The Convivial Society

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

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

Just before my unexpected hiatus during the latter part of last year, I had gotten back to the practice of recording audio version of my essays. Now that we’re up and running again, I wanted to get back to these recordings as well, beginning with this recording of the first essay of this year. Others will follow shortly, and as time allows I will record some of the essay from the previous year as...

At long last, the audio version of the Convivial Society returns. It’s been a long time, which I do regret. Going back to 2020, it had been my practice to include an audio version of the essay with the newsletter. The production value left a lot to be desired, unless simplicity is your measure, but I know many of you appreciated the ability to listen to the essays. The practice became a somewhat i...

Welcome back to the Convivial Society . In this installment, you’ll find the audio version of the latest essay, “What You Get Is the World.” I try to record an audio version of most installments, but I send them out separately from the text version for reasons I won’t bore you with here. Incidentally, you can also subscribe to the newsletter’s podcast feed on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Just look...

Welcome again to the Convivial Society , a newsletter about technology and culture. This post features the audio version of the essay that went out in the last installment: “Lonely Surfaces: On AI-generated Images.” For the sake of recent subscribers, I’ll mention that I ordinarily post audio of the main essays (although a bit less regularly than I’d like over the past few months). For a variety o...

Welcome back to the Convivial Society . In this installment, you’ll find the audio version of two recent posts: “The Pathologies of the Attention Economy” and “Impoverished Emotional Lives.” I’ve not combined audio from two separate installments before, but the second is a short “Is this anything?” post, so I thought it would be fine to include it here. (By the way, I realized after the fact that...

Welcome to the Convivial Society , a newsletter about technology and culture. In this installment, I explore a somewhat eccentric frame by which to consider how we relate to our technologies, particularly those we hold close to our bodies. You’ll have to bear through a few paragraphs setting up that frame, but I hope you find it to be a useful exercise. And I welcome your comments below. Ordinaril...

This is the audio version of the last essay posted a couple of days ago, “What Is To Be Done? — Fragments.” It was a long time between installments of the newsletter, and it has been an even longer stretch since the last audio version. As I note in the audio, my apologies to those of you who primarily rely on the audio version of the essays. I hope to be more consistent on this score moving forwar...

Welcome to the Convivial Society , a newsletter about technology and culture. This is the audio version of the last installment, which focused on the Blake Lemoine/LaMDA affair. I argued that while LaMDA is not sentient, applications like it will push us further along toward a digitally re-enchanted world. Also: to keep the essay to a reasonable length I resorted to some longish footnotes in the p...

Welcome to the Convivial Society , a newsletter exploring the relationship between technology and culture. This is what counts as a relatively short post around here, 1800 words or so, about a certain habit of mind that online spaces seem to foster. Almost one year ago, this exchange on Twitter caught my attention, enough so that I took a moment to capture it with a screen shot, thinking I’d go on...

Welcome to the Convivial Society , a newsletter about technology and culture. I tend to think of my writing as way of clarify my thinking, or, alternatively, of thinking out loud. Often I’m just asking myself, What is going on? That’s the case in this post. There was a techno-cultural pattern I wanted to capture in what follows, but I’m not sure that I’ve done it well enough. So, I’ll submit this...

Welcome to the Convivial Society , a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. In this installment you’ll find the audio version of the previous essay, “The Face Stares Back.” And along with the audio version you’ll also find an assortment of links and resources. Some of you will remember that such links used to be a regular feature of the newsletter. I’ve prioritized the essays, i...

Welcome to the Convivial Society , a newsletter about technology and culture. The pace of the newsletter has been slow of late, which I regret, but I trust it will pick up just a touch in the coming weeks (also please forgive me if you’ve been in touch over the past month or so and haven’t heard back). For starters, I’ll follow up this installment shortly with another that will include some links...

Welcome to the Convivial Society , a newsletter that is ostensibly about technology and culture but more like my effort to make some sense of the world taking shape around us. For many of you, this will be the first installment to hit your inbox—welcome aboard. And my thanks to those of you who share the newsletter with others and speak well of it. If you are new to the Convivial Society , please...

As promised, here is the audio version of the last installment, “The Dream of Virtual Reality.” To those of you who find the audio version helpful, thank you for your patience! And while I’m at it, let me pass along a few links, a couple of which are directly related to this installment. Links Just after I initially posted “The Dream of Virtual Reality,” Evan Selinger reached out with a link to hi...

Welcome to a special installment of the Convivial Society featuring my conversation with Andrew McLuhan. I can’t recall how or when I first encountered the work of Marshall McLuhan, I think it might’ve been through the writing of one of his most notable students, Neil Postman. I do know, however, that McLuhan, and others like Postman and Walter Ong who built on his work, became a cornerstone of my...

Welcome to the Convivial Society , a newsletter about technology and culture. In this installment I write a bit about burnout, exhaustion, and rest. It doesn’t end with any neat solutions, but that’s kind of the point. However, I’ll take up the theme again in the next installment, and will hopefully end on a more promising note. As many of you know, the newsletter operates on a patronage model. Th...

Welcome again to the Convivial Society . This installment follows relatively quickly on the last, and you may be forgiven for not having yet made your way through that one, which came in at 4,500 words (sorry). But, we have some catching up to do, and this essay is only half as long. Read on. In her testimony before the Senate, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen made an observation that caught...

Welcome to the Convivial Society , a newsletter about technology and culture. It’s been a bit longer than usual since our last installment, but I’m glad to report that this has been in part a function of some recent developments, which I’m delighted to tell you about. Many of you are reading this because you caught my interview with Ezra Klein back in August. That interview was based on an install...

A week after the fact, here is the audio version of the last installment: “Notes from the Metaverse.” Ordinarily, the audio version accompanies the essay, but in this case you’re getting it a bit later. Nothing new in this version, so if you’ve already read the essay, feel free to disregard. But for those of you who do prefer listening, here you go, with my apologies for not getting this out soone...

Welcome to The Convivial Society . In this installment, you’ll find some thoughts on the cultural consequences of digital media. A big chunk of new readers means that I’m being a bit more careful not to presume familiarity with themes that I’ve written about before, so some of what follows may be old news for some of you. Either way, you can file this installment under my ongoing effort to think a...

“What is fundamental to a convivial society is not the total absence of manipulative institutions and addictive goods and services, but the balance between those tools which create the specific demands they are specialized to satisfy and those complementary, enabling tools which foster self-realization. The first set of tools produces according to abstract plans for men in general; the other set e...

I sent out an installment titled “Ill With Want” a couple of days ago, but was unable at the time to include the audio version. I know that many of you find the audio useful, so, now that I’ve been able to record it, I wanted to get that to you. Nothing new here if you have already read the text version. I will, however, take the opportunity to pass along a link to a podcast I recorded (not the on...

Welcome to the  Convivial Society , a newsletter about technology and culture, broadly speaking. This post began as part of a recent  feature  I’ve titled “Is this anything?”: one idea for your consideration in less than 500 words. It spilled over 500 words, however, so just consider it a relatively brief dispatch. My writing is an exercise in thinking out loud, so I’m never quite sure where it wi...