(Roughly) Daily

As we head into the weekend, some food for thought…

A decade ago, the world was, at once, both the seed of today and a very different place: In what was considered one of the biggest political upsets in American political history (and the fifth and most recent presidential election in which the winning candidate lost the popular vote), Donald Trump was elected to his first term. The U.K. chose Brexit. The stock market finished strong, with the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq reaching new highs. (In the 10 years that have followed, the Dow has risen about 150%; the S&P 500, roughly 400%; and the NASDAQ has roughly sextupled.)

It was a big year for pop culture, marked by Beyoncé’s Lemonade, the massive Pokémon Go craze, and the rise of Netflix with Stranger Things, the Rio Olympics, and the loss of icons like David Bowie and Prince.

It was also a big year in tech: Russian hacking and disinfo (especially on Facebook) was a huge story– as was Apple’s elimination of the headphone jack in the iPhone 7. Theranos collapsed; and Wells fargo opened millions of accounts for customers without those customers’ permission (for which they were sunsequently fined $3 Billion). And Virtual Reality was everywhere (in the promises/offers from tech companies), but nowhere in the market. TikTok was launched in 2016, but hadn’t yet become the phenomenon (and avatar of algorithmly-driven feeds) that it has become. And in the course of 2016, artificial intelligence made the leap from “science fiction concept” to “almost meaningless buzzword” (though in fairness, 2016 was the year that Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo program triumphed against South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Sedol).

Back in 2016, the estimable Alan Jacobs was pondering the road ahead. In a piece for The New Atlantis, he coined and discussed a series of aphorisms relevant to the future as then he saw it. He begins…

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The apho-
rist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion
is a conviction that he is wiser or more intelligent than his readers.
– W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger, The Viking Book of Aphorisms

Author’s Note: I hope that the statement above is wrong, believing that certain adjustments can be made to the aphoristic procedure that will rescue the following collection from arrogance. The trick is to do this in a way that does not sacrifice
the provocative character that makes the aphorism, at its best, such a powerful form of utterance.

Here I employ two strategies to enable me to walk this tightrope. The first is to characterize the aphorisms as “theses for disputation,” à la Martin Luther — that is, I invite response, especially response in the form of disagreement or correction. The second is to create a kind of textual conversation, both on the page and beyond it, by adding commentary (often in the form of quotation) that elucidates each thesis, perhaps even increases its provocativeness, but never descends into coarsely explanatory pedantry…

[There follows a series of provocations and discussions that feel as relevant– and important– today as they were a decade ago. He concludes…]

… Precisely because of this mystery, we need to evaluate our technologies according to the criteria established by our need for “conviviality.”

I use the term with the particular meaning that Ivan Illich gives it in Tools for Conviviality [here]:

I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among per-
sons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this
in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands
made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I con-
sider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal inter-
dependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in
any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount
of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates
among society’s members.

In my judgment, nothing is more needful in our present technological moment than the rehabilitation and exploration of Illich’s notion of conviviality, and the use of it, first, to apprehend the tools we habitually employ and, second, to alter or replace them. For the point of any truly valuable critique of technology is not merely to understand our tools but to change them — and us…

Eminently worth reading in full, as its still all-too-relevant: “Attending to Technology- Theses for Disputation,” from @ayjay.bsky.social.

Pair with a provocative piece from another fan of Illich, L. M. Sacasas (@lmsacasas.bsky.social): “Surviving the Show: Illich And The Case For An Askesis of Perception.”

[Image above: source]

* Sherry Turkle

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As we think about tech, we might recall that it was on this date in 1946 that an ancestor of today’s social networks, streaming services, and AIs, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), was first demonstrated in operation.  (It was announced to the public the following day.) The first general-purpose computer (Turing-complete, digital, and capable of being programmed and re-programmed to solve different problems), ENIAC was begun in 1943, as part of the U.S’s war effort (as a classified military project known as “Project PX“); it was conceived and designed by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, where it was built.  The finished machine, composed of 17,468 electronic vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints, weighed more than 27 tons and occupied a 30 x 50 foot room– in its time the largest single electronic apparatus in the world.  ENIAC’s basic clock speed was 100,000 cycles per second (or Hertz). Today’s home computers have clock speeds of 3,500,000,000 cycles per second or more.

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