Technology is a topic I often touch on in this blog* because first, it’s directly relevant to my book in-progress on Far West Texas, and second, the digital revolution we’re all living through is so dizzyingly, all-at-once enchanting and consternating. Where is this all taking us? Mars? The Stars? Or, will we all end up like the pudding-like protagonist of E.M. Forster’s eerily prophetic short story “The Machine Stops”? How does this digital revolution connect to / echo with technological change in the past, for example, with the advent of the printed book, the telegraph, radio, telephones, cinema, television? With other technologies, from the railroads to airplanes? Or for that matter, the bow and arrow, or say, or the clock? And how is the digital revolution, in fact, or not in fact, fundamentally different from what has come before? Most importantly, how to live a human life, a good and creative life, say, this writer’s life, that is not hijacked by technological imperatives, above all, the constant pull to the glamor of the screens? (And I mean “glamor” in its original, occult sense.) So many questions… Sometimes some of the literature begins to answer them.
Doug Hill’s Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology
Doug Hill’s Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology. That fuzzy blurb on the cover is from Jerry Mander: “This book is the most comprehensive, provocative, and entertaining review of technological thought, expression, impact, and controversy that I have yet seen.” Yours Truly concurs.
The first and major thing I appreciated about Doug Hill’s Not So Fast is that he provides an up-to-date general overview of the literature on the history and the philosophy of technology. Francis Bacon, Henry James, Martin Heidegger, Aldous Huxley, Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner, Norbert Wiener, Jacques Ellul, Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, Steve Jobs–and an army more– they’re all there. Secondly, in engaging, butter-smooth prose throughout, Hill tackles, as he quotes philosopher Albert Borgmann, “the pervasiveness and consistency of [technology’s] pattern.” I mean to say, Hill has accomplished a rare combined literary and intellectual feat.
Here’s the catalog copy for Not So Fast:
There’s a well-known story about an older fish who swims by two younger fish and asks, “How’s the water?” The younger fish are puzzled. “What’s water?” they ask.
Many of us today might ask a similar question: What’s technology? Technology defines the world we live in, yet we’re so immersed in it, so encompassed by it, that we mostly take it for granted. Seldom, if ever, do we stop to ask what technology is. Failing to ask that question, we fail to perceive all the ways it might be shaping us.
Usually when we hear the word “technology,” we automatically think of digital devices and their myriad applications. As revolutionary as smartphones, online shopping, and social networks may seem, however, they fit into long-standing, deeply entrenched patterns of technological thought as well as practice. Generations of skeptics have questioned how well served we are by those patterns of thought and practice, even as generations of enthusiasts have promised that the latest innovations will deliver us, soon, to Paradise. We’re not there yet, but the cyber utopians of Silicon Valley keep telling us it’s right around the corner.
What is technology, and how is it shaping us? In search of answers to those crucial questions, Not So Fast draws on the insights of dozens of scholars and artists who have thought deeply about the meanings of machines. The book explores such dynamics as technological drift, technological momentum, technological disequilibrium, and technological autonomy to help us understand the interconnected, interwoven, and interdependent phenomena of our technological world. In the course of that exploration, Doug Hill poses penetrating questions of his own, among them: Do we have as much control over our machines as we think? And who can we rely on to guide the technological forces that will determine the future of the planet?
Of late I have become an enthusiast of typewriting— the machine I am working on these days is a refurbished Swiss-made 1967 Hermes 3000, and quite the workhorse it is! (Ribbons? Kein Problem.) Of course I do most of my writing on my computer using Microsoft Word; WordPress for this blog; not to mention multitudinous hours spent with ye olde email program. But for laser-level attentional focus–and percussive energy!– the typewriter is something special, and as time goes by, the more I use it, the more I appreciate it. In fact, I now use my typewriter for one thing or another (drafts, notes, letters, recipe cards) almost every day.
Though I have yet to meet him in person, my mentor in the Typosphere is none other than Richard Polt, professor of philosophy at Xavier University and the author of some heavy-weight tomes on Heidegger, and, to the point, a practical manual I often consult, and warmly recommend to anyone thinking of buying a typewriter, or, say, hauling Grandpa’s out of some cobwebbed corner of the garage: The Typewriter Revolution. As “Richard P.” Professor Polt also maintains a blog of the same name. And now he, Frederic S. Durbin, and Andrew V. McFeaters, have put together a pair of anthologies, both just published, the second of which, Escapements: Typewritten Tales from Post-Digital Worlds (Loose Dog Press, 2019), includes a story of mine: “What Happened to the Dog?”
Herewith, “What Happened to the Dog?” (Caveat: undoubtedly the photographs in the book itself are of better quality; these I just snapped with my smartphone, too quickly, I daresay, in a rush to make the PO with the originals.) May this entice you to buy the ridiculously low-priced anthology of a cornucopia of wildy-imagined stories by many other writers, now available at amazon.com— and better yet, have a go at typing your own pre-/post-digital fiction.
My writing assistant answers the title question: She was having a perfectly reasonable morning siesta when, suddenly, this book appeared on her back. She reports that this reminded her, mistily, of a previous life as a dimetrodon.
Those of you who follow this blog may be wondering, what perchance, and by jumpingjacks, does this short story about a typewriter have to do, and by the way what has happened with, the book in-progress on Far West Texas? The question of technology has turned out to be central to what I am writing about Far West Texas. (Darkly: there will be Heidegger quotes.)
Fingers crossed that I can finally get the next Marfa Mondays podcast up Monday after next.
Next Monday, the second of the month, I post here for the writing workshop. More anon.
Dense yet elegantly lucid, Stephen L. Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst was published by O’Reilly Associates in 1995, on the eve of the explosion of email, well before that of social media. Astonishingly, it delineates the nature of our now King Kong-sized challenges with technology, when those challenges were, so it now seems, but embryonic. And Talbott writes with unusual authority, grounded in both philosophy and his many years of writing and editing for O’Reilly Media, a prime mover in the economic / cultural juggernaut of a complex, increasingly dispersed from its origin in California’s Santa Clara Valley, that has become known as “Silicon Valley.”
> Talbott offers the entire text of The
Future Does Not Compute for free on his website at this link, along with an annotated table of contents. You
can also find a paperback edition from your go-to online bookseller.
From the catalog copy:
“Many pundits tell you that the computer is ushering us toward a new Golden Age of Information. A few tell you that the computer is destroying everything worthwhile in our culture. But almost no one tells you what Stephen L. Talbott shows in this surprising book: the intelligent machine gathers its menacing powers from hidden places within you and me. It does so, that is, as long as we gaze into our screens and tap on our keyboards while less than fully conscious of the subtle influences passing through the interface…
“The Net is the most powerful invitation to remain asleep we have ever faced. Contrary to the usual view, it dwarfs television in its power to induce passivity, to scatter our minds, to destroy our imaginations, and to make us forget our humanity. And yet — for these very reasons — the Net may also be an opportunity to enter into our fullest humanity with a self-awareness never yet achieved. But few even seem aware of the challenge, and without awareness we will certainly fail.”
For me Talbott’s work was a wondrous but belated
find, given my focus on the conundrums of technology in my book-in-progress on
Far West Texas (which also, on few occasions, ranges as far west as Silicon
Valley, for reasons which will be clear in the book itself).
NOTES ON TALBOTT’S THE FUTURE DOES NOT COMPUTE –BUT FIRST, OWEN BARFIELD
Owen Barfield: “Our destiny is to become conscious and free”
In his acknowledgements Talbott
writes that he is “indebted above all to a man I have met only though his
published writings: Owen Barfield.” Barfield (1898-1987) was an English philosopher,
author of Worlds Apart and Saving the Appearances, among many
other works, and part of the Oxford literary circle that included C.S.
Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkein. Writes Talbott:
“The core insights underlying all [Barfield’s] work remain among the most original scholarly achievements of this century. So original, in fact, that these insights are impossible to accept– even impossible to think.”
An important influence on Owen Barfield was the work of Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), most notably his book The Philosophy of Freedom. When he found Steiner’s works, Barfield had already independently come to many similar conclusions. In the documentary on Barfield cited above, “it was a case of like finding like.”
See the page on Rudolf Steiner here and an archive of his works here.
Caveat: Reading Steiner can get very strange very fast; not everyone has the stomach for reading about angelic channelings, epic battles in the supercelestial realms, etc. Steiner’s Anthroposophy is an offshoot of Theosophy, and as such, heavily influenced by many of the ideas of Russian mystic Madame Blavatsky. (Read a brief note about Madame Blavatsky, the monumental figure of modern esotercism, in the excerpt from my book about Francisco I. Madero here.)
But: keep your shoes on your feet and your helmet
buckled onto your coconut! Steiner was, among many other things, the founder of
the Waldorf Schools. Read about that influence in Silicon Valley here (New
York Times) and here (Business
Insider). There is also a video posted
in 2013 by the Waldorf School of the Peninsula which explains the
educational philosophy in some detail.
(I’m focusing on computers here, so I won’t get
into Steiner and Biodynamic Agriculture; do Google or Duckduckgo should you
feel so moved. P.S. Wikipedia, aka wiki-whenever-whomever-whatever, is likely
not your best source of information on this subject.)
“[This is] the most radical book that Steiner wrote, it is the foundation of all his thought… I think it is the only book that would have convinced me he had something important… to say… he is removing the blinkers from the Western mindset. He clarifies the act of knowing… he brings it down to the simplest possible elements and he shows you where, in your thinking, it’s possible that you might be free. He shows you, there’s a self-contained place in your thinking where it’s absolutely clear that you could be free…. If you build from that place, you can be sure that what you are thinking and feeling and willing is coming from a place that is not being determined by anybody or anything else… we can begin to know ourselves in the world, and that would be the true basis of freedom.”
BACK TO NOTES ON TALBOTT’S THE FUTURE DOES NOT
COMPUTE
Talbott:
“During most of [the] seventeen years I was working with computers, and it slowly became clear to me that the central issues bedeviling all of us who try to understand the relation between the human being and the computer are issues upon which Barfield began throwing light some seven decades ago. The Future Does Not Compute is my attempt to reflect a little of that light toward the reader.”
Talbott on awareness of self and awareness of the nature of machines:
“Machines become a threat when they embody our limitations without our being fully aware of those limitations. All reason shouts at us to approach every aspect of the computer with the greatest caution and reserve. But what incentive has our culture provided for the exercise of such caution and reserve? It’s more in our nature to let technology lead where it will, and to celebrate that leading as progress.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“On the one hand: the machine as an expression of the human being. On the other hand: the machine as an independent force that acts or reacts upon us. Which is it? I am convinced there is no hope for understanding the role of technology in today’s world without our first learning to hold both sides of the truth in our minds, flexibly and simultaneously. The relationship between human being and machine has become something like a complex symbiosis.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“If it is only through self-awareness and inner adjustment that I can restrict the hammer in my hands to its proper role, I must multiply the effort a millionfold when dealing with a vasty more complex technology– one expression in a much more insistent manner its own urgencies.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“understanding is the basis of freedom.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“the computer, one might almost say, was invented as an inevitable refinement of the corporation” Ch. 3 “The Future Does Not Compute”
“what we have embodied in technology are our own habits of thought… The need is to raise these habits to full consciousness, and then take responsability for them.” Ch. 5 “On Being Responsible for Earth”
“another word for responsability is ‘dominion’– not the dominion of raw power, but of effective wisdom.” Ch. 5 “On Being Responsible for Earth”
“We can no longer stop or even redirect the engine of technological change by brute, external force. Such force is the principle of the engine itself, and only strengthens it. We must tame technology by rising above it and reclaiming what it not mechanical in ourselves.” Ch. 5 “On Being Responsible for Earth”
“But Mander does neglect one critical fact: what we have embodied in technology are our own habits of thought. Yes, our artifacts gain a life of their own, but it is, in a very real sense, our life. We too easily ignore the ways in which we infuse these artifacts with the finespun web of our own, largely subconscious habits of thought. The need is to raise these habits to full consciousness, and then take responsibility for them.
[Much of chapter 6 includes a scathing attack on
George Gilder’s ideas.]
“…the more complex and indirect the mechanisms through which human action come into expression, the more you and I must be masters of ourselves.” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“…one way or another, you are creating your future. Wake up before you find that the devils within you have done the creating.” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“…the view that a technology can be ‘democratizing and leveling’ testifies to a radical alienation from everything that constitutes both the inner life and culture” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“…the telephone, automobile, radio, and television have all contributed to social fragmentation, personal isolation, and alienation from both self and other” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“What hope is there for peace and human rights when I conceive the barriers separating me from my fellows to be mere obstructions on a network technology diagram rather than the powers of darkness shadowing my own heart?” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
On freedom and power:
“The need is to recognize ourselves in our machines, and our machines in ourselves, and begin to raise ourselves above our machines.” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
“Freedom, you might say, is not a state, but a tension” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
“The doing required of us is a refusal to continue seeing all problems as the result of a doing rather than a being, as technical rather than spiritual.” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
“…if we persist in the cultivation of a purely technical stance toward our work and our technology, we will find that, like the corporation, it takes on a life of its own, which is at the same time, our life–but out of control and less than fully conscious… this autonomous life may exercise a totalitarian suppression of the human spirit that will be all the more powerful for its diffuseness and invisibility” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
On the so-called “global village”:
“…could it be that what we so eagerly embrace, unawares, are the powers of dissolution themselves?” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
“…what concerns me is the likelihood of our expressing within a new social and technological landscape the same spiritual vacuity that gave rise to the old tyrannies” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
“The global village is… a technological creation. Many would-be village architects are inspired by te endless potentials they discern in a satellite dish planted among thatched roof houses. This techno-romantic image calls up visions of information sharing and cooperation, grassroots power, and utopian social change. What it ignores is the monolithic and violently assimilative character of the resulting cultural bridges.” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
On awareness and loss:
“The light of mathematics may have descended into our minds from the circling stars, but how many students of mathematics still look to the night sky with wonder?” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
On “helping” developing countries by bringing modern technology:
“the logic and assumptions of our technology can prove bitterly corrosive. Worse, the kind of community from which Western technical systems commonly arise is, for the most art, noncommunity–typified by the purely technical, one-dimenional, commercially motivated, and wholly rationalized environments of corporate research and development organizations.”
More:
“…human life can be sustained only within a sea of meaning, not a network of information” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
Heavvvvy….
“…our rush to wire the world will some day be seen to have spawned a suffering as great as that caused by this century’s most ruthless dictators”
On the corporation (corporation as machine):
“Is the corporation a human activity in the service of human needs, or not? It is remarkble how easily and subtly the human-centered view slips from our grasp. Indeed, just so far as the corporation is viewed as an enterprise designed to score a profit, rather than to serve worthwhile ends under the discipline of economic controls, to that extent the entire organization has already been cut loose from its human justification and reduced to something like a computational machine” Ch. 10 “Thoughts on a Group Support System”
Nugget o’ wisdom:
“… every problem is a gift… [it] invites the production of new, human “capital.’ This is far different from seeing a problem merely as something to be gotten rid of by the most efficient means possible.” Ch. 10 “Thoughts on a Group Support System”
Essence:
“It’s not the Net we’re talking about here; it’s you and me. And surely that’s the only place to begin. Neither liberation nor oppression can become living powers in any soil except that of the human heart” Ch 11
Yep:
“If we experience our machines as increasingly humanlike, then we are experiencing ourselves as increasingly machinelike.” Ch 11
“…we are strongly tempted to use our freedom in order to deny freedom, pursuing instead the mechanization of life and thought” Ch 11
“… what is directly at risk now–what the computer asks us to abdicate– are our independent powers of awareness. Yet these powers are the only means by which we can raise ourselves above the machine” Ch 11
“What if the human being to whom we so beautifully adapt the computer is the wrong sort of human being? What if our efforts really amount to a more effective adaptation of the human being to the machine, rather than the other way around?” Ch 11
“…we have learned to regard ourselves as ghosts in the machine… we have more and more become mere ghosts in the machine” Ch 11
Quotable:
“an electronic New Jerusalem, its streets paved with silicon” Ch. 24 “Electronic Mysticism”
More to ponder:
“ancient man, much more than we, experienced himself rather like an like an embryo within a surrounding, nourishing cosmos… a plenum of wisdom and potency”
“the mythic surround was engaged in weaving the ancient mind, as in a dream”
“From Tolkein’s storyteller– who originates and remains one with his own mind– they have descended to mechanican tinkerer… just so far as we forget our ancient descent from a cosmos of wisdom above us– we lose the basis of creative mastery, an offer ourselves to be remade by the mechanisms below us”
“we are pursuing an experiment every bit as momentous as the discovery of mind at the dawning of western civilization– what manner of god will we be?”
Essential quote from Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute:
“…what we have today is in some respects a seriously disabled consciousness, and… our own infatuation with machines is both a symptom of our disability and a further contributor to it.”
Viva, Richard Polt! He says that if you send him your address he will send you this postcard.
One of the themes in my work-in-progress
on Far West Texas is the nature and pervasive influence of
technology, especially digital technology– but also other kinds of industrial
and military technology.
So what’s with the typewriter poem? The poem
pictured above, “The Typewriter Manifesto,” is by philosophy
professor Richard Polt. I’m a big fan of his blog and his book, The Typewriter
Revolution.
My 56 year-old Hermes 3000 works fine, no need to update the OX! (Yes, ribbons are easy to score on eBay).
Nope, I am not a Luddite, but yep, I use a typewriter on occasion. When needed, I also use a Zassenhaus kitchen timer, a 30 year-old finance-nerd calculator (I used to be a finance nerd), and a battery-operated alarm clock. Yes, I know there are apps for all of those, and yes, I actually have downloaded and previously used all those apps on my smartphone but, e-NUFFF with the digital! Too many hours of my day are already in thrall to my laptop, writing on WORD or blogging, emailing, podcasting, maintaining my website, surfing (other blogs, mainly, and newspapers, plus occasional podcasts and videos), and once in a purple moon, making videos. Most days my iPhone stays in its drawer, battery dead, and I like it that way.
But kiddos, this not a writer-from-an-older-generation-resisting-innovation thing. Back when I was avid to adopt new technology. I had a cell phone when they were the size and shape and weight of a brick. I started my website in 1999! I bought the first Kindle model, and the first iPad model. I was one of the first writers to make my own Kindle editions (check out my latest). I started podcasting in 2010. I even spent oodles more time than I should have figuring out the bell-and-whistles of iTunes’ iBook Author app… and so on and so forth.
From Charles Melville Scammon’s “California Grays Among the Ice” Whales! Magnificent outside! Digestive juices inside!
In short, with technology, especially anything
having to do with writing and publishing, I dove right into the deep end… and
I have seen the whale. And it was not, is not, and will not be on my schedule
to get swallowed whole.
(The original pretzel-brain inducing essay by
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” with its handful of
profound points coccooned within copious noodathipious deustcher
Philosophieprofessor flooflemoofle, is here.)
And here is the Lilly interview with Jeffrey Mishlove, for “Thinking Allowed” (the one where Dr. Lilly wears his earrings and Davy Crockett hat). Um, you will not eat your popcorn during this one.
#
Delighted to have surfed upon Tadeuz Patzek’s
blog, LifeItself. Patzek is a professor of petroleum engineering,
recently chair of the department at University Texas Austin. He
is co-author with Joseph A. Tainter of Drilling Down. I
read Drilling Down on Kindle this week, then bought the paperback to
read it again.
“Cryptocurrencies are a new
asset classthat enable decentralized
applications.“
In other words, “cryptocurrencies” are
not currencies as we know them. “Crypto” is too sexy a word for what
these actually are. So let’s call these puppies NACTEDAs. Rhymes with
“rutabagas.”
Ludwin’s most interesting quote? Buried deep in
the middle of his explanation of the nature of NACTEDAs is this colorful
explanation of how NACTEDAs are generated or “mined”:
“Now we need an actual contest… On your mark, get set: find a random number generated by the network! The number is really, really hard to find So hard that the only way to find it is to use tons of processing power and burn through electricity. It’s a computing version of what Veruca Salt made her dad and his poor factory workers do in Willy Wonka. A brute force search for a golden ticket (or in this case, a golden number).”
This is not a point Ludwin makes (he sails on,
with utter nonchalance): It is just a question of time– maybe a loooooooong
time, albeit perchance a seemingly out-of-nowhere-pile-on-Harvey-Weinstein
moment– until people recognize the environmental and social justice
implications of such extravagant electricity use for generating NACTEDAs.
Can you say, opportunity cost?
As it stands, most people don’t or don’t want to
grok where the magic invisible elixir that always seems to be there at the flip
of a switch actually comes from…. which is, uh, usually… and
overwhelmingly… coal. And neither do they grok that this flow of power is not
never-ending, but a utility that can be cut off. Ye olde winter storm can do it
for a day or so. More ominously, the grid itself can fail for lack of
maintenance, or any one of one a goodly number of events– it need not
necessarily be some cinematically apocalyptic cyberattack or epic solar flare.
Can you say Puerto Rico. Can you say Mexico City after the earthquake. Can you
say what happens when you don’t pay your bill. Or if the electrical company
makes a mistrake. Lalalalala.
In any event, I wouldn’t recommend a camping
vacation on some random mountaintop in West Virginia any time for… the rest
of your life.
#
And
herewith, hat tip to Root Simple,
Lloyd Kahn demonstrates his low-tech dishwashing method. The duck part at the
end is charmingly weird.
