The Convivial Society

A few days ago, a handful of similar stories or anecdotes about technology came to my attention. While they came from different sectors and were of varying degrees of seriousness, they shared a common characteristic. In each case, there was either an expressed bewilderment or admission of obliviousness about the possibility that a given technology would be put to destructive or nefarious purposes....

“It appears to me that we cannot neglect the disciplined recovery, an asceticism, of a sensual praxis in a society of technogenic mirages. This reclaiming of the senses, this promptitude to obey experience, the chaste look that the Rule of St. Benedict opposes to the cupiditas oculorum (lust of the eyes), seems to me to be the fundamental condition for renouncing that technique which sets up a def...

Some have argued that one benefit of the new newsletter ecosystem is a return to the older conventions of blogging in its halcyon days. I don’t know about that. I doubt you or I really want two or three dispatches from every newsletter we’ve subscribed to arriving in our inbox every day. That said, I do occasionally feel the attraction of that older form. I won’t say that this installment is blog-...

“Attention discourse” is how I usually refer to the proliferation of essays, articles, talks, and books around the problem of attention (or, alternatively, distraction) in the age of digital media. While there have been important precursors to digital age attention discourse dating back to the 19th century, I’d say the present iteration probably kicked off around 2008 with Nick Carr’s essay in the...

Over the years, I’ve thought on and off about silence in the context of digital media. Mostly, this has taken the form of commending what came to be called strategic silence. The idea being that, given the dynamics of the attention economy, it is sometimes better to pass over certain developments in calculated silence than it is to comment on them or even to speak out against them. At other times...

Back in 2019, Colin Horgan published an essay discussing the role of convenience in shaping our techno-social order. “It’s convenience, and the way convenience is currently created by tech companies and accepted by most of us,” Horgan argued, “that is key to why we’ve ended up living in a world we all chose, but that nobody seems to want.” While I’m inclined to qualify the “we all chose” element o...

If you’ve joined the Convivial Society over the past two or three months, this installment requires a brief introduction. I’m always ready to acknowledge my extensive debts to an older generation of scholars and writers, who have shaped my thinking about technology. Among those scholars, Ivan Illich has played an especially important role. The newsletter’s title, for example, pays tribute to his T...

Welcome to an unusually brief installment of the Convivial Society. An analogy came to mind, and you can tell me what you think. I vowed to keep it short, under 1,000 words. So this remains suggestive, and I’ll be eager to see if it generates any interesting insights or otherwise proves to be a helpful framing. In 1979, the late sociologist Peter Berger published a book titled, The Heretical Imper...

“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”— Wendell Berry, “To know the dark” Welcome to the latest installment of the Convivial Society , especially to those of you who are relatively new around here. This is a full newsletter with a longish essay and...

Last Wednesday, I was working on the draft of a newsletter I had intended to send out later in the week. Of course, that was before my Twitter feed was taken over by the failed coup or insurrection or seditious mob, or whatever else one may call it, which stormed the Capitol to interrupt the certification of the electoral college votes and, as far as some participants were apparently concerned, ha...

“Existence in a society that has become a system finds the senses useless precisely because of the very instruments designed for their extension. One is prevented from touching and embracing reality. Further, one is programmed for interactive communication, one's whole being is sucked into the system. It is this radical subversion of sensation that humiliates and then replaces perception.”— Ivan I...

“All technical progress exacts a price. We cannot believe that Technique brings us nothing; but we must not think that what it brings it brings free of charge.”— Jacques Ellul, “The Technological Order” (1962) In case you’ve ever wondered, I don’t exactly have a grand research project or even a clearly defined area of interest. You might, in fact, should I ever have occasion to bore you with the d...

You can listen to an audio version of the essay by clicking Play above. Jane Jacobs opened her mid-twentieth century classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities , with a discussion of the peculiar nature of cities. In the course of this discussion, she devoted all of three chapters to a single aspect of city life: the uses of sidewalks. I’ve always found the second of these three chapters...

“To be sane in a mad timeis bad for the brain, or worsefor the heart.” — Wendell Berry, “The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment” I’ve been reading a fair amount about the meaning and significance of place over the last several weeks, and in the course of that reading I encountered an observation made almost in passing by the renowned Chinese-American geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan. “In the past,” T...

“I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality— recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand — on the other hand radiating out for possible community, for rebirth of community.” — Ivan Illich,  interview   (1996) [Welcome back friends to the Convivi...

This summer, as it became evident that the global pandemic was exposing the weaknesses of many of our institutions, it seemed like an auspicious time to revisit the work of Ivan Illich. Of course, if you’ve been following the newsletter for any amount of time at all, you know that I think any time is an auspicious time to be reading Illich. In any case, I decided to use the newsletter to organize...

“The substance of the good life must be taken into consideration if radical political reform is to become a live option.”— Albert Borgmann,  Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life  (1984) In 1943, Simone Weil, the French philosopher and activist who was living in England at the time, was tasked by the Free French government with writing a report exploring how French society might be rev...

It was my pleasure back in June to enjoy a conversation with Carl Mitcham about the life and work of Ivan Illich. A couple of weeks ago, I had the similar pleasure of speaking with Gustavo Esteva, an activist and scholar who, despite having earlier rejected Illich as a “reactionary priest,” went on to become Illich’s close friend and collaborator in the early 1980s. Gustavo is also the founder of...

“People can change, but only within bounds. In contrast, the present industrial system is dynamically unstable. It is organized for indefinite expansion and the concurrent unlimited creation of new needs, which in an industrial environment soon become basic necessities … Such growth makes the incongruous demand that man seek his satisfaction by submitting to the logic of his tools. The demands mad...

“There are two ranges in the growth of tools: the range within which machines are used to extend human capability and the range in which they are used to contract, eliminate, or replace human functions. In the first, man as an individual can exercise authority on his own behalf and therefore assume responsibility. In the second, the machine takes over—first reducing the range of choice and motivat...

“I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows to make and unmake, produce and consume – a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion a...

We are presently in the midst of another wave of free speech/cancellation discourse, this one prompted by an open letter published in Harper’s warning against a rising tide of illiberal constraints on free expression. While debates about free speech are as old as the idea of free speech, a case could be made that they have taken on a different character in recent years. This may be a matter of fre...

In addition to my scribblings here and elsewhere, I occasionally give talks about the role technology plays in our private and social lives. If there’s a Q&A time afterwards, one of the questions I’m most likely to get will be about how parents should regulate their kid’s use of digital devices. Sometimes the underlying anxiety and frustration is palpable. For a long time, I was hesitant to addres...

“Never has the individual been so completely delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never have men been less capable, not only of subordinating their actions to their thoughts, but even of thinking. Such terms as oppressors and oppressed, the idea of classes–all that sort of thing is near to losing all meaning, so obvious are the impotence and distress of all men in face of the social machine,...

Hello everyone, First off, that was a great first thread on Tools for Conviviality . Secondly, for session two, we’ll have our synchronous discussion tomorrow night (Monday, June 29th) at 8 PM (EST). I’ll post another thread that should arrive in your inbox around 7:30 PM. Thirdly, here is audio of a conversation I was honored to have with Carl Mitcham, a philosopher of technology and close associ...