LM Sacasas
@LMSacasas
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Thinking About Technology and Culture | Newsletter: | Book:
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I've got some good news to share!
Many thanks to Ben Loehnen
@AvidReaderPress
,
@Vogelrachelm
, and
@ezraklein
!
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The shitposters are from the future. They were sent back in time to thwart the singularity.
Seems the origin of the Google AI’s conclusion was an 11 year old Reddit post by the eminent scholar, fucksmith.
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You know what I think about a lot? That time that Hayao Miyazaki was shown an AI demonstration and replied simply with “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
Apple's Vision Pro comes with EyeSight, a feature that reveals your eyes when with another person, hides them when you're immersed in VR and blends the real world in as it appears before you.
#WWDC23
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Random take nobody asked for: One of the most profound yet unacknowledged costs associated with modern technology has been the loss of the star-filled night sky.
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If we extend our nervous system indiscriminately into the whole world, we should not be surprised to find that we are perpetually anxious, exhausted, and demoralized.
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“But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.” — Neil Postman
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We’ve gone from creating tools to accomplish what we desire to desiring only what our tools can accomplish.
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"And, what the computer people don’t realize–or they don’t care–is we’re dancing animals. You know; we love to move around. And we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore."
Kurt Vonnegut, from a 2005 interview (h/t
@mattCivico
)
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“When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition."
— Marshall McLuhan
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McLuhan argued that, pushed to its limits, a medium flips or reverses its characteristics.
Internet scale pushes information into disinformation, connection into loneliness, and desire into apathy.
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Hannah Arendt’s distinction between solitude and loneliness is invaluable. The former is essential to thought and the latter can be devastating. But we’ve contrived a techno-social milieu which deprives us of solitude while exploiting our loneliness.
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"I don't know."
"I need more time to think."
"I need to wait for better information."
"I don't know enough to have an opinion."
"It's not incumbent on me to have an opinion about this."
These are all perfectly acceptable and responsible responses.
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“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
― Wendell Berry (2000)
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"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk … every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”
— Søren Kierkegaard
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Sorry, I’m stuck on the incongruity of populating the world with non-human agents and interfaces that will mediate human experience in an age of mounting loneliness and isolation.
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Times tech columnist: “Of course, it would have been impossible to predict the effects of the internet’s presence in our lives.”
McLuhan:
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I don’t know, maybe I’m just cranky right now, but, honestly, if we don’t have a visceral response to the demoralizing and absurd quality of this kind of thing then maybe something’s gone terribly wrong.
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Twitter's "hidden curriculum" teaches users that they must have an opinion about everything. It's an intellectually and morally toxic lesson to internalize.
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This is, in fact, an anti-world. It generates a condition of wordlessness.
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Every so often I remember how television channels, all four of them or whatever, would every night just ... sign off. Like, "that's enough for today, you all get some sleep now."
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The message of the medium we call AI is the obfuscation of responsibility and relationship.
When AI people talk about labour, they tend to frame jobs as sets of tasks, rather than sets of responsibilities.
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Thesis: We desire to be seen and acknowledged. To exercise meaningful degrees of agency and judgment. In short, to belong and to matter. Social media trades on these desires, exploits them, deforms them, and never truly satisfies them, which explains a good deal of the madness.
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Everything I needed to know about optimization and time-saving technologies, I learned from "The Little Prince."
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The failure to seriously consider how new technologies might be weaponized reveals a stunning degree of either naivete, hubris, or recklessness.
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Whether by immersion in virtual worlds or a flight from earth, we are being sold a retreat from the human condition and its natural habitat.
In the future, Bezos explained at a recent event, people native to space colonies will visit earth "the way you would visit Yellowstone National Park."
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"World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation." — Marshall McLuhan, 1970
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This is a good example of why I’d argue that “AI” is conceived, marketed, and deployed as life-support for dying institutions. Modernity’s last gasp.
The alternative is to rethink/re-imagine these institutions, their aims, and the assumptions that underwrite them.
these tools will help us be more productive (can't wait to spend less time doing email!), healthier (AI medical advisors for people who can’t afford care), smarter (students using ChatGPT to learn), and more entertained (AI memes lolol).
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Please read what Langdon Winner wrote in 1977 and let us dispense with the idea that we were not warned.
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"Contemporary man ... attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it."
— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
Should we all wear sensors to avoid being run over by driverless cars?
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You don't see this kind of truth in advertising anymore, friends. Apple is to be commended.
Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.
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"I repeat: life cannot be delegated."
— Lewis Mumford, "Authoritarian and Democratic Technics" (1963)
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"What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument." — Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Bloomberg reports the claim of the first child born following polygenic screening as an embryo, via a company called Genomic Prediction.
Basically a test that rank orders embryos by health using genome wide profile 🧵
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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.
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Thesis: We are not addicted to the internet or smart phones. Rather, our will power is utterly depleted by the persistent cognitive, emotional, and moral demands they make of us.
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Hey,
@hypervisible
, I’ll do this one for you: “Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration.”
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One of the Ivan Illich's most helpful concepts was the idea of counter-productivity. Past certain thresholds of scale or quantity or speed, etc., tools and institutions became counter-productive and eventually destructive.
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Random observation: We've failed to reckon with how peculiar the era of electronic mass media was in human history. We're taking the consensus reality it generated for a baseline rather than seeing it as a technologically contingent phenomenon.
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Here's the problem: we're starved for personal relationships and but we're simultaneously being de-skilled in the relevant habits and sold cheap substitutes instead.
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"I would like to get ... people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we can do with them ... how their use shapes our perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using them." — Illich, 1988
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Never before will simply stepping outside and taking a walk have such therapeutic value. And it will be free.
movies are going to become video games and video games are going to become something unimaginably better
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Hard to overstate the damage done by the weaponization of bad faith at the scale made possible by digital media.
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So much of modern society was built upon the interlocking presumptions of objective knowledge, impartial institutions, and neutral technology. As each in turn becomes increasingly implausible, rightly or wrongly, the modern world order comes apart.
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Mary Shelley published Frankenstein 200 years ago. The novel is not merely or even primarily about the illicit pursuit of knowledge. It is also about the failure to take responsibility for what one has created.
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“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.”
— Marshall McLuhan on the
#metaverse
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Look, maybe it was just a bad idea to connect everything and everybody.
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Doomscrolling is structurally induced acedia, the sleepless demon unleashed by the upward swipe of the infinite scroll.
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"We live the given life, and not the planned."
— Wendell Berry, who turned 86 today
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Arendt on the shockingly swift collapse of morals, norms, etc.
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Exercise: read through The Lord of the Rings and substitute every mention of “the Ring” with “smartphone.”
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1. "selling out" presupposes a romantic purity, which collapses in digital environments
2. the ideal of not "selling out" is implausible to a self mediated by social media platforms
3. Digital tech erodes all remaining barriers to commercialization of everything
3. precarity
When exactly, and how, did the intense stigmatization of “selling out,” so central to gen X culture and the 90s, become obsolete and even incomprehensible? I don’t think people now worry about their heroes, or themselves, “selling out” in at all the same way as they did then.
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For the past ten years, I tried to think out loud, and in conversation with several of you, about the personal and social consequences of technological change. I collected the best of that work into this volume:
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The information bomb “plays a prominent role in establishing fear as a global environment, because it allows the synchronization of emotion on a global scale.”
— Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear
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In 1968, they made the mistake of inviting Ivan Illich to speak to a gathering of American students preparing to do volunteer work in Latin America.
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“The internet, as a mediator of human interactions, is not a place, it is a time. It is the past.”
Seven theses on the internet, temporality, and action.
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"Algorithm Aversion" ... also known as not giving up on life.
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“I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.”
— Walker Percy, "The Moviegoer"
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Well put.
The question I ask myself every time I'm exposed to a new piece of ed tech is whether or not this tool helps students "do school" or if it helps students "learn." The overwhelming majority, like 99%, are all about doing school.
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Impossible to overstate the degree to which the petty, narcissistic type is naturally equipped to command the heights of the attention economy.
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Since the Amish are trending … allow me to suggest that we should all emulate the Amish. They are paradigmatically modern in that they have made the need to think about technology a defining feature of their culture.
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I suppose this has the advantage of clarifying the essence of what the human is reduced to in each case.
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“Once you have learned how to ask questions—relevant and appropriate and substantial questions—you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.” — Neil Postman
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Jacques Ellul sometimes spoke of technique as the compulsive search for “the one best way” in every sphere of life.
One under-appreciated consequence of believing there is such a thing is living with the perpetual frustration of failing to achieve it.
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Seems like a banal observation, but … a quick glimpse at the timeline gave me, in succession, a Jeopardy clip, an image of a 5-month-old Holocaust victim, something about fashion, and a story about climate change. This is an absurd and demoralizing way to encounter information.
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McLuhan's Tetrad of Media Effects
1. What does a new technology enhance?
2. What does a new technology make obsolete?
3. What does a new technology retrieve that had been obsolesced?
4. What does a new technology flip into when pushed to its extreme?
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The only good thing about this is imagining Augustine's reaction.
“Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”
Saint Augustine
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Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention.
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“Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.” — Ivan Illich
I’ve been thinking about this line for a long time. I think it contains a fundamental truth that lies at the heart of much of our disorder.
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Why is everything in this fucking country a skill that has to be mastered? We turn things that in other parts of the world are just done into something extra. You can't just have good beer or a nice walk. You have to make it into a production, like micro-brewing. It's exhausting.
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The concluding chapter of Neil Postman's Technopoly was titled "The Loving Resistance Fighter." It featured a list of conveniently tweet-sized characteristics of those who resist American Technopoly. They are those who ... 1/
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At the end of a certain way of thinking about human beings, technology, and politics you would find ... a nightmare.
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The age in which humans achieved unprecedented levels of ostensible techno-scientific control over the world also became the age of anxiety. This is not a coincidence.
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Hero of the people, I salute you for your action at the gas pump.
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Modernity traded locally shared common worlds for a desituated public sphere built on shared knowledge mediated by institutions and experts.
What we’re living through is the collapse of that arrangement and the subsequent dissolution into virtually shared common worlds.
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"As Arendt reminds us: 'those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.'" —
@Roger_Berkowitz
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"Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns of information."
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)
the big secret about the modern world that is really obvious but no one will admit is that it's social media that is making politics insane
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“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash ... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” — Paul Virilio
One of the issues in developing AI is what's called "dual use": something developed for positive uses works just as well for negative uses. Here's an example: a system for drug development can also be used for chemical weapon development.
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The four horsemen of the digital apocalypse will be called Convenience, Security, Disruption, and Lulz.
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This is Hannah Arendt in "The Crisis In Education." I found it hard not to read this paragraph in light of social media.
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"Contemporary man ... attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it."
— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)
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I'm fascinated by the fact that we've internalized the need to add an embarrassing number of exclamation points to emails just to show that we're not sociopathic.
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Darkly fitting that the “perfected memory” on display amounts to an image of isolation.
Starting to roll out today,
#GoogleOne
members — on Android and iOS — will be able to enjoy
#MagicEraser
, a new HDR video effect, free shipping on select print store orders and more so you can easily perfect all of your memories in Google Photos.
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"You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both."
Stumbled on these lines from John Ruskin, circa 1850.
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Attention is just another name for the contact the mind makes with the world. If it is sufficiently attenuated, our capacity and inclination to care, desire, love, and act also suffer.
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The bargain on offer seems to be that we may lose skills, competencies, work, stability, community, and layers of engagement w/the world, but we’ll get lots of stuff, material or virtual.
But what if our well-being depended almost entirely on the side of the things surrendered?
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"the search for motives, the demand that everybody display in public his innermost motivation, since it actually demands the impossible, transforms all actors into hypocrites; the moment the display of motives begins, hypocrisy begins to poison all human relations." — Arendt
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In 1985, historian Melvin Kranzberg of the Georgia Institute of Technology summed up what he had learned about technology during his long career.
"Kranzberg's Six Laws," as they've come to be known, are still a useful guide to thinking about technology today.
Here they are ...
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When I read something like this, I find it helpful to ask, “What does a person already have to believe in order for this to sound like a remotely plausible or even desirable claim?”
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Attention is a virtue, and its proper reward is not improved productivity but the disclosure of the world’s variegated beauty.
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One insight I've derived from my reading of Arendt, but which is certainly not unique to her, is that people need a common world in which they can appear and be seen and act. So much of what we call the attention economy exploits precisely this need. 1/x
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Things I did not see coming in 2019: Christianity Today having a better day on Twitter than JK Rowling.
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