Monthly Muse: 6/2024
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a quote or passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Weekly Groundings will be back next Friday; today, I offer you the June 2024 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth
Contemplation
This month on Handful of Earth featured an extended review of
’s book, What Tech Calls Thinking. My intention in writing this review was not only to evaluate the book, but also to propose the question of whether the tech-critical left and tech-critical right can unite against Big Tech. After reading and reviewing Daub’s book, I am skeptical about this possibility at the current juncture. While contemporary left and right criticism of tech abounds, it appears that many of the motivations behind these respective critiques are divergent.On the one hand, the critique of tech from the right relies on a concept of human essence that is met with suspicion from the social constructionist left. On the other hand, the critique of tech from the left focuses on issues of social inequality and marginalization that can be anathema to right-wing political dispositions.
Though I rely on the categories of “left” and “right” as a practical shorthand in the review, consistent readers of Handful of Earth will know that I reject these terms as overarching political categories. My hope is that the critique of the “technological mindset” can help bridge the gap between self-identified leftists and rightists. However, this will not be as simple as building utilitarian political coalitions. Coalitions are desperately needed but, in the effort to build them, we cannot lose sight of the motivating reasons for engaging in a particular form of politics in the first place. Without an attention to reasons, motivations, and philosophical commitments, political coalitions will be short-lived and superficial.
I hope that Handful of Earth is a place for my readers to reflect on the deeper reasons that lie behind surface political positions and alliances, reasons that most mainstream (and alternative) outlets simply do not have the time or interest to explore.
Provocation
“[I]f we’re unable to impose limits on ourselves, the world will eventually do it for us. Technological civilisation is self-limiting: it is not, as the technological order suggests, possible to separate ourselves from the world in order to master it. Progress…will eventually run out of resources to consume; and even if we escape this trap, it will eventually run out of adults willing to tolerate the tension between resonance and modernity long enough to bear and raise children. No amount of technology will fix this, any more than technology will fix climate change; because the resource being mined to exhaustion in our intimate lives is resonance. And you can’t fix a shortage of resonance using the mindset that is causing the shortage.”
, “The End of Never-Ending Progress?”