Posts Tagged ‘society’
“The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation”*…
Matt Pearce revisits Neil Postman‘s 1992 Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology…
In the 1960s, a German-American computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum coded an early version of today’s AI chatbots. Weizenbaum called his program ELIZA, after the “My Fair Lady” character Eliza Doolittle who takes speech lessons (and gets better).
How people reacted to Weizenbaum’s crude creation tells us almost everything we need to know about AI hype more than half a century later.
ELIZA could hold basic “conversations,” including playing the role of a psychotherapist with real human users. [In the example above, ELIZA’s responses to one woman are shown in capital letters.]
Anybody with a cursory awareness of recent headlines about AI romances and AI psychosis already knows where this is going. ELIZA’s human interlocuters in the 1960s, despite talking to a clunky machine they knew had been programmed by Weizenbaum, refused to believe that they were talking to a mere machine. His secretary, having watched him build the contraption over several months, after just a few exchanges with ELIZA, asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so she could have some privacy.
Weizenbaum, exhibiting a bit of Freudian sangfroid about all this, was not surprised to see people form emotional attachments with inanimate objects. He’d already seen people get attached to their cars or guitars or computers. But “what I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation.”…
… I learned about Weizenbaum’s ELIZA experiment from Neil Postman’s 1992 book “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” a work of technoconservatism that, like Weizenbaum’s writings, was imbued with foresight about our struggles with today’s vastly more powerful technologies.
Consider this passage from Postman’s “Technopoly”:
In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.
Technology, attacking and taking over the culture? Bending society to its own imperative for advancement? In my United States of America? Postman (most famous for writing “Amusing Ourselves to Death”) thought the U.S. was the world’s first “Technopoly,” a society marked by “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology,” where information itself has become a form of pollution.
To Postman, “the milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning or purpose.”
Neil Postman wrote “Technopoly” before the introduction of ChatGPT and Sora; TikTok and YouTube; Twitter and Facebook; Google Search and the Netscape browser. Postman wrote the book before Windows 95 existed. A philosophy of technology that mostly holds up through successive eras of technical revolution has already passed time’s first test, which is for the philosophy to outlive the philosopher. And Postman’s philosophy is ultimately conservative, motivated by the desire to preserve the traditions of humanism, social cohesion and a shareable sense of collective history.
Technoconservatism was old before it was new. Postman quotes Plato’s “Phaedrus,” where Thamus warns that whoever learns writing (one of our first dangerous technologies) “will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” and “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” And Postman, to his credit, is like — well, yeah! Writing really did that. A new technology is neither good nor bad, but ecological: it “does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.”
In previous generations, societies dealt with information revolutions (which always produced information gluts) by creating institutions that prioritize “good” information and deprioritize the bad; think about schools with their organized curricula, courts with their standards of evidence, newspapers with their party lines or codes of journalistic ethics. But Postman notes that we got lucky after the Gutenberg revolution, when information technology’s development slowed down long enough for societies to catch up and be excellent:
From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture undertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century [with the invention of the telegraph], no significant technologies were introduced that altered the form, volume, or speed of information. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press. It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a heightened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism. New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books. It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. I weight the list with America’s “Founding Fathers” because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence in print.
Contrast the luxuriously slow social pace of the Gutenberg era with today’s information development timelines. Over the course of three decades, we’ve seen the rise and now-decline of the open web; the rise and now-decline of social media; the rise of short-form video and the rise of chatbots and synthetic information. All created enormous economic and philosophical disruptions whose fundamental impacts you can’t get a group of people in a room together to describe accurately. Among the disruptions: These increasingly efficient forms of sharing information keep encountering falling test scores; universities are trying to implement AI as their own students use it for cheating or boo the tech at their graduations; people are falling in love with their chatbots, which sometimes tell their users to kill themselves. A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this…
Read on for how we might — dare one suggest, should— act: “A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this,” from @mattdpearce.com.
Compare to/contrast with with Yuval Avnar‘s riff on Pascal’s musing on the implications of his invention, the “arithmetic machine” (an early, if not the first, modern mechanical calculator): “The Inventor of the Thinking Machine Didn’t Worry. Neither Should You.“
* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
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As we introspect, we might send pointed birthday greetings to Ambrose Bierce; he was born on this date in 1842. His satirical lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary was named as one of “The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature” by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. His story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been described as “one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature”; and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also published as In the Midst of Life) was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.
A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction. For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. S. T. Joshi argues that he may well be the greatest satirist America has ever produced, and can take his place with such figures as Juvenal, Swift, and Voltaire. His war stories influenced Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and others; and he was an influential and feared literary critic. In recent decades Bierce has gained even wider regard as a fabulist and for his poetry.
In 1913, Bierce told reporters that he was travelling to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared over the border and was never seen again.
Apropos the piece featured above:
TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
– The Devil’s Dictionary
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”*…
The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age [see also]. Does our polycrisis moment herald another big shift?
Nathan Gardels, editor-in-chief of Noema, introduces two provocative articles from the current issue that suggest that it might…
Is our present moment comparable to the first Axial Age some 2,500 years ago? This was a time when major religions, philosophical frameworks and ethical systems — from Hinduism and Buddhism to the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophes — emerged around the world in relative simultaneity.
In a Noema essay, Otto Scharmer thinks this is likely so. If history moves by cycles of challenge and response, he argues that today’s “planetary polycrisis” — widespread anomie, social distrust and disorientation in the face of war, climate change and the upheavals of AI — “demands not just better policies or technologies but a shift in our structure of consciousness” at the level of collective awareness. He continues, “For the first time in human history, the challenges we face require a planetary response.”
In the first Axial Age, the attainment of written language capacitated an inner life of reflection on the basis of abiding texts that created a platform for shared meanings. That critical self-distancing capacity for reflection, or “interiority,” enabled people to transcend their immediate circumstances, tribes and local narratives to become self-aware as individuals in the larger universe. The sociologist Charles Taylor called this process “dis-embedding.”
In this context, written language — the first cloud technology of stored information — fostered philosophical exchange, the codification of ethical systems and shared metaphysical notions of salvation from the earthly storm. The sense of ontological security these narratives promised amid perpetual turmoil spread the appeal among constituencies far and wide.
In our era, Scharmer sees a new axial shift toward “collective interiority,” in which a new consciousness of the relationality of all being as an indivisible unity conjoins the subjective inner world with the outer world. In a word, he sees the “re-embedding” of the individual back into the interdependence of community and nature, this time not out of narrow ignorance as in the ascribed past, but through an enlightened ecology of mind.
Scharmer’s prime anxiety is what he calls “an emerging epistemic monoculture.” He writes: “Just as industrial agriculture replaced the diversity of the living soil with chemical fertilizers and crop monocultures — productive in the short term, devastating over time — the current AI moment is producing an epistemic monoculture. It manifests in a single computational form of knowing that views the world as a set of objects.”
In this, he follows the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who feared in the 1960s that the integral nature of Being would be extinguished by the advent of cybernetic technologies, in which encompassing feedback loops self-reinforce calculating reason to the exclusion of any spiritual dimension or philosophical frame to elevate or govern it. He worried that what he called the “technicity” of instrumental means with no substantive end would inexorably prevail over the diminished soul.
The key question going forward is whether this is necessarily so. Is AI the path to an epistemic monoculture that depletes the rich soil of experiential existence? Or, through the capacity for planetary-scale computation, can it cultivate the very collective interiority that comes from a fuller understanding of how multiple intelligences comprise the Earth system as one self-regulating organism? Won’t augmenting the human field of experience with AI, and vice versa, generate the very awareness of relationality that bridges the divide between individual and collective interiority?
In a related Noema conversation, theoretical biologist and complex systems scientist Stuart Kauffman discusses how this new consciousness would manifest as a transcendent presence awakened within individuals’ inner lives.
Frontier scientific advances have made us humans realize we are embedded and entangled within Earth’s habitat. We are not above and apart from our biosphere, Kauffman says, but “co-creators” in its evolution. Like the poet Goethe, he sees a dynamic, creative universe as a continuous “divine” activity rather than a static set of laws for all time — creatio continua —in which humans are participants.
“What are the implications for the self-understanding and responsibility of human civilization in this undetermined unfolding?” I asked Kauffman.
He explained: “The spiritual consequence, I would argue, is a new sacredness of participation. If the world is not fully given in advance, then Creation is not only ‘back then’ but ongoing. The sacred is not merely a completed order; it is the act of becoming itself … [it is] reverence for the creative unfolding, not worship of a finished blueprint.
“A ‘Next Axial Age’ could be framed as a spirituality of co-creation rather than dominion. And crucially, this spirituality would not be anti-science — it would be a new science understood as careful participation in a living, creative world.”
The observant reader will surely note how far all of this is from the dominant zeitgeist of bitter polarization in both culture and politics, the backtracking on climate commitments, the waging of hard-power wars and the acceleration toward superintelligence with few guardrails in place. Yet it is precisely these extreme conditions that are fueling the search for a new way of seeing and organizing the world. It is in the nature of an axial shift that it arises in opposition to the present order…
Awareness of the relationality of all being is a response to the planet in crisis: “What Might The Next Axial Age Look Like?” from @noemamag.com.
Both of the cited pieces– “We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age” and “Emergence Is Not Engineering“– are eminently worth reading in full.
Apposite: “On metanarratives – or, how we transform our cultural mythology” by Sharon Blackie, complemented by Nicholas Carr‘s “Restoration of the Demon” and Alan Jacobs‘ “Something Happened By Us: A Demonology” together, a caution against mistaking re-enchantment for re-connection.
* Albert Einstein
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As we speculate on sea change, we might send compassionate birthday greetings to a man who tacked against the tide that may now be turning, Gustavo Gutiérrez; he was born on this date in 1928. A philosopher, theologian, and Dominican priest, he was one of the founders of Latin American liberation theology, and his 1971 book A Theology of Liberation is considered pivotal to the formation of liberation theology at large.
Gutiérrez’s theological focus connected salvation and liberation through the preferential option for the poor, with an emphasis on improving the material conditions of the impoverished. Gutiérrez argued that revelation and eschatology have been excessively idealized at the expense of efforts to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. His methodology was often critical of the social and economic injustice he believed to be responsible for poverty in Latin America, and of the Catholic clergy itself. The central pastoral question of his work was: “How do we convey to the poor that God loves them?”
“A free press can, of course, be both good and bad; but, most certainly, without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad”*…
The Fourth Estate is, of course, hugely influential in civic and political life; a free press is essential to the healthy functioning of a democracy, in the U.S. and around the world— more generally to effective self-determination in any society. So the latest World Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is concerning. Indeed, the global state of press freedom has reached a 25-year low.
RSF has been compiling the Index since 2002; as of this year:
• Less than 1% of the global population lives in a country rated as having “good” press freedom.
• More than half of countries and territories now fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories, up from 13.7% in 2002.
• The U.S. ranks 64th globally in 2026, down from 17th when the index began.
The index ranks 180 countries and territories based on five indicators: political context, legal framework, economic context, sociocultural context, and journalist safety.
This world map shows press freedom scores around the world in 2026, revealing a widening divide between Europe, the only region with countries rated “good,” and much of the rest of the world.
More on what’s happening and why: “Mapped: Press Freedom Around the World in 2026,” from @voronoiapp.bsky.social (and, of course, much more in the RSF Index)
(Image above: source)
* Albert Camus
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As we challenge censorship (and oligopolistic control), we might recall that it was on this date in 1917 that the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded. In his will, Joseph Pultizer specified solely four awards for excellence in journalism, four in books and drama, one for education, and five traveling scholarships.
In journalism, prizes were to recognize “the most disinterested and meritorious public service rendered by any American newspaper during the preceding year” (a gold medal worth $500 with no monetary component); “the best editorial article written during the year, the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in the right direction” ($500); and “the best example of a reporter’s work during the year, the test being strict accuracy, terseness, the accomplishment of some public good commanding public attention and respect” ($1,000). (A $1,000 prize for the best history of services rendered to the public by the American press in the preceding year was only awarded once; similarly, a $1,000 prize for a paper on the development of the School of Journalism was never awarded due to a dearth of competitors.)…
… the Pulitzer Prize Board, has increased the number of awards to 23 and introduced poetry, music, photography, memoir and audio journalism as subjects, while adhering to the spirit of the founder’s will and its intent…
– source
The awards were administered/bestowed by Columbia University (the journalism school at which Pulitzer had endowed). Herbert B. Swope received the first Pulitzer for journalism (the only one awarded in that first year of the program) for his series “Inside the German Empire” for the New York World… as it happens, a Pulitzer paper.
The Internet Archive has the book that Swope’s series became)
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post, a piece by Nate Hagens on preparing for what promises to be (to put it politely) a challenging future. It’s via (R)D‘s old friend Patrick Tanguay (and his wonderful newsletter Sentiers), who does the introductory honors…
Nate Hagens has spent two decades mapping what he calls the “more-than-human predicament,” the interlocking crises of fossil fuel depletion, ecological overshoot, and economic fragility. This piece marks a shift in his focus: the diagnostic work is largely done, and the current moment demands a framework for action rather than further description of the problem. It’s quite long and perhaps a bit dry, but considering the complexity of everything he’s talking about, I think it reaches a nice balance between all the things and “ok, I can read this, sit with it, and have a well ordered map of what needs doing and a framework from which to work.” The framework has four levels—personal psychological grounding, trusted network-building, six broad intervention fronts, and a timeline—premised on the idea that none of the material work is possible without first stabilising the individual (“being human”) and building shared understanding among people who see the situation clearly.
The six fronts—physical infrastructure, ecological intervention, dignity systems for the dispossessed, governance, culture and meaning, and economic transition—are not a menu but an interdependent set of domains where work is needed simultaneously. Some are familiar territory for anyone thinking about collapse and resilience; others are less obvious. Hagens insists, correctly, on including dignity infrastructure for people who will lose livelihoods as supply chains contract and jobs are automated, and treats culture and collective meaning-making as essential rather than supplementary. He also argues directly that ideological critique, however accurate, is not a plan. That the moment calls for moving from naming what’s wrong to building what comes next.
What gives the framework its structure is the timeline underneath it all: three overlapping phases. Phase A is the stability window that still exists in much of the world, and the one in which trust, infrastructure, and institutions must be built while surplus and coordination capacity remain. Phase B is the period of shocks and triage, already beginning in places, where the goal is to hold systems together and prevent cascades. Phase C is the stable destination—regenerative, locally embedded, equitable—that gives the earlier phases their direction. Hagens’ central argument is that what gets built now sets the initial conditions for everything that follows, and that path dependence operates at a civilisational scale.
Most of the positive climate outcomes we are likely to see in the next twenty years will not come from technology, they will come from curtailed economic expansion driven by the very forces I described at the beginning of this essay: war, debt, and energy depletion. We already got a preview of this during the pandemic as economic activity halted. Industrial activity contracting is not a climate policy, but it is a climate outcome. […]
Subsidiarity and local governance capacity: decisions made at the lowest appropriate level, which in many cases is probably much more local than we currently assume. Communities need the ability to govern their own resource allocation when higher-level institutions can’t or won’t. […]
Collective imagination and sensemaking: the role of arts and creative work in helping communities grieve, adapt, and imagine. This is not a luxury, it is how human groups have always metabolized disruption to continue working together. […]
Shared reality and sovereign visioning: the capacity of communities to tell their own story and find their own vision for the future rather than have it told for them by algorithms, demagogues, or strangers with large followings. In a period of disruption, the communities that hold together will have a strong enough shared cultural narrative to metabolize hardship without breaking apart. This is not a soft category, it is essential and has the ability to bear weight. […]
This window is finite, and many of us – especially in the last few weeks – are increasingly aware that it is closing. We just don’t know exactly how fast. But everything that can only be built in stability – institutional trust, physical infrastructure, knowledge transfer, and relationships – has to be built now, in this window, before conditions change. […]
What does it look like? Regenerative, resilient, human-scale, embedded in local ecology, equitable in a way that does not depend on infinite growth to fund redistribution, and rich in meaning, social connection, and all the things that actually make human life good.
Eminently worth reading in full. The logic of Pascal’s wager suggests that we take Hagens’ advice seriously: “What to Do as the World Falls Apart: A Framework for Action,” from @natehagens.bsky.social (via @inevernu.bsky.social).
Evidence that taking action can matter: “Scientists have scrapped the worst‑case climate scenario – because action is making a difference,” from Andrew King.
And a reminder that there’s more action to take: “The world is heading toward a financial crisis – the state of US politics has left us ill-prepared,” from Eduardo Porter.
* Widely (but incorrectly) attributed to Benjamin Franklin
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As we prepare, we might recall that the Academy of the Distrustful was founded in the library room of the Palau Dalmases in Barcelona. A Baroque literary and musical academy with the aim of promoting the study of classical and Catalan history and poetry, mostly in Spanish, by fourteen scholars headed by the noble Pau Ignasi de Dalmases i Ros. In the event, it lasted only several years: during the War of the Spanish Succession several of its members supported Charles III of Austria over (the man who became) Philip V of Spain— and disbanded the group.
On this date in 2005, 2025, the 325th anniversary of its foundation, the Academy was reconstituted as a humanities academy (in the broadest sense of the term) in the Sala Dalmases of the Historical Archive of the City of Barcelona.
“All the cities of the world are going to expand. We need to have a better understanding of what makes good urban habitat for home sapiens.”*…
“When did our vision of the future become so constrained, tired, and even dystopic?” Julien Crockett talks with Bruno Carvalho, the author of The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World, about the history of city planning and how urban design intertwines with a society’s prognostications and projections…
Cities have long been places of possibility—places where it seemed that we could break from the past and create an entirely new future. As Bruno Carvalho observes in his new book, The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World, this mindset is a key feature of what it means to be “modern”—a sensibility toward the present and the future as it relates to the past.
Yet, as Carvalho’s wide-ranging history details, a break from the past does not assume a positive vision of the future. In fact, Carvalho begins his book with the question “Where did the future go?”—the title of a debate between the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and anthropologist David Graeber. Both imagine that the only cities of tomorrow are on Mars. When did our vision of the future become so constrained, tired, and even dystopic?
Carvalho’s book returns to a recurring paradox we have faced since the Enlightenment: the better our capacity for creation and prediction, the more limited our ability to imagine a new future. He marvels, though, that “we know some of what is coming: urbanization and climate change, life and death. Between all that, there is a lot of space for reinvention.”
In our conversation, we look to the past to help us think through what reinvention might look like and discuss what it means to plan for a radically different future. We also discuss the legacies of Silicon Valley, the construction of New York City, urban futures moving from the West across the Pacific, and whether Carvalho is optimistic about what’s to come…
Eminently worth reading and pondering: “Where Did the Future Go?” from @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social.
* Jan Gehl
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As we undertake to understand the urban, we might recall that it was on this date in 455 that the Vandals entered Rome, which they plundered for the next two weeks. It was, as sackings went (this was Rome’s third, of four altogether), relatively “light”: while the Vandals (who had destroyed all of Rome’s aqueducts on their approach) looted Roman treasure and sold many Romans into slavery, their leader Genseric acceded to the pleas of Pope Leo that the Vandals refrain from the wholesale slaughter of Rome’s population and the destruction of the Eternal City’s historic buildings.
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