Brandon Marcus
@brandonjmarc
Brandon Marcus
We ought instead to take Ellul’s book, placed in the context of his larger work, as an appeal to walk a middle path between unrestrained technophilia and reactionary technophobia, a path we see only if we refocus on human ends, which are familial, communal, political, and ecclesial. This requires that we are willing to admit that among our vast... See more
Samuel • Confronting the Technological Society
Ellul’s analysis of freedom holds up, since most of us are not masters but consumers of technology, adapting to it and prone to mistake the valuable tensions involved in pursuing the highest goods for nothing but technical problems to be solved (and surely our technicians are no less prone to this). Recognizing the value of these tensions can be... See more
Samuel • Confronting the Technological Society
But as more and more activities and areas of life get absorbed in technique — in recent years perhaps most visibly through digital technologies shaping friendships, learning, buying and selling, travel, music, leisure, and much else — the possibilities of pushing back against it diminish. The lesson here is not that the particular technologies are... See more
Samuel • Confronting the Technological Society
llul distills the essential characteristics of technique to a list of seven. The two most obvious ones, he says, have been addressed so often by other scholars that he can set them aside: rationality (for example, systematization and standardization) and artificiality (subjugation and often the destruction of nature). The other five characteristics... See more
Samuel • Confronting the Technological Society
... See moreTaylor's moral justification of authenticity ignores that subtle process, within the neoliberal regime, by which the ideas of freedom and self-realization are transformed into vehicles for more efficient exploitation. The neoliberal regime exploits morality. Once it is able to present itself as freedom, domination becomes complete. Authenticity is
... See moreRituals are processes of embodiment and bodily
performances. In them, the valid order and values of a com-
munity are physically experienced and solidified. They
are written into the body, incorporated, that is, physically
internalized. Thus, rituals create a bodily knowledge and
memory, an embodied identity, a bodily connection. А
ritual community is a
6 prompts that turn a chatbot into a fact-checker
Most of us encounter claims faster than we can verify them, which is part of what makes a chatbot useful here: it can help trace a claim back to its origin and flag what's missing along the way.
An important caveat before we start: A chatbot... See more
Hana Lee Goldinsubstack.comOur digital economy has levied a gigantic cognitive tax on news consumers trying to find accurate information. The cost is just too much to bear.