technology 160
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…
Watching Movies and Wondering about Metaphysics in an Anxious Age
Casey Spinks muses on zombie shows, Pixar movies, Scorsese films, metaphysical realism, and the philosophical fate of modern culture in his review of Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics…
When Innovation Runs Out: The Vindication of Maintenance
The Innovation Delusion goes a long way toward demystifying and destigmatizing the ordinary yet essential work of maintenance.
Education and Democracy in Disembodied Times: Emerson and Dewey on Humane Technology
In an age of knee-jerk innovation, the warnings articulated by Emerson and Dewey are more needed than ever. They advocated for applied knowledge, but they also insisted such technology must…
Bees’ Wings & Zerks
Supportive efforts can steer this ingenious workforce toward better stewardship and environmental integrity by reclaiming that awe that life on the land should inspire.
Mr. Munson’s Mustang: A Fable
"In order to implement vital system updates, you must install the Trans-Mog-Z Facilitator, available at any Big Horizon Automotive Intervention Center. This has been your first notice.”
Cultivating the Skills that Freedom Requires in Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road
Human driving requires unending mutual predictions and constant accommodations for each other. It is in such experiences that we end up with something meaningful for life in the physical world…
Wendell Berry and Zoom
While the futurists and transhumanists and purveyors of educational technologies would have us voluntarily cut off our arms so we can enjoy their fancy new prostheses, our priority should be…
