technology 143
Filling Time Filling Minds
That with which we fill our time, after all, is what ends up filling our minds, hearts, and souls. More than simply responsible scheduling, our very character is on the…
Do Not Go Gentle Into That AI Night
What starts as a method to optimize reading, exercise, or relationships becomes an end in itself. The native physiological benefit of the morning walk or bed-making is overshadowed by appeasing…
Spider-Man Has Lost His Place
Spider-Man now devalues human-scale kindness and decency by questing in the multiverse, and ideological rigidity and swift judgment have replaced his former nuance and virtue-seeking.
Are Americans Better Off?
Let’s just say you’d better have great discipline and a very rich interior life if you expect to be happy amid great affluence. If this is true of individuals, that…
Composition as the Art of Loading Brush
Instead, we have the opportunity to spur students to true and healing composition through the exercise of creativity, precision, care, and nuance. The best analytical writing assignments in the future…
Cyber-Sophistry, or How ChatGPT Unmasks the Emptiness of AI
AI is the culmination of an ideological fantasy of elite control, woven into the very infrastructure of commonplace media technologies. When it gets used to talking to us, we may…
The Power of Place: Payphones
The value in seeing payphones is the way it develops a practice of seeing. So often we are driving or walking down streets, unaware of what serves us no purpose…
The War Machine is Not Ergonomic
We have wrought a strange and fantastically complicated world for ourselves. But we can know how well we are interfacing with it by its fruits: a terrifyingly effective machinery, but…
Centering Humanity in the Age of the Chatbot
Though the metaphor sounds alarmist, an unimaginable tsunami is barreling down on a complacent world. We may have time to adjust, who knows?
Why I Wish I Didn’t Have a Smartphone and Computer (But Probably Won’t Give Them Up)
We can agree that many technological “advances” have objectively done more harm than good, in terms of the human condition as well as the Earth, and that we face a…
Joining the Dance: Setting Aside Screens to Build the City
The young pagans band around the picnic table and scrawl inky runes into their hands with cheap pens. Around them, the world falls, and wonders if they will learn to…
Flowers and Dust: Summer in The Great Gatsby
The summer, its heat and its flowers, has finally been put to death. But the dust remains. George Wilson is covered in it, alive and dead, and as Nick told…
The Dignity of Craft: In Praise of Mortise & Tenon
Beyond writing about craftmanship and antique furniture, M&T explores ideas about human work in a technological age, work in the context of community, and the relationship between craft and tradition.…
Hot Mediums, Hot Tempers
Life is inherently unpredictable and requires engagement without certainty of outcome. It also often requires patience. No matter how many labor-saving and time-bending devices we create, we will never exist in…
“Great Men” and Great Expectations
We may heap much of the blame or praise upon generals and czars and presidents, but they are rarely in the trenches. We may want to avoid taking responsibility for…
The Banalities of “the Birth of Modern Agriculture”: A Review of Neil Dahlstrom’s Tractor Wars
All of the biases, all of the bloodlessness, and all the banalities of Tractor Wars, I suggest, are the products of a whole way of thinking about technology, agriculture and…
An Exception that Proves the Rule: NFTs Don’t Serve the Great Economy
Chris Hytha is a laudable example of somebody civilizing our approach to digital assets, and I fully support him. I’m glad to see fellow Philly Porchers Anthony Hennen and Nick…
Resist Not Crypto
The status of NFTs in the world of 2027 depends, in large part, on how well we’re able to incorporate them into our positive vision of the good. We can,…
Pretend It’s a Book
Fran Liebowitz suggests that “a book isn’t supposed to be a mirror, it’s supposed to be a door.” Universities are the same. They are not meant to simply reflect the…
Life Under Sycamores
Frank Mulder is preaching the same Gospel. Pictures of Frank Mulder make him look like he could be a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, on a bicycle, planting sycamores instead of apple…
The Face of Education
As a new school year begins, Jon Schaff takes stock of the effects of Covid on education. Learning is relationship, and, if the point of college, as the very term…
From Technological Nostalgia to Technological Faithfulness
I bought myself an iPad in August 2016, and to say that it changed my life would be only a slight overstatement. For several years I had been experiencing increasingly…
The Tyranny of Big Tech Demonstrates the Tyranny of Faulty Ideas on the Right
Hawley’s book goes some way towards providing a framework for using the threat of a legislative boot to stomp Big Tech back down to size. Whether the Right will listen…
A Frenchman Discovers Silicon Valley Post-Animal Agriculture
In the book Steak Barbare, Gilles Luneau unravels the industry that depends on promoting a vegan diet and post-animal agriculture. His book sheds light not only on how labs grow…