Our current historical moment is one wherein a space is opening wider and wider in which a movement critical of technology (which is not the same as being anti-technology [as such]) can grow. From the threats of automation looming over once “safe” career fields, to the recognition that our digital devices are empowering a massive surveillance operation, to new devices that strike people as transparent examples of tech designer’s lack of interest in what people think, to a world threatened by ecological destruction (much of which is the result of thoughtless use of technology) – this is a moment at which people are primed to hear a critique of technology. Especially as tech firms drown in money whilst venture capitalists and Wall Street froth at the mouth – people can see that behind the shiny ideology of modern technology sit the descendents (at least in spirit) of the machine owners who have been enriching themselves by “disrupting” the lives of the less powerful for hundreds of years. At a time when a dense economic tome about inequality can become a surprise best seller even as tech firms merrily purchase competitors for billions the old Luddite saying “no general but Ludd means the poor any good” returns with a certain unnerving truth. After all, the tech firms might happily bring out all manner of new “goods” but their “disruptive” mantra makes it clear that they have no interest in “the good.”
Almost the whole of Christian theology could perhaps be deduced from the two facts (a) That men make coarse jokes, and (b) That they feel the dead to be uncanny.
minutely articulated
A Spirit and a Vision, are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing. They are organised and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.
— William Blake, from the Descriptive Catalogue for his Exhibition of 1809
A Spirit and a Vision, are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing. They are organised and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.
[gallery] This Google Doodle of a Brazilian favela was Twitter’s controversy du jour yesterday. One tweeter described himself as “choking on [his] own outrage,” given Google’s insensitivity to the poverty and crime that make the favelas places of misery for most of their inhabitants.
The favelas are places of much suffering. Google’s prettification of them is silly and insensitive. But let’s be serious for a moment: Google Doodles do no harm to anyone. None. They are far too trivial to deserve outrage.
Few things are more tiresome to me than the educated Left’s ceaseless policing of the symbolic/discursive realm (e.g., politically incorrect Google Doodles), in what might charitably be described as the naive belief that consciousness-raising promotes justice, which by now we ought to know it doesn’t. Those of us who have been trained to manipulate symbols and language tend to overrate their importance, but at this point in history there’s no excuse for such overrating.
On a less charitable reading, people like policing symbols and discourses because you can do it from your computer without ever lifting a finger, or paying a cent, to alter the structural injustice that perpetuates the favelas. Signaling your outrage on Twitter does absolutely nothing to help anybody. Getting Google to take down their Doodle is a pathetic parody of a moral victory.
Meanwhile the rich keep getting richer and the poor poorer. Families and communities around the world are under assault by malicious forces. The favelas in Brazil receive no relief, and children keep getting shot in Chicago, and Wall Street (i.e., international capitalism) proceeds from strength to strength in sublime indifference to it all. If we’re going to choke on our own outrage, there are plenty of reasons. Google Doodles are not among them.
If Amazon’s Fire Phone could tell kale from Swiss chard, if it could recognize trees and birds, I think its polarity would flip entirely, and it would become a powerful ally of humanistic values. As it stands, Firefly adds itself to the forces expanding the commercial sphere, encroaching on public space, insisting that anything interesting must have a price tag. But of course, that’s Amazon: They’re in The Goldfinch detection business, not the goldfinch detection business.If we ever do get a Firefly for all the things without price tags, we’ll probably get it from Google, a company that’s already working hard on computer vision optimized for public space. It’s lovely to imagine one of Google’s self-driving cars roaming around, looking everywhere at once, diligently noting street signs and stop lights… and noting also the trees standing alongside those streets, and the birds perched alongside those lights.
Lovely, but not likely.
Maybe the National Park Service needs to get good at this.
And what does this mean for the habits of mind we cultivate? I return often to the ideas of Jack Miles in this essay—also about generalists and specialists, with a key useful heuristic: that specialists tend to embody all the disposition of farmers, while generalists tend to embody the virtues of hunters. Both are necessary, and both need each other. The careful tending to a field whose needs are more or less known, protected, and nurtured further, on the one hand. And the more landscape-crossing, round-the-next-bend pursuit of the not yet known and its promised nourishment, on the other.I want students to try out and value both operative modes, no matter where their own career paths take them. Knowing that others are also asking valuable questions in different disciplinary ways ideally breeds humility: a sense that what one has to offer could be enriched when conjoined in conversation with others whose expertise may not be immediately legible from within a silo.
And not just humility: I want students in engineering to know that their practices can be both private and public, that their status as citizens can be catalyzed through making things.
Typical rustic folk games involved hundreds of drunken men from rival villages rampaging through streets and fields, trying to drive, say, a casket of beer (the proto-ball) into the crypt of a church (the proto-goal). The schools distilled such testosterone-fuelled rituals into new formats involving smaller teams, sober boys and sodden leather balls. Codified by the Football Association and later disseminated to the world, this style of soccer was never the so-called beautiful game; the original purpose of educators was to instill manly and martial virtues into future imperial soldiers and administrators.