? Is technology or culture the problem?

Of course, things have not quite worked out this way. As the late nineteenth-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim perceived, the flipside of free-floating autonomy is anomie — a society without any authoritative norms. Pried from closed communities, many people suffer from pathologies of isolation and purposelessness. Family breakdown, drug ad

Technologies shape culture, politics, and economics as much as the other way around. For instance, most of our own social and governmental institutions today—prisons, hospitals and nursing homes, welfare systems, even schools—were shaped both literally and figuratively by that great embodiment of the Industrial Revolution: the factory.

The term “cynical romantic” might seem odd, since cynicism and romanticism are typically regarded as opposites. Whereas romantics are devoted to pursuing aesthetic beauty, sentimentality and the sublime, cynics deride everything and everyone as motivated purely by self-interest; they reject all contrary evidence as fatal stupidity or risible hypocr

Paul Bogard’s 2013 The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light is probably about as a good a survey of the consequences of light pollution as you’re likely to find. Bogard traces the rise of the regime of artificial lighting and its less than benign consequences for both humans and non-humans, from the well-docume

"Our various technological prostheses become extensions of our absentmindedness as they become more refined." - Duncan Reyburn