The Convivial Society

Hello all, The audio version keep coming. Here you have the audio for Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology. Below you’ll find a couple of paintings that I cite in the essay. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoy it. Cheers, Michael Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

I continue to catch up on supplying audio versions of past essays. Here you have the audio for “Vision Con,” an essay about Apple’s mixed reality headset originally published in early February. The aim is to get caught up and then post the audio version either the same day as or very shortly after I publish new written essays. Thanks for listening! Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

Just before my unexpected hiatus during the latter part of last year, I had gotten back to the practice of recording audio version of my essays. Now that we’re up and running again, I wanted to get back to these recordings as well, beginning with this recording of the first essay of this year. Others will follow shortly, and as time allows I will record some of the essay from the previous year as well. You can sign up for the audio feed at Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

At long last, the audio version of the Convivial Society returns. It’s been a long time, which I do regret. Going back to 2020, it had been my practice to include an audio version of the essay with the newsletter. The production value left a lot to be desired, unless simplicity is your measure, but I know many of you appreciated the ability to listen to the essays. The practice became a somewhat inconsistent in mid-2022, and then fell off altogether this year. More than a few of you have inquired about the matter over the past few months. Some of you graciously assumed there must have been some kind of technical problem. The truth, however, was simply that this was a ball I could drop without many more things falling apart, so I did. But I was sorry to do so and have always intended to bring the feature back. So, finally, here it is, and I aim to keep it up. I’m sending this one out via email to all of you on the mailing list in order to get us all on the same page, but moving forward I will simply post the the audio to the site, which will also publish the episode to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. So if you’d like to keep up with the audio essays, you can subscribe to the feed at either service to be notified when new audio posts. Otherwise just keep an eye on the newsletter’s website for the audio versions that will accompany the text essays. The main newsletter will, of course, still come straight to your inbox. One last thing. I intend, over the coming weeks, to post audio versions of the past dozen or so essays for which no audio version was ever recorded. If that’s of interest to you, stay tuned. Thanks for reading and now, once again, for listening. Cheers, Michael The newsletter is public and free to all, but sustained by readers who value the writing and have the means to support it. Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome back to the Convivial Society. In this installment, you’ll find the audio version of the latest essay, “What You Get Is the World.” I try to record an audio version of most installments, but I send them out separately from the text version for reasons I won’t bore you with here. Incidentally, you can also subscribe to the newsletter’s podcast feed on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Just look up The Convivial Society. Aside from the audio essay, you’ll find an assortment of year-end miscellany below. I trust you are all well as we enter a new year. All the best to you and yours! A Few Notable Posts Here are six installments from this past year that seemed to garner a bit of interest. Especially if you’ve just signed up in recent weeks, you might appreciate some of these earlier posts. Incidentally, if you have appreciated the writing and would like to become a paid supporter at a discounted rate, here’s the last call for this offer. To be clear, the model here is that all the writing is public but I welcome the patronage of those who are able and willing. Cheers! Podcast Appearances I’ve not done the best job of keeping you all in loop on these, but I did show up in a few podcasts this year. Here are some of those: With Sean Illing on attention With Charlie Warzel on how being online traps us in the past With Georgie Powell on reframing our experience Year’s End It is something of a tradition at the end of the year for me to share Richard Wilbur’s poem, “Year’s End.” So, once again I’ll leave you with it. Now winter downs the dying of the year, And night is all a settlement of snow;From the soft street the rooms of houses show A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin And still allows some stirring down within. I’ve known the wind by water banks to shakeThe late leaves down, which frozen where they fell And held in ice as dancers in a spell Fluttered all winter long into a lake; Graved on the dark in gestures of descent, They seemed their own most perfect monument. There was perfection in the death of ferns Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone A million years. Great mammoths overthrown Composedly have made their long sojourns, Like palaces of patience, in the grayAnd changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii The little dog lay curled and did not rise But slept the deeper as the ashes roseAnd found the people incomplete, and froze The random hands, the loose unready eyes Of men expecting yet another sunTo do the shapely thing they had not done. These sudden ends of time must give us pause. We fray into the future, rarely wroughtSave in the tapestries of afterthought.More time, more time. Barrages of applause Come muffled from a buried radio.The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow. Thank you all for reading along in 2022. We survived, and I’m looking forward to another year of the Convivial Society in 2023. Cheers, Michael Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome again to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. This post features the audio version of the essay that went out in the last installment: “Lonely Surfaces: On AI-generated Images.” For the sake of recent subscribers, I’ll mention that I ordinarily post audio of the main essays (although a bit less regularly than I’d like over the past few months). For a variety of reasons that I won’t bore you with here, I’ve settled on doing this by sending a supplement with the audio separately from the text version of the essay. That’s what you have here. The newsletter is public but reader supported. So no customers, only patrons. This month if you’d like to support my work at a reduced rate from the usual $45/year, you can click here: You can go back to the original essay for links to articles, essays, etc. You can find the images and paintings I cite in the post below. Jason Allen’s “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp” Detail from Pieter Bruegel’s “Harvesters” The whole of Bruegel’s “Harvesters” Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome back to the Convivial Society. In this installment, you’ll find the audio version of two recent posts: “The Pathologies of the Attention Economy” and “Impoverished Emotional Lives.” I’ve not combined audio from two separate installments before, but the second is a short “Is this anything?” post, so I thought it would be fine to include it here. (By the way, I realized after the fact that I thoughtlessly mispronounced Herbert Simon’s name as Simone. I’m not, however, sufficiently embarrassed to go back and re-record or edit the audio. So there you have it.) If you’ve been reading over the past few months, you know that I’ve gone back and forth on how best to deliver the audio version of the essays. I’ve settled for now on this method, which is to send out a supplement to the text version of the essay. Because not all of you listen to the audio version, I’ll include some additional materials (links, resources, etc.) so that this email is not without potential value to those who do not listen to the audio. Farewell Real Life I noted in a footnote recently that Real Life Magazine had lost its funding and would be shutting down. This is a shame. Real Life consistently published smart and thoughtful essays exploring various dimensions of internet culture. I had the pleasure of writing three pieces for the magazine between 2018 and 2019: ”The Easy Way Out,” “Always On,” and “Personal Panopticons.” I was also pleasantly surprised to encounter essays in the past year or two drawing on the work of Ivan Illich: “Labors of Love” and “Appropriate Measures,” each co-authored by Jackie Brown and Philippe Mesly, as well as “Doctor’s Orders” by Aimee Walleston. And at any given time I’ve usually had a handful of Real Life essays open in tabs waiting to be read or shared. Here are some more recent pieces that are worth your time: “Our Friend the Atom The aesthetics of the Atomic Age helped whitewash the threat of nuclear disaster,” “Hard to See How trauma became synonymous with authenticity,” and “Life’s a Glitch The non-apocalypse of Y2K obscures the lessons it has for the present.” Links The latest installment in Jon Askonas’s ongoing series in The New Atlantis is out from behind the paywall today. In “How Stewart Made Tucker,” Askonas weaves a compelling account of how Jon Stewart prepared the way for Tucker Carlson and others: In his quest to turn real news from the exception into the norm, he pioneered a business model that made it nearly impossible. It’s a model of content production and audience catering perfectly suited to monetize alternate realities delivered to fragmented audiences. It tells us what we want to hear and leaves us with the sense that “they” have departed for fantasy worlds while “we” have our heads on straight. Americans finally have what they didn’t before. The phony theatrics have been destroyed — and replaced not by an earnest new above-the-fray centrism but a more authentic fanaticism. You can find earlier installments in the series here: Reality — A post-mortem. Reading through the essay, I was struck again and again by how foreign and distant the world of late 90s and early aughts. In any case, the Jon’s work in this series is worth your time. Kashmir Hill spent a lot of time in Meta’s Horizons to tell us about life in the metaverse: My goal was to visit at every hour of the day and night, all 24 of them at least once, to learn the ebbs and flows of Horizon and to meet the metaverse’s earliest adopters. I gave up television, books and a lot of sleep over the past few months to spend dozens of hours as an animated, floating, legless version of myself. I wanted to understand who was currently there and why, and whether the rest of us would ever want to join them. Ian Bogost on smart thermostats and the claims made on their behalf: After looking into the matter, I’m less confused but more distressed: Smart heating and cooling is even more knotted up than I thought. Ultimately, your smart...

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. In this installment, I explore a somewhat eccentric frame by which to consider how we relate to our technologies, particularly those we hold close to our bodies. You’ll have to bear through a few paragraphs setting up that frame, but I hope you find it to be a useful exercise. And I welcome your comments below. Ordinarily only paid subscribers can leave comments, but this time around I’m leaving the comments open for all readers. Feel free to chime in. I will say, though, that I may not be able to respond directly to each one. Cheers! Pardon what to some of you will seem like a rather arcane opening to this installment. We’ll be back on more familiar ground soon enough, but I will start us off with a few observations about liturgical practices in religious traditions. A liturgy, incidentally, is a formal and relatively stable set of rites, rituals, and forms that order the public worship of a religious community. There are, for example, many ways to distinguish among the varieties of Christianity in the United States (or globally, for that matter). One might distinguish by region, by doctrine, by ecclesial structure, by the socioeconomic status its members, etc. But one might also place the various strands of the tradition along a liturgical spectrum, a spectrum whose poles are sometimes labeled low church and high church. High church congregations, generally speaking, are characterized by their adherence to formal patterns and rituals. At high church services you would be more likely to observe ritual gestures, such as kneeling, bowing, or crossing oneself as well as ritual speech, such as set prayers, invocations, and responses. High church congregations are also more likely to observe a traditional church calendar and employ traditional vestments and ornamentation. Rituals and formalities of this sort would be mostly absent in low church congregations, which tend to place a higher premium on informality, emotion, and spontaneity of expression. I am painting with a broad brush, but it will serve well enough to set up the point I’m driving at. But one more thing before we get there. What strikes me about certain low church communities is that they sometimes imagine themselves to have no liturgy at all. In some cases, they might even be overtly hostile to the very idea of a liturgy. This is interesting to me because, in practice, it is not that they have no liturgy at all as they imagine—they simply end up with an unacknowledged liturgy of a different sort. Their services also feature predictable patterns and rhythms, as well as common cadences and formulations, even if they are not formally expressed or delineated and although they differ from the patterns and rhythms of high church congregations. It’s not that you get no church calendar, for example, it’s that you end up trading the old ecclesial calendar of holy days and seasons, such as Advent, Epiphany, and Lent, for a more contemporary calendar of national and sentimental holidays, which is to say those that have been most thoroughly commercialized. Now that you’ve borne with this eccentric opening, let me get us to what I hope will be the payoff. In the ecclesial context, this matters because the regular patterns and rhythms of worship, whether recognized as a liturgy or not, are at least as formative (if not more so) as the overt messages presented in a homily, sermon, or lesson, which is where most people assume the real action is. This is so because, as you may have heard it said, the medium is the message. In this case, I take the relevant media to be the embodied ritual forms, the habitual practices, and the material layers of the service of worship. These liturgical forms, acknowledged or unacknowledged, exert a powerful formative influence over time as they write themselves not only upon the mind of the worshipper but upon their bodies and, some might say, hearts. With all of this...

This is the audio version of the last essay posted a couple of days ago, “What Is To Be Done? — Fragments.” It was a long time between installments of the newsletter, and it has been an even longer stretch since the last audio version. As I note in the audio, my apologies to those of you who primarily rely on the audio version of the essays. I hope to be more consistent on this score moving forward! Incidentally, in recording this installment I noticed a handful of typos in the original essay. I’ve edited these in the web version, but I'm sorry those of you who read the emailed version had to endure them. Obviously, my self-editing was also a bit rusty! One last note, I’ve experimented with a paid-subscribers* discussion thread for this essay. It’s turned out rather well, I think. There’ve been some really insightful comments and questions. So, if you are a paid subscriber, you might want to check that out: Discussion Thread. Cheers, Michael * Note to recent sign-ups: I follow a patronage model. All of the writing is public, there is no paywall for the essays. But I do invite those who value this work to support it as they are able with paid subscriptions. Those who do so, will from time to time have some additional community features come their way. Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. This is the audio version of the last installment, which focused on the Blake Lemoine/LaMDA affair. I argued that while LaMDA is not sentient, applications like it will push us further along toward a digitally re-enchanted world. Also: to keep the essay to a reasonable length I resorted to some longish footnotes in the prior text version. That version also contains links to the various articles and essays I cited throughout the piece. I continue to be somewhat flummoxed about the best way to incorporate the audio and text versions. This is mostly because of how Substack has designed the podcast template. Naturally, it is designed to deliver a podcast rather than text, but I don’t really think of what I do as a podcast. Ordinarily, it is simply an audio version of a textual essay. Interestingly, Substack just launched what, in theory, is an ideal solution: the option to include a simple voiceover of the text, within the text post template. Unfortunately, I don’t think this automatically feeds the audio to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. And, while I don’t think of myself as having a podcast, some of you do access the audio through those services. So, at present, I’ll keep to this somewhat awkward pattern of sending out the text and audio versions separately. Thanks as always to all of you who read, listen, share, and support the newsletter. Nearly three years into this latest iteration of my online work, I am humbled by and grateful for the audience that has gathered around it. Cheers, Michael Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter exploring the relationship between technology and culture. This is what counts as a relatively short post around here, 1800 words or so, about a certain habit of mind that online spaces seem to foster. Almost one year ago, this exchange on Twitter caught my attention, enough so that I took a moment to capture it with a screen shot, thinking I’d go on to write about it at some point. Set aside for a moment whatever your particular thoughts might be on the public debate, if we can call it that, over vaccines, vaccine messaging, vaccine mandates, etc. Instead, consider the form of the claim, specifically the “anti-anti-” framing. I think I first noticed this peculiar way of talking about (or around) an issue circa 2016. In 2020, contemplating the same dynamics, I observed that “social media, perhaps Twitter especially, accelerates both the rate at which we consume information and the rate at which ensuing discussion detaches from the issue at hand, turning into meta-debates about how we respond to the responses of others, etc.” So by the time the Nyhan quote-tweeted Rosen last summer, the “anti-anti-” framing, to my mind, had already entered its mannerist phase. The use of “anti-anti-ad infinitum” is easy to spot, and I’m sure you’ve seen the phrasing deployed on numerous occasions. But the overt use of the “anti-anti-” formulation is just the most obvious manifestation of a more common style of thought, one that I’ve come to refer to as meta-positioning. In the meta-positioning frame of mind, thinking and judgment are displaced by a complex, ever-shifting, and often fraught triangulation based on who holds certain views and how one might be perceived for advocating or failing to advocate for certain views. In one sense, this is not a terribly complex or particularly novel dynamic. Our pursuit of understanding is often an uneasy admixture of the desire to know and the desire to be known as one who knows by those we admire. Unfortunately, social media probably tips the scale in favor of the desire for approval given its rapid-fire feedback mechanisms. Earlier this month, Kevin Baker commented on this same tendency in a recent thread that opened with the following observation, “A lot of irritating, mostly vapid people and ideas were able to build huge followings in 2010s because the people criticizing them were even worse.” Baker goes on to call this “the decade of being anti-anti-” and explains that he felt like he spent “the better part of the decade being enrolled into political and discursive projects that I had serious reservations about because I disagreed [with] their critics more and because I found their behavior reprehensible.” In his view, this is a symptom of the unchecked expansion of the culture wars. Baker again: “This isn't censorship. There weren't really censors. It's more a structural consequence of what happens when an issue gets metabolized by the culture war. There are only two sides and you just have to pick the least bad one.” I’m sympathetic to this view, and would only add that perhaps it is more specifically a symptom of what happens when the digitized culture wars colonize ever greater swaths of our experience. I argued a couple of years ago that just as industrialization gave us industrial warfare, so digitization has given us digitized culture warfare. My argument was pretty straightforward: “Digital media has dramatically enhanced the speed, scale, and power of the tools by which the culture wars are waged and thus transformed their norms, tactics, strategies, psychology, and consequences.” Take a look at the piece if you missed it. I’d say, too, that the meta-positioning habit of mind might also be explained as a consequence of the digitally re-enchanted discursive field. I won’t bog down this post, which I’m hoping to keep relatively brief, with the details of that argument, but here’s the most relevant bit: For my purposes, I’m especially...

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. I tend to think of my writing as way of clarify my thinking, or, alternatively, of thinking out loud. Often I’m just asking myself, What is going on? That’s the case in this post. There was a techno-cultural pattern I wanted to capture in what follows, but I’m not sure that I’ve done it well enough. So, I’ll submit this for your consideration and critique. You can tell me, if you’re so inclined, whether there’s at least the grain of something helpful here or not. Also, you’ll note that my voice suggests a lingering cold that’s done a bit of a number on me over the past few days, but I hope this is offset by the fact that I’ve finally upgraded my mic and, hopefully, improved the sound quality. Cheers! If asked to define modernity or give its distinctive characteristics, what comes to mind? Maybe the first thing that comes to mind is that such a task is a fool’s errand, and you wouldn’t be wrong. There’s a mountain of books addressing the question, What is or was modernity? And another not insignificant hill of books arguing that, actually, there is or was no such thing, or at least not in the way it has been traditionally understood. Acknowledging as much, perhaps we’d still offer some suggestions. Maybe we’d mention a set of institutions or practices such as representative government or democratic liberalism, scientific inquiry or the authority of reason, the modern university or the free press. Perhaps a set of values comes to mind: individualism, free speech, rule of law, or religious freedom. Or perhaps some more abstract principles, such as instrumental rationality or belief in progress and the superiority of the present over the past. And surely some reference to secularization, markets, and technology would also be made, not to mention colonization and economic exploitation. I won’t attempt to adjudicate those claims or rank them. Also, you’ll have to forgive me if I failed to include you preferred account of modernity; they are many. But I will venture my own tentative and partial theory of the case with a view to possibly illuminating elements of the present state affairs. I’ve been particularly struck of late by the degree to which what I’ll call the myth of the machine became an essential element of the modern or, maybe better, the late modern world. Two clarifications before we proceed. First, I was initially calling this the “myth of neutrality” because I was trying to get at the importance of something like neutral or disinterested or value-free automaticity in various cultural settings. I wasn’t quite happy with neutrality as a way of capturing this pattern, though, and I’ve settled on the myth of the machine because it captures what may be the underlying template that manifests differently across various social spheres. And part of my argument will be that this template takes the automatic, ostensibly value-free operation of a machine as its model. Second, I use the term myth not to suggest something false or duplicitous, but rather to get at the normative and generative power of this template across the social order. That said, let’s move on, starting with some examples of how I see this myth manifesting itself. Objectivity, Impartiality, Neutrality The myth of the machine underlies a set of three related and interlocking presumptions which characterized modernity: objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality. More specifically, the presumptions that we could have objectively secured knowledge, impartial political and legal institutions, and technologies that were essentially neutral tools but which were ordinarily beneficent. The last of these appears to stand somewhat apart from the first two in that it refers to material culture rather than to what might be taken as more abstract intellectual or moral stances. In truth, however, they are closely related. The more abstract intellectual and institutional pursuits were always...

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. In this installment you’ll find the audio version of the previous essay, “The Face Stares Back.” And along with the audio version you’ll also find an assortment of links and resources. Some of you will remember that such links used to be a regular feature of the newsletter. I’ve prioritized the essays, in part because of the information I have on click rates, but I know the links and resources are useful to more than a few of you. Moving forward, I think it makes sense to put out an occasional installment that contains just links and resources (with varying amounts of commentary from me). As always, thanks for reading and/or listening. Links and Resources * Let’s start with a classic paper from 1965 by philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence.” The paper, prepared for the RAND Corporation, opens with a long epigraph from the 17th-century polymath Blaise Pascal on the difference between the mathematical mind and the perceptive mind. * On “The Tyranny of Time”: “The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.” More: “The Western separation of clock time from the rhythms of nature helped imperialists establish superiority over other cultures.” * Relatedly, a well-documented case against Daylight Saving Time: “Farmers, Physiologists, and Daylight Saving Time”: “Fundamentally, their perspective is that we tend to do well when our body clock and social clock—the official time in our time zone—are in synch. That is, when noon on the social clock coincides with solar noon, the moment when the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky where we are. If the two clocks diverge, trouble ensues. Startling evidence for this has come from recent findings in geographical epidemiology—specifically, from mapping health outcomes within time zones.” * Jasmine McNealy on “Framing and Language of Ethics: Technology, Persuasion, and Cultural Context.” * Interesting forthcoming book by Kevin Driscoll: The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media. * Great piece on Jacques Ellul by Samuel Matlack at The New Atlantis, “How Tech Despair Can Set You Free”: “But Ellul rejects it. He refuses to offer a prescription for social reform. He meticulously and often tediously presents a problem — but not a solution of the kind we expect. This is because he believed that the usual approach offers a false picture of human agency. It exaggerates our ability to plan and execute change to our fundamental social structures. It is utopian. To arrive at an honest view of human freedom, responsibility, and action, he believed, we must confront the fact that we are constrained in more ways than we like to think. Technique, says Ellul, is society’s tightest constraint on us, and we must feel the totality of its grip in order to find the freedom to act.” * Evan Selinger on “The Gospel of the Metaverse.” * Ryan Calo on “Modeling Through”: “The prospect that economic, physical, and even social forces could be modeled by machines confronts policymakers with a paradox. Society may expect policymakers to avail themselves of techniques already usefully deployed in other sectors, especially where statutes or executive orders require the agency to anticipate the impact of new rules on particular values. At the same time, “modeling through” holds novel perils that policymakers may be ill equipped to address. Concerns include privacy, brittleness, and automation bias, all of which law and technology scholars are keenly aware. They also include the extension and deepening of the quantifying turn in governance, a process that obscures normative judgments and recognizes only that which the machines can see. The water may be warm, but there are sharks in it.” * “Why Christopher Alexander Still Matters”: “The places we love, the places that are most successful and most alive, have...

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. The pace of the newsletter has been slow of late, which I regret, but I trust it will pick up just a touch in the coming weeks (also please forgive me if you’ve been in touch over the past month or so and haven’t heard back). For starters, I’ll follow up this installment shortly with another that will include some links and resources. In this installment, I’m thinking about attention again, but from a slightly different perspective—how do we become the objects of the attention for others? If you’re a recent subscriber, I’ll note that attention is recurring theme in my writing, although it may be awhile before I revisit it again (but don’t hold me to that). As per usual, this is an exercise in thinking out loud, which seeks to clarify some aspect of our experience with technology and explore its meaning. I hope you find it useful. Finally, I’m playing with formatting again, driven chiefly by the fact that this is a hybrid text meant to be both read and/or listened to in the audio version. So you’ll note my use of bracketed in-text excursuses in this installment. If it degrades your reading or listening, feel free to let me know. Objects of Attention A recent email exchange with Dr. Andreas Mayert got me thinking about attention from yet another angle. Ordinarily, I think about attention as something I have, or, as I suggested in a recent installment, something I do. I give my attention to things out there in the world, or, alternatively, I attend to the world out there. Regardless of how we formulate it, what I am imagining in these cases is how attention flows outward from me, the subject, to some object in the world. And there’s much to consider from that perspective: how we direct our attention, for example, or how objects in the world beckon and reward our attention. But, as Dr. Mayert suggested to me, it’s also worth considering how attention flows in the opposite direction. That is to say, considering not the attention I give, but the attention that bears down on me. [First excursus: The case of attending to myself is an interesting one given this way of framing attention as both incoming and outgoing. If I attend to my own body—by minding my breathing, for example—I’d say that my attention still feels to me as if it is going outward before then focusing inward. It’s the mind’s gaze upon the body. But it’s a bit different if I’m trying to attend to my own thoughts. In this case I find it difficult to assign directionality to my attention. Moreover, it seems to me that the particular sense I am using to attend to the world matters in this regard, too. For example, closing my eyes seems to change the sense that my attention is flowing out from my body. As I listen while my eyes are shut, I have the sense that sounds are spatially located, to my left rather than to my right, but also that the sound is coming to me. I’m reminded, too, of the ancient understanding of vision, which conceived of sight as a ray emanating from the eye to make contact with the world. The significance of these subtle shifts in how we perceive the world and how media relate to perception should not be underestimated.] There are several ways of thinking about where this attention that might fix on us as its object originates. We can consider, for example, how we become an object of attention for large, impersonal entities like the state or a corporation. Or we can contemplate how we become the object of attention for another person—legibility in the former case and the gaze in the latter. There are any number of other possibilities and variations within them, but given my exchange with Mayert I found myself considering what happens when a machine pays attention to us. By “machine” in this case, I mean any of the various assemblages of devices, sensors, and programs through which data is gathered about us and interpretations are extrapolated from that data,...

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter that is ostensibly about technology and culture but more like my effort to make some sense of the world taking shape around us. For many of you, this will be the first installment to hit your inbox—welcome aboard. And my thanks to those of you who share the newsletter with others and speak well of it. If you are new to the Convivial Society, please feel free to read this orientation to new readers that I posted a few months ago. 0. Attention discourse is my term for the proliferation of articles, essays, books, and op-eds about attention and distraction in the age of digital media. I don’t mean the label pejoratively. I’ve made my own contributions to the genre, in this newsletter and elsewhere, and as recently as May of last year. In fact, I tend to think that attention discourse circles around immensely important issues we should all think about more deliberately. So, here then, is yet another entry for the attention files presented as a numbered list of loosely related observations for you consideration, a form in which I like to occasionally indulge and which I hope you find suggestive and generative. 1. I take Nick Carr’s 2008 piece in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, to be the ur-text of this most recent wave of attention discourse. If that’s fair, then attention and distraction have been the subject of intermittent public debate for nearly fifteen years, but this sustained focus appears to have yielded little by way of improving our situation. I say the “the most recent wave” because attention discourse has a history that pre-dates the digital age. The first wave of attention discourse can be dated back to the mid-nineteenth century, as historian Jonathan Crary has argued at length, especially in his 1999 book, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. “For it is in the late nineteenth century,” Crary observed, within the human sciences and particularly the nascent field of scientific psychology, that the problem of attention becomes a fundamental issue. It was a problem whose centrality was directly related to the emergence of a social, urban, psychic, and industrial field increasingly saturated with sensory input. Inattention, especially within the context of new forms of large-scale industrialized production, began to be treated as a danger and a serious problem, even though it was often the very modernized arrangements of labor that produced inattention. It is possible to see one crucial aspect of modernity as an ongoing crisis of attentiveness, in which the changing configurations of capitalism continually push attention and distraction to new limits and thresholds, with an endless sequence of new products, sources of stimulation, and streams of information, and then respond with new methods of managing and regulating perception […] But at the same time, attention, as a historical problem, is not reducible to the strategies of social discipline. As I shall argue, the articulation of a subject in terms of attentive capacities simultaneously disclosed a subject incapable of conforming to such disciplinary imperatives.” Many of the lineaments of contemporary attention discourse are already evident in Crary’s description of its 19th century antecedents. 2. One reaction to learning that modern day attention discourse has longstanding antecedents would be to dismiss contemporary criticisms of the digital attention economy. The logic of such dismissals is not unlike that of the tale of Chicken Little. Someone is always proclaiming that the sky is falling, but the sky never falls. This is, in fact, a recurring trope in the wider public debate about technology. The seeming absurdity of some 19th-century pundit decrying the allegedly demoralizing consequences of the novel is somehow enough to ward off modern day critiques of emerging technologies. Interestingly, however, it’s often the case that the antecedents don’t take us back...

As promised, here is the audio version of the last installment, “The Dream of Virtual Reality.” To those of you who find the audio version helpful, thank you for your patience! And while I’m at it, let me pass along a few links, a couple of which are directly related to this installment. Links Just after I initially posted “The Dream of Virtual Reality,” Evan Selinger reached out with a link to his interview of David Chalmers about Reality+. I confess to thinking that I might have been a bit uncharitable in taking Chalmers’s comments in a media piece as the basis of my critique, but after reading the interview I now feel just fine about it. And, apropos my comments about science fiction, here’s a discussion between philosophers Nigel Warburton and Eric Schwitzgebel about the relationship between philosophy and science fiction. It revolves around a discussion of five specific sci-fi texts Schwitzgebel recommends. Unrelated to virtual reality, let me pass along this essay by Meghan O’Gieblyn: “Routine Maintenance: Embracing habit in an automated world.” It is an excellent reflection on the virtues of habit. It’s one of those essays I wish I had written. In fact, I have a draft of a future installment that I had titled “From Habit to Habit.” It will aim at something a bit different, but I’m sure that it will now incorporate some of what O’Gieblyn has written. You may also recognize O’Gieblyn as the author of God, Human, Animal, Machine, which I’ve got on my nightstand and will be reading soon. In a brief discussion of Elon Musk’s Neuralink in his newsletter New World Same Humans, David Mattin makes the following observation: A great schism is emerging. It’s between those who believe we should use technology to transcend all known human limits even if that comes at the expense of our humanity itself, and those keen to hang on to recognisably human forms of life and modes of consciousness. It may be a while yet until that conflict becomes a practical and widespread reality. But as Neuralink prepares for its first human trials, we can hear that moment edging closer. I think this is basically right, and I’ve been circling around this point for quite some time. But I would put the matter a bit differently: I’m not so sure that it will be a while until that conflict becomes a practical and widespread reality. I think it has been with us for quite some time, and, in my less hopeful moments, I tend to think that we have already crossed some critical threshold. As I’ve put it elsewhere, transhumanism is the default eschatology of the modern technological project. Podcasts Lastly, I’ve been neglecting to pass along links to some podcasts I’ve been on recently. Let me fill you in on a couple of these. Last fall, I had the pleasure of talking to historian Lee Vinsel for his new podcast, People and Things. We talked mostly Illich and it was a great conversation. I commend Vinsel’s whole catalog to you. Peruse at your leisure. Certainly be sure to catch the inaugural episode with historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan, the author of one of the classic texts in the history of technology, More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave. And just today my conversation with the Irish economist David McWilliams was posted. We talked mostly about the so-called meta verse, and while we focused on my early “Notes From the Metaverse,” it also pairs nicely with the latest installment. My thanks to David and his team for their conviviality. And to the new set of readers from Ireland, the UK, and beyond—welcome! Postscript I can not neglect to mention that it was brought to my attention that the promo video for Facebook’s VR platform, Horizons, from which I took a screenshot for the essay, has a comical disclaimer near the bottom of the opening shot. As philosopher Ariel Guersenzvaig noted on Twitter, “‘Virtual reality is genuine reality’? Be that as it may, the VR footage is not genuine VR...

Welcome to a special installment of the Convivial Society featuring my conversation with Andrew McLuhan. I can’t recall how or when I first encountered the work of Marshall McLuhan, I think it might’ve been through the writing of one of his most notable students, Neil Postman. I do know, however, that McLuhan, and others like Postman and Walter Ong who built on his work, became a cornerstone of my own thinking about media and technology. So it was a great pleasure to speak with his grandson Andrew, who is now stewarding and expanding the work of his grandfather and his father, Eric McLuhan, through the McLuhan Institute, of which he is the founder and director. I learned a lot about McLuhan through this conversation and I think you’ll find it worth your time. A variety of resources and sites were mentioned throughout the conversation, and I’ve tried to provide links to all of those below. Above all, make sure you check out the McLuhan Institute and consider supporting Andrew’s work through his Patreon page. Links McLuhan Institute’s Twitter account and Instagram account Andrew McLuhan’s Twitter account The image of McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter on the beach which Andrew mentions can be seen at the :30 mark of this YouTube video featuring audio of Carpenter describing his friendship with McLuhan Eric McLuhan’s speech, “Media Ecology in the 21st Century,” on the McLuhan Institute’s YouTube page (the setting is a conference in Bogota, Columbia, so McLuhan is introduced in Spanish, but he delivers his talk in English) Laws of Media: The New Science by Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan Marshall McLuhan/Norman Mailer exchange Marshall McLuhan/W.H. Auden/Buckminster Fuller exchange Jeet Heer’s essay on McLuhan from 2011 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Critical Edition) Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews Marshall McLuhan Speaks Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. In this installment I write a bit about burnout, exhaustion, and rest. It doesn’t end with any neat solutions, but that’s kind of the point. However, I’ll take up the theme again in the next installment, and will hopefully end on a more promising note. As many of you know, the newsletter operates on a patronage model. The writing is public, there is no paywall, but I welcome the support of readers who value the work. Not to be too sentimental about it, but thanks to those who have become paying subscribers this newsletter has become a critical part of how I make my living. And for that I’m very grateful. Recently, a friend inquired about one-time gifts as the year draws to a close, however this platform doesn’t allow that option. So for those who would like to support the Convivial Society but for whom the usual subscription rates are a bit too steep, here’s a 30% discounted option that works out to about $31 for the year or about $2.50 a month. The option is good through the end of December. Cheers! Several years ago, I listened to Terry Gross interview the son of a prominent religious leader, who had publicly broken with his father’s legacy and migrated to another, rather different branch of the tradition. Gross asked why he had not simply let his faith go altogether. His reply has always stuck with me. He explained that it was, in part, because he was the kind of person whose first instinct, upon deciding to become an atheist, would be to ask God to help him be an atheist. I thought about his response recently when I encountered an article with the following title: “The seven types of rest: I spent a week trying them all. Could they help end my exhaustion?” My first, admittedly ill-tempered reaction was to conclude that Betteridge’s Law had been validated once again. In case this is the first time you’re hearing of Betteridge’s Law, it states that any headline ending in a question can be answered with no. I think you’ll find that it holds more often than not. With the opening anecdote in mind, my second, slightly more considered response was to conclude that some of us have become the kind of people whose first instinct, upon deciding to break loose from the tyranny of productivity and optimization, would be to make a list. Closely related to this thought was another: some of us have become the kind of people whose first instinct, upon deciding to reject pathological consumerism, would be to buy a product or service which promised to help us do so. And I don’t think we should necessarily bracket the religious context of the original formulation in the latter two cases. The structure is altogether analogous: a certain pattern of meaning, purpose, and value has become so deeply engrained that we can hardly imagine operating without it. This is why the social critic Ivan Illich called assumptions of this sort “certainties” and finally concluded that they needed to be identified and challenged before any meaningful progress on social ills could be made. As it turned out, that article on the different forms of rest takes a recent book as its point of departure. The book identified and explored the seven forms of rest—physical, emotional, mental, social, and so on—which the author of the article sampled for a day a piece. Probably not what the book’s author had in mind. Whatever one makes of the article, or the book upon which it is based, the problem to which it speaks, a sense of permanent burnout or chronic exhaustion, is, as far as I can tell, real and pervasive, and it is a symptom of a set of interlocking disorders afflicting modern society, which have been exacerbated and laid bare over the last two years. Others have written about this phenomenon perceptively and eloquently, particularly if we consider discussions of rest, exhaustion, and burnout together with similar discussions about the changing nature and meaning of work. The writing...

Welcome again to the Convivial Society. This installment follows relatively quickly on the last, and you may be forgiven for not having yet made your way through that one, which came in at 4,500 words (sorry). But, we have some catching up to do, and this essay is only half as long. Read on. In her testimony before the Senate, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen made an observation that caught my attention. When asked by Senator Todd Young of Indiana to “discuss the short and long-term consequences of body image issues on these platforms,” Haugen gave the following response, emphasis mine: The patterns that children establish in their teenage years live with them for the rest of their lives. The way they conceptualize who they are, how they conceptualize how they interact with other people, are patterns and habits that they will take with them as they become adults, as they themselves raise children. I’m very scared about the upcoming generation because when you and I interact in person, and I say something mean to you, and I see wince or I see you cry, that makes me less likely to do it the next time, right? That’s a feedback cycle. Online kids don’t get those cues and they learn to be incredibly cruel to each other and they normalize it. And I’m scared of what will their lives look like, where they grow up with the idea that it’s okay to be treated badly by people who allegedly care about them? That’s a scary future. There is much that is worth discussing in Haugen’s testimony, but these comments stood out to me because they resonated with themes I’ve been working with for some time. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the relationship among the virtue of pity, embodied presence, and online interactions, which, it seems to me, is precisely what Haugen has in view here. Back in May I wrote a short post that speculated about a tendency to become forgetful of the body in online situations. “If digital culture tempts us to forget our bodies,” I wondered, “then it may also be prompting us to act as if we were self-sufficient beings with little reason to care or expect to be cared for by another.” I wrote those lines with Alasdair MacIntyre’s book, Dependent Rational Animals, in mind. In it, MacIntyre seeks to develop an account of the virtues and virtuous communities that takes our bodies, and thus our dependence, as a starting point. So, for example, he writes, What matters is not only that in this kind of community children and the disabled are objects of care and attention. It matters also and correspondingly that those who are no longer children recognize in children what they once were, that those who are not yet disabled by age recognize in the old what they are moving towards becoming, and that those who are not ill or injured recognize in the ill and injured what they often have been and will be and always may be. From this starting point, MacIntyre makes the case for what he calls the virtues of acknowledged dependence, explaining that “what the virtues require from us are characteristically types of action that are at once just, generous, beneficent, and done from pity.” “The education of dispositions to perform just this type of act,” he continues, “is what is needed to sustain relationships of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving.” Among this list of characteristics, pity was the one that most caught my attention. It is a quality that may strike many as ambivalent at best. The phrase, “I don’t want your pity,” is a common trope in our stories and it is often declared in defiantly heroic cadences. And, indeed, even when the quality has been discussed as a virtue in the tradition, writers have seen the need to distinguish it from counterfeits bearing a surface resemblance but which are often barely veiled expressions of condescension. MacIntyre, wanting to avoid just this association with condescension, uses instead the Latin word misericordia. Thus MacIntyre, drawing on Aquinas writes,...

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. It’s been a bit longer than usual since our last installment, but I’m glad to report that this has been in part a function of some recent developments, which I’m delighted to tell you about. Many of you are reading this because you caught my interview with Ezra Klein back in August. That interview was based on an installment of this newsletter in which I offered 41 questions through which to explore the moral dimensions of a given technology. Well, as it turns out, I’ve sold my first book, based on those questions, to Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. As you might imagine, I’m thrilled and immensely grateful. Naturally, I’ll keep you posted as I write the book and publication day approaches. There’s more than a little work to be done before then, of course. And, in case you were wondering, the newsletter will continue as per usual. In fact, I’ve got about five drafts going right now, so stay tuned. For now, here is a rather long and meandering, but certainly not comprehensive, discussion of models and metaphors for ordering knowledge, memory, the ubiquity of search, the habits and assumptions of medieval reading, and how information loses its body. I won’t claim this post is tightly argued. Rather, it’s an exercise in thinking about how media order and represent the world to us and how this ordering and representation interacts with our experience of the self. Here’s a line that struck me recently: “It’s an idea that’s likely intuitive to any computer user who remembers the floppy disk.” Is that you? It’s definitely me. I remember floppy disks well. But, then, it occurred to me that the author might have the 3.5-inch variety in mind, while I remember handling the older 8-inch disks as well. In fact, I am even old enough to remember this thing below, although I never did much but store a few lines of code to change the color of the TV screen to which my Tandy was hooked up. In any case, the idea that is supposedly intuitive to anyone who remembers floppy disks is the directory structure model, or, put otherwise, “the hierarchical system of folders that modern computer operating systems use to arrange files.” In a recent article for The Verge, “File Not Found: A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans,” Monica Chin explored anecdotal evidence suggesting that, by somewhere around 2017, some significant percentage of college students found this mental model altogether foreign. The essay opens with a couple of stories from professors who, when they instructed their students to locate their files or to open a folder, were met with incomprehension, and then proceeds to explore some possible causes and consequences. So, for example, she writes, that “directory structure connotes physical placement — the idea that a file stored on a computer is located somewhere on that computer, in a specific and discrete location.” “That’s a concept,” she goes on to add, that’s always felt obvious to Garland [one of the professor’s supplying the anecdotal evidence] but seems completely alien to her students. “I tend to think an item lives in a particular folder. It lives in one place, and I have to go to that folder to find it,’ Garland says. ‘They see it like one bucket, and everything’s in the bucket.” This suggests, of course, the reality that metaphors make sense of things by explaining the unknown (tenor) by comparison to the known (vehicle), but, when the known element itself becomes unknown, then the meaning-making function is lost. Which is to say, that files and folders are metaphors that help users navigate computers by reference to older physical artifacts that would’ve been already familiar to users. But, then, what happens when those older artifacts themselves become unfamiliar? I happen to have one of these artifacts sitting in front of me in my office, but, in truth, I never use it. Of...