20.1.15

Is Our Enthrallment with Technocratic Life Killing Culture?

This essay by Leon Wieseltier, "Among the Disrupted" is worth reading. He winds his reflections through the themes of digital power, the role of the writer, and the nature of our move toward an alarming transhumanism. Doug Sikkema forwarded the essay to me and I'm grateful that he pointed it out. I was pleasantly surprised to see Michel Serres quoted. The fit is good.

Serres has triggered a great deal of thought and reflection for many of us around the ideas of communications, messengers, the nature of technology, and what it means to think of ourselves as humans. I've completed a draft of a review essay on Nicholas Carr's recent book, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, and there are many fruitful points of contact. Carr explores what it means for humans to create increasingly automated systems and how it can erode our abilities and create dependencies that require scrutiny.

Reading Wieseltier, Serres, and Carr is a useful means of increasing awareness of how the machines and the values they foster are changing our culture.