Daily Writing
Postman: some problems
Years from now, it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved…
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
40 years from then to be exact. The ability those prime, blue trucks and their homey warehouses have to receive orders at a click, cue up an item, and rush it across downtowns and past suburbs within 24-hours is a marvel. An organization’s national town hall coordinating thousands of employees to meet in one virtual room and witness a presentation at almost no cost compared to the travel it once would have taken is incredible.
But what is all this efficiency and connectivity really serving?
Did we lose the trees somewhere in the forest of data accumulation & the hyper-active hive mind of communication?
In the midst of breakdowns & burnout, have we discovered the bankruptcy & dangers of our mode of online existence?
Postman nailed it in the 80’s as computers incorporated and telephones cemented their place in business operations. All the while, individual citizens (only then starting to become consumers) were invited into the circus to “enjoy the bounties of innovation.” The catch wasn’t revealed until much later.
Every technology is a bargain, but not a bargain in the sense of a deal. Tech persuades us to not examine its effects closely and to take on its stipulations wholesale. Digital products are designed with commercial ends in mind, ad captandum vulgus, and operate in a system that doesn’t reward virtue but virality.
This is the trap into which we fell. Seeing the supposed benefits in the corporate world, those at the start of the technological era took on the same inventions, processes, and paradigms into their personal lives. Technology came home with us from the office. Efficiency invaded personal lives. The doctrine of more, faster, better pervades our religion.
Does it help or hurt to receive any item in the world within one day? Does it aid or addle the mind to be “connected” to anyone and everyone ever hour of the day by the “speed-of-light retrieval of data” if needed?
Let’s just say it’s been “noticed” that these technologies we call essential “have created at least as many problems for (us) as they may have solved…”
alignment
Premature of our current climate politically & technologically, the poet Robert Frost wrote this haunting line:
Society can never think things out:
It has to see them
acted out by actors
Devoted actors at a sacrifice.
After writing about & following the peaks and (many) troughs of culture the past decade, this truth resounds.
Postman always mused that “the inventor of a technology is the least equipped to predict its impacts,” and Frost gives the reason why— innovation isn’t intuitive, it’s in a hurry. The fastest way to see if a technology works is to release it. So too is the fastest way to become trapped in the externalities of your premature proposition.
America is an empire built on the assumption that things have to be acted out. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (for those white, male, and close to the center of the bell curve) have to be actualized to test their mettle. War and death were a necessary evil we can justify in hindsight because of the technology of liberty that just had to be implemented. All the philosophizing & eloquence in their musing failed to reach the proper method that work like MLK or Mandela’s were able to find.
We sit as the complicit inheritors of this kind of recklessness, building a system of prosperity and production on the idea that we needn’t consider second order effects for long (or in equal proportion to the first order “gains” of invention). As companies race to align large language models to society, we fail to rightly adjudicate whether society is aligned to virtue.
This question, are we aligned with the virtues we want to see in society, should be at the heart of the alignment project.
indebted
How do you know when it’s time to kill a project or simplify it?
I’ve been struggling to engage Postman and the work on this second pathway for months now. I’m not sure how to move past it to the work on the third pathway & beyond. I still see its purpose and love its central conceit. But the toll its first section, mired in the ache and problems we’re facing, takes makes me reticent to push through to its hopeful end.
Simplification is both an experience and current consideration.
The first pathway had more sections that became appendices as the freedom to focus on the core few took hold. I had to trim all that was not essential to shine a light on what could be added back in post. Vitally, I needed permission from outside myself. Someone to tell me it was okay to downsize the dream reinvigorated my passion for it.
Unfortunately, not all projects encounter this issue at the same point in the process.
If enough momentum has not been built, the question leans towards killing or totally retooling what the project will become. This can be incredibly beneficial and instructive because we have to remember, bad ideas are not fatal. The idea itself may be a good one. It could have simply been a bad idea for your season of life, current focus in your domain, or for the medium you’re most excited to use. This realization and practice, killing your darlings, can pull you out of a funk and launch you on a new path where your newfound learnings can prevent you from falling at the same spot.
…But what about when you’re indebted to a work and feel you have to get it out of your system before you’re able to do anything else? Is there an exemption from killing your darlings when you’ve got years of sunk cost invested in a project’s idea-spring & life-source? Does the spiritual connection to an author and the need to pin their work down within a specific era of your life supplant any suggestion to move on? If a debt is owed, must it be repaid?
memento resurrectionis
A Sabbath post…
In death as in birth, we go not alone.
The biblical story is one of continual lost potential on this side of Eden. The offer to resurrection life was never a sham, never a far off reality, but a misunderstood gift. The hope of followers of the one called the Christ is in His words—”I am in you and you are in me”— as we grow into increasingly united but beautifully diverse bearers of the imago dei within…
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together,
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you…T.S Eliot, The Waste Land
The glory to which man is called is that he should grow more godlike by growing ever more human…
Fr Dumitru Staniloae, Orthodoxy, Life in the Resurrection
For death is not the end of life but the beginning of its renewal…
Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will announce My words to you.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, making something on the wheel. But the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter; so he remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make.
Jeremiah 18:1-4
When you walk
Through a storm
Hold your head up high
And don't be afraid
Of the dark…Walk on
Walk on
With hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone…Gerry & the Pacemakers, “You’ll never walk alone” (Penny & Sparrow version ftw)
memento mori
Tyson Motsenbocker wrote a tranquil poem to run over a smooth guitar foundation in one of his songs I can’t shake.
It tells the story of a man meeting the personifications of Death & Love, but never getting close enough to experience either. His final interaction with one is haunting and forms the basis for most people’s view on death…
Many years later, when the man had grown old
And his beard was long and white
And his face looked like a map of the mountains
Death came to visit him
"Hello", said the man
"Hello", said Death
"All of these years I have looked to find her alone", said the man
"But whenever I came near, I found that you were there also"
"Ah", said Death, sitting down beside the man
"That was your mistake
For wherever Love is, I am close behind
She displays my power and my poetry and even my beauty
When I am nearby, Love's face shines brighter
The colors of the earth burn truer
And time itself speeds"
"I have always avoided her to be clear of you", said the man
"And I too have made a mistake", said Death, rising to his feet
"By never telling you that I always come alone in the end"- Tyson Motsenbocker, A Kind Invitation
Two problems with this formulation of the death process and the life that leads to it:
Firstly, we aren’t just mortal creatures, humans from humus born into frailty and towards inevitable death; we are also natal creatures, born into human bodies and destined to live our lives out on the earth.
Natality tries to capture that idea that “humans are not born in order to die but in order to begin.”
Consider the idea above and its explication from Jennifer Banks & her mortally-rebirthed sage, Hannah Arendt:
Although humans may have been created out of nothingness, the fact that they were made at all paradoxically negates all forms of nothingness. “Once called into existence,” Arendt writes, summarizing Augustine, “human life cannot turn into nothingness.”
In Motsenbocker’s (and indeed in most of Western culture’s) paradigm, death is an ending. It’s a de-creation, a road to non-life. It nips at our heels and chases every moment of love, generosity, or beauty we could hope to experience. It is the ever-present threat of nothingness we, whether with fear or courage, believe awaits us.
Which leads to the second issue I take with this ubiquitous worldview:
We never reach the end alone.
As “human life cannot turn into nothingness” “once called into existence,” so too does this mortal step on the journey not precipitate a lack of community—that thing by and into which we were birthed. Our natality necessitates a trajectory that is up & to the right in generative, not material, qualities. We don’t reach mortality with all our contribution & acquisition depleted, but with the creative work we do in life—the community we build, the art we ship, the communion we cultivate—deeply tied to and through this transition point.
Entropy does not undo reciprocity, what we cultivate lives on in new forms as long as we, created things persist.
And we persist in our natality whenever we engage life with the gifts we’ve been given in the communities we’ve been planted…
Birth and the miracle of our creative beginnings are what indelibly shape us and prove our capacity to creatively act in the world.
memento vivere
Keep death daily before your eyes….
The rule of Saint Benedict has both beauty and wisdom weaved into its lines.
But this famous line, I’m starting to think, is not part of that wisdom.
The idea is that to memento mori propels us to carpe diem.
Saints and sages have long utilized this practice to purge their hearts and turn their attentions and affections to that which is above and deeper within. To meditate on your death was to remember the importance of the living forward into the hope of resurrection life. It gave a shape to the container of life in this world and pushed the monastic tradition to form some of the most beautiful and loving people to ever exist.
So with great trepidation and humility, I would suggest that for us today this advice is wrong.
Are we hurtling towards death or are we living out of our birth?
Most would see the space rock we occupy that swings around a ball of fire in a vast cosmos or the inevitable laws of entropy that apply to all or the proclivity of humans from page 1 to lean into their death as signs of the mortality paradigm pervading all. Indeed, you don’t have to read deep into a history book, ancient text, or popular novel (from the Fault in our Stars to a good Michael Crichton novel) to read the human condition as synonymous to death.
Death shapes most fear in life as subjects like disease, war, and crime reach our ears. It makes itself known to most before they reach adulthood in the loss of a relative or friend. It even intrudes on the space of Birth all too often as the ultimate, unanswerable question of why chokes out our dreams and hope for life.
It’s no wonder so many have found it necessary to turn to mortality as a practice to reckon with our frailty. Therapy aids the process, opening windows to the harsh reality of death. The Christian tradition fuels our “death-trospection”, giving an icon of the Cross as a symbol of our Way (more on this in a bit). Death is a hot topic again in the 21st century as cafés and blogs write about its importance and the way our systems, from medical to political, encourage conversation about our ends.
And these are not completely negative.
Death’s reality is a palliative for poor existential framing.
Some are held back by their fear of death, others are unable to confront and say goodbye to those who need release, and more need to remember we cannot overcome death (the drive to persist is futile at best & all-consuming vanity at worst).
But in all these cases, a palliative is no cure.
These mortally-focused worldviews create dilemmas within the one-sided nature of their narrative about reality.
See so much of the end as our ever-present reality and we find roads to make it so.
In a world that can naturally lean toward chaos (tohu va-bohu in the Hebrew), living lives with an anchor in the end brings its fruit unnaturally close. Jennifer Banks reflects on our mortal drive stating,
The Holocaust was a consequence of a death drive that ran deep through Western societies, one that had propelled humanity into a fruitless, barren place… Locked in their own privacy, flying into their inner selves, they had lost faith in their ability to transform their worlds and to create new, plural realities through their actions and their speech…
Through pain, we need to discover that the counter-balance to mortality is not hedonism—living it up in our time to focus only on the present— but the concept of natality and its experience with us all…
Consider each of these well-worn death aphorisms flipped to manifest the change natality creates:
From the time we are born, we are being shaped by birth…
Study birth always; it takes an entire lifetime to learn how to give birth or to come to terms with our having been born…
The great philosophers are those who practice being born and birthing…
Keep birth daily before your eyes…
Birth is evidence of our freedom...
The fundamental purpose of art is to process the strange, painful, and miraculous experience of childbirth…
The elliptical nature of each of these affirmations provide the paradigm shift— from death to life, from destruction to creation, from non-existence to artistic-creation. And natality offers a way to each of these blessings, if we can understand it’s philosophical underpinnings…
dailies manifesto
You should write everyday. Not you, I’m talking to me. Me, the reader, me the writer.
Rick Rubin taught us Creativity is an action & way of being. It begs to be utilized, sharpened, displayed, and lived out.
Seth Godin taught us Creativity is intertwined with Generosity & capable of transforming others. It’s for someone, not everyone.
What is the path to creativity? Here’s Seth:
If you want to learn how to juggle, you have to drop an enormous number of balls. If you want to learn how to swim, you have to sort of drown. And if you want to learn to be creative, you have to show me an enormous number of bad ideas…
This “enormous number of bad ideas” (that produce a couple good ones) will lead to a place where you’re quite sure you have something to say to someone. Not everyone, because we can’t change the whole of the fractalized world. And not some thing ambiguous and jumbled, because being a meaningful specific beats being a wandering generality every time.
This is domain expertise, calling, the pieces of a grand contribution. On the journey of creativity, hoard signs that point to this…
The journey matters as much as this final creative act. Each step is a chance to create something that resonates with someone deeply. Tap into the ache within everyone, and drill down to the life & cares of just one. Find the path and stay on it. Because along the path are all kinds of signs that point to ways of being in the world that radically transform life itself.
Goal of the Dailies- To become creative by generously creating so someone shares your work with a friend to say, “See!?”
Step 1: Show me your bad ideas (“Let's prove that your bad ideas are not fatal...”)
Step 2: Find your domain expertise (“This means you know what your audience wants 10 minutes before they do…”)
Note: I got rid of photos on the blog because those were a way of hiding. I started sharing the date of each post because not sharing it was a way of hiding. Make small moves to put yourself on the hook to begin to share more of yourself.
crossing boundaries
From an early point, humans are obsessed with boundaries. My toys versus your toys, my food not yours.
As we grow into social beings we become polite about these boundaries & our egocentrism, but we construct our environments out of the belief that boundaries are what we need to thrive. We think it natural & necessary for the rich to avoid with the poor, the north to not associate with the south, and country music listeners to not associate with jazz listeners.
Our ancient texts affirm this belief whether in the Taoist view of the yin and the yang or in Akkadian myths of Marduk dividing up roles for the kings of the proto-Babylonian land to rule parts of his creation. Even in the Hebrew Bible’s own creation account, Elohim separates “light and day,” “water from waters,” “sea from sky”, “land from sea,” (Gen 1:4-10) and appoints his own “rulers” over each of them (Gen 1:16). Beyond the creation accounts, the Israelite nation is called specifically to be a “kingdom of priests & a (set apart) nation” (Ex 19:6), so that they can one day be “set high above all nations” (Deut 26:18-19).
At first glance, these and many similar passages (Gen 49:26, Ex 13:12, Lev 20:24-26, Numb 16:9, Deut 10:8…) give us a view of humanity that works better when apart. We are inclined to think this is the way of things and any of its evil is necessary for flourishing…
But at the earliest point, we all crossed a boundary without thought to its indecency. Non-life to life, womb to world, water to air.
This is the miracle of birth- that, in it, we are in touch with another layer of reality, a boundary-crossing reality that effects or person and our place wholesale. A mother gives up the social baggage of my space-your space and invites another creature to be one with her- the most primal image of the Messiah’s call to “be one with me” (John 17:21).
Birth gives us an opportunity to witness the true nature of reality that is boundary-less.
Birth confounds the binary. It is an experience of neither mastery nor powerlessness; it confronts us with our embodied, earthly creativity, with what we can control and with what we simply cannot control…
Jennifer Banks, Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth
Unfortunately, “natality”, as Jennifer Banks and philosophers before her eloquently coin the term, is not at the top of our list for dinner party conversation like mortality or our separation from parts of the world is. Pressures consign this facet of the human experience to just one of its halves and one brief moment of time and conversation. We stifle its transforming power to show us how we (even those never to find themselves in need of a midwife or doula) can partake in radical acts of creation.
Birth breaks down most of the dualisms humans use to structure reality: man/woman, mind/body, thought/experience, destruction/creation, self/other, creator/created, birth/death. In challenging those binaries, birth can be an act of nonconforming, and motherhood an expression of alterity. Therein lies the difficulty of talking about birth today: birth is both the norm and its transgression.
Jennifer Banks, Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth
It makes all the sense in the world then that 3 of the 4 Gospels of the Christian Scriptures would begin with birth narratives (John maintains the natality of Christ through his poetic opening on the theological implications of the incarnation; while Mark, with no explicit birth narrative, goes to lengths to stress the idea that those outside “the family” are just as invited to the table as those born into it, giving us numerous boundary crossing stories in the place of the nativity to drive home this point). When Jesus comes onto the scene, his whole ministry is to bridge chasms that have opened up between people. He sits with the rich and the poor, invites tax collectors to dine with zealots, and speaks with forwardness and a restoring dignity to the opposite gender, allowing all to cross the boundaries of their time to sit at his feet.
Looking back then, in light of this reality, we see what was always there:
That the creator God in Genesis invited his handiwork (“let there be” is a jussive not an imperative) to become distinctly itself. Because the goal was never separation of land and sky or people from people.
Creation is about adopting uniqueness to find contribution (reflecting 1 Cor 12:12’s “one body, many parts” idea).
That the call of a certain people was to make uncertain the boundaries between all people.
Because the purpose of “setting apart” was never to create hierarchy.
Being chosen is about finding one’s own way to help others along the way (hear the Torah’s “a blessing to the nations” refrain; Gen 22:18, Jer 47:2, Gal 3:8).
Birth, the first, great crossing of boundaries, should begin to shape our understanding of the world and give us a map for the steps into new connections and the synergism of all life this side of Eden...
+ theology
We all hide. They layers of our inner self unravel before us with terror.
We frantically shove it all back in the drawer before those around us can notice the truth of us appear.
Do we hide because we’re scared of failure or being on the hook?
Fear is the anticipation of failure or the anxiety of possibility and it’s not usually helpful.
If you’re adventuring the Amazon rainforest or fighting in a gladiatorial arena or surviving the zombie apocalypse it can keep you quick. If you’re posed at a keyboard, preparing to speak to an audience, or procrastinating a hard conversation, fear is only masochism.
But most hiding isn’t because of this kind of fear.
Most of us hide to avoid being on the hook.
Askıda ekmek. The Turkish tradition of buying an extra loaf the baker hangs on a wall for those in need in the community.
We stay off the hook by neglecting our idiosyncratic potential, generous contributions, and personal experience. We tell ourselves our lack of a degree disqualifies us from speaking into the great conversation. We (and if you haven’t got the joke yet, “we” = “I”) avoid mixing our burgeoning selves with our former selves for fear of being on the hook for what our new self has to say to the world.
And this kind of hiding led to stagnation, distraction, and a failure to be generous with the space I’ve sat in for nearly 2 years.
Going forward, this new self won’t be hiding.
“+ theology” because the vast majority of my resources, training, practice, and ideas generated lean into my background as a follower of the Way of Jesus. The scholarship I’ve digested, the classes and sermons I’ve begun to teach, and the musings I spend the most time on have found their way from the eremos of the tech-space into a community of saints asking questions about the fundamental nature of our relationship to a higher power.
I’m only late to the party on the days I deny my ability to contribute to the conversation.
Technology and creativity will always be integral to the way I write and projects I take. “+ theology” doesn’t mean a subsumption of these beneath a new banner. It puts me on the hook to share additional angles and mentors who build on the equation. It opens a part of myself that can invigorate the ideas from my old self, correcting and finding synergy with that version and its passion.
So let this be an reintroduction. An introduction to my new findings of the past 2 years. To those contemporary authors like J Richard Middleton, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Robert Alter, Amy Peeler, Ronald Rolheiser, Dallas Willard, Tomáš Halik, James K A Smith... And to those with lasting impact, now long venerated like Augustine, John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, John Cassian, Thomas Merton, TS Elliot, Ignatius of Loyola…
bad art
The Beatles changed music as they wrote, recorded, & produced more than 200 songs.
+200 songs and 10% made it to #1.
Most won’t ever create 20 works that impact culture throughout their entire lifetime… but that shouldn’t mean we settle for 0.
We have a feel for the economics of entertainment & the probability of the genetic lottery; we know on a primal level we’ll never match Paul & John. School & society reinforce this feeling fitting us into machines not masterpieces. Deep within us though is an urge to connect, to make a difference, to be part of the conversation.
Social media, yet another stifling s-word, mires this ache in a haze of mediocrity & distraction.
We create “content” (that which is inside another thing) upon performative platforms. Whether we’re updating our network about a life change or lifestyle change-agent, we post and comment and like and “influence” in spaces that are fickle & finite. As trends & times change, so too will our work and the hours we poured into pressing “publish.”
We’ve settled for less than a goose egg here- we’ve settled for the undoing of our creative capacities.
Social media mirrors the war-torn regions about which it often pretends to publicize. It creates rifts between communities and rips through the character-development of a people. It “feeds” us shorter, more flashy, and sensational content (it’s been quipped about virality that “what works on social media is a car wreck”) and pushes us from our calling, our values, our gift.
But we don’t have to settle.
Show me your bad art. Churn through 180 bad songs and the good ones will shine through. Begin today and in 2030 your work may not be in the top #100, but it will certainly have been worth it.
the 20’s
We will look back on the 2010’s as an era of growth, excitement, and innovation around the internet and social platforms.
But the history book’s documentation of the 2020’s will evoke grief and regret about the harms and externalities of our “innovation.”
Debates rage on as culture wars effect moderation policies, design philosophies, and profit incentives for tech companies. As both sides seek to create “freedom” for their constituents by taking control of the whole project by either blowing the whole thing open or micro-managing its cancerous effects, both sides rearrange ships on the titanic.
Policy won’t stop the way our society has superficially come to “like” or “dislike” its reality. Healthy conversation about social media use won’t stop the ways our algorithms push us further and further away from agreement on any topic or idea. “Free expression” (whether in its caustic form on the right or in its pandering form on the left) won’t stop the enslavement of a generation to the form technology takes.
As the ledger of harms grows long and the decision-makers and arbiters of truth grow distracted, the 20’s are setup to be a decade where just one feeling is reflected back to us through its often revisited Wikipedia page: regret.
encyclopedia(s)
…a book or set of books giving information on many subjects or on many aspects of one subject and typically arranged alphabetically….
We used to have one encyclopedia for all human knowledge. Naturalis Historia.
Then human knowledge outgrew the bounds of a codex and extended from A-Z. Then the whole thing blew wide open.
Each of us have our own cultural encyclopedia’s. We all see the world through different foundational truths, grounding perspectives, and methodological ideals. Part of this is due to globalization— that fractal expansion of the human experience whose impact we’ll never fully grasp— and part of it pays its dues to the advent of social media algorithms— those partitioning arbiters of all we see online whether fact, fiction, or fable.
When the French polymath Galileo had to argue a point with his materialist contemporary, Decartes, he consulted a similar encyclopedia to his opponent’s own. He operated out of a foundation of knowledge that was much the same.
Yes, Frontier innovation would have been shifting, and No, Agreement on a guiding moral & historical philosophy to interpret this knowledge would have been difficult to establish, but the base set of facts and potential perspectives to take would have been manageable, and common ground could have been found through adjacent reasoning and similar dialogue partners given a little bit of time.
Agree with this idea or not, the problem of today is not just one of the scale of information but of our control mechanisms.
Algorithms are the final arbiters of truth to decide what enters your encyclopedia. Your feed is your world, your perspective, and the knowledge base from which you operate. If you see only see the moral failures of one group online, you can quickly come to believe this group to be chronically incompetent. Whether you recognize the side of the prism you’re viewership supports or not, your ability to see and discern is altered by the angle from which you look.
As our last historical information control systems in the courts begins to decline and trust in institutions like government wane even further, we are left, in the West, with a question always unasked, always unthought of…
From which cultural encyclopedia(s) are you making that asssumption?
cameras, search, DALL-E 3
The lens with which I view technological shifts has morphed over the past year. With the birth of my first child, I think about invention in new terms. As my parents grew up in a televised age and I grew up in a platformed one, our kids will grow up with new norms, habits, and social conditioning embedded in the technology their every interaction is dictated by. Using DALLE-3 taught me just how much this change matters.
Art has always sought to freeze a moment, feeling, or zeitgeist in time for later retrieval and experience. This has shaped our culture in ways unimaginable. We have to ask, what has this profound practice done to shape our memory, our worldviews, and our relationships?
In the early 1800’s, the first permanently captured images of the real world appeared. The shock of this innovation certainly woke many up to the potentials of technological prowess. The right to privacy, the ability to document crimes or wars, and the inclination to remember early parts of your life were all invented alongside the first many iterations of the camera. A new generation grows up knowing they can go out to capture and create pictures of whatever they find.
Fast forward two centuries and exponentially more rapid change occurs. The continuation and proliferation of this technology into every part of our society converges around the World Wide Web and the Search Bar. With security cameras, professional photographers, and (most importantly) smartphone cameras, we became awash with images. Google emerged to solve the problem of having to sort through the world’s ever-increasing data. A new generation grows up knowing a few strokes on a keyboard can find them a picture of anything that has occurred in the world or been created by humans.
Fast forward a mere fifteen years thanks to Moore’s yet unfailing Law. LLM’s turn language, colors, and sound into geometry to be manipulated by a machine’s intelligence. The internet becomes the sandbox within which AI plays to create novelty at the whims and wishes of online engineers and once-failed artists. An image that has never existed can be produced from simple language cues as ML improves over months, weeks, days, and prompts. A new generation grows up knowing any imaginable idea can be created instantly from every bit of the historical internet.
Does this make future generations more prone to limitless creativity and less comfortable with the labor of creation? Will it shape our children’s trust in a vital or meaningful photo’s veracity (when any image can be deep-faked and auto-extended to include what was originally present)? What will the culture of tomorrow’s human-AI synthesis think about the way we have used images to rewrite law, history, and life in a pre-DALL-E world?
notice more fractals Ⅱ
Neil Postman, prophetic media critic of the age of television that gave rise to our social media-infused day, saw a trivial, distracted, and self-centered culture emerge because of technologies deeply integrated into public life. He understood that novel technology is not simply additive nor subtractive, but ecological in nature. It changes everything. It effects every part of a society from top to bottom. In his seminal work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he diagnosed:
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.
The designs inherent in the television as a “performer” reshaped society as an “audience.” This was a massive shift to say the least. The dream of liberal democracy is radical participation through action, not the jeers, boos, resounding laughter, and homogeneous concordance of televised democracy. Don’t like what you see, change the channel. Watching a presidential debate with company, turn the volume down so your voice rings louder than your technicolor opponents. Audiences hold all the power in this kind of asynchronous, parasocial relationship. This new character of social life in the West paved the way for the technology we are all the product of today. The smartphone.
Fifteen years after its release, we have seen a new design cement into place an old way of seeing ourselves. From the first version of the iPhone to the original launch of Facebook, the user has been the center of attention. Engineers ask, How can we create a user experience that is personal, user-friendly, accessible? Some of these questions provoke thoughtful, flourishing answers. They also have the power to make a user believe, subtly and over prolonged exposure to interfaces, that they are the center of the universe. As theologian Samuel D James put it, “the center of gravity in the online world is your profile, in which you are granted a near-godlike ability to craft an identity.” This kind of navel-gazing is prone to create a culture that does not look up to see community, details, and differences.
Similarly, digital technology is not typically a friend to nuance and complexity. Again from James, “our online conversations seem to drive us deeper into our pre-dug intellectual foxholes.” We see this all the time in toxic Twitter (X) battlefields and public forums that silo off attacker from the scapegoat they are burning. What we often fail to notice is what the obliteration of friction does to complicated, deep understanding.
We have been trained by our devices to look away from otherness and complexity, and we have lost so much. I return now to trees “as one of the most ubiquitous and long-lasting visual metaphors.” Manuel Lima, the cartographer of the artistic and practical journey tree images have been on, says “the tree is an extraordinary prism through which we can observe the evolution of human consciousness, ideology, culture, and society.” These ancient sages of our forests have been abused and forgotten by our western character of hurry and individualism.
You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above. That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen.
This “root problem” The Overstory sets out to explore has a cause. Our smartphones instruct us to not stop and to not care. We digest this message directly from the devices we touch more than any family member or friend. The moment we are confronted with a choice to lean into complexity and otherness, our efficiently trained character reinforces our proclivity for avoidance. Understanding another the plight of the poor is hard. Loving those who have hurt us is hard. Diving into relationship with people who don’t look like we do is hard. And hard things are not on our agenda.
We need counter-formative practices to recreate an inherent desire and ability to do hard things like these.
We need to “notice more fractals.”
collective conscious; protecting personhood
There are two streams of life technology effects profoundly.
Our “collective conscious” as a species is that slow, diffusive process of change we witness when innovation becomes embedded in institutions, economies, and cultural roadways. “Individual personhood” is that rapidly evolving, small-scale change in the lives of all citizens of a developed nation. These are the macro and the micro. The R&D that eventually breeds new systems versus the practical that over quickly produces changed people.
When I argue for an emerging tech’s implementation in healthy ways, for example AI in its ability to adjust our aperture, I am a techno-optimist about its implementation in the collective conscious of a society.
The production of new proteins and the ability of LLM’s to decode animal language are prospects (now made real) that excite me and encourage my enthusiasm for future, positive disruption.
The addition of a new super-powered chatbot in the lives of business people, teachers, and teenagers brings me only longing for stronger foundations of personhood.
A healthy vision of the implementation of technology respects the boundaries of the home, increases the value of holistic human beings, and relegates devices to their proper place as tools not augmentations.
Innovations in medicine should not encourage an MD to bring his stethoscope home to bed. The negative effect of this device was charted by Stanley Joel Reiser in its separation between doctors and patients (and their own trained intuition) as the latter became seen as unreliable in the face of quantifiable data from a machine. Imagine the adoption of a technology like this in a doctor’s personal life. As the counselor must put away the cognitive-behavioral therapy they apply each work day, so must the doctor neglect diagnoses and prescriptions for every problem they face in their marriage and friendships.
These are examples that map onto the adoption of our most pervasive technologies today. As the television transformed participants in democracy into audiences of democracy, social media and smartphones transformed customers of products into consumers of their product’s subtle ideologies.
As intellectual and business paragon Andy Crouch says, “magic is simply technology plus a dream.” In the case of digital technology like smartphones, social platforms, and AI, that dream is man as god. What we have found in every attempt to blend the limitations of man with the capabilities of technology is a regression. Homo deus, in reality, becomes homo machina. The efficiencies touted by software peddlers only serve to decrease the friction between a person offloading part of their brain to a device. The sum total of our outsourcing to technology is a new, digital humanity that feels unsafe without Apple Maps, cannot remember a phone number (or much else compared to the comparative savants of centuries past), and requires social mediator platforms to be their diplomatic representatives in a world too afraid to be vulnerable, authentic, and loving towards each other.
A healthy vision of technology in our world sees our creations for what they are, not what we want them to be. AI is a tool to solve challenges that match the scale of AI’s brainpower. It is not an article writing servant to be used in place of lacking minds. Smartphones are supercomputers, cheaply made to create a workforce that can collaborate on problems with low startup costs. They are not devices to bring with us to bed and create an illusion of the perfect life from their efficiencies.
When I think about the future of technology, I have a deep desire to see our collective consciousness as a global people ethically transformed as the march of justice continues on. All this can happen while individual personhood remains intact amidst the technological explosions happening around us all.
Postman: the end of education
Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see…
At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living…Neil Postman, The End of Education
As a new-made parent, I’ve been dwelling on these ideas and much else besides.
I was taught how to make a life for the majority of my educated years. This was an incredible blessing. It’s something that instills a deep-seated knowledge of what matters in life. Thoreau said, “rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,” and while I tend towards the latter three qualifications, I believe progressive culture’s favorite monastic saw love in his day as something trivial, consumptive, and selfish (not much has changed in our definitions). In this regard, I agree- truth wins out and is the sole currency we can teach our kids to uncover throughout their formative years.
Postman and I wouldn’t push back on the alternative. You could make an argument that school should teach students to make a living. However, I’d sooner reason that capitalism is the best system for economic governance than give credence to this method of pedagogy (the theories and practice may find validation in some aspects of flourishing, but certainly not all). I use our financial system as an example intentionally as it, more than almost anything else, has had the unintended effect of turning our institutions, especially education, into factories replicating “productive members of (a money-obsessed) society.”
In a post-war, manual labor and factory-filled environment, this may have been a valuable function for education (read statement with extreme skepticism). Whatever the reasons for absolving the thoughtful establishments of the past, we live in a new economy, culture, and geo-political environment. Knowledge work requires a new kind of worker.
The current (educational) structure, which seeks low-cost uniformity that meets minimum standards, is killing our economy, our culture, and us… One of the things that school is for is to teach our children to understand and relish the idea of intellectualism, to develop into something more than a purpose-driven tool for the industrial state.
- Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams
I quote this argument from an entrepreneur who paid his dues “making a living” off his early education. Seth built and sold a tech company to Yahoo in the early internet days and understood the value of economic motivators as well as anyone when he wrote these thoughts. His drive has always been to create change-makers in society, starting his own alternative-MBA program to rewrite the laws for education laid down by the industrial revolution. Making a living has become a language, an attitude, and a way of life. It can be impossible to separate the intertwined nature of school and this paradigm. It’s even harder to convince someone that financial increase is not something we should encourage for students.
Find my vote thrown in with the former purpose of schooling: to create adults who understand how to make a life. How to live by morals and a communal vision of the good life (which requires philosophical and theological education) and how to navigate the protean currents of culture (which requires a strong grip on history and sociology).
When you give a man a fish, you help him survive poverty…
When you teach him to use the rod, you help him heap piles of aquatic life upon a shore ad infinitum…
When you teach a man to be a fisherman (with all the accoutrements that lifestyle entails), you create a man connected to his local economy, willing to serve the greater good, and prone to finding creative, holistic, and healthy solutions to the problems of our time.
Technology is on a relentless warpath to create cogs in a machine that serve its end. Through our purpose and methods for education, we have coopted what was once vital and made it subservient to financial ends. We must reinvent and restore education for the modern era because of our today and their tomorrow. Our world is suffering from a lack of wisdom. When we teach prudence, we gain it. At the same time that we gain it, we impart it to those “living messages we send to a time we will not see.” In this, we find the true end of education.
center of gravity
The greatest marketing tactic a company can use is to transform customers into consumers. Consumers crave a new product. They seek it out whether they have need of it or not. Wendell Berry wrote that “capitalism doesn’t acknowledge limits” when warning against the dangers of becoming consumed with the “cancer of increase.”
We have been formed by this doctrine of the internet as much as we have been by free market philosophies. The trick that made the internet so sticky (meaning that it entices users to “stick” around longer than usual and return in the future) was its ability to bend the universe to its user’s whims. From the first version of Macintosh to the original launch of Facebook, the user has been the center of attention for all of a designer’s creativity. How can we create a user experience that is personal, user-friendly, accessible? Some of these questions provoke thoughtful, flourishing answers. They also have the power to make a user believe, subtly and over prolonged exposure to interfaces, that they are the center of the universe.
From the moment a platform is launched, whether it be on Medium or Instagram, Netflix or Amazon, the focus is you. What are your preferences? What are your interests? Who are you? Who would you like to be? These and more compose a cacophony of messages that reinforce each of our god complexes and transfer authority and agency from without to within. This form of empowerment and access can bring flourishing to many. We can never forget the abilities the web has granted our world in a time when collaboration and problem-solving are high needs.
At the same time, we must reckon with the fact that so much of the online half of our lives can steadily be shown to produce people who are entitled, narcissistic, and selfish. Our algorithms feed us exactly what we desire. Our notifications are tailored to create an ambient set of rhythms from which our life flows. In the chaos of this sycophantic noise hides a technology that has become so ingrained, so necessary, and so pervasive that to begin to even think of questioning its existence and design is anathema. Profit incentives, design biases, and social fabric tether our ship to a rock among rising tides. To remove our binds and climb free of the wreckage will require coming to terms with our natural limits. It will take eschewing the facade of primacy the internet has embedded in our self-perception. It will ask of us what every philosopher has had to ask through the ages, Who am I in this wide, wild world?
regrets from the “once hopeful”
Unforeseen consequences stand in the way of all those who think they see clearly the direction in which a new technology will take us. Not even those who invent a technology can be assumed to be reliable prophets…
Everyone is distracted, All of the time…
~ Justin Rosenstein (inventor of the like button, Co-founder of one project and Asana)
A strange series of events played out over the middle years of social media and digital technology’s most recent life cycle. From 2016 to 2020, an upheaval was occurring within the playground of tech giants. Each month saw a wunderkind or luminary disavow their inventions and recant their testimonies about digital technology’s goodness…
Social media companies are taking behavioral cocaine and sprinkling it over your interface. that’s the thing that keeps you coming back…
~ Aza Raskin (Inventor of infinite scroll, Co-Founder of The center for humane technology)
We began to see technologists “parent their devices” and (for those who were parents themselves) opt-out of giving access to their own children. News of caution and best practices emerged from the Valley. Those who had seen behind the curtain had something to say…
I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy…
~ Frances Haugen (Former Facebook designer, analyst, and whistleblower: “The Facebook files”)
It’s easy to see why so many innovators and trailblazers in the field began to leave and speak out. Our society was devastated by the transformation of thought, feeling, and action into a digital, hyper-individualized medium. Those creators of our new world had no ability to understand how their tools would shape our lives.
Most people think they spend 2 hours a day on their phone. When we look at the data...it's 4.5 hours — it shows that there's a disconnect between reality and your awareness…
~ Tim Kendall (former president of pinterest, creator of screen-time reduction app)
Whenever we enter a moment like ours, the first question that should arise is not “am I being effected by this shift,” but “how am I being effected by this shift?” This disconnect between what we see and feel tells a deeper story. We are no longer untethered simply from each other. We are isolated from our very selves without those institutions and principal methods of self-learning that make up a culture.
If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty…
~ Jaron Lanier (Father of Virtual Reality, author of Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now )
Inventors have in mind a use for their technology and a fulfillment of its potential. This explains the phenomenon of whistle-blowing in Big Tech. So many creators of our digital ecosystem’s most pervasive designs foresaw what the most rich, flourishing, and empowering versions of their tools could be. When runaway technologies destroyed the foundation of our democracies, usurped the history of progress, and meddled with the psychology of billions, once hopeful inventors gaped in dismay at what they had wrought.
Technology steers what 2 billion people are thinking and believing every day. It's possibly the largest source of influence over 2 billion people's thoughts that has ever been created…
~ Tristan harris (Former design ethicist at Google, Co-Founder of The center for humane technology)
While their designs continue to propagate, their regrets have propelled movements. No one can predict where a technology will end up and what aspects of society it will impact. What can be done is examination. We would be wise to begin a careful interrogation of the places in our lives where tech negatively impacts our well-being. Take an inventory of what digital content you permit everyday and account for its byproducts. You may discover that the hope you once felt about a platform or device’s influence has soured and turned to regret in light of the reality it has shaped.
We are surrounded by the wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in them… we become blind to the ideological meaning of our technologies…
~ Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology