Here’s a photo of my kiddos’ dresser from a few years ago, when I realized it was basically a museum of technology. I almost typed “obsolete technology,” but these things all still work — the Casio and the Sony Dream Machine were both possessions from our own childhoods. I wrote about these items in a recent newsletter about the objects we love and live with.
“It is stupid to be categorically against technology. It is not stupid to be suspicious of technology.”
—Neil Postman
“Might solve a mystery / or rewrite history…”
—the Ducktales theme song
* * *
My kids wanted me to sit and watch DuckTales with them this morning — the episode was “Armstrong” from the original DuckTales in 1987. Gyro Gearloose, a chicken and inventor who works for Uncle Scrooge, invents a “helpful” robot named Armstrong. Armstrong can do anything, and Uncle Scrooge quickly takes the opportunity to replace all of his labor force — his accountants and office workers, his loyal butler Duckworth, and pilot Launchpad — with Armstrong. Armstrong, of course, soon goes rogue, steals all of Uncle Scrooge’s money, and holds Scrooge and his inventor hostage.
* * *
Later in the morning, I got one of Audrey Watters’ wonderful newsletters:
I regret to inform you that one of the biggest hustlers in the business came out this week with an essay that drew on Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. As I’ve argued elsewhere here at Second Breakfast, you can readily connect fascism and wellness, eugenics and fitness — so let’s be really honest about what it means when someone like Marc Andreessen openly embraces this violent, right-wing machismo that he calls “techno-optimism.” Dave Karpf has a very good response, and you’ll learn more from reading that than you will reading anything that Andreessen has ever written or done. (Like most entrepreneurs, he has never “done the reading” and you have to wonder if he cribbed from Marinetti purposefully or, more likely, just coincidentally, is also “nourished by fire, hatred, and speed.”) Another book recommendation, while I think of it: Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant. […] “Down with all kings but King Ludd.” — Ada Lovelace’s dad.
* * *
Since I saw that manifesto, I had been been making my own short list of techno-skeptic books I would recommend to anybody who finds themselves tempted by such unfettered techno-optimist nonsense. It would include:
and Thoreau, Mumford, Melville, etc.
I asked some of my friends to help with the list and the responses ranged from “oh lord I need to write my book about it” to “how much more can be written on this topic?”
(My friend Alan Jacobs, for example, has written an essay with the subtitle “Neil Postman Was Right. So What?” about how such books have been “utterly powerless to slow our technosocial momentum, much less to alter its direction.”)
* * *
I myself am neither a techno-skeptic nor a techno-optimist, but probably more of what Karpf calls a “techno-pragmatist.”
What I am doing is looking for the appropriate technologies for doing the kinds of things I want to do — these are usually some weird mix of analog and digital, high-tech and low-tech — but always, adopting them thoughtfully requires asking the right questions of them.
Had he asked such questions, Uncle Scrooge would’ve saved himself a lot of trouble!
We all need variety sometimes, but when every channel has nothing, shouldn’t we notice?
I came across this 1992 op-ed by pianist Keith Jarrett called “Categories Aplenty, but Where’s the Music?”
Jarrett wrote it in the year after Miles Davis’ death. It’s cranky, and it might make some folks roll their eyes. (Jarrett was notorious for being difficult and “proud to be difficult” — in a 1997 NYTimes profile he was quoted as saying, “There are some ages, I think, that don’t deserve art as much as others. I almost think we live in a time now when that is true.”) But for a 30-year-old piece of writing, it feels state-of-the-art to me in that it still describes the state of the arts today. (Plus, I tend to like cranky musicians. Musicians have to be too nice today!)
“We live in an age in which only results seem to count, not processes,” Jarrett writes. “We need to hear the process of a musician working on himself. We don’t need to hear who is more clever with synthesizers. Our cleverness has created the world we live in…”
Elsewhere, Jarrett has told the story of his first encounter with music as a young kid: banging on the kitchen table with celery sticks. He asks us to “try to imagine the first musician,” who was “not playing for an audience, or a market,” but was “playing out of need, out of his need for the music.”
The original musician was not looking for his image; he was using his voice to learn about the world. He knew the world to be liquid (i.e., not made up of discrete entities). We see the world as ‘bits’ of information, either/or, yes or no, digital. We seem to have no desire to experience time. We trade this experience for the ‘accuracy’ of ‘bits’ of time: it’s either 9:19 or 9:20, never almost 9:20. So we think that time is a straight line and, eventually, that everything has edges. Something stops here, something starts there. But the natural world is essentially circular; our heartbeats are not like a click-track or a drum machine; there are different kinds of time, and we don’t only die when we are dead.
“Life is liquid, not solid; a process, not a result; the present, not the future,” he writes. “Life is a process. We’re losing the concept of ‘becoming,’ because this, too, is circular.”
He quotes a canto by Ezra Pound (“Nothing counts save the quality of the affection”) and paraphrases Emerson’s Self-Reliance:
This is a good place to mention that ‘Do your own thing’ came from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who actually said, ‘Do your thing, and I shall know you.’ In other words, you reveal yourself to others through what you do. Emerson’s statement was not meant to be a kind of carte blanche to follow our shallowest whims: it’s not about life style or fashion or technique or casual choices. His statement contains a warning: I will only recognize you if you have your voice; I will not recognize you otherwise.
The actual line from Emerson is “Do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”
(Surely, Emerson read Thessalonians: “Do your own work.”)
Jarrett still plays, btw, but due to chronic fatigue and two strokes, he can now only play with his right hand.
Here’s an interview with Rick Beato from earlier this year:
Related reading: “Tomas Transformer at the piano.”
“Tiny things take on significance when I’m away from home. I’m on the alert for omens. Odd things happen when you get out…”
—Charles Portis, The Dog of the South
Here are two images from this week’s walks. I think they neatly summarize our present moment: circuit boards and clowns.
That we would train machines to be like us is not surprising.
The real scandal is how much we’ve trained ourselves to be like machines.
We’ve trained ourselves to be so machine-like that the machines don’t have to make that much of a leap to emulate us.
Resistance is celebrating and cultivating what is not machine-like in you.
Resistance is also using machines that help you feel more human.
By pedaling a bicycle, for example, you become one with the machine, but you’re also using all of your senses including the kinesthetic and vestibular. On your bike you come into contact with people and places you normally might not. The bicycle expands you rather than diminishes you.
(This, by the way, is nothing original that people haven’t been saying for hundreds of years. As my wife who studied STS in graduate school put it: “Same shit, different machines.”)
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