are somehow working at cross-purposes against ourselves. It’s the feeling that our efforts, however well-intentioned or feverish, are not only inadequate but somehow self-defeating. Or, alternatively, it’s the lack of satisfaction lampooned in the popular comedic bit from a few years ago about how “everything is amazing but nobody is happy.”

Of course, part of the problem is that everything is not, in fact, amazing. Being able to access the internet on a transatlantic flight, a key element of the routine, hardly amounts to a just society conducive to human flourishing. And, naturally, many among us might feel as if they are always spinning their wheels and getting nowhere because existing social structures are stacked against them, often deliberately so. Having acknowledged as much, though, it’s worth exploring another dimension of the problem, what we might call 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.

“The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern,’” Rosa writes, “is the idea, the hope and the desire, that we can make the modern world controllable.” “Yet,” he quickly adds, “it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.”

In other words, the more we seek to control the world, the more it will fail to speak to us, and, consequently the more alienated and dissatisfied we will feel. I might even put it this way: Rosa aims to show that how we set about to find meaning, purpose, or happiness more or less guarantees that we will never find any of them. The rest of the book is an elaboration of this basic dynamic.

Philosophically, Rosa develops his thesis from the observation that human experience is grounded in the perception that “something is present,” and that this awareness even “precedes the distinction between subject and world.” Gradually, we learn to distinguish between the self and the world, but these are “two poles … of the relationship that constitutes them.” The question for Rosa is “how is this something that is present constituted.” In other words, how does our mode of relating to the world shape our perception of it?

Rosa’s “guiding thesis” on this score is that “for late modern human beings, the world has simply become a point of aggression,” an apt phrase that seemed, sadly, immediately useful as a way of characterizing what it feels like to be alive right now. The world becomes a series of points of aggression when, as Rosa puts it, “everything that appears to us must be known, mastered, conquered, made useful.” If our response to this is a measure of befuddlement—how else would we go about living if not by seeking to know, to master, to conquer, to make useful?—then it would seem that Rosa is probably right to say that this is a bedrock assumption shaping our thinking rather than being a product of it.

And, as he goes on to say, because we encounter the world in this way, then “the experience of feeling alive and of truly encountering the world—that which makes resonance possible—always seems to elude us.” We’ll return momentarily to the idea of resonance, a critical concept to which Rosa devoted an earlier book, but for now we should simply note that, in Rosa’s view, a failure to experience resonance “leads to anxiety, frustration, anger, and even despair, which then manifest themselves, among other things, in acts of impotent political aggression.”

Rosa acknowledges that relating to the world primarily by seeking to control or manage it is hardly a new development. This “creeping reorganization of our relationship to the world,” Rosa writes, “stretches far back historically, culturally, economically, and institutionally.” Indeed, the modern project, dating back at least to the 17th century, particularly in its techno-scientific dimensions, can be interpreted as a grand effort to tame nature and bring it under human control. And, of course, as C. S. Lewis observed in The Abolition of Man, the drive to control nature was eventually turned on humanity itself.

But in Rosa’s view, this “creeping reorganization” has, in the 21st century, “become newly radicalized, not least as a result of the technological possibilities unleashed by digitization and by the demands for optimization and growth produced by financial market capitalism and unbridled competition.” For example, Rosa cites the various tools we deploy to measure and optimize our bodies: “We climb onto the scale: we should lose weight. We look into the mirror: we have to get rid of that pimple, those wrinkles. We take our blood pressure: it should be lower. We track our steps: we should walk more.” “We invariably encounter such things,” Rosa notes, “as a challenge to do better.” A bit further on, Rosa adds, “More and more, for the average late modern subject of the ‘developed’ western world, everyday life revolves around and amounts to nothing more than tackling an ever-growing to-do list. The entries on this list constitute the points of aggression that we encounter as the world … all matters to be settled, attended to, mastered, completed, resolved, gotten out of the way.”

Why are we like this? Rosa provides a two-fold answer: “the normalization and naturalization of our aggressive relationship to the world is the result of a social formation, three centuries in the making, that is based on the structural principle of dynamic stabilization and on the cultural principle of relentlessly expanding humanity’s reach.”

By “the structural principle of dynamic stabilization,” Rosa means that “the basic institutional structure of modern society can be maintained only through constant escalation.” Modern society according to Rosa “is one that can stabilize itself only dynamically, in other words one that requires constant economic growth, technological acceleration, and cultural innovation in order to maintain its institutional status quo.”

I trust that, if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, this claim about dynamic stabilization will have struck you as vaguely familiar. It is more or less what Ivan Illich was arguing nearly fifty years ago. In fact, I think it would be fair to describe Rosa’s book in its entirety as being Illich in another key. Just a few pages in, I turned to the index to see if Illich was cited because it was already evident that there would be a deep affinity between what Rosa was arguing and Illich’s work, something I continued to think right down to the last page. Alas, he was not, and I will resist the temptation to note the various points at which Illich anticipated Rosa’s argument. (Dear reader: there were many.)

Dynamic stabilization, then, means that should our institutions cease growing and expanding, society would become unstable. It’s worth noting that this is not simply the way societies work. Indeed, modern society, for better and for worse, may be unique in this regard. I think that it was in the aftermath of September 11th that this point was driven vividly home to me by the immediate and evidently panicked insistence that, above all else, Americans should not cease buying stuff. Sure, hug your loved ones, but not too long because you’ve got 0% financing to take advantage of. The panic, of course, was not altogether misplaced. I’m not an economist and thus happy to be corrected on this score, but it seemed to me then, as it does now, that should any sizable portion of the population suddenly decide that their well-being was not served by buying more things, the modern economy would collapse.

This is why Rosa astutely observes that “this escalatory perspective has gradually turned from a promise into a threat.” “What generates this will to escalation,” he explains, “is not the promise of improvement in our quality of life, but the unbridled threat that we will lose what we have already attained.” “The game of escalation,” Rosa argues, “is perpetuated not by a lust for more, but by the fear of having less and less. Whenever and wherever we stop to take a break, we lose ground against a highly dynamic environment, with which we are always in competition.” Rosa invites us to consider how a growing number of parents in the “developed” world claim that they are motivated not by the hope that their children will have it better than they do but by the fear that they might have it worse.

This matters for Rosa’s overall argument because it means that societies that can only stabilize themselves dynamically “are structurally and institutionally compelled to bring more and more of the world under control and within reach, technologically, economically, and politically: to develop resources, open markets, activate social and psychological potentials, enhance technological capabilities, deepen knowledge bases, improve possibilities of control, and so on.”

This structural imperative is coupled with the cultural assumption that “our life will be better if we manage to bring more world within our reach: this is the mantra of modern life, unspoken but relentlessly reiterated and reified in our actions and behavior.” According to Rosa the “categorical imperative of late modernity” is “Always act in such a way that your share of the world is increased.” Rosa goes so far as to suggest that the history of technology is driven by the “promise of increasing the radius of what is visible, accessible, and attainable to us.” This amounts, in Rosa’s view, to a desire to render more and more of the world controllable.

From here, Rosa lays out what he identifies as the four dimensions of controllability:

* making the world visible, knowable, expanding our knowledge of it

* making the world physically reachable or accessible

* making the world manageable

* making the world useful

Modern science, technology, economic development, and the political-administrative apparatus all contribute to making the world controllable along these four dimensions. In the political-administrative sphere, Rosa adds that “the struggle for power can be understood in all respects as a struggle for control.” “Power,” he continues, “always manifests itself in the expansion of one’s own share of the world, often at the expense of others.”

Next, Rosa turns to what he calls the paradoxical flipside of the modern quest for control. The “institutionally enforced program” and “cultural promise of making the world more controllable, not only does not work but in fact becomes distorted into its exact opposite.” Or, to put this into Illichian terms, they become counterproductive, first frustrating the attainment of the goal they seek to achieve and then becoming socially destructive.

“The scientifically, technologically, economically, and politically controllable world,” Rosa argues, “mysteriously seems to elude us or to close itself off from us. It withdraws from us, becoming mute and unreadable. Even more, it proves to be threatened and threatening in equal measure.” The relation to the world that emerges from a desire to control is characterized by alienation or worldlessness, it is, Rosa writes, “a relation of relationlessness in which subject and world find themselves inwardly unconnected from, indifferent toward, and even hostile to each other.”

Early on, Rosa had put the matter rather starkly: “A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered would be a dead world.” This particular formulation recalls Simone Weil’s observation in her profound analysis of the Iliad that “force” is “that x that turns anyone who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” I’m suggesting, of course, that we think of what Weil calls “force” as being not altogether dissimilar from, indeed, an essential element of the drive to bring the world under control. But, of course, we don’t really want a world that is, practically speaking, dead to us.

Perhaps the most valuable part of the book, in my view, commences at this point in the argument when Rosa describes the alternative of relating to the world as a point of aggression to be mastered, managed, and controlled. This alternative mode of relation Rosa calls resonance. The prior book by that title clocks in at 450 pages. Here Rosa gives us what amounts to a 30-page primer.

What Rosa calls resonance is a way of relating to the world such that we are open to being affected by it, can respond to its “call,” and then both transform and be transformed by it—adaptive transformation as opposed to mere appropriation. “The basic mode of vibrant human existence,” Rosa explains, “consists not in exerting control over things but in resonating with them, making them respond to us—thus experiencing self-efficacy—and responding to them in turn.”

Consider, by way of example, something as prosaic as an encounter with another person. Such an encounter will be resonant only when we offer ourselves to the encounter in such a way that we can be affected or moved by the other person and when we, in turn, can respond in kind to this call. As Illich might say, it is a willingness to be surprised by the encounter and to receive ourselves back as a gift of the other. Indeed, Rosa even draws our attention, as Illich does so often, to the gaze. “Our eyes,” Rosa writes, “are windows of resonance. To look into someone’s eyes and to feel them looking back is to resonate with them.”

As a result, such encounters transform both of the people involved. One key to such encounters, however, is a measure of uncontrollability. As some of us may know from experience, any effort to manufacture a “resonant” encounter with another person is almost certainly destined to fail. Similarly, if an object or a person were altogether subject to our control or manipulation, the experience of resonance would also fail to materialize. They would not call to us or be able to creatively respond to us. Indeed, Rosa argues, as we’ve seen, that whatever is wholly within our control we experience as inert and mute. As a result, the farther we extend the imperative to control the world, the more the world will fail to resonate, the more it falls silent, leaving us alienated from it, and to the degree that we come to know ourselves through our relation to a responsive other, then also from ourselves.

Interestingly, Rosa, who otherwise develops his argument in strictly sociological language, nonetheless notes an analogy to religious insights. “Religious concepts such as grace or the gift of God,” Rosa writes, “suggest that accommodation cannot be earned, demanded, or compelled, but rather is rooted in an attitude of approachability to which the subject-as-recipient can contribute insofar as he or she must be receptive to God’s gift or grace.” “In sociological terms,” he adds, “this means that resonance always has the character of a gift.” 

Along these lines, one recalls, too, Arendt’s warning in the prologue to The Human Condition: “The future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something made by himself.” Something, we might add, that he can control and manage precisely because he has made it. On the other hand, the uncontrollability of resonance, Rosa insists, means that “there is no method, no seven- or nine-step guide that can guarantee that we will be able to resonate with people or things.”

Rosa goes on to elaborate on the nature of resonance and further specify how exactly it is undermined by the impulse to control and manage our experience. But the crux of the matter is relatively straightforward: “An attitude aimed at taking hold of a segment of the world, mastering it, and making it controllable is incompatible with an orientation toward resonance. Such an attitude destroys any experience of resonance by paralyzing its intrinsic dynamism.”

From here, Rosa walks us through a series of scenarios arranged around the progression of a life from birth to death in order to illustrate how the paradox of control plays out along the way. As the father of two young children, I was, naturally, especially interested in his discussion of child-rearing and education. “As in the case of childbirth or home security, here too,” Rosa writes, “the measurability and manageability of multiple processes seems not to diminish anxiety but to heighten it.”

Channeling Illich once again, unwittingly I suppose, Rosa goes on to describe what might be a familiar dynamic:

“This [heightening of anxiety] can be seen in modern parents’ concern that their child’s every discomfort, every scratch, every abnormality in his or her growth, speech, motor skills, or communicative faculties requires medical attention. This dependence on experts and on medical devices undermines parents’ expectations of self-efficacy and, consequently, their ability to experience it. It is no longer parents themselves who listen to their children’s needs and then (in resonance with them) seek out an appropriate response, but rather doctors and experts acting on the basis of reliable data, thus making developmental processes as controllable as possible.”

It is in this section, too, that Rosa supplies us with the useful term parameterized, by which Rosa means “made quantitively measurable one way or another.” So, speaking of the parameterization of the various aspects of child development, Rosa observes, “for each one there are countless experts, guidebooks, and support programs.” It is as if the mode of relating entailed by parameterization disabled our capacity to make reasonable and relatively confident judgments about what one ought to do and instead throws us on the mercy of countless competing and inconclusive authorities.

Not surprisingly, Rosa rightly notes that “technologies and processes associated with digitalization have fundamentally transformed our lives by making nearly the entire world, as it is represented in our consciousness, accessible and controllable in historically unprecedented ways.” Digital technology has especially abetted the parameterization of human experience with every new sensor and data-gathering device, rendering ever more aspects of our own experience as points of aggression. “It is all but impossible,” Rosa observes, “to keep track of the number of steps one takes in a day without being tempted to increase or optimize that number.” And so it is with whatever we can measure and quantify. In this way, “our relationship to our own bodily processes and psychological states has thus been transformed … from one of flexible, self-efficacious listening and responding to one of technological and medical calculation and control.”

It’s worth noting, I think, that Rosa’s examples tend to focus on how you and I might deploy digital technologies to bring more of the world ostensibly under our control. What he might also have explored at greater depth is the degree to which we are not the master’s of these systems of control, indeed, that very often they open up pathways for others to control us. I don’t mean this in some weird conspiratorial sort of way. I mean simply that the same technologies we deploy to parameterize our experience can be used to finely calibrate the worker at the workplace as if she were just another part of the machinery or, alternatively, to exclude someone from health insurance coverage based on the their health parameters.

Rosa draws the book to a close with a discussion of “the monstrous return of the uncontrollable.” “Despite the unpredictability and uncontrollability of our circumstances,” he warns, “we are still held responsible for results that we are supposed to have been able to foresee, which gives rise to anxiety.” “Controllability,” he adds, “in theory thus transforms uncontrollability in practice into a menacing ‘monster.’”

A little further on, he makes the following observation: “the impression of a world become increasingly politically uncontrollable is further reinforced by the similarly uncontrollable dynamism of media and social networks, which have rapidly become capable of provoking previously unimagined, massively consequential waves of outrage or excitement that are unpredictable and uncontrollable in terms of how they arise, how they pass away, and how they interact with one another.”

In one of his Sabbath poems, Wendell Berry reminded us that “we live the given life, not the planned.” I can’t think of a more pithy way of putting the matter. By the “given life,” of course, Berry does not mean what is implied by the phrase “that’s a given,” something, that is, which is taken for granted. Rather, Berry means the gifted life, the life that is given to us. We are presented with a choice, then: we can receive the world as a gift, which does not preclude our acting upon it and creatively transforming it, or we can think of it merely as raw material subject to our managing, planning, predicting, and controlling. Rosa helps us to see, quite precisely, why the latter path will be marked by frustration, anxiety, and alienation. So I will give him the last, more hopeful word:

“If we no longer saw the world as a point of aggression, but as a point of resonance that we approach, not with an aim of appropriating, dominating, and controlling it but with an attitude of listening and responding, an attitude oriented toward self-efficacious adaptive transformation, toward mutually responsive reachability, modernity’s escalatory game would become meaningless and, more importantly, would be deprived of the psychological energy that drives it. A different world would become possible.”

I’m foregoing links this time around out of a desire to just get this installment out and into your inboxes. I will note, though, that I recently had the pleasure of talking with Andrew McLuhan, Marshall’s grandson and the director of the McLuhan Institute, as well as David Sax, the author of Revenge of the Analog, on Quarantime, a podcast hosted by Peter Hirshberg and Mickey McManus. You can listen to it here. I also recently enjoyed a conversation with Elise Lonich Ryan of the Beatrice Institute, which you can find here. I readily confess to being somewhat ill at ease with the podcast format, in part, because I can’t control what transpires! But I’ve been glad for these conversations and honored by the invitations.

Cheers, Michael

If you’ve joined the Convivial Society over the past two or three months, this installment requires a brief introduction. I’m always ready to acknowledge my extensive debts to an older generation of scholars and writers, who have shaped my thinking about technology. Among those scholars, Ivan Illich has played an especially important role. The newsletter’s title, for example, pays tribute to his Tools for Conviviality. So last summer, as we were growing accustomed to life in Zoom-world, I began a newsletter-based reading group around Illich’s work, and that group led to an ongoing series of conversations with some of Illich’s friends and colleagues, all of whom have been extraordinarily generous with their time and encouragement. This installment, then, is the latest in that series.

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. The first of these also became the book Ivan Illich in Conversation, which remains an excellent introduction to Illich’s thought. The second became Rivers North of the Future, which provides a sketch of Illich’s unique and stimulating interpretation of the modern world.

In our conversation you will hear about the backstory to those interviews and about the relationship between Cayley and Illich, which took shape around them. And, of course, you’ll hear about a lot more, too.

You can also find the audio of the Illich interviews on Cayley’s website, which includes a remarkable archive of his programs over the years. (Notable examples include his interviews with George Grant, Charles Taylor, and Richard Sennet.)

Finally, Cayley is the author of a forthcoming intellectual biography of Illich, which I feel pretty confident saying will be the best guide to Illich’s life and thought for years to come. Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey will be published this month by Penn State University Press, and you can order your copy here [30% discount code: NR 21].

My conversation with Cayley follows earlier conversations with Carl Mitcham, Gustavo Esteva, and Gov. Jerry Brown.

I remain grateful to each of them, as I am to David Cayley, for their hospitality.

I trust you’ll enjoy the conversation.

Cheers,

Michael

Welcome to an unusually brief installment of the Convivial Society. An analogy came to mind, and you can tell me what you think. I vowed to keep it short, under 1,000 words. So this remains suggestive, and I’ll be eager to see if it generates any interesting insights or otherwise proves to be a helpful framing.

In 1979, the late sociologist Peter Berger published a book titled, The Heretical Imperative. As the subtitle explained, it was a book about “the contemporary possibilities of religious affirmation.” According to Berger, any form of religious affirmation in modern societies necessarily arises out of a context of pervasive religious pluralism. In such a context, choosing your religion, or choosing to have none, becomes an imperative. You can’t quite escape the awareness of having made a choice, a choice which could have been otherwise.

As it turns out, the Greek root of the word heresy can be translated as “to choose for one's self.” Thus Berger’s heretical imperative, or the imperative to choose. Unlike in certain pre-modern settings, where you’d likely be born into a religious tradition and live your life in a rather insulated and homogenous social setting that never gave you much occasion to question it, in the modern world getting religion, even if that means remaining faithful to your parent’s faith, is experienced as a choice you’ve made rather than something that is simply given in the nature of things. 

So, just as for 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. 

Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. It critically explores the methods we deploy to interpret texts of all sorts. It’s often associated specifically with the interpretation of religious texts or the modern tradition of philosophical hermeneutics. I’m using the term to suggest that the proliferation of media artifacts and the growing colonization of our experience by varieties of digital mediation have generated an imperative to self-consciously interpret. 

Is that really a new situation, you may ask. Yes and no. It is true, I would grant, that human experience has always been marked by explicit or implicit acts of interpretation. But, three considerations …

(1) Acts of interpretation become more explicit when we confront symbolically encoded human artifacts or media objects. In a walk through the woods, I’m engaged in certain kind of mostly pre-conscious interpretative work—reading the landscape, we might say. Walking through a museum, on the other hand, involves interpretative work of a different and more conscious nature. To the degree that our experience is mediated by digital devices, it takes on the quality of a walk through a (very weird) museum full of works of human artifice calling forth our interpretations. 

(2) Also, if I’m right about our experience of digitization generating a primary experience of the Database rather than the Narrative, then the need to be always interpreting becomes all the more apparent. For one thing, digitally mediated relations themselves become media artifacts and media objects. In the face-to-face company of those we know relatively well, our interpretative labor is less acute. We likely have a repertoire of habitual interpretive paradigms on which we can draw, and the less obviously mediated character of in-person exchanges means that the interpretive work likely remains pre-conscious. However, when the person becomes an avatar communicating through text, image, meme, film, GIF, etc., then the interpretative burden intensifies. 

And, of course, while most of us know that narratives require interpretation, they also supply interpretations in such a way that it is possible to naively assume that a narrative is simply relaying a transparent account of things. So, when our primary experience is of the Database, then we find ourselves in the position of supplying the interpretative labor a trusted narrative would’ve provided for us. 

(3) I’ve already been hinting at a critical difference: self-consciousness. As is often the case, the conditions of digital media make explicit and conscious what had been previously implicit and unnoticed. And this development can have profound consequences, which can be difficult to describe. 

Perhaps an example will help. Consider the case of someone who deploys a certain style of naive literalism to a religious text, which assumes that reading the Bible, for example, does not involve any “human interpretation.” When they read the text and tell you what it means, they don’t see themselves as interpreters but merely reporters of what the text obviously says. I’ve called this a naive approach not because it is gullible, although that may also be true, but because it is unaware of itself. It has not been troubled by indeterminacy or doubt. It is aware of only one right reading, which it takes for granted. For such a person to become aware of themselves as interpreters is to induce a crisis of faith. They come to see their own reading as just that and as one among many.

So, yes, humans have always been interpreters of experience, but the nature and scope of the interpretive work has changed, and, most importantly, we’ve become aware of it.

We might say, then, that the conditions of pervasive digitization have rendered the full range of human experience a text to be interpreted. Condemned to preform ever more baroque hermeneutical maneuvers we are deprived the satisfactions of a naive experience of reality. Perhaps this accounts for the widely-reported sense of unreality that plagues so many of us.

Meanwhile, public discourse increasingly takes on the quality of interminable debates carried on by individuals with fundamentally different hermeneutical styles and, consequently, interpretations of reality.

And, of course, there is no magisterium to settle matters for us. Indeed, those institutions that functioned analogously to the magisterium but for matters of public interest—the press, the expert class, etc.—have been rendered just another set of interpreters. They may still see themselves as the orthodox sect, of course. But that is no guarantee their interpretive authority will be recognized by others.

Berger noted that multiple responses were possible in the face of the heretical imperative, and the same is true for hermeneutical imperative. Suffice it to say for now that the best hermeneutics require virtues of the head and the heart.

“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”— Wendell Berry, “To know the dark”

Welcome to the latest installment of the Convivial Society, especially to those of you who are relatively new around here. This is a full newsletter with a longish essay and much else. Also, this time around, I’m not addressing a crisis de jour, and I hope that comes off as a feature rather than a bug. Over this past year, I have found myself writing about current events a good deal more than usual. This is fine, but I’m glad to return to another mode of reflection, one in which I feel myself more at home. One note about the title: I’d say that this is the question ultimately raised by the essay rather than one it answers definitively. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy it.

Reading Dante’s Divine Comedy poses any number of challenges to modern readers. This should not, I’ll quickly add, deter modern readers from the attempt, which, in my view anyway, will more than repay the effort. In any case, one of these challenges may be the curious astronomical dimensions of Dante’s poem. You may know, for example, that each of the three cantiche that make up the poem—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—ends on the same Italian word, stelle, or, in English, stars. Moreover, the final portion of Dante’s journey, related in Paradiso, is literally a journey through what we think of as space and what Dante, and his contemporaries, imagined as a series of concentric spheres with earth its center and the realm of God beyond the farthest sphere. It’s also clear that Dante believed the starry heavens were meant to draw our eyes toward God. At one point, he refers to the stars as God’s “lure.”

But perhaps most interestingly, in the middle part of his journey, as he ascends the mountain of purgatory, which Dante imagines as an island in the southern hemisphere, the character of Dante displays a remarkable awareness of where the stars and planets are located in the sky at any given moment. He frequently alludes to the position of the sun relative to the constellations of the Zodiac, and he is intimately familiar with the paths of the planets (including the moon) through the sky as well as the seasonal position of the stars. Within the first few lines of Paradiso, he casually invites readers to imagine the time of year when the sun rises where four circles—the horizon, the equator, the zodiac, and the colure of the equinoxes—intersect to form three crosses in conjunction with Aries! I’m inclined to think that few modern readers would even know where to begin with such instructions.

I can’t speak to whether Dante’s astronomical proficiency was common in his time—after all, Dante was not exactly your average medieval Florentine—but he did have the same experience of the starry sky as human beings had enjoyed for millennia before him and centuries after. Of that much we can be sure.

As science journalist Jo Marchant explained in the opening pages of her recent book, The Human Cosmos, the earliest existing examples of Paleolithic art may very well have included elaborately coded depictions of the night sky. Marchant’s book goes on to explore the remarkable role the stars have played in human thought and culture since then. In short, human beings have payed meticulous attention to the stars and experienced them as a source of wonder, admiration, and even reverence. Seen in this light, our own relationship to the night sky appears as a remarkable, and perhaps tragic, anomaly.

The sight of the star-filled sky, a unifying human inheritance across thousands of years, has been all but lost to the majority of people who now live in urban and suburban settings. By one account 80% of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way. In 1994, when an earthquake knocked out power to much of Los Angeles in the middle of the night, some residents were so spooked by the appearance of the Milky Way above them that they called the police to report the strange phenomenon. I suspect that some of you reading this may be among those who have never seen the arc of our galaxy grace the night sky. For my part, I can count on one hand with fingers to spare the opportunities afforded to me to witness the undiminished night sky over the course of my four decades on planet earth.

I began to think about the loss of the night sky as I was reading about the latest SpaceX launch carrying another batch of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites. SpaceX currently aims to place 12,000 of these satellites in orbit and is seeking permission to eventually place upwards of 40,000. The goal is to create a global broadband network making the internet accessible to even the earth’s most remote regions. Musk has said that, thanks to Starlink, anyone “will be able to watch high-def movies, play video games and do all the things they want to do without noticing speed.” With the latest launch a few days ago, there are now 952 Starlink satellites in orbit. By comparison, there have been about 8,000 total satellites put into orbit since the launch of Sputnik in 1957. We should note, too, that SpaceX is not alone in these efforts. Amazon’s Project Kuiper has also secured FCC approval to put 6,236 satellites in orbit.

Musk’s ambitions have caused more than a little controversy among astronomers, who fear that this blanket of satellites will hamper their efforts to study the universe from earth-based telescopes. Since the launch of the first Starlink satellites in 2019, which were brighter than 99% of the other 200 orbiting human artifacts visible to the naked eye, SpaceX has responded to these concerns with measures to darken the satellites and equip them with visors to reduce their impact on earth-based astronomical observations. But while these measures have helped to some degree, scientists say the problem remains. Starlink satellites remain brighter than a recommended 7th-magnitude threshold, which would put them beyond visibility to the naked eye.

The Starlink satellites are clearly not responsible for the loss of the starry sky. That process has been underway for more than two centuries and has been the consequence of what are now much more mundane technologies that we hardly think of at all. But I began to think of the ambitions of the Starlink project as somehow amounting to a final twist of the knife. Perhaps this is a bit too dramatic a metaphor, but if we think that the loss of the star-filled night sky is a real and serious loss with significant if also difficult to quantify human consequences, then the final imposition of an artificial network of satellites where before the old celestial inheritance had been seems rather like being tossed cheap trinkets to compensate for the theft some precious treasure. One might also interpret the development in more symbolic terms, almost as a modern-day Tower of Babel, which is to say as a defiant and hubristic gesture of human self-sufficiency, a self-referential enclosure of the human experience, a literal immanent frame (to borrow a term from philosopher Charles Taylor).

But Starlink was only a point of departure leading me to consider the costs of the unrelenting drive toward artificial illumination, a technological development most of us now take for granted. The loss of the stars, after all, could only happen because of a more general loss of darkness. Our relationship to the night, like most human things, is not simply given. It has a history, which varies from culture to culture. The conflicting and evolving way human cultures have thought about the night, and the darkness that accompanies it, has been the subject of numerous essays and books. (Craig Koslofsky’s Evening’s Empire: A history of the night in early modern Europe comes to mind). That said, until recently in human history, these various cultural constructions of the night arose out of a fairly uniform experience of the daily patterns of light and darkness and the ubiquitous presence of the stars, which have been the subject of scientific, philosophical, religious, and artistic interest across cultures from times immemorial. The transformation of this relatively uniform human experience began as new technologies of illumination became available throughout the modern era. In his aptly titled In Praise of Shadows, Japanese novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki has written of the attitude of the characteristically modern and Western individual: “from candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.”

The decisive turn, of course, came with the advent of electrification, in the late nineteenth century. One of the best accounts of the progress of electrification in the United States, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940, was written by the historian of technology, David Nye. Thomas Hughes’s Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 is another notable account of the same.

Nye went on to devote a couple of chapters to electrification in a later book, American Technological Sublime, a work I continue to think is indispensable to understanding the role of technology in American culture. As the book’s title suggests, Nye examined how new technologies, of a certain scale and power, generated experiences of the sublime in those who first observed them in action. For example, among other technologies, Nye considers the railroad, bridges and skyscrapers, the atomic bomb, and Apollo XI. According to Nye, these technologies occasioned a quasi-religious response of awe and fear from the public and they were often introduced with elaborate civic fanfare and ritual. The result is what amounts to the cultivation of a functional civil religion centered on technology, which served as a unifying force within an otherwise fractious society.

Electrification, and the electrified cityscape in particular, served as one of Nye’s case studies of the technological sublime. It would be hard to overstate the degree of wonder and fascination that electric lighting generated in those who witnessed it for the first time, often in the presence of spectacular displays of artificial lighting produced for various turn-of-the-century world’s fairs and exposition. (These fairs and expositions, by the way, also offer a fascinating window on technology and American culture from roughly 1870 to 1970. The work of Robert Rydell is especially useful here: All the World’s A Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 and A World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions.)

Nye’s thesis suggests that, in the American case at least, the loss of the night sky might be described as the surrender of the natural sublime for the sake of the technological sublime. Any lament of the loss of the night sky needs to reckon with the wonder electric lighting also elicited at its advent. But the two were far from equivalent and the costs of the exchange were not readily apparent. As is often the case, I find myself thinking that Ivan Illich’s insistence on the need to recognize thresholds of productivity is essential. The point is not to reject new technologies or the conveniences they offer, but rather to identify the limits beyond which these technologies become counterproductive and even destructive.

At the time there were, of course, some who noted that something of consequence was being lost. “We of the age of the machines,” Henry Beston wrote in the 1920s,

“having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of the night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, today’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or poetry of night, who have never even seen the night.”

Curiously, this is a thoroughly modern lament. I don’t think Dante could have written it. The pre-Copernican cosmos, with the earth at its center surrounded by a series of concentric spheres on each of which a planet was embedded like a jewel, was a relatively cozy place. A man or woman looking up to the stars did not see a vast, cold, dark emptiness that made them feel small and insignificant, as we sometimes tend to do, perhaps especially to the degree that we have lost sight of the stars themselves. They saw instead a well-ordered cosmos in which they felt themselves at home. They saw, too, a realm bathed in light and, odd as it may seem to us, suffused with music—the so-called “music of the spheres” or musica universalis, itself a fascinating topic.

(An even more arcane aside: Even in the post-Copernican world, the idea of astral musical harmonies played a crucial role in the development of Kepler’s theory of elliptical orbits, see his Harmonices Mundi. It also helped Immanuel Kant improve on Newton’s account of the lunar influence on tidal patterns! You can begin to make sense of the seemingly odd grouping of the latter four of the medieval liberal arts, the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.)

Setting the medieval digression aside, Beston is mostly preoccupied with what we might call abstract, unquantifiable costs incurred by electrification, to which we’ll return shortly. But there are other costs, of course. Many that we find it easier to talk about and which have indeed been widely discussed, usually under the heading of “light pollution,” which the International Dark-Sky Association defines as “any adverse effect of artificial light, including sky glow, glare, light trespass, light clutter, decreased visibility at night, and energy waste.”

Paul Bogard’s 2013 The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light is probably about as a good a survey of the consequences of light pollution as you’re likely to find. Bogard traces the rise of the regime of artificial lighting and its less than benign consequences for both humans and non-humans, from the well-documented interruption of the body’s natural sleep cycles and the consequent poor health outcomes to the disruption of natural ecosystems and waste of resources. We hardly ever think of it this way, but electrification can be understood as a massive and unprecedented social and environmental experiment. And I’d say the result are not in yet.

Much of this amounts to a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the limits of our creaturely frame and the kind of techno-social environment that it requires. As Jacques Ellul might have put it, we have built a techno-social environment that is in many respects inhospitable to human beings as such, although it serves the interest of some humans quite well; better for some that our consumption and labor be unbounded. Techno-scientific advances once sought to improve the human lot. Now they as often arise for the sake of the techno-scientific enterprise itself or the economic order that sustains it, generating spurious needs while failing to meet basic ones. In turn, whole industries and markets arise to produce techniques designed mitigate the harm done by a human-built world whose structures and rhythms undermine the possibility of genuine human freedom and flourishing.

Moreover, darkness and the starry sky have succumbed to that all too familiar pattern whereby a public good, commonly shared or freely accessible, has been transmuted into a luxury item available only to the privileged classes. Dark Sky tourism had been flourishing in the pre-pandemic world. To glimpse the night sky, which had for the whole of human history until the last 50 to 70 years, which amounts to the blink of an eye, all one had to do was step outside in the evening. Now you may have to pay for the privilege. This is not unlike Ivan Illich’s argument in “Silence is a Commons.” “Just as the commons of space are vulnerable, and can be destroyed by the motorization of traffic,” Illich argued, “so the commons of speech are vulnerable, and can easily be destroyed by the encroachment of modern means of communication.” “Such a transformation of the environment from a commons to a productive resource,” Illich went on to insist, “constitutes the most fundamental form of environmental degradation.” And as with silence so with darkness.

Illich understood that commons of this sort were “more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads.” How, then do we describe something so subtle and intimate?

“Two things,” Kant famously observed, “fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Is there a relationship between the two? Is there any sense in which we get not only our spatial bearings but also our psychological and emotional bearings from observing the beauty and rhythms of the star-filled sky? Are we bearing an unacknowledged burden of mental and physical exhaustion because the night no longer brings most of our labors to a close and bids us rest. Is there anything to be said for the inspiration the night sky has given to the human imagination?

We are doomed, it seems, to abide the loss of all that we cannot quantify. Absent shared ethical frameworks or normative accounts of human flourishing, modern societies tend to resort to quantification as an ostensibly neutral and value free lingua franca suitable for the public sphere. Meanwhile, it becomes increasingly difficult to recognize and defend human goods that cannot be objectively measured. And should some effort be made to quantify them, they are likely to be reduced, impoverished, and exploited.

What do we lose when we lose the stars? What has it cost us to conquer the night?

Perhaps only the poet can say.

But, in this case, all of us may have some part to play. I encourage you to check out the International Dark Sky Association. There are, in fact, relatively simple things that can be done to improve the situation and some cities across the United States have already taken action.

Links and Resources

“The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness”World Atlas Night Sky Brightness Dark Site Finder“Missing the Night Sky”

News and Resources​

* Evan Selinger reviews a recent book, Life After Privacy, which argues that we need to accept the fact that we live in a post-privacy world. Selinger patiently dissects the key claims in the book and argues that such despair is premature.

* “Taking Trust Seriously in Privacy Law” was among the several articles cited by Selinger in his review. From the abstract: “Instead of trying to protect us against bad things, privacy rules can also be used to create good things, like trust. In this paper, we argue that privacy can and should be thought of as enabling trust in our essential information relationships. This vision of privacy creates value for all parties to an information transaction and enables the kind of sustainable information relationships on which our digital economy must depend.”

* And here is Selinger’s entry, co-written with Brenda Leong, in the forthcoming The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics, “The Ethics of Facial Recognition Technology.”

* Jeremy Antley has an engaging piece on war games in Real Life: “As the goal of technoculture is no longer to control the future but rather to pre-empt it with the predictive power of simulation, its training games now involve the creation of “just in time” subjectivities — citizens capable of reconfiguring their training and worldview on the fly, allowing, for example, the near-seamless transformation of Xbox or Playstation devotees into drone pilots.”

* Interesting essay on the historical relationship between novel technologies and how we imagine the mind, focusing on the recent prevalence of predictive technologies: “Human beings aren’t pieces of technology, no matter how sophisticated. But by talking about ourselves as such, we acquiesce to the corporations and governments that decide to treat us this way. When the seers of predictive processing hail prediction as the brain’s defining achievement, they risk giving groundless credibility to the systems that automate that act – assigning the patina of intelligence to artificial predictors, no matter how crude or harmful or self-fulfilling their forecasts.”This essay reminds us that one of the more subtle, but not insignificant ways technology shapes us is by supplying metaphors for human experience that condition how we think about ourselves.

* You may have already seen this, but, just in case, a delightful tour of North American accents.

* Short post from historian Lee Vinsel summarizing his research over the past few years: “Seven Theses on Technology and the US Economy.”

* Antonio Garcia-Martinez interviews Zeynep Tufekci. As you all know, I’m a fan of Tufekci’s work, especially as she has written about the pandemic throughout this past year. Lots of good insights here on social media, political culture, etc.

* This is a lovely online exhibit: “Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination.” The section on “Nature in Profile” features the work of 19th century naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt. It just so happens that The New Atlantis just published a terrific essay on von Humboldt: “A Scientist’s Mind, a Poet’s Soul: On the unified cosmic vision of Alexander von Humboldt, the nineteenth century’s great naturalist-adventurer.”

Re-framings

— Erazim Kohák, The Embers and The Stars: a philosophical inquiry into the moral sense of nature. the first part of the book’s second chapter is titled, “The Gift of the Night.” There’s a great deal therein that I could have excerpted. Here’s a small bit of it:

In the global city of our civilization we have banished the night and abolished the dusk. Here the merciless glare of electric lights extends the harshness of the day deep into the night restless with the hum of machinery and the eerie glow of neon. Unreflectingly, we think it a gain, and not without reason. We are creatures of daylight, locating ourselves in our world by sight more than by any other sense. We think of knowing as seeing. Light and darkness belong among our most primordial metaphors for good and evil … Ever since the dawn of history, humans have struggled to kindle a light against the darkness, making it, too, a place of works of charity and necessity …

Those lights are deeply good, as good as the labor of all who keep vigil by their glow. To think of them as a triumph over darkness, however, is far more problematic. We have thought in those terms for so long that night has come to appear alien and threatening, an enemy to be banished, no long a place of our being. Yet half of our time on this earth is, perforce, lived in the night. Might we not do better to teach ourselves to think of the lights we make as a human way of dwelling at peace with the night?

[…]

[W]e are not only creatures of the light. We are creatures of the rhythm of day and night, and the night, too, is our dwelling place. Darkness enriches even our days. Pure light would blind us: our perception depends on discerning contrasts, the interplay of light and darkness. Without the rhythm of day and night, of going forth and resting, our lives would flatten out in unchanging monotony and our philosophy in an undifferentiated technē. It is good, deeply good, to kindle a light in the darkness, though not against it. There must also be night.

— In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury included the following bit of narration, based perhaps on his own experience. Describing the light of character’s eyes, the narrator describes the protagonist’s apprehension of the light in the face of a young girl he has just met:

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

The Conversation

After an extended hiatus, the Illich reading group will be resuming. This time around we are discussing David Cayley’s Rivers North of the Future, essentially an extended interview Illich gave Cayley late in his life. This was Cayley’s effort to get Illich to expand on his interpretation of modernity, which, despite Cayley’s urging, Illich never managed to turn into a book. Rivers North also gives us the best glimpse of Illich’s faith and how it shaped his work. The reading group is pretty much the only part of the newsletter that is reserved for paid subscribers, so if you want to join up, you know what to do. Additionally, Cayley will be joining me for a conversation about Illich, which I’ll be posting in early February.

You can also be on the look out for a bit of an experiment in the near future: a discussion thread open to all readers. When I solicited some feedback at the end of last year, one recurring theme in the responses was the desire for a bit more of a community experience among readers. This will be an effort to push a bit in that direction. We’ll see how it goes.

Cheers,

Michael

Last Wednesday, I was working on the draft of a newsletter I had intended to send out later in the week. Of course, that was before my Twitter feed was taken over by the failed coup or insurrection or seditious mob, or whatever else one may call it, which stormed the Capitol to interrupt the certification of the electoral college votes and, as far as some participants were apparently concerned, hang the Vice President of the United States. 

I’m fully aware of the insignificance of my own judgments on these matters, but let me nonetheless make clear at the outset that, however dispassionate the following discussion may seem, I consider the actions of mob, its enablers, and its apologists reprehensible and seditious. Moreover, I regret to add, the proceedings were, in my view, merely one particularly dramatic symptom of a grave, possibly fatal condition, which will not magically resolve itself come January 21st.

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. 

In light of the complexity and gravity of the situation, which transpired just days ago (although it may already seem like weeks), I feel obliged to stress that this is a tentative exercise in thinking out loud. I’ll begin with a few comments about the labels and categories we use to think about digital media before turning to a more direct analysis of last week’s events and what they reveal about our media environment. More than is usually the case, the following discussion lacks a tight, well-ordered structure, so I’ve supplied the numbering to provide some sense of how my thoughts were grouped together. Think of what follows not so much as an argument but as a series of interlocking perspectives on the same phenomenon. 

(1) Reading through the torrent of commentary on the assault on the Capitol has left me with the sense that we’ve still not quite figured out how exactly to talk about the relationship between digital media and human experience. 

Much of the discussion has centered on the moderation policies of social media companies, particularly given their role in the organization of the assault on the Capitol. Some have commented on the role of social media during the assault. And others have sought to examine whether digital media played a more fundamental role in these events and, by extension, our cascading national omni-crisis. Each of these deserves our attention, as does much else, of course. For my part, I’ve been thinking about related matters for some time now under the assumption that digital media—like writing, printing, and electronic media before it—occasions profound social and political change. This is not, in my view, a techno-determinist position. I fully acknowledge that new technologies interact unpredictably with existing values, institutions, and social structures. Moreover, all along the way, people make choices, although perhaps increasingly constrained and conditioned by the new media infrastructure once it has become entrenched. But I remain convinced that media ought to be understood ecologically rather than additively. When a new species is introduced into a natural ecosystem, you don’t just get the old ecosystem plus a new species. You may very well end up with an entirely new ecosystem or even a collapsed ecosystem. Thus, when digital media restructures human communication in roughly 25 years time (dating roughly from the early years of the commercial internet), we should expect significant social and political change. The challenge is to make sense of it midstream, as we still are. 

(2) As events unfolded and also in their immediate aftermath, it seemed as if the reality of what was happening was difficult to ascertain. What I have in mind is not simply a case of what we tend to mean when we say something like “I still can’t believe x happened,” which almost always communicates the opposite of the literal sense. Rather, it seems to me that we were confronted with a rather more nebulous sense of unreality, one grounded in a similar inability to clearly parse the relationship between digitization and our experience of the world, which is in turn related to the unfathomable proliferation of digitally mediated reality. We are, of course, well along an established trajectory dating back decades, which has been alternatively theorized, for example, as involving the rise of pseudo-events, spectacle, or hyperreality. 

(3) It’s not uncommon to hear someone claim that “Twitter is not real life.” The phrase is generally meant to convey the position that only a relatively small percentage of the population are active Twitter users, thus Twitter is not really representative of reality. Consequently, those whose understanding of reality is shaped largely by their time on Twitter are not really perceiving real life or at least don’t have a good grasp of what really matters in real life.

There is, mind you, a measure of truth to this, but claiming that Twitter is not real life tends to obscure more than it illuminates. What it obscures are the porous boundaries between Twitter and non-Twitter, a fact which has for the past four years been driven home to us on a nearly daily basis. Better to say, for example, that Twitter mediates reality, as does Facebook, Instagram, CNN, your local NPR station, a textbook, a smartphone camera, and your native language. It is not a matter of real life in opposition to mediated reality. The challenge is simply to understand the nature and consequences of the various mediations that together shape our understanding of the world we all share. 

While I think it is ultimately unhelpful to speak about digitization generating unreal phenomena or to think of it as a set of activities that are somehow sealed off from the so-called “real” world, it is nonetheless revealing that we reach for this language. It suggests both a lack of trenchant categories with which to describe digitization and, consequently, our inability to fully the integrate the consequences of digitization into our thinking about the world. 

(4) Speaking of the digital sphere as a place or even a space is part of the problem. Digital tools do not generate places in the ordinary sense of the word, they mediate relationships, in part precisely by disassociating the self from place. It seems to me that if you think of “online” as a place, it is easier to imagine that this place is somehow detached from the so-called real world—you leave here and go there. However, if you think instead of digitized relations, then that temptation seems to lose its plausibility. The key is to understand the nature of these relations. 

Let’s speak, then, of digital tools, digital media, and digitized relations. The three are clearly interdependent—you don’t get digitized relations without either digital tools or their products—but I think it will be useful to keep these distinctions in mind. When it is helpful to think of the three together as a package, I will simply refer to the digital or digitization for brevity’s sake. (Much in the same way that we speak of electrification or industrialization.) 

(5) It is certainly true that the total relevant media environment includes network television, cable news, and talk radio. Many have rightly pointed out that, for example, our present situation cannot entirely be blamed on Facebook, Twitter, or any other digital media platform when television and radio also command such large and devoted audiences. This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t account for the degree to which digital is now the master medium, in the sense of being the technical infrastructure for other media (digital tools), supplying content for other media (digital media), and forming the larger environment within which other media operate (digitized relations). 

(6) Let’s get back to the mob at the capital as our discreet case in point. Here again, I’ll begin with distinctions. 

The event is complex not simple. It has many causes, dimensions, and consequences. If we are tempted to reduce it to one thing and search for one cause, it is because we always find it easier to think in those terms. Moreover, there are multiple, overlapping angles of analysis to consider when we set out to think through the significance of what happened. And it may be that thinking through the relationship of Digitization to this event may not be the most important consideration. As Adam Elkus, for example, has been insisting, this particular event was shaped by elite calculations about hard power during extraordinary circumstances; the attention placed on the internet and the sub-cultures it hosts is, in his view, at least somewhat misguided. I don’t disagree, although I believe its worth exploring the consequences of Digitization and its relation these events. I think we’ll find a great deal of consequence unfolding on this terrain as well.

(7) We will fail to grasp the nature of our situation unless we understand that we inhabit a world composed of two distinct but intermingling configurations of social relations, digitized and analog (for lack of a better way of putting the latter). It is a mistake to either collapse these two configurations into each other as if they were identical or to assume that the two are hermetically sealed off from one another. When this happens, the analysis either attributes too much or too little to digitization. The key, it seems to me, is to recognize the distinctiveness of the relations constituted by digitization and how these relations interact with pre-digital institutions and social arrangements. Consider, for example, the vector of time. Digitization generates temporal pressures that place acute stress on institutions which operate at pre-digital temporal settings. One doesn’t even need to pass a value judgment on which may be the “better” in order to realize that significant problems arise when these two orders of social relations are entwined. 

(8) I remain relatively convinced that if we think of a culture as a materially and symbolically mediated set of human relations with a distinct, relatively coherent set of beliefs and values, then it is perfectly legitimate to speak of the proliferation of cultures resulting from the digital mediation of human relations. In this sense, I would argue that if modernity was characterized by mutually reinforcing trends towards pluralism and homogenization, trends which loosen the grip, so to speak, of distinct and independent local cultures, then Digitization has nourished the revival of micro-cultures, which, unlike older, traditional cultures, however, are not to be found in place but rather in the symbolic order of relations sustained by Digitization but whose members then spill out into a common world, which receives members from competing digital cultures and with radically different views of reality. 

Of course, this may seem like a banal observation when we have been hearing about internet sub-cultures for years and years. However, I’d say the term has been generally understood as culture in the weak sense. In the old order of things, deep cultural differences could be sapped of their power, chiefly by the commodifying forces of the market economy, the often unstated assumptions of liberal democracy, and mass media. Culture was often reduced to a matter of cuisine, dress, and music rather than one of divergent and often competing orientations toward the world. Digitally mediated sub-cultures around particular games or films, for example, have been understood in this sense. I’m suggesting that digitally mediated sub-cultures can become cultures in the strong sense, generating distinctive perspectives on truth, morals, and norms. 

And, again, I think this becomes clear precisely when we cease thinking about the internet as a space (virtual reality, cyberspace, “go online,” etc.) and begin to think of it as alternatively mediated relations. Early in the history of digitization, the internet was called the information superhighway. But the internet was never simply a conduit of information. It did not merely transmit information, it connected people in ways they could not be connected otherwise. It materialized and supercharged the dynamics of cultural formation: symbolic exchange, social networks, and the mechanisms of shame and approbation. And it did so, while simultaneously diminishing the significance of place, which has historically been the most formative vector of cultural formation, and also undermining the authority of older culturally formative institutions. 

But, there’s more to this. The fact that this cultural formation happens in the context of digitized relations also means that participants can more readily be locked into alternative realities rather than simply alternative moral orders. Precisely because the formation is happening in the absence of a “common world of things” a “common sense” fails to emerge. I’m thinking here of the way that Hannah Arendt has defined these terms. “The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves,” Arendt wrote in The Human Condition. She went on to claim that “while the intimacy of a fully developed private life, such as had never been known before the rise of the modern age […], will always greatly intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and private feelings, this intensification will always come to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men.”

I’ve written recently about Arendt’s understanding of a common world and a common sense with a view to our digitized age, so I won’t belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that under the conditions of digitization, it becomes increasingly difficult to arrive at a common world and a common sense, and much less any general agreement about what shape that world should take. 

Digitized relations create conditions that can be described as disembodied environments of symbolic exchange structured by carefully calibrated architectures of reward and affirmation, environments which lend themselves to rapid cultivation of alternative understandings of public phenomena. Do such alternative understandings always yield violent insurrections? No, obviously not. Are such possibilities always latent? Yes. 

It’s worth noting, even if just in passing, the underlying loneliness and indeterminacy of identity that render someone susceptible to the temptations of a selfhood dialectically optimized in tandem with an inscrutable algorithm. 

(9) Consider the debate about whether this was a serious coup attempt or whether it was a farce and participants were there mostly for social media points. The answer is simply “yes.” 

You’ve likely heard some commentary, especially early on and in light of the visually dominating presence of the QAnon shaman, dismissing the mob as nothing more than LARPers (Live Action Role-Playing), who got a bit out of hand. But this view clearly misses an important point. The reference to larping in this context suggests either games like Dungeons and Dragons or, more accurately, in-person meet ups of would be wizards and knights. Obviously, this is a misguided caricature, but it’s what the rhetoric is meant to suggest: people who should not be taken seriously because they are playing silly games. 

Unfortunately, this strikes me rather as a slander of larpers, who, as far as I can tell, retain a decidedly firm grip on the borders of the game world and often deploy elaborate rites and practices to secure a high degree of self-awareness about the distinction between fantasy and reality. 

Digitization affords no such distinction, as I’ve already argued, even though it is clear that since the early days of the internet, many participants believed that it did. An illusion, I suspect, generated in part by the disembodied and anonymous nature of the early internet forums. 

Early internet theorizing and some present day nostalgia celebrates this stage of the internet as a golden age, wherein individuals could freely play with different identities. The reality, of course, was more complicated. Such role playing could liberate aspects of the self that were unjustly suppressed by existing prejudices, but they could just as easily liberate aspects of the self that were justly suppressed by legitimate and salutary moral and ethical standards. Getting to role play white supremacy, for example, can hardly be conceived of as a commendable experience of liberation. 

The critical point, however, is that there is no line between political role playing online and the so-called real world. When there is no clear line between the stage and the world, you cannot go on playing a role or acting a part without assuming the risk that you will in fact be transformed by the performance. Moreover, there being no line between digitized relations and analog relations, the perceived immateriality of the digital spectacle can be seen to invite actions that might otherwise have stuck the same person as ludicrous or ill-advised.

Perhaps best remembered for having coined the phrase “the global village,” Marshall McLuhan later came to prefer “the global theater.” In a 1977 interview, McLuhan was asked about his view of technology as a revolutionizing agent. “Yes,” McLuhan responds, “it creates new situations to which people have very little time to adjust. They become alienated from themselves very quickly, and then they seek all sorts of bizarre outlets to establish some sort of identity by put-ons. Show business has become one way of establishing identity by just put-ons, and without the put-on you’re a nobody. And so people are learning show business as an ordinary daily way of survival. It’s called role-playing.”

(10) One of the most widely circulated responses to the events on January 6th has been an essay in the New York Times by historian Timothy Snyder, who has written widely on authoritarianism in the 20th century. It’s a long piece and I won’t pretend to summarize its contents here. I do, however, want to engage one particular section of Snyder’s argument. As we move into the heart of Snyder’s analysis, he writes the following: 

Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.

Snyder pays some attention to the role of digital media, although he is narrowly focused on social media platforms. But those comments, most of which are accurate and point us toward a better understanding of the role of digital media, do not quite get us there. And, in this paragraph I’ve cited, which has been widely quoted online and can be justly called the crux of the essay, we see the consequences of an inadequate account of digitization. 

To see the problem, ask yourself this question:  Who exactly is the “we” who has given up on truth? 

It would seem that the problem is rather a proliferation of “truths,” stridently and even desperately believed. Am I prepared to say that some of these “truths” are, in fact, lies and falsehoods? Yes, of course. But that’s immaterial. They are believed. Furthermore, politics has always been understood to be the realm of lies and falsehoods, noble, Big, or otherwise. It would seem that we are dealing with something more than conventional lies in this sense. 

Additionally, we did not “lose” the institutions that produce facts, these institutions have lost their authority among large segments of the public across the political spectrum. 

It must be understood that these two developments proceed in tandem, such that we can describe our situation not as post-truth but as post-trust. Although, even then it is not that we are post-trust so much as we are beyond the age of institutions that commanded widespread trust. Trust has always played a role in the establishment of public knowledge. None of us have independently reasoned ourselves to every single belief we hold about public realities, nor could we even if we so desired. We take on authority a great deal more than we realize. So, when the old institutions we trusted for a base of common knowledge and understanding have (deservedly or otherwise) lost their standing, then public knowledge splinters accordingly.  

(11) Last summer I argued that, in the context of information superabundance, the Database now precedes the Narrative. Digitization has made possible the dissemination and storage of information at unprecedented scale and speed. To the degree that your view of the world is mediated by digitized information, to that same degree your encounter with the world will be more like an encounter with a Database of unfathomable size than with a coherent narrative of what has happened. The freedom, if we wish to call it that, of confronting the world in this way also implies the possibility that any two people will make their way through the Database along wildly divergent paths. 

Consider the events of January 6th. Long before any kind of credible and authoritative narrative had been established, most of us had already encountered a multitude of data related to the event:  videos, images, audio, and endless commentary from people directly involved or observing from a distance. In this context, no one controls the narrative. In this context, speculation runs rampant. In this context, people will form impression, that while false, will never be corrected. 

Existing digital cultures will connect the disparate entries in the emerging database to form narratives, which line up with their existing understanding of reality. It is possible to run through the database in countless plausible ways. A consensus narrative will almost certainly not emerge.

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

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

It’s notable, too, that this fragmentation of perspectives happens at a foundational level. Which is to say that it’s not just that there is widespread disagreement about how to interpret the meaning of an event. It is also that there is widespread disagreement about the basic facts of the event in question. It is one thing to argue the meaning of the moon landing for human affairs, it is another to incessantly debate whether the moon landing happened. Which is why I have argued in the past that we are all conspiracy theorizers now. We are all in the position of holding beliefs, however sure we may be of them, that a sizable portion of the population considers not just mistaken but preposterous and paranoid. 

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

The trouble, of course, is that while we might inhabit very different perceived realities, we live in the same world. In the case of the United States, the election and the pandemic are both troubling examples of what can happen under these circumstances. In both cases, it might be said that the world as it is catches up with our mediated realities. You can spin alternative political realties only so long before blood is shed. You can argue the true nature of a virus only so long before the deaths pile up. But this is little comfort and hardly points us forward. 

Seen in this light, then, the spectacle, as Snyder puts it, or the Database, as I have called it, precedes the epistemic fragmentation. Is it the case that digital sophists with wealth and charisma will do their best to manipulate this state of affairs to serve their own ends? Yes, of course. But I think it is important to consider that even apart from such actors, we are in a bad place. The epistemic habits are becoming ingrained and the Database only grows. 

(12) Thomas Kuhn famously argued that scientific revolutions happened when a reigning scientific paradigm, could no longer account for proliferating anomalies. For some, the encounter with the Database may be described as an incessant assault of anomalies, perpetually deferring the establishment of a paradigm or compelling narrative. The result, I suspect, is generalized suspicion and reluctant indifference bordering on apathy, if not finally cynicism. 

Digitized relations, then, allow for the possibility of getting locked into an alternative reality. But they also create the possibility of descending into a state of permanent skepticism about public knowledge. Neither are conducive to a healthy public sphere.

Thus, as William Butler Yeats put it in “The Second Coming,” a poem published interestingly enough in November 1920, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

(13) While the events of January 6th were the result of a confluence of factors that were in large measure independent of digitization, the event itself could not have happened apart from the general context created by digitization. Consequently, I think it best to view the event, which cannot be said to be complete even as I write this, to be an early, if also particularly outrageous and violent actualization of a pattern of event that will become increasingly common barring any large scale and unforeseeable changes to our digital media environment. 

“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.”— Ivan Illich, “To Honor Jaques Ellul” (1993)

Consider the following words spoken by a character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 novel, The House of Seven Gables:

“Then there is electricity, the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence! … Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but a thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!”

A bit overwrought, perhaps, but it expresses something of the wonder, dread, and exhilaration which attended the growing understanding of electricity in the mid-19th century. Roughly the same historical context had already yielded Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with its imaginative debt to galvanism, the late eighteenth century fascination with the relationship between electricity and biological life.

Hawthorne’s language in this passage calls to mind the way, a century later, Marshall McLuhan would talk about electronic forms of communication. “With the arrival of electric technology,” McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media, “man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself.”

I would guess that this is the the kind of claim that makes McLuhan seem a bit too esoteric or even a little bizarre to some readers. But if we sit with it for just a moment, I think we’ll find it both fairly straightforward and also illuminating (no pun intended). The relationship between networks of electronic communication and the nervous system, which also communicates via electrical impulses, seem obvious enough, of course. McLuhan is suggesting that the networks of electronic communication extend the functions of the biological nervous system beyond the physical limits of the body.

So let’s take a look at a handful of places where McLuhan leans on the concept of electronic communication as an extension of the nervous system and see where this might lead us. Bear in mind that McLuhan is writing in the 1960s, and these observations predate the advent of the internet as we know it. McLuhan has radio and the television chiefly in mind, with the telegraph as a distant predecessor. He is, however, already thinking about how the computer will affect these networks of electronic media.

So here is McLuhan explaining the analogy a bit further: “It is a principle aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system. Our central nervous system is not merely an electric network, but it constitutes a single unified field of experience.”

In other words, global networks of electronic media augment our field of experience. Whereas the field of experience constituted by our biological nervous system was anchored to the body’s location in space and time, electronic media as an extension of the nervous system generates a field of experience that is potentially global in scope.

Emphasizing the speed electronic networks of communication, McLuhan noted that “when information moves at the speed of signals in the central nervous system, man is confronted with the obsolescence of all earlier forms of acceleration, such as road and rail. What emerges is a total field of inclusive awareness. The old patterns of psychic and social adjustment become irrelevant.”

The notion of a field of inconclusive awareness (or unified field of experience) is more or less the same dynamic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan noted when he made the following observation: “In the past, news that reached me from afar was old news. Now, with instantaneous transmission, all news is contemporary. I live in the present, surrounded by present time, whereas not so long ago, the present where I am was an island surrounded by the pasts that deepened with distance.”

Contrary to how he is sometimes (mis)read, McLuhan was not exactly sanguine about this state of affairs. “To put one's nerves outside, and one's physical organs inside the nervous system, or the brain,” McLuhan argued, “is to initiate a situation ... of dread.” But McLuhan was deeply interested in understanding rather than deriding the psychic consequences of these transformations occasioned by new technologies.

Note how he tells us in the paragraph I cited above that the “old patterns of psychic and social adjustment become irrelevant.”

There are two important parts to this claim, first the distinction between psychic and social, and, second, the idea that patterns of adjustment have become irrelevant. Regarding the latter, I take him to mean that whatever means of organizing and coping with information, stimuli, perceptions, etc. we deployed in the old age of pre-electronic media were now no longer up to the task.

Regarding the former, the distinction is a common one. We are accustomed to distinguishing between the individual and society. But I think McLuhan is also implying that we can speak of a social or collective consciousness in the same way that we might speak of a person’s consciousness. And that, along similar lines, we can speak about disorders of the corporate psyche in the same way that we might speak about disorders of the individual psyche.

I find it helpful to think along these lines by taking memory as a case in point. Clearly, we have our personal memories, and, certainly, even these memories have a social dimension. When we gather with old friends or family members, we might mutually spur each other to recollections of shared events that no one member of the group would have arrived at on their own. But I think it is meaningful to also speak about how societies remember (to borrow the title of Paul Connerton’s book on the theme).

A society’s memory is not merely the sum total of all the memories of the individuals that make up that society. In fact, in certain respects, it may be said to exist independently of individuals. It is true that such memories are not always subjectively realized in human consciousness, but they do not, for that reason, cease to effect the social body. We might even speak of such memories as suppressed or repressed, and, in this way, also potentially traumatic. Naturally, we do not look for these memories in structures of individual consciousness, but rather in the material structures of society: the layout of its cities, its architecture, its allocation of resources, its place names, etc.

So, for example, the layout of a city may continue to reflect decisions made decades earlier with overtly racist intent. Whether or not any individuals consciously remember such decisions, the material substrate carries the memory, as it were, just as the body often carries memories the mind has forgotten. And such memories continue to work themselves out in the life of the city, whether a critical mass of the city’s populace becomes consciously aware of them or not. In this way, we might even speak of them as traumatic memories. Only when they are brought to conscious awareness is there any hope of escaping their disordering consequences. But awareness is, I think, a double-edged sword. At least, we might say that awareness can in its own way become paralyzing for both individuals and society.

So, if we allow for the usefulness of the concept of collective consciousness we can entertain the idea that the consequences of the internet, for example, are felt not only privately but also collectively. This may seem like a banal observation, and may be it is. Of course the internet has collective and social consequences, it seems that we have been doing little else than talking about such consequences for the last several years. But I mean to especially emphasize the consequences felt at the level of the social psyche. As I put it a few months ago, I don't think we take seriously enough the idea that the internet functions as a kind of collective unconscious which is generating a form of collective madness.

Perhaps madness is not the best word, although, I don’t know, it seems like a credible case can be made on certain days. But let’s return to a few more of the comments McLuhan made before working our way to some kind of conclusion.

“In the electric age,” McLuhan observed, “when our central nervous system is technologically extended to the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action.” “It is no longer possible,” he added, “to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.”

Both the idea of participation in depth and that of a novel interest in the consequences of our action as a result of electronic media are recurring themes in McLuhan’s work. I think they make more sense when we try to imagine what instantaneous exposure to national and world events would have seemed like to people who had ordinarily only encountered such events through write-ups in newspapers. (McLuhan, I should note, was born in 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta.) It’s easy to forget the wonder of seeing events transpiring live from across the globe when most of us have only known a world in which this was a banal experience. In other words, I don’t think we are well-positioned to comprehend what it would have been like to suddenly feel as if the world were collapsing in on you because electronic media had now dramatically extended the reach of your perceptive apparatus.

Of course, you happen to be around 40 years of age, give or take a few years, you might be rather well positioned to comprehend how digital media built upon and augmented these developments, chiefly by allowing us to carry our extended nervous system around with us at all times. But there are important differences, of course. The age of pre-digital electronic media was also the age of mass, non-participatory media. Whereas electronic media in the pre-digital age generated a more or less passive experience of rather uniform streams of information, digital tools have wildly diversified our feeds and enabled us to generate a meta-level of self-aware discourse to overlay the field of unified experience that electronic media generated. Digital media has also generated massive and readily accessible databases of memory, which feed back into the layer of self-aware discourse. Indeed, in a metaphorical sense, we might say that if electronic media constituted an extension of the nervous system, digital media has extended memory and speech. Together, these three have generated a simulacrum of collective consciousness. Seen this light, we have become mad indeed, talking endlessly to ourselves and increasingly trapped within our own words, unable to rightly perceive the world around us and much less act effectively in it.

Consider, too, McLuhan’s claim that it is no longer possible to adopt an aloof or dissociated stance toward our experience. McLuhan seem to have had in mind the way that electronic media involves one affectively in the events they transmit. We might, for example, note, as McLuhan did, how television coverage of the war in Vietnam transformed the American experience of war. American society felt the war in a different sense than it had any previous war. But digital media does more to erode the ideals of disinterestedness, objectivity, and neutrality. It diversified the mass media feed that had previously generated a false sense of national consensus. Its expansive and searchable archives through light on every inconsistency and all hypocrisy which sustained the myth of disinterested neutrality on the part of experts, leaders, and institutions. It was observed frequently in the late 20th century that television especially made the aura of detached, formal dignity attending public figures, and the respect it ostensibly commanded, implausible. It did so by collapsing the distance between public figures and the masses, which was the prerequisite of such an aura. It rewarded more approachable, visually charismatic, and informal presentations of the self. Digital media has had an even more profound effect, which will become all the more evident once the light of the electric age is altogether extinguished.

McLuhan, I’ll note in passing, also understood the dynamics of the so-called attention economy long before the term was coined. “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems,” he warned, “to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.” “Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests,” he added, “is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation [!], or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.” In other words, we do not own our extended nervous system, nor our external memories or our augmented voices. And this only heightens the disorders of our collective consciousness. It generates a kind of paranoia about what we perceive, which in the meta-discourse of our collective mind takes the form of endless debates about tech platforms, free-speech, deep fakes, filter bubbles, etc.

McLuhan also argued that the act of extending one of capabilities is simultaneously an act of auto-amputation. “With the arrival of electric technology,” McLuhan wrote, “man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself.” “To the degree that this is so,” he continued, “it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.”

Further on, he claimed that “the principle of self-amputation as an immediate relief of strain on the central nervous system applies very readily to the origin of the media of communication from speech to computer.” Each new technology seeks to relieve the stresses induced by the earlier medium, but then serves only to create a more desperate situation requiring a further extension and subsequent acceleration. This dynamic seems self-evident at this point. Just make note of all the ways we turn to new technologies and techniques in order to compensate for the consequences of existing technologies. McLuhan is here anticipating, in rather more esoteric terms, an crucial element of Hartmut Rosa’s more recent theory of social acceleration, in which he describes a feedback loop whereby technical acceleration, achieved by both new techniques and new technologies, leads to the acceleration of social change, and the acceleration of the pace of life, which then calls for further technical acceleration.

Interestingly, McLuhan also claims that “self-amputation forbids self-recognition.” But I’m not sure this is quite right, at least not any longer. As McLuhan himself explained, we are, as of the mid-twentieth century at least, increasingly aware of the consequences of new technology. “Today it is the instant speed of electric information,” he observed, “that, for the first time, permits easy recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of change and development. The entire world, past and present, now reveals itself to us like a growing plant in an enormously accelerated movie.” And so, we may perhaps be able to recognize the self-amputation of our perceptive apparatus.

This possibility recalled, not surprisingly, something that Ivan Illich wrote in a talk honoring Jacques Ellul. Noting the degree to which we had taken leave of our senses, not our wits, mind you, but our more literal senses, sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste.

Notice the McLuhanesque phrasing when he notes that “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.”

But here was the cure, as far as Illich could see it:

“It appears to me that we cannot neglect the disciplined recovery, an asceticism, of a sensual praxis in a society of technogenic mirages. This reclaiming of the senses, this promptitude to obey experience, the chaste look that the Rule of St. Benedict opposes to the cupiditas oculorum (lust of the eyes), seems to me to be the fundamental condition for renouncing that technique which sets up a definitive obstacle to friendship.”

News and Resources​

* Farmville is shutting down after a ten-year run. This piece, leaning on Ian Bogost, looks at how the game set the pace for the much of the internet in the last decade. “The game encouraged people to draw in friends as resources to both themselves and the service they were using, Mr. Bogost said. It gamified attention and encouraged interaction loops in a way that is now being imitated by everything from Instagram to QAnon, he said.‘The internet itself is this bazaar of obsessive worlds where the goal is to bring you back to it in order to do the thing it offers, in order to get your attention and serve ads against it or otherwise derive value from that activity,’ he said.”

* 30 “Bug” drones delivered to the British Army.

* “Limits to prediction: pre-read.” For a course taught this fall by Arvind Narayanan and Matt Salganik (made available by Narayanan):“Is everything predictable given enough data and powerful algorithms? Researchers and companies have made many optimistic claims about the ability to predict phenomena ranging from crimes to earthquakes using data-driven, statistical methods. These claims are widely believed by the public and policy makers. However, even a cursory review of the literature reveals that state-of-the-art predictive accuracies fall well short of expectations.”

* “Principled Artificial Intelligence: Mapping Consensus in Ethical and Rights-Based Approaches to Principles for AI” (January 2020): “The rapid spread of artificial intelligence (AI) systems has precipitated a rise in ethical and human rights-based frameworks intended to guide the development and use of these technologies. Despite the proliferation of these ‘AI principles,’ there has been little scholarly focus on understanding these efforts either individually or as contextualized within an expanding universe of principles with discernible trends. “To that end, this white paper and its associated data visualization compare the contents of thirty-six prominent AI principles documents side-by-side. This effort uncovered a growing consensus around eight key thematic trends: privacy, accountability, safety and security, transparency and explainability, fairness and non-discrimination, human control of technology, professional responsibility, and promotion of human values.”

* Stanford Medical Center came under fire this month for not having prioritized its front-line workers for vaccine distribution. Clearly, the whole matter has been highly contentious, and my aim in linking this story is not to stake out a moral position on the question of vaccine distribution. Rather, it is to highlight how hospital administrators took refuge in “the algorithm made me do it” rationalization. When you outsources human judgment to algorithmic process you also outsource (or at least distribute) responsibility, which will be all too convenient to some.

* “Singularity Vs. Daoist Robots”: An interview with Yuk Hui, a Chinese philosopher of technology, which serves as a helpful introduction to his work. One goal for 2021 is to become better acquainted with Hui’s work, which was first brought to my attention, if I remember correctly, by Carl Mitcham. More recently, Adam Elkus recommended his work and this interview as a good starting point. I believe that Hui also plays an important role in Alan Jacobs’s latest essay for The New Atlantis, which is still behind a paywall.

* “The mechanical monster and discourses of fear and fascination in the early history of the computer”: “This discourse established a clear dichotomy of fear and fascination: fears of a loss of autonomy and usurpation of labour, and fascination with a machine that possessed unlimited possibilities. What made the computer truly a mechanical monster was its hybridity, which was perhaps more present in representations of the computer than in the mechanics of the technology itself. It represented both the technological sublime and an apocalyptic dystopia at the same time. Through the combination of existential threat, categorical impurity, and exotic fascination, the computer emerged as a contemporary image of the mechanical monster.”

* “A Forgotten Pinhole Camera Made from a Beer Can Captures the Longest Exposure Photograph Ever”

* Marshall McLuhan: “Anything I talk about is almost certainly to be something I’m resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button.”

* This recent release from Theodore Porter looks interesting: The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900.

Re-framings

— Wendell Berry, almost certainly channelling Ivan Illich, in “Health is Membership” (1994):

People seriously interested in health will finally have to question our society's long-standing goals of convenience and effortlessness. What is the point of ‘labor saving’ if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health?

We are now pretty clearly involved in a crisis of health, one of the wonders of which is its immense profitability both to those who cause it and to those who propose to cure it. That the illness may prove incurable, except by catastrophe, is suggested by our economic dependence on it. Think, for example, of how readily our solutions become problems and our cures pollutants. To cure one disease, we need another. The causes, of course, are numerous and complicated, but all of them, I think, can be traced back to the old idea that our bodies are not very important except when they give us pleasure (usually, now, to somebody's profit) or when they hurt (now, almost invariably, to somebody's profit).

— From Wendell Berry’s 2012 collection of Sabbath poems:

X

In memory: Ivan Illich

The creek flows full over the rocksafter lightning, thunder, and heavy rain.Its constant old song rises underthe still unblemished green, new leavesof old sycamores that have so farwithstood the hardest flows. And thisis the flux, the thrust, the slow songof the great making, the world neverat rest, still being madeof the ever less and less that we,for the time being, make of it. 

The Conversation

I have one more newsletter project that I am working on right now, and that is to collect the essays I’ve written throughout the year into one document, which I’ll make available in a few days. I’m doing this mostly for my sake, but perhaps some of you might want to download the document, too. So you can look for that next week.

Other than that, you can look for the newsletter to continue in the new year with another installment out by the middle of January. In the new year, I hope to also get back to my conversations with Ivan Illich’s friends and colleagues, his co-conspirators. The online Illich reading group will also resume with David Cayley’s, Rivers North of the Future, which is essentially the transcript of a long interview Cayley conducted with Illich in the late 1990s. (The reading group is pretty much the only paid subscriber-only content.)Some of you will be coming to the end of your year’s subscription in the next couple of weeks. Through the time warp that was 2020, it seems like the launch of the newsletter was both just yesterday and a decade ago. In any case, I hope you’ve found The Convivial Society valuable enough to continue your support. (Thanks to you, the newsletter is apparently holding down the 25th spot under Substack’s Culture tag.)

Some of you have written to tell me that you would appreciate it if the newsletter had a more robust community-building dimension to it. At least that’s how I would summarize the comments. I have continued to think about this, and I hope to find some ways to make that possible. In truth, I suspect that the chief requirement would be more time on time on my part in the work of moderating and engagement, and that’s going to be a bit of a challenge. Nonetheless, I think we can make somethings happen on this front, so stay tuned.

Happy new year, to all for whom that applies. I wish I could say that I was optimistic about the coming year, especially given all that 2020 has been. But, alas, I can’t quite. Nonetheless, may we find the right measure of courage, resilience, humility, generosity, and even gratitude to face whatever the new year will bring. And may we work, in whatever way we are able, for the health of our communities, remembering, as Wendell Berry has put it, that “a community in the fullest sense—a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.”

Cheers,

Michael

“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, “The Technological Order” (1962)

In case you’ve ever wondered, I don’t exactly have a grand research project or even a clearly defined area of interest. You might, in fact, should I ever have occasion to bore you with the details, be surprised to learn just how haphazardly I stumbled into writing about technology. Several years ago now, I reflected a bit on the work of tech criticism, by which, of course, I mean not a reflexive hostility to technology but rather the effort to think well about its meaning and consequences. The gist of it was that, generally speaking, the tech critic thinks and writes for the sake of something other than technology itself, whether that be, for example, the environment, the just society, or the good life. And this is as it should be. Technology is properly a means toward an end, and we get into trouble precisely when it becomes an end in itself.

My writing, I suspect, probably reflects this rather unfocused interest in matters technological, cultural, and moral. Insofar as I have a “thing,” however, I’d say that it is an interest in exploring and applying the work of an older, now mostly forgotten tradition, loosely defined, of technology criticism. It’s an effort I once called, and still occasionally refer to as the recovery of the tech critical canon. If it ever seems that I am saying something new or different, it is more likely the case that what I am saying is simply a variation on some older theme and that it appears novel or original only to the degree that it has been forgotten or ignored.

My explorations along these lines tend to alternate among different strands of this tradition. At times the media ecological strand is top of mind, and the work of scholars like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Neil Postman becomes more prominent in my thinking. If you’ve been reading the newsletter of late, for the better part of this year really, you already know that my attention has more recently been mostly on the work of Ivan Illich, one of the few critics to whom I’d attach the epithet “radical,” suggesting one who gets to root of things. The names of others come readily to mind—Lewis Mumford and George Grant among the dead and Albert Borgmann, Wendell Berry, Carl Mitcham, and Langdon Winner among the living. Hannah Arendt, while not ordinarily thought of as a philosopher of technology, strictly speaking, has also served me well in this regard. 

Of late, I’ve had occasion to turn again to the work of Jacques Ellul, the 20th century French scholar, lay theologian, and sometime member of the French Resistance during the Second World War. Ellul was honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by the World Holocaust Remembrance Center for his labors on behalf of Jews fleeing the Nazi regime. While the homage to Illich’s notion of conviviality is evident in the title of this newsletter, I also intended to evoke the title of Ellul’s best known work, The Technological Society.

Of course, it is not that I think Ellul, Illich, or any of the other individuals I’ve mentioned were infallible in their judgments or that they foresaw all of the particular challenges we now face, but I do continue to be struck by the prescience of their analysis and the enduring relevance of their insights. I should add, of course, that I do highly value the work of contemporary writers, many of whom I read with considerable profit. The older critics, however, do have one decided advantage, and that is the advantage of not taking for granted the techno-social configuration that is more or less our default cultural setting and which thus inevitably shapes our thinking about technology. To be clear, this is not necessarily a matter of their keen insight or clear vision, it is, in large measure, simply a matter of chronological vantage point. They came up in a different age, so their experiences allowed them to perceive aspects of the modern technological project that we are more likely to miss if only because we have no similar point of contrast in our experience to illuminate the distinctive contours of our own age. What I’m suggesting, though, is that their work can become just such a point of contrast for us. At least, it has served that function for me (and I hope, by extension, for you as well). Many of their categories and frameworks remain useful, and they point us to alternative ways of being with technology. Hardly a day goes by in which I don’t find occasion to deploy the work of one of these thinkers to make sense of present circumstances. 

As one example, while reading through Ellul recently, I was reminded of his discussion of what he called “technical humanism,” and it caught my attention because of the recent discussions of both the documentary The Social Dilemma and the Center for Humane Technology with which the film is associated. Several individuals connected with the center, former Google employee Tristan Harris most prominent among them, appear in the documentary about the social ills of social media. 

In my feeds, people responded to the The Social Dilemma, which came out in October, in much the same way that they responded to the Center when it was first launched a few years back, which is to say with more than a healthy dose of skepticism and frustration. As far as I can tell, a good bit of the frustration stemmed from the fact that the documentary, and to a similar degree the work of the center, ignored the labors of contemporary academics and activists, who had been raising the alarm about social media companies long before the wayward technologists experienced their ostensible moral awakenings. Fair enough, I say. But then I immediately think about how Ellul and company were likewise marginalized and even scorned, often by contemporary scholars, who were all too ready to dismiss their work. But this is merely a self-indulgent digression—back to what Ellul had to say about technical humanism. 

Writing in The Technological Society, which was first published in 1954, Ellul noted that “the claims of the human being have thus come to assert themselves to a greater and greater degree in the development of techniques; this is known as 'humanizing the techniques.’” But Ellul, who had up to that point in his book gone to great lengths to demonstrate how technique had thoroughly captured society, was not impressed.

Ellul defined technique as (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” Ellul understood that what mattered most about modern technology was not any one artifact or system, but rather a way of being in the world. This form of life or fundamental disposition precedes, sustains, and is reinforced by the material technological order. 

So, Ellul went on, if we seek the “real reason” for humanizing technology “we hear over and over again that there is ‘something out of line’ in the technical system, an insupportable state of affairs for a technician. A remedy must be found." 

But, Ellul invites us to ask, “What is out of line?” “According to the usual superficial analysis,” Ellul answers, “it is man that is amiss. The technician thereupon tackles the problem as he would any other. But he considers man only as an object of technique and only to the degree that man interferes with the proper function of the technique.”

In other words, he continued, “Technique reveals its essential efficiency in discerning that man has a sentimental and moral life. These factors are, for technique, human and subjective; but if means can be found to act upon them, to rationalize them and bring them into line, they need not be a technical drawback. Of course, man as such does not count.”

This humanizing of technology presumes the existing techno-social status quo and ultimately serves its interests. It only amounts to a recalibration of the person so that they may fit all the more seamlessly into the operations of the existing techno-economic order of things. That techno-economic order is itself rarely questioned; it is taken mostly for granted, the myth of inevitability covering a multitude of sins.

I’m not sure we can say that contemporary proponents of humane technology reason precisely by this logic. But neither do I think that they avoid ending up in much the same place, practically speaking. Consider the proliferation of devices and apps, some of which the Center for Humane Technology promotes, which are designed to gather data about everything from our steps to our sleep habits in order to help us optimize, maximize, manage, or otherwise finely calibrate our bodies and our minds. The calibration becomes necessary because the rhythms and patterns of our industrialized and digitized world have proven to be inhospitable to human well-being, while, nonetheless, alleviating certain forms of suffering. One might say that while, for many, although certainly not all, modern technological society has managed to supply various material needs, it has been less adept at meeting many of our non-material needs. And it would be a serious mistake to imagine that only our material needs mattered. So now the same techno-economic forces present themselves as the solution to the problems they have generated. In Ellul’s terms, the answer to problems generated by technique is the application of ever more sophisticated and invasive techniques. The more general technological milieu is never challenged, and there’s very little by way of a robust account of what human flourishing might look like independent of the present technological milieu. 

Ellul also has little time for the “professional humanists” who cheer on such solutions. “This procedure suits the literati, moralists, and philosophers who are concerned about the human situation,” he writes, “Unfortunately, it is a historical fact that this shouting of humanism always comes after the technicians have intervened; for a true humanism, it ought to have occurred before. This is nothing more than the traditional psychological maneuver called rationalizing.”

“It seems impossible to speak of a technical humanism,” Ellul concluded after some further discussion of the matter. It was more likely, in his view, that human beings would simply be forced to adapt to the shape of the technological system. “The whole stock of ideologies, feelings, principles, beliefs, etc. that people continue to carry around and which are derived from traditional situations,” these Ellul believed would only be conceived as unfortunate idiosyncrasies to be eliminated so that the techno-economic system may operate ever more efficiently. “It is necessary (and this is the ethical choice!) to liquidate all such holdovers,” he continued sarcastically, “and to lead humanity to a perfect operational adaptation that will bring about the greatest possible benefit from the technique. Adaptation becomes a moral criterion.”

One is reminded here of how tech enthusiast Robert Scoble recently tweeted his thanks to a man killed in a Tesla accident a couple of years back for his sacrifice, which, Scoble explained, helped improve the auto-pilot’s functioning. The tweet now appears to have been deleted. Scoble, who recorded his video message while riding with his children in a Tesla by the site of the accident, got a fair amount of heat for it. It is possible to imagine someone making the case for the inevitable costs of technological progress in a less callous if no less objectionable fashion, of course, and without also presuming to speak for the family of the victim. What struck me was the way Scoble spoke with almost religious fervor, as if technological progress was a transcendent value for which the sacrifice of a mere human life was an ultimately negligible price to pay. Indeed, one which the victim, unwitting as he no doubt was, ought to have been grateful to make. It is was not enough, it would seem, to accept the tragedy. One must celebrate it.

Later, in the midst of the backlash, he tweeted, “Twitter is rough tonight but I have sailed rougher seas. People never understand the future at first.” One begins to imagine why Illich, when he was once asked to forecast the future, sharply replied, “To hell with the future! It’s a man-eating idol.”

Returning once more to Ellul, later in a 1983 article about ethics and technology, he also recognized the problem which still plagues us but that few seem to acknowledge: those who call for ethical technology presume that human beings “must create a good use for technique or impose ends on it, but [are] always neglecting to specify which human beings.”

“Is the ‘who’ not important?” Ellul asked. “Is technique able to be mastered by just any passer-by, every worker, some ordinary person? Is this person the politician? The public at large? The intellectual and technician? Some collectivity? Humanity as a whole? For the most part politicians cannot grasp technique, and each specialist can understand an infinitesimal portion of the technical universe, just as each citizen only makes use of an infinitesimal piece of the technical apparatus. How could such a person possibly modify the whole?”

Needless to say, the situation has hardly improved on this score in the last 30+ years. In fact, technological systems have become ever more complex and our governing institutions more dysfunctional.

It’s worth noting that Ellul’s work was often dismissed by later scholars precisely because it attempted to consider “the whole,” to speak about technological society, to make judgements about the total techno-social package. This approach was rejected in favor of granular analysis of technological development, which avoided sweeping claims about something as vague as “the technological order.” This makes a certain amount of sense, and it has yielded valuable insights. But it came at the cost of missing the proverbial forest for the trees, ignoring larger patterns and cumulative effects. The contingencies evident at a micro-level of analysis compound into culturally formative currents. The complete technological milieu has a total effect that is greater than its constituent parts, just as the total effect of a work of fiction cannot be properly assessed merely by tabulating literary devices and figures of speech. And these effects include shifting assumptions, new habits and dispositions, the dissolving and reconstitution of the plausibility structures sustaining political values, the redrawing of the horizons of expectation and desire, restructurings of the social order, the reshaping of our imagination, and a reorientation of our experience of the world. None of which will be apparent from a social history of the refrigerator, however interesting such a tale might be.

Now, while readers of The Technological Society would be forgiven for assuming that Ellul was overly fatalistic, providing neither a path forward nor any measure of hope, that was not exactly true. It’s just that Ellul intended for readers to engage the whole of his corpus (over 40 books!) and read his sociological works in dialectic tension with his theological reflections, in which Kierkegaard and the Swiss theologian Karl Barth loom large. One might even say that, in this expectation, Ellul was, in fact, overly optimistic! In any case, he did make an argument for the value freedom as it arises out of a condition of perceived necessity presented by contemporary technology. It was precisely against the background of necessity that freedom could exist.

To one interviewer he said, “I would say two things to explain the tenor of my writings. I would say, along with Marx, that as long as men believe that things will resolve themselves, they will do nothing on their own. But when the situation appears to be absolutely deadlocked and tragic, then men will try and do something.” (As odd as it may seem to some contemporary American readers, it could be said that Marx and Jesus where the two pillars of Ellul’s thought.)

“Thus it is,” Ellul went on to explain,

that I have written to describe things as they are and as they will continue to develop as long as man does nothing, as long as he does not intervene. In other words, if man rests passive in the face of technique, of the state, then these things will exist as I have described them. If man does decide to act, he doesn’t have many possibilities of intervention but some do continue to exist. And he can change the course of social evolution. Consequently, it’s a kind of challenge that I pose to men. It’s not a question of metaphysical fatalism.”

Seen in this light, Ellul’s work was an effort not simply to instruct but also to provoke. And it is to provoke us toward the realization of a measure of freedom available only when we fully reckon with the reality that opposes it.

I would only add this note in closing. We ought to understand freedom as having two dimensions: freedom from and freedom for. Too often we fail to consider that freedom is fully realized only when it is conceived not only as a freedom from restraint, but also as a freedom to fulfill a deeper calling toward which freedom itself is but a penultimate means. The two are related but not identical. What Ellul would have us see is that the modern technological order tends to promise the former while simultaneously eroding the latter.

News and Resources​

* An introduction and invitation to the work of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (whose work I’ve found personally stimulating as I have thought about technology over the years): “Perceiver and perceived, then, are drawn into the cohesion of life. In the posthumous collection The Visible and the Invisible (1964), Merleau-Ponty wrote of the shared ‘interworld’ where ‘our gazes cross and our perceptions overlap’; it is here, he says, that the ‘intertwining’ of your life with other people’s lives is revealed. Far from a world of detached egos, or one of mere objects, what we encounter through embodied perception is this crisscrossing of lateral, overlapping relations with other people, other creatures and other things – an expressive space that exists between lived bodies. It’s not that we are all ‘one’, but that we inhabit a world in which, to quote the philosopher Glen Mazis, ‘things, people, creatures intertwine, interweave, yet do not lose the wonder that each is each and yet not without the others’.”

* A couple of short primers on Ellul I usually recommend. One by Samuel Matlack at The New Atlantis and the other by Doug Hill in the Boston Globe.

* Here is Carl Mitcham’s “Three Ways of Being-With Technology” alluded to in the essay above and from which the chart was taken.

* If I may be forgiven for recommending my own work, this was the first essay I wrote for The New Atlantis a couple of years back. It covers some of the same ground as this newsletter. This is one of those pieces, which, having looked back on it some time later, I still feel pretty good about. “We fail to ask, on a more fundamental level, if there are limits appropriate to the human condition, a scale conducive to our flourishing as the sorts of creatures we are. Modern technology tends to encourage users to assume that such limits do not exist; indeed, it is often marketed as a means to transcend such limits. We find it hard to accept limits to what can or ought to be known, to the scale of the communities that will sustain abiding and satisfying relationships, or to the power that we can harness and wield over nature. We rely upon ever more complex networks that, in their totality, elude our understanding, and that increasingly require either human conformity or the elimination of certain human elements altogether. But we have convinced ourselves that prosperity and happiness lie in the direction of limitlessness. ‘On the contrary,’ wrote Wendell Berry in a 2008 Harper’s article, ‘our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible.’”

* On the mystery of that Gatwick drones: “Most people with any interest in the Gatwick drone have already made their mind up. Either the initial sighting was a mistake, and subsequent sightings were the result of mass panic or confirmation bias, as proved by the technical unfeasibility of what was described. Or there was a drone, and the same technical challenges are evidence that it was an extremely sophisticated attack, one that we should be wary of dismissing.”

* A discussion of some of the main themes in the work of Walter Ong, “Looking Is Not Enough: Reflections on Walter J. Ong and Media Ecology” (h/t to Mike Plugh). This in particular merits reflection: “Ong argued that all technological mediation requires some level of interpretation. Where face-to-face interaction presented one interiority to another, the technologies of rhetoric added a distortion, so that people had to learn how to understand rhetorical products—at least according to Plato and Aristotle. Written texts demand more interpretation: what do these marks mean? This interpretation occurs both at the level of the code itself and at the level of the text. Printed texts include more helps to interpretation: type face, type style, page arrangement, the attention to visual patterns that influence thought, and so on. Products of secondary orality demand more, not less, interpretation since they involve a deception—the hiding of the text on which they depend. Digital materials, as being yet more abstract, require more interpretation. And so it goes. In Ong’s titular phrase, ‘Hermeneutic Forever.’”Bonus: Here is audio of a talk Walter Ong gave in 1972.

* A tryptic: 1. “How Trees Made Us Human.” 2. “The Social Life of Forests.” 3. Alan Jacobs’s recently re-designed site, “The Gospel of the Trees.”From the second piece: “Although plants are obviously alive, they are rooted to the earth and mute, and they rarely move on a relatable time scale; they seem more like passive aspects of the environment than agents within it. Western culture, in particular, often consigns plants to a liminal space between object and organism. It is precisely this ambiguity that makes the possibility of plant intelligence and society so intriguing — and so contentious.” Yet not one mention of ents!

* Article by Jacques Ellul titled “The Technological Order.” Published in 1962, two years before The Technological Society would appear in English. Useful introduction to his work. “Since Technique has become the new milieu, all social phenomena are situated in it. It is incorrect to say that economics, politics, and the sphere of the cultural are influenced or modified by Technique; they are rather situated in it, a novel situation modifying all traditional social concepts. Politics, for example, is not modified by Technique as one factor among others which operate upon it; the political world is today defined through its relation to the technological society. Traditionally, politics formed a part of a larger social whole; at the present the converse is the case.”

* On “the peril of persuasion in the Big Tech age.” This article focuses on the dangers posed by novel digital technologies of persuasion, chiefly that citizens may be manipulated and misled by finely tuned and targeted misinformation. Fine as far as it goes, but it seems to me that the more significant consequence of the digital media environment will be that the ideal of a public sphere ordered around persuasion will itself become implausible to a growing number of people. The divide will be between those who continue earnestly presuming such an ideal and those willing to take advantage of such earnestness for their own ends.

* Long-ish piece on why time management is ruining our lives. I suspect most of you reading this don’t need to be convinced of the titular claim. Here’s one brief excerpt:“The allure of the doctrine of time management is that, one day, everything might finally be under control. Yet work in the modern economy is notable for its limitlessness. And if the stream of incoming emails is endless, Inbox Zero can never bring liberation: you’re still Sisyphus, rolling his boulder up that hill for all eternity – you’re just rolling it slightly faster.”Now here is Ellul from the essay linked just above this one: “It is useless to hope that the use of techniques of organization will succeed in compensating for the effects of techniques in general; or that the use of psycho-sociological techniques will assure mankind ascendancy over the technical phenomenon.” Part of the problem, of course, is that technique itself forms our environment and shapes our moral imagination. The appeal of discreet instances of technique lies in their promise of fulfilling the logic of Technique writ large, which goes by many names, such as Productivity or Efficiency. But these are at best means to an end that have been taken as ends in themselves. We have no clear sense of where we ought to go, but we’re sure that we ought to be getting there faster and more efficiently.

* On “the coming war on the hidden algorithms that trap people in poverty”:”Low-income individuals bear the brunt of the shift toward algorithms. They are the people most vulnerable to temporary economic hardships that get codified into consumer reports, and the ones who need and seek public benefits. Over the years, Gilman has seen more and more cases where clients risk entering a vicious cycle. ‘One person walks through so many systems on a day-to-day basis,’ she says. ‘I mean, we all do. But the consequences of it are much more harsh for poor people and minorities.’”

* Shannon Mattern on the cultural history of plexiglass: ”Plexi pairs visual access with physical distance in order to sanction exchange: the handover of money or goods, the serving of food, the verification of identity and confirmation of action, the transmission of messages (albeit through somewhat muffled voices and blurred facial expressions). The presence of plexi prompts us to suspend our fear of contamination while we engage in necessary transactions. Its assurances, even if partly a matter of ‘security theater,’ can serve vital cultural and economic functions: they keep us shopping, going out to eat, attending class, congregating at political rallies. But it is also through plexiglass that Americans have, for decades, been negotiating social tensions and civil unrest.”

Re-framings

— From the conclusion of Xiaowei Wang’s reflections on factory farming:

Life outside may not always be grandiose, visible, or permanent, but as the constant failed attempts at biosecurity show, nothing is steady or stable. As COVID-19 continues, from afar I get glimpses of the village on social media—while my life in the city has been suspended, they continue to plant rice, raise chickens, and make rice wine. Life outside requires a focus on mutual care; a vocabulary of tending to the future that we increasingly hear calls for; a kind of thoughtfulness that asks us to attend to the present moment and the communities we are accountable to. Life outside requires us, as urban dwellers, to think outside, too—outside ourselves and our cities. To think of life outside, beyond containment, is an experiment in imagining new forms of security beyond the kind shaped by market forces.

— I suspect that many of you already knew about the 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi, which is the Hopi word for “life out of balance.” I did not, until recently, when I also learned that the director, Godfrey Reggio, was inspired by the work of Ellul and Illich. My thanks to Madhu Prakash for pointing me to it. Here is a short interview with Reggio about the film. From the credits:

The Conversation

Folks, it’s been quite a year. I’ve got nothing else to say for it presently, except that it is almost behind us. The Convivial Society, having lumbered through the last part of this year, will enter its second year with renewed focus and perhaps a few tweaks. More about that next time.

As I usually include links to things I’ve written here, so here’s one to recent essay on Ivan Illich: “The Skill of Hospitality.” Also, it was a year ago that I put together a collection of my writing on the old blog, which you can find here.

Finally, I’ve recently found a few email replies to the newsletter in my spam folder. This has happened before, but it’s been awhile and I’ve been remiss in reviewing what’s been going in there. So, I’ll do my best to get back to those in the coming days, although it will likely be slow-going through the holidays.

My best to all of you. May this season bring you and yours a measure of joy.

Cheers,

Michael

You can listen to an audio version of the essay by clicking Play above.

Jane Jacobs opened her mid-twentieth century classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, with a discussion of the peculiar nature of cities. In the course of this discussion, she devoted all of three chapters to a single aspect of city life: the uses of sidewalks. I’ve always found the second of these three chapters especially interesting. In it, Jacobs examines the myriad incidental contacts generated among people who daily make use of a shared sidewalk—the nods, the smiles, the brief conversations, etc.

Let’s think for a bit about Jacobs’s analysis and take the sidewalk as an example of what I recently called the material infrastructure of social life, and, more specifically, as a space of public rather than private consequence. As Jacobs observes, the point of “the social life of city sidewalks” is precisely that it is public*, bringing together, as she puts it, “people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion and in most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion.”

In other words, Jacobs is describing the multiple, usually brief and inconsequential, contacts people who live on the same city street will have with one another over an extended period of time. These contacts are mostly with people who are not necessarily part of our circle of friends, but who, because of these contacts, become something more than mere strangers. And that seems like a crucial, often ignored category because it informs, as Jacobs recognizes, whatever vague understanding we have of the public writ large.

Jacobs acknowledges, of course, that, taken separately, these contacts amount to nothing, but the sum of such contacts, or their absence, becomes absolutely consequential. At stake, in her view, is nothing less than the trust that is essential to any functioning civic body.

“The trust of a city street,” she writes, “is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop ….”

Again, as Jacobs explains, most of these contacts are “utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all. The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level—most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands […]—is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.”

“The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street,” she insists. And, what’s more, “Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized.” (I’ll trust you to fill in the Illichian digression on that last observation!)

In the course of her analysis of the little publics sustained by the city sidewalks, she also offers an astute observation about the nature of suburban social life. As a built environment, the suburbs make it very difficult to cultivate the casual acquaintanceship generated by the countless contacts that inevitably arise from the shared city sidewalk. In a suburban setting, you either invite people into your home or, with vanishingly few exceptions, they remain strangers altogether, and Jacobs is realistic about how few people we are likely to invite into our homes. The materially induced tendency, then, is to know relatively well those who are most like us and, those who are not, hardly at all. What is lost, we might say, is the category of what Aristotle called civic friendship.

All of which raises the question: From where exactly will “a feeling for the public identity of people” arise? How might “a web of public respect and trust” be fostered? We’ll come back to that in a bit, but first let’s consider how these dynamics have been impacted by our contemporary technological milieu.

On this score, I’m particularly struck by the degree to which we are encouraged to displace or outsource the sort of micro-interactions, which generate the human contacts Jacobs finds so valuable. Sometimes this is a matter of unintended consequences; sometimes it is a matter of intentional design and expressed preferences.

As an example of the former, consider one unintended consequence of GPS. We tend to think of GPS displacing the paper map, which is true enough but not quite the whole story. The paper map was not the only method we used to find our way when we were in need of directions. We were just as likely to ask someone for directions to where we wanted to get. And, if it happened that I lost my way or that my directions proved inadequate, I’d likely pull over or stop someone to ask directions. In other words, in circumstances where we would have had occasion to interact with another person, we now turn to a device.

As an example of the latter, consider the move toward automated tellers, online banking, or self-checkouts in retail spaces. In these cases, a fairly common opportunity for a brief human interaction has been lost. The proliferation of home delivery services and online retail also promise to relieve us of the need to venture out into the spaces that previously presented us with opportunities for casual human contacts. We’ve tended to frame these developments with questions about employment and labor, which are perfectly legitimate frames of analysis, but Jacobs encourages us to imagine a different kind of cost, which is also much harder, if not impossible to quantify.

Consider as well how digital devices confront us with the subtle temptations of telepresence. We have the capacity and perhaps the proclivity to take partial leave of our immediate surroundings, including a tacit permission to forego the sorts of contacts Jacobs discussed by presenting as one who is presently conducting business elsewhere or otherwise preoccupied.

In fact, the trajectory toward a situation where we find ourselves ensconced within relatively comfortable zones of affinity, familiar at first hand chiefly with those who are mostly like us, is longstanding. One might see it, as Richard Thomas did in a manner not altogether dissimilar from Jacobs’s analysis of the sidewalk, in the architectural shift from front porches to back patios, and all that such a shift entails and implies about our social lives.

As Thomas observed, “Nineteenth century families were expected to be public and fought to achieve their privacy. Part of the sense of community that often characterized the nineteenth-century village resulted from the forms of social interaction that the porch facilitated. Twentieth-century man has achieved the sense of privacy in his patio, but in doing so he has lost part of his public nature which is essential to strong attachments and a deep sense of belonging or feelings of community.” The chef’s kiss comes with the advent of the doorbell camera, which casts our gaze into the public as a mode of surveillance rather than civic interest.

It’s not that any one instance of these cases is significant or necessarily “wrong.” Rather, as Jacobs suggested, it is the case that they become consequential in the aggregate. In other words, we should be attentive to the sort of people we become as a result of the mundane social liturgies, engendered by our material environment, which we daily enact with little or no reflection.

I should grant that Jacobs had in view not merely chance interactions, but recurring encounters with people who shared a city block over time and thus would gradually become familiar to one another. For those who have not lived on a city block in this manner, of course, these recently outsourced human interactions are simply a further attenuation of our public lives, that is to say of our lives insofar as they intersect with those who are not a part of our private circles.

But let’s return to the question of how we imagine the public when we have so severely constricted the contacts we might have had with those who are not part of these circles. What most interested me in Jacobs’s discussion was her insistence that these casual sidewalk contacts were mostly with people with whom we do not ordinarily desire any deeper relationship. Given the material structure of suburban life, people tend to operate with two categories of relationships: those they know relatively well and those who remain strangers altogether. There is little or no space in between. And, naturally, those in the class of people we know relatively well would tend to be more like us than not. All of which is to say that some of our most pronounced “filter bubbles” emerged long before the advent of social media.

What matters here is that we will still operate with some mental model of the other. We will still conjure up some generalizations about the people who are not like us. When we enjoy a high frequency of contacts with the public such that some of them become more than mere strangers although less than friends, then our conception of the public is anchored in particular flesh and blood human beings, thus, in theory, tethering our imaginings more closely to some approximation of reality.

However, when we lack such contacts, when our experience of others too readily divides into friends and strangers, then our image of the public tends toward abstraction, a blank screen onto which it may be tempting to project our fears, suspicions, and prejudices or, perhaps more benignly and naively, our own values and assumptions.

But the situation seems to be a bit worse than that. It’s not just that we lack the sidewalk as Jacobs experienced it, or some similar public space, and are thus left with a wholly inchoate image of the public beyond our affinity groups. It is, rather, that our digital media feeds and timelines have become our sidewalk, our trivial and incidental contacts, very different indeed from those Jacobs observed, transpire on digital platforms. This has turned out to be, how shall we say, a suboptimal state of affairs.

The problems are manifold. We are tempted to mistake our experience of a digital media platform for the full breadth of reality. While in-person contacts tend to be governed by operative social norms, digital platforms foster a comparatively high degree of irresponsible and anti-social behavior. Untethered by civic friendships, our image of the public may be filled in for us by those who have an expressed interest in sowing division and fear. Relatedly, and perhaps most significantly, social trust craters on digital media. It would be hard to overstate the damage done by the weaponization of bad faith at the scale made possible by digital media. It's far worse than the mere proliferation of lies. It undermines the very plausibility of a politics sustained by speech. And it is utterly untouched by our precious fact-checking.

In short, our most public digital sidewalks tend toward open hostility, rancor, and strife. Little wonder, then, that so many are fleeing to what might think of as the digital suburbs, relatively closed, private, and sometimes paywalled spaces we share with our friends and the generally like-minded. But I suspect this will do little for the public sphere that we will still share with those who remain outside of our circles, be they digital or analog, and who do not share our values and assumptions.

Civic virtues, as it turns out, do not spring up out of nowhere. All virtues and vices arise from habits engendered by practices, which, in turn, reflect the material infrastructure of our social lives. Right now it seems as if that infrastructure is increasingly calibrated to undermine the possibility of civic friendship. Which brings us back, once again, to Ivan Illich staking his hope on the practice of hospitality: “A practice of hospitality recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand. On the other hand radiating out for possible community, for rebirth of community.”

* It’s worth noting Sara Hendren’s comment in What Can A Body Do? on Jacobs’s discussion of the sidewalk and the unstated assumptions about accessibility: “But you can only see and be seen, only get into and out of the shared public of life of the world, if you can get down the sidewalk in the first place.”

“To be sane in a mad timeis bad for the brain, or worsefor the heart.” — Wendell Berry, “The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment”

I’ve been reading a fair amount about the meaning and significance of place over the last several weeks, and in the course of that reading I encountered an observation made almost in passing by the renowned Chinese-American geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan. “In the past,” Tuan wrote, “news that reached me from afar was old news. Now, with instantaneous transmission, all news is contemporary. I live in the present, surrounded by present time, whereas not so long ago, the present where I am was an island surrounded by the pasts that deepened with distance.”

I find historical observations of this sort instructive. They need not be profound, and, upon reflection, they tend to have an “of course that was the case” quality to them. But, that said, they are not, in fact, the kind of thing we routinely think about. The value of such observations lies in the striking point of contrast they offer to our situation, which then allows us to perceive more clearly an aspect of our experience that is so thoroughly ordinary we are tempted to think that this is just the way things have always been and, hence, must always be. Until, that is, a simple observation suddenly reveals the historical contingency of our situation and, consequently, affords us the simultaneously obvious but potentially revolutionary realization that things could be otherwise.

In this case, Tuan reminds us that until relatively recently, roughly the middle of the nineteenth century, the speed at which news or information could reach us was meaningfully correlated to place—the greater the distance the longer it took for news to get to you. News from afar, like light from distant stars, was always from the past.

The results of this correlation could be unfortunate, of course—recall, for instance, the Battle of New Orleans, which was fought nearly three weeks after the War of 1812 was formally concluded. But, at the same time, place and distance acted as filters of sorts on reality, concentrating a person’s attention, by default as it were, upon the world before them, which may now strike us as a feature rather than a bug. In a recent conversation with a student about Tuan’s observation, she put it this way: place, and by implication distance, regulated our information intake. It was likely that we would know most, and first, about what was nearest (and likely dearest) to us.

The contrast with our situation could hardly be more pronounced, of course. Not too long ago, for example, regardless of where you were in the world, if you happened to be on Twitter at the right time, you would have seen several videos of a massive explosion in Beirut mere minutes after it happened, followed, of course, by wildly speculative real-time commentary about its causes and consequences. This is but one relatively vivid and memorable example out of the innumerable cases we encounter daily.

Our present digital deluge of indiscriminately instantaneous information is not altogether without precedent. It lies rather on a trajectory that has already taken us through the age of electronic media. In the mid-1980s, for example, Joshua Meyrowitz noted a familiar pattern. “Nineteenth century life,” Meyrowitz observed in No Sense of Place,

entailed many isolated situations and sustained many isolated behaviors and attitudes. The current merging of situations does not give us a sum of what we had before, but rather new, synthesized behaviors that are qualitatively different. If we celebrate our child’s wedding in an isolated situation where it is the sole ‘experience’ of the day, then our joy may be unbounded. But when, on our way to the wedding, we hear over the car radio of a devastating earthquake, or the death of a popular entertainer, or the assassination of a political figure, we not only lose our ability to rejoice fully, but also our ability to mourn deeply.

The kind of incident Meyrowitz described is, of course, no longer limited to moments when we have access to broadcast media like radio or television. Upon reading this paragraph I naturally thought about the emotional roulette we play each time we glance at our social media feeds, which are always with us. You never quite know what news you’ll encounter and how it will mess with you for the rest of the day. As a recent song I rather like puts it, “Turning on my phone was the first mistake I made.”

In other words, ubiquitous connectivity means that we experience very few “isolated situations,” in Meyrowitz’s sense, and that we inhabit a psychic realm of perpetual affective dissonance and discord, buffeted by unrelenting crosswinds of data and information.

It’s a small quibble, but I’m not sure the word isolated is the word I’d use here. We tend to think of isolation as a generally negative experience giving the word a pejorative connotation. I’d prefer to speak about the integrity of a situation, how it holds together as a distinct experience. What Meyrowitz is describing, and what digital media accentuates, is the loss of situational integrity entailed by the varieties of tele-presence enabled by digital technology. The boundaries of my situation are always fuzzy and permeable. My here is always saturated by countless elsewheres. Place fails to bound my now.

And it is not only a matter, as in his example, of experiencing the full and singular emotional depth of an occasion. To take another instance of the same pattern, it is also true, as has been frequently noted, that the boundaries between work and rest have likewise blurred so that we tend to do neither well, assuming we enjoy the sort of work which can and ought to be done well.

Meyrowitz premised his analysis of electronic media on a fusion of the frameworks provided by Marshall McLuhan and sociologist Erving Goffman, who theorized human identity as a function of the roles we play in a variety of front stage and back stage settings. But Goffman assumed these settings would be bounded in place with relatively clear and concrete boundaries, the door separating the seating area of a restaurant and the kitchen, for example. We knew where we were and thus how to be. McLuhan’s work taught Meyrowitz that electronic media dissolved boundaries of that sort, generating a measure of disorientation with regards to where and when we are, which in turn throws our sense of who we are and how we ought to be into a bit of confusion.

“The electronic combination of many different styles of interaction from distinct regions,” Meyrowitz concluded, “leads to new ‘middle region’ behaviors that, while containing elements of formerly distinct roles, are themselves new behavior patterns with new expectations and emotions.” It would seem that this middle region, as Meyrowitz puts it, is now more or less where we live, to the degree we adopt the default settings of our techno-cultural moment. Consequently, we are all, with mixed results, improvising and navigating our way through it.

But let’s come back to the idea that place and distance, which is another way of saying the parameters of experience drawn by the body, regulated our information economy with regards to the quantity of information we encountered and its quality. By quality I mean not only whether the information was good information, which is to say accurate or truthful, but also relevant, important, pertinent, or personally valuable. Whatever the relative merits of such a situation or whatever ills of provincialism it may imply, what strikes me is the degree to which such filters were simply given. We might think of them as default settings about which we would have been largely unreflective. We, on the other hand, bear the epistemic and affective burdens of information superabundance regardless of whether we deem information superabundance itself to be a blessing or a curse. Either way, we have to grapple with its personal and social consequences.

The burdens I have in view, of course, are those we now routinely associate with filtering and managing flows of information—a task which invites the constant deployment of new tools and techniques, which, in turn, often have counter-productive effects. Clearly, these are not altogether novel burdens, we may find complaints about the sort of thing we think of as “information overload” in connection with printing, but they are hardly getting easier to bear. And these burdens are not merely cognitive. They are affective as well. Tending to our information ecosystem, if we attempt it at all, requires a striking degree of vigilance and discipline. And as we noted at the outset, 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.

Doomscrolling is one symptom of the general condition, but the habit predates 2020. It’s what happens when we give ourselves over to the flood of information and allow it to wash over us. Whatever else one may say about doomscrolling, it seems useful to think of it as structurally induced acedia, the sleepless demon unleashed by the upward swipe of the infinite scroll (or the pulldown refresh, if you prefer). Acedia is the medieval term for the vice of listlessness, apathy, and a general incapacity to do what one ought to do; ennui is sometimes thought of as a modern variant. As we scroll, we’re flooded with information and, about the vast majority of it, we can do nothing … except to keep scrolling and posting reaction gifs. So we do, and we get sucked into a paralyzing loop that generates a sense of helplessness and despair.

To further clarify our situation, consider W. H. Auden’s discussion, which I’ve cited before, of the idea that, as he put it, “the right to know is absolute and unlimited.” “We are quite prepared,” Auden wrote,

“to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, 'What can I know?' we ask, 'What, at this moment, am I meant to know?' — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.”

Before the advent of electronic media, the limits associated with being a body in place made it more likely that the knowledge we encountered was also knowledge that we could live up to, in the sense that Auden is commending here. In a digital media environment, it is not simply the case that we might be tempted to deliberately, in some Faustian sense, search out knowledge we cannot live up to, we are, in fact, overwhelmed by such knowledge. The idea of knowledge I can live up to implies a capacity to discern a meaningful correlation among the knowledge in question, my situation, my abilities, and my responsibilities, but this is capacity is precisely what is overwhelmed in our media ecosystem. Hence the ensuing state acedia.

We have ordinarily thought of the dynamics I’ve been discussing under the rubric of information overload, but I think it’s worth pursuing a slightly different line of thought. To think in terms of information overload is already to think in terms of the human being as an information processing machine. I’d prefer to start with the recognition that whatever else we may be, we are bodies, and that the conditions of our embodiment present us with a set of limits we may choose to either respect or ignore. Relatedly, I’ve been contemplating a thesis of late: that the body has been the root of all human understanding, but that this has been changing. So the real challenge we face is that of inhabiting a human-built world wherein the body can no longer ground understanding and may even be experienced as a liability. I suspect there will be more along these lines in future installments. Stay tuned.

News and Resources​

* More from Frank Pasquale this time around. This one is an interview at Commonweal titled “What Robots Can’t Do.” I was especially heartened by reading this line: “There is a fundamental equality among them, a common dignity grounded in our common fragility.” In context, Pasquale is discussing the difference between having a human teacher and a robot “teacher,” but the idea of grounding a common dignity in our common fragility resonated with me.

* Timely reading from Geoff Shullenberger, “Put Not Thy Trust in Nate Silver,” a review of Jill Lepore’s new book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, which might be summed up as #JeanBaudrillardWasRight: ”When reality and a model of that reality appear to be mismatched, in other words, we may discard the model, or we may discard reality. Baudrillard argues that we have collectively discarded reality. The cultural logic of simulation has altered the epistemic framework that determines what is real, leaving us with the hyperreal where the real once was.”

* Back in July, Aaron Lewis wrote a widely-read essay on memory and our sense of time in the digital age, “The Garden of Forking Memes.” Regrettably, I’ve just recently gotten around to reading it because I kept waiting for a chunk of time to be able to sit with it for awhile, which, as you all know, isn’t always forthcoming these days. In any case, it’s an insightful piece and you should read it. As you may have noticed, any effort to understand our situation which focuses on how we remember (or don’t) will always get my attention: “If, as Marx once wrote, the grievances of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living, the “perfect memory” of digital media has made this burden all the more weighty. Creating a stable political arrangement atop technologies of total recall will be a tall task. Our systems of governance were built for a world of extreme information asymmetry. Educated elites controlled the flow of information and kept old ghosts at bay. Now, the floodgates have been opened, and the Big Mood is one of temporal confusion and disorientation — we no longer feel like we’re marching steadily forward from the past into the future. There’s a massive subreddit devoted to documenting “glitches in the Matrix”; a new science of Progress Studies that’s trying to cure our End-of-History malaise; a whole entire subculture of Doomers who don’t believe there will be such a thing as history in the future.”

* Kelly Pendergrast in Real Life on the temptations of anthropomorphized robots, “robot’s friendliness or cuteness is something of a Trojan horse—an appealing exterior that convinces us to open the castle gates, while a phalanx of other extractive or coercive functions hides inside.” More: “The robot is not conscious, and does not preexist its creation as a tool (the zombie was never a friend). The robot we encounter today is a machine. Its anthropomorphic qualities are a wrapper placed around it in order to guide our behavior towards it, or to enable it to interact with the human world. Any sense that the robot could be a dehumanized other is based on a speculative understanding of not-yet-extant general artificial intelligence, and unlike Elon I prefer to base my ethics on current material conditions.”

* In England, citizens have created hedgehog “highways” through enclosed properties in an effort to boost the declining hedgehog population: ”The highway is an eccentric delight – stone steps, hedgehog cutouts and little signs like ‘Church’ for any hedgehog that can read. The ramp at Peter Kyte and Zoe Johnson’s house is 85cm tall and believed to be one of the biggest in the country. Last year the couple put out their night camera and captured visits most nights. ‘One or two of them are quite tubby and got stuck at the bottom,’ says Peter. One video of a hedgehog using their ramp has been viewed 33,000 times.”

* Sociologist Zeynep Tufecki recently launched a newsletter. I used to think that I got in on the newsletter thing a bit late; lately, it’s starting to feel like I actually got in early. In any case, Tufekci is a consistently sane, clear, and insightful writer. On the pandemic, she has been indispensable. I’d recommend subscribing if you’ve not done so already.

* On human illumination as a source of pollution:“Artificial light should be treated like other forms of pollution because its impact on the natural world has widened to the point of systemic disruption, research says … ”In all the animal species examined, they found reduced levels of melatonin – a hormone that regulates sleep cycles – as a result of artificial light at night. [Narrator: we humans, too, are an animal species.]“At the heart of this is a deep-rooted human need to light up the night. We are still in a sense afraid of the dark,” he said. “The ability to turn the night-time into something like the daytime is something we have pursued far beyond the necessity of doing so.”

Re-framings

— From Ivan Illich’s “The Rebirth of Epimethean Man,” the essay which closes Deschooling Society:

To the primitive the world was governed by fate, fact, and necessity. By stealing fire from the gods, Prometheus turned facts into problems, called necessity into question, and defied fate. Classical man framed a civilized context for human perspective. He was aware that he could defy fate-nature-environment, but only at his own risk. Contemporary man goes further; he attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it. We now must face the fact that man himself is at stake.

— This is C. S. Lewis writing in a letter to a friend dating from the middle of the last century. Naturally, I’ll leave it to each of you to navigate the religious element, but I think the general principle is widely applicable:

“It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know).A great many people do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don't think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we're doing it, I think we're meant to enjoy Our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds song and the frosty sunrise.As about the distant, so about the future. It is very dark: but there's usually light enough for the next step or so.”

The Conversation

“As about the distant, so about the future. It is very dark: but there’s usually light enough for the next step or two.” I thought that line worth repeating, and, indeed, may it be so for all of us.

I’ve got the next installment, or possibly a dispatch, in the draft folder, so the pace might be picking up a bit around here this month.

As always, feel free to reach out via email. I can be a bit slow to reply depending on when the email catches me, but I very much appreciate hearing from you all. And, as always, please do consider passing this newsletter along to anyone you think might find it useful.

Cheers,

Michael

“I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality— recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand — on the other hand radiating out for possible community, for rebirth of community.” — Ivan Illich, interview (1996)

[Welcome back friends to the Convivial Society. This latest installment has been a while in coming, and it’s not short. The gist of it is this: thinking with Arendt about the material dimensions of a common world and a common sense with a view to better understanding our experience of digital culture. I hope you find it helpful.]

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. This owes something, of course, to the great importance Ivan Illich placed on hospitality, especially as it took shape around a table. But here I’m turning to the work of another theorist in order to think through some of the more vexing and at times disturbing features of public life.

Thinking about the table has drawn me back to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, first published in 1958. This work is notable for Arendt’s discussion of the distinctions among what she calls the private, public, and social realms. The political arena of the ancient Greek polis was her model for the public. The private realm was the realm of the household. The social realm was a more recent development, it was the realm of mass society. It was not a private realm, but neither was it a realm in which the individual could meaningfully appear in the full integrity of her particularity. I won’t take the time to explain those distinctions at greater length here, except as they relate to Arendt’s use of the table as a recurring metaphor, a metaphor which will, I think, usefully illuminate aspects of our digitally mediated experience. I suspect, in fact, that ultimately it would be useful to develop a fourth category, the digital, to extend Arendt’s analysis of the private, public and social. You might take what follows as some initial thinking toward that end.

The Common World of Things

Arendt’s figurative use of the table had tucked itself away in my mind from the time I first read The Human Condition around 2010. It always struck me as an evocative image, but it was not until recently that I began to see more clearly its significance.

“To live together in the world,” Arendt wrote in the paragraph that first caught my attention, “means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.”

So there it is: our life together is built upon a world of things, which, like a table, gathers and distinguishes us. The point may at first seem somewhat trivial, but we’ll find that there’s some depth here as soon as we start unpacking Arendt’s argument.

These lines I just cited appear in the course of Arendt’s discussion of the public realm and its relation the world. Both of these terms, public and world, are technical terms in her work.

“The term ‘public’ signifies the world itself,” she explains, “in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it.” She goes on to clarify that the world is not simply synonymous with the earth, which she thinks of as related to our “organic life.” The world, in her sense, is related “to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together.”

We might say that the world as she means it is more or less co-extensive with what the historian Thomas Hughes called the human-built world—it is our cultural habitat and also what I’m calling the material infrastructure that sustains it. In this light, then, the table is not simply a metaphor, it is a case in point, a microcosm of the larger social order, which itself takes shape around an array of material artifacts.

We’ve already seen that for Arendt the world of things that constitutes the public is like a table in that it alternatively gathers, relates, and separates individuals. In other words, by virtue of being around a table a set of individuals are simultaneously related together as a group while also distinguished from one another. It is a role played by all the elements that make up the material infrastructure of social life. The question we need to bear in mind, of course, is this: How exactly are we being gathered and how exactly are we being related to one another?

Permanence and Stability

“The existence of a public realm,” Arendt observed, “and the world's subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence.”

Here we once again encounter the table, or, at least, what the table illustrates: a gathering and relating of individuals. This gathering and relating function is attributed to a community of things, which I’m reading as a network of materiality mediating human relationships. The curious additional insight is the indispensable quality of permanence, a feature that also speaks to a distinct mode of materiality.

“If the world is to contain a public space,” Arendt argues, “it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men.” Further on, she writes,

“The common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die. It transcends our lifespan into past and future alike; it was there before we came and will outlast our brief sojourn in it. It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us.

Arendt’ insistence on a measure of permanence and stability across time recalls Simone Weil’s discussion of a stable ground upon which a human life may be rooted. In The Need for Roots, Weil argued that rootedness was an essential human need and, she added, “a human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”

Like Arendt, Weil is here insisting upon a trans-generational common world, although she is less explicit about its material base. And, yes, of course, I’ll add that Ivan Illich made similar observations. In discussing society’s substitution of the better for the good, for example, Illich warns that “at this point the balance among stability, change, and tradition has been upset; society has lost both its roots in shared memories and its bearings for innovation.” Note especially the past/future orientation of that last clause, and, perhaps especially, the notion of having “bearings for innovation.” Another subject for another day.

But one last note on the matter of permanence: For Arendt the permanence of the world of things not only grounds our common experience of the world but also human identity. “The things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life,” Arendt wrote, “and their objectivity lies in the fact that … men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table.”

But let’s turn now to the epistemic implications of Arendt’s notion of a common world.

A Common Sense

The world of things turns out to have important psychological and epistemological functions in Arendt’s analysis, and this is were I think her line of thinking gets really interesting. We might say that Arendt takes the world of common things to be an epistemic backstop that keeps us from sliding into pure subjectivism, nihilism, or egoism. As we’ll see in a moment a world of common things grounds a common sense.

So, for example, she writes,

“The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves, and while the intimacy of a fully developed private life, such as had never been known before the rise of the modern age and the concomitant decline of the public realm, will always greatly intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and private feelings, this intensification will always come to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men.”

This is quite a remarkable claim. The inverse correlation she posits between an intensification of subjective emotion and private feeling, on the one hand, and an assurance of the reality of the world on the other seems particularly striking given present concerns about the degree to which Americans appear to have not only conflicting beliefs, but to live in alternate realities.

[N.B. I refer specifically to “Americans” not to suggest that something similar isn’t happening elsewhere, but only that I feel that I can speak to the case here in a way that I would not presume to speak about other societies, especially since so many of you are better positioned to do so! And, international readers, please do feel free to fill me in on the situation on the ground as you see it.]

But where does the world of things fit into this picture? Arendt speaks here of the presence of others, yes, but also of the decline of the public realm, which she has already equated with the human-built world that sustains it, or, to put it another way, that acts as the stage upon which the public appears. In other words, she has in view the presence of others within a particular materially objective context.

Arendt argues that to live an “entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life.” She expands on this by explaining that it means that one is “deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things.”

Here again is the notion of being gathered and separated by the common world of things with an emphasis on an “objective” relationship with others. Of course, it is not the nature of reality itself that is at issue here. Rather, Arendt has in view our experience of reality, or, to put it another way, the measure of certainty we attain from knowing that we inhabit a shared reality with others. We see and hear and are seen and heard in turn, and somehow the intermediation of the common world of things is essential to this dynamic. This certainly does not at all preclude vigorous and intense disagreement about what is good, right, and just; but it does suggest that it is possible for such debates to unfold meaningfully within shared horizons of the real. And this is what Arendt understands as “common sense,” which she calls “the sixth and highest sense.” Common sense is not just a set of mundane observations that are widely assumed to be true. Rather, it was common in the sense that it was the product of the senses working in tandem on a world held in common with others.

“Only the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives,” she wrote, “can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense.”

However, in the modern world Arendt argued, common sense “became an inner faculty without any world relationship.” “This sense now was called common,” she added, “merely because it happened to be common to all. What men now have in common is not the world but the structure of their minds.” And that is a critical point aptly stated.

Moreover, she observes that “a noticeable decrease in common sense in any given community and a noticeable increase in superstition and gullibility are therefore almost infallible signs of alienation from the world.” Again, she does not mean alienation from the earth, but alienation from a common world of human things that constitutes a public space of appearance within which a common sense can take hold and bind individuals to a commonly shared reality.

This alienation marked by a decrease in common sense is not inconsequential. Not only might it be paired with superstition and gullibility, but with darker and even destructive proclivities. Consider the following analysis from the Origins of Totalitarianism, in which Arendt takes up the question of what we would label escapist literature. She attributes the desire to escape reality, which, in her view, characterizes the masses, to “their essential homelessness,” which I read as more or less synonymous with what she later calls world alienation in The Human Condition and with what Weil termed rootlessness. But Arendt believes that the human need to make sense of things is also a factor. Deprived of its share in a common world that persists across time, a person can no longer bear reality’s “accidental, incomprehensible aspects.” Thus, she argues,

“The masses’ escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist, since coincidence has become its supreme master and human beings need the constant transformation of chaotic and accidental conditions into a man-made pattern of relative consistency.”

I’ve come back again and again, to the relationship Arendt drew between loneliness and totalitarianism. (See the essay by Samantha Rose Hill linked below.) Arendt made a point of distinguishing between solitude and loneliness, noting that one may be alone without being lonely and that loneliness often occurs in the midst of others.

Interestingly, for our purposes, Arendt connects loneliness to the loss of a common world. “Loneliness arises when thought is divorced from reality,” she observed, “when the common world has been replaced by the tyranny of coercive logical demands.” Quoting Martin Luther she adds, “‘A lonely man always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst.’” Without a common world there is no break on the slide into slavish and despairing ideological consistency.

In other words, without a common and stable world of things to ground our experience with others, without the table around which we might gather, the mind is cut off from a common sense and set loose upon itself in ways that become self-destructive.

Thus, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she also makes the following argument:

Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity. Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices — and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect.

Now, along with “totalitarian propaganda” let us also include “conspiracy theories” and the relevance of this analysis will be all the more apparent. The loss of a common world and the common (or communal) sense it sustains engenders not only heightened subjectivity but also leaves individuals susceptible to propaganda, conspiracy theorizing, and loneliness.

The Tele-Present Age

I’ve belabored the exposition of Arendt’s argument, so let me draw things to a close by speaking more directly to our present media environment. What especially interests me is the degree to which our digital media environment differs from the older analog order of things, specifically with regard to its role in sustaining a common world and public life. I’m sometimes tempted to speak of this difference as a move from a material order to an immaterial order, but I realize that this is not quite right. After all, digital media is a thoroughly material reality built on tubes, cables, satellites, servers, and rare-earth metals mined at great human cost, none of which are any less material in nature simply because they are ordinarily hidden from public view.

Nevertheless, it is important to account for how digital media reconfigures the material infrastructure of social life such that the dynamics of human experience are also transformed. And a good deal of this transformation involves the scrambling of the relationship between bodily presence and action. What happens, for example, when important segments of our life together no longer emerge within a world of common things we simultaneously occupy? In other words, what are the consequences of a social life increasingly dependent on varieties of tele-presence?

Tele-, as you remember from some long-ago middle school vocabulary lesson, is the Greek root that means “far” or “distant” and suggests “operating at a distance.” Consider three common words: telegraph, telephone, television—writing at a distance, voice at a distance, sight at a distance, respectively. Each of these is a mode of telepresence, and, as the example of the telegraph suggests, telepresence is not uniquely tied to digital media. Digital media, however, has permeated our experience with telepresent activity.

Early debates about the internet were sometimes framed by an opposition of digital activities to “real life.” This was never a very helpful framing, as sociologist Nathan Jurgenson spent a great deal of time explaining several years ago. It seems to me that we would have better spent our time had the question of telepresence framed our discussions. “Is this real?” now seems to me to have been a far less interesting question to ask than “Where am I?”

When we gather, as we so often do now, on a service like Zoom, where are we? Where exactly is the interaction happening? And, what difference does it make, say, that there is no here we can easily point to, and much less is there a table? What sort of world is this that now “hosts” so much of our social life, and how might we distinguish it from the world of common things that for Arendt was so important to public life, and, as we saw, even to our grasp of a shared reality.

It seems apparent that the digital realm lacks the permanence that Arendt thought was essential to a common world in which individuals could appear and be seen, and also that it has accelerated the liquefaction of modern life. Consequently, it fails to stabilize the self in the manner Arendt attributed to a common world of things. It also seems that Arendt’s fears about the epistemic consequences of the loss of a common world of things were well grounded. By abstracting our interactions into a placeless world of symbolic interchange and generating the conditions of what Jay Bolter has labeled digital plentitude, digital media appears to undermine rather than sustain our capacity to experience a common world, which in turn generates a common sense. Increasingly, then, we come to suspect that we are all occupying altogether different realities.

There are, of course, many more questions to be asked about how digital tools transform human experience, but reckoning with the seeming worldlessness, in Arendt’s sense, of the digital realm and its abstraction of experience from bodily presence may help us better understand some of the challenges we face as we seek to wisely navigate this digital world together.

Of course, in Arendt’s view, mass society and the realm of the social it generated, already tended in some of these directions.

In a memorable paragraph, Arendt describes the experience of the table under conditions of mass society:

The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic seance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.

At first glance, this is not a bad way of conceiving the digital realm: the materiality of the table suddenly vanishes and in our telepresent interactions we begin to fall over ourselves as it were, chaotically clashing with each other even as we are ensconced within our respective epistemic bubbles. But unlike the members of mass society, we are at a further (or at least different) remove from one another confronting not embodied presences, but something more akin to subjectivities variously represented by images and avatars.

Finally (yes, really), I’ll note that we cannot replicate the agora, the public space of the ancient Greeks, which so deeply informed Arendt’s view of the public realm. To the degree that we are connected politically with each other at a much different geographic scale than the ancient Greek city-state, to that same degree we cannot replicate the ancient public sphere. In that ancient model, however, the public and the private, sustained one another if they were rightly ordered. Mass society, in Arendt’s view, scrambled the private and the public realms, robbing each of their particular virtues. It did so by gradually eroding the local and material context of the public realm.

I wonder if we might not reimagine a new pairing. Not the private and the public, but the digital and the local. I’m not exactly sanguine about this possibility, mind you. It seems to me that the tendency of the digital realm as it is presently configured tends toward the erosion of the local, which, I tend to think is the natural habitat of the human being and thus the proper site of human flourishing. However, it may be possible for digital tools, perhaps if they were designed with a view to conviviality, to also sustain a vibrant local realm, which may nourish the human experience and ground our necessary ventures in the digital public. Perhaps I’m glossing over irreconcilable tensions, but I’ll be coming back to these themes and I’d be happy to hear your thoughts.

News and Resources​

* Frank Pasquale on affective computing: “In all too many of its present implementations, affective computing requires us to accept certain functionalist ideas about emotions as true, which leads to depoliticized behaviorism and demotes our conscious processes of emotional experience or reflection. Just as precision manipulation of emotions through drugs would not guarantee “happiness” but only introduce a radically new psychic economy of appetites and aversions, desires and discontents, affective computing’s corporate deployments are less about service to than shaping of persons. Preserving the privacy and autonomy of our emotional lives should take priority over a misguided and manipulative quest for emotion machines.”

* Samantha Rose Hill on Arendt, loneliness, and totalitarianism: “We think from experience, and when we no longer have new experiences in the world to think from, we lose the standards of thought that guide us in thinking about the world. And when one submits to the self-compulsion of ideological thinking, one surrenders one’s inner freedom to think. It is this submission to the force of logical deduction that ‘prepares each individual in his lonely isolation against all others’ for tyranny. Free movement in thinking is replaced by the propulsive, singular current of ideological thought.

* “What Forest Floor Playgrounds Teach Us About Kids and Germs”:“At the end of four weeks, the kids’ arms were swabbed and their blood was drawn again, and Sinkkonen’s team began analyzing the results. In a study published Wednesday in Science Advances, they found that the children who had been playing in the newly forested spaces had more diverse communities of friendly bacteria living on their skin. Specifically, alphaproteobacteria species seemed to flourish. Not surprising: Previous studies have shown this subgenre to be associated more often with children who grow up on farms than city kids.”

* Double shot of Frank Pasquale this time around. This one is an excerpt from Frank’s new book, New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI (which I’m eager to pick up soon), tackling autonomous weapons systems: “[I]t is hard to avoid the conclusion that the idea of ethical robotic killing machines is unrealistic, and all too likely to support dangerous fantasies of pushbutton wars and guiltless slaughters”Back in 2015, I wrote briefly and in an Arendtian vein on lethal autonomous weapons: Lethal Autonomous Weapons and Thoughtlessness.

* One of the newsletters I enjoying receiving is The Tourist written by Phil Christman. It’s been especially good of late.

* Cleverly titled essay about chairs designed specifically for gaming from Lewis Gordon in Real Life—“Throne of Games”:“There’s an element of surrender in the way users give up their bodies to games, which is literalized in the design of chairs that cocoon and immobilize them — chairs that aim, as much as possible, to minimize any reminder of the player’s embodiment.”

* NASA’s OSIRIS-REx briefly made contact with the asteroid Bennu (a mere 200 million miles from earth) for five to six seconds, collected a sample, and took off again. It is now on its way back to earth. (Although …) This is, of course, a remarkable achievement of human ingenuity. NASA noted that the probe touched down “within three feet (one meter) of the targeted location.”

This latter note naturally recalled one of the several subtitles Walker Percy facetiously offers for Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book … “How it is possible for the man who designed Voyager 19, which arrived at Titania, a satellite of Uranus, three seconds of schedule and a hundred yards off course after a flight of six years, to be one of the most screwed-up creatures in California—or the Cosmos.”

* Click here for one minute animation of medieval (possibly also Roman) bridge building. Lots of these bridges are still standing and in working order. For example:

One also happens to appear in this painting of Frankfurt (1858) by Gustave Courbet:

* As I was writing about how a table gathers and separates us, I stumbled upon this image of the seating arrangement for a dinner at Buckingham Palace on May 19, 1910, for the world leaders who were attending the funeral of the late King Edward VII. More, including a photograph of nine of the gathered kings, on this thread.

And look, frankly I’m not going to pass up the opportunity to pass along to you the opening paragraph of Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August: “So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens - four dowager and three regnant - and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”

Re-framings 

— Pope Francis’s latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, touches on the social consequences of digital media:

42. Oddly enough, while closed and intolerant attitudes towards others are on the rise, distances are otherwise shrinking or disappearing to the point that the right to privacy scarcely exists. Everything has become a kind of spectacle to be examined and inspected, and people’s lives are now under constant surveillance. Digital communication wants to bring everything out into the open; people’s lives are combed over, laid bare and bandied about, often anonymously. Respect for others disintegrates, and even as we dismiss, ignore or keep others distant, we can shamelessly peer into every detail of their lives.

43. Digital campaigns of hatred and destruction, for their part, are not – as some would have us believe – a positive form of mutual support, but simply an association of individuals united against a perceived common enemy. “Digital media can also expose people to the risk of addiction, isolation and a gradual loss of contact with concrete reality, blocking the development of authentic interpersonal relationships”. They lack the physical gestures, facial expressions, moments of silence, body language and even the smells, the trembling of hands, the blushes and perspiration that speak to us and are a part of human communication. Digital relationships, which do not demand the slow and gradual cultivation of friendships, stable interaction or the building of a consensus that matures over time, have the appearance of sociability. Yet they do not really build community; instead, they tend to disguise and expand the very individualism that finds expression in xenophobia and in contempt for the vulnerable. Digital connectivity is not enough to build bridges. It is not capable of uniting humanity.

— Neils Bohr to Werner Heisenberg (from Heisenberg’s Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations):

Isn’t it strange how this castle [pictured below] changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here? As scientists we believe that a castle consists only of stones, and admire the way the architect put them together. The stones, the green roof with its patina, the wood carvings in the church, constitute the whole castle. None of this should be changed by the fact that Hamlet lived here, and yet it is changed completely. Suddenly the walls and the ramparts speak a quite different language. The courtyard becomes an entire world, a dark corner reminds us of the darkness in the human soul, we hear Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be.’ Yet all we really know about Hamlet is that his name appears in a thirteenth-century chronicle. No one can prove that he really lived, let alone that he lived here. But everyone knows the questions Shakespeare had him ask, the human depth he was made to reveal, and so he, too, had to be found a place on earth, here in Kronberg. And once we know that, Kronberg becomes quite a different castle for us.

— During my conversation with Gov. Jerry Brown about his friendship with Ivan Illich, Gov. Brown briefly recounted how Illich expressed his preference for the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas over that of Martin Buber. A listener passed along an essay by Illich unearthing a history of ocular perception, which concluded with a discussion of Levinas on the human face:

Levinas set out to save "the face." The face of the other stands at the center of his life's work. The face of which he speaks is not my own, which appears reversed in the mirror. Nor is it the face that a psychologist would describe. For Levinas, face is that which my eye touches, what my eye caresses. Perception of the other's face is never merely optical, nor is it silent; it always speaks to me. Central in what I touch and find in the face of the other is my subjectivity: "I" cannot be except as a gift in and from the face of the other

The Conversation

I’ve used this space in the past to let you know about recent publications. There’s not been too much of that lately, but I will remind more recent subscribers of my last essay in The New Atlantis, “The Analog City and the Digital City,” if for no other reason than to direct you to their recently and beautifully redesigned website. And those of you relatively new to the newsletter may also want to check out a recent collection of my writing here.

Allow me to also pass along a link to my conversation with Henry Zhu, which you can find on his podcast in two parts: “Natural Limits” and, appropriately enough, “The Convivial Society.” You’ll note that Henry does these things right. The page for each of these conversations includes a time-stamped transcript with relevant quotes and links included.

Finally, I’m sure you’ve noted that I’m barely keeping up with the main installments of the newsletters and Dispatches have been few and far between over the last two months. On second thought, maybe you haven’t noticed at all. Either way, I’ll keep plugging along here as best I can. As always, thanks for reading.

Cheers,

Michael