Technology, tao, and taboo

Manifestoes

As a foreword: A fairly bad essay about technology—specifically, digital tools and screens—is making the rounds this week, and I was prompted to dig some old notes out of storage and write the following. It is not a response to that essay, which I won’t even cite, because there are far too many of them. Instead of responding to arguments or taking sides I’m going to pull back and work through a framework for thinking about the available positions. I did not anticipate where I wound up, and as I say it was a bit of thinkpiece, but I’m certain enough of where I ended to file it under “Manifestoes.” You may or may not find it useful.

When confronted with a potentially dangerous technology there are essentially three possible responses. The first is to embrace it optimistically, use it without reservation, and hope for the best. That being both fairly obviously foolish and also more or less the norm of twenty-first global society it has no need of defense, so let’s set it aside. (I you disagree, you’re not going to enjoy what follows, so I’ll set you aside as well.) I’m interested in the other two responses, each of which shows a kind of wisdom—but a different kind, philosophically incompatible, yet both of which may be not only necessary but codependent.

The first is what I’ll call the tao of technology. This is the idea that all things have use to the one who uses them wisely. The sage, in other words. The sage can carry a smart phone in his pocket without continually pulling it out and staring at it, either because he knows that to do so would be foolish or because he has adapted the device to quit distracting him—because he has created some architecture of nondistractability, we might say, either internal or external. The sage can use so-called artificial intelligence to learn about the world in ways formerly impossible without outsourcing his thinking to the machine or growing dependent on it for essential communication skills, because he knows his own mind and has cultivated discipline. And so on.

The second approach let’s call the taboo. Given a tool that people are likely to abuse, it is best to ban it or, at least, heavily restrict its use. A taboo is essentially a law, but doesn’t have to take the form of public law; it may be personal. Acknowledging that I would be better off without a smart phone in my pocket, I might get rid of it and buy a flip phone. I might boycott not only AI tools but those who use them.

But a personal taboo is hard to enforce. In fact, the discipline required to enforce a personal taboo against a tool is exactly the discipline required to use the tool well in the first place, which means that it is an option available only to the sage. A taboo, to be a taboo, must be externally enforced. Again, it doesn’t require an act of Congress. A community might, like the Old Order Amish once did, adopt telephones and automobiles only to decide that it had been more Christlike before, and agree to rip out the wires and sell their cars—dissent coming at the cost of expulsion from the community. Or it might be like the friend you meet at the gym, who will bug you if you miss a workout.

Of course to adopt even a communal taboo requires wisdom; it only recognizes that while the spirit may be willing, the flesh is weak. My own “architecture of nondistractability” involves taking social media apps off my phone, which is really a kind of taboo, but one that comes from (I believe) wisdom, and which helps me to use the device in ways that better serve my life. It’s usually the case that good decisions come from experience, and that experience comes from bad decisions. But real wisdom, the wisdom of the sage, is not merely an ad-hoc bundle of taboos but a sixth sense that guides decisions about new tools in light of some ultimate end—human flourishing, a good life—albeit a sense that, when given shape as a particular action, looks like a taboo.

You might think of the tao as individual and the taboo as communal, or of the tao as internal and the taboo as external, or (as I prefer) of the tao as global and the taboo as particular—or even of the tao as Grace and the taboo as Law. You might think of the waveforms of the tao collapsing into particles of (literally particular!) taboos.

Portrait format and peripheral vision

Impressions

I have a Big Question to ask, but no answers. I’m just thinking through my keyboard.

Consider, for the sake of argument, Instagram — not to heap blame on Meta, but as a starting point. Instagram privileges, by visual design, not square photos but portrait-format images. On an individual’s feed, anything not taller than wide is cropped arbitrarily. That change, made a year or so ago, annoyed a lot of people, but it’s a local consequence, if not an inevitable one, of the smart phone as viewing device: you’re working within a portrait-format medium.

Imagine you’re scrolling vertically through images on a vertically oriented device. The images you will see for the longest duration, which therefore will make the greatest visual impression on you, will get the most attention, and will therefore be served algorithmically most often to others, are those that take up the most physical space on the vertical screen — that is, those in portrait format.

But again: it’s not the algorithm. It’s the medium. The algorithm makes the problem worse, but it starts with the fact that the phone is a vertical device.

This is a fairly radical change from the way the world was presented in 20th-century media, especially in film: in a horizontal orientation that showed context within a room or across a landscape. And those media, importantly, reflected the way (I think) normal human beings take in their surroundings. If you’re walking around you see what’s in front of you, and you also scan left to right; not so often up or down, I think, unless the ground is uneven or a bird is singing in the trees. We don’t naturally move up and down, but across horizontal surfaces; our vision unconsciously reflects that.

My question is, how, and to what extent, does the privileging of portrait-format images change the way we actually see the world?

When the machine becomes the master: Window sash edition

Impressions

Let’s talk about machines. Not machines as metaphors, but grease-and-sawdust, rattle-and-hum, be-careful-or-you’ll-hurt-yourself machines that do actual physical work in the actual physical world. When, and how, does an actual machine take charge?

In a 2006 episode of The Woodwright’s Shop (“Old Woodworking Machines“), Roy Underhill visited a restored 19th-century factory that makes window sashes using belt-driven machinery. Roy built his reputation working with hand tools, but in the presence of all this chatter-roaring interconnected machinery he is as excited as any little boy. And as much as I too prefer working with hand tools, I have to admit it’s all just really cool. Everything runs off the same steam-driven belt! You can see all the working parts: the gears, the levers, the controls. There is no magic, no black box whose workings are obscure; the genius of the machines’ creators is right before your eyes, and accessible to the worker’s hands.

Until we come (at about 10:30 in the video) to a mortising machine that, rather than plunging its bit into the wood when the worker steps on a pedal, reciprocates. “Wait a minute, now,” Roy says. “You’re not having to force the chisel down here. It ‘s going automatically.” To this point each operation as been at the worker’s command. Roy himself owns a mortising machine that chops each time the worker steps on a treadle. Make no mistake: despite saving physical labor it still requires skill and care to use. (I’ve used it. Oh, wouldn’t I love to have one?) But here, the worker has to bring the wood to the machine and position it precisely on the machine’s schedule. “It isn’t going to wait for me!” Roy is told.

“I don’t like this,” Roy says. “You are having to be the servant to the machine!”

There—precisely there, I would say—is the dividing line. Reduce the relationship between worker and tool to its essence and this is what you have. Whether you bring your work to the machine or the machine to your work, if you do it on your own time and under your own control, you are the master. (Or, at least, you have the opportunity to develop mastery.) If you are following the machine’s patterns and obeying its designs, you are the servant. Your relationship to your work has fundamentally changed. You have lost, as they say, agency. In a few steps across the floor of a 19th-century factory, the machine took charge, and Roy pointed it out, and didn’t like it. Nor do I. Nor, dear reader, should you.

chip carving of sunflowers

Sunflowers and sameness

Impressions
chip carving of sunflowers
“Sunflowers,” 2025. Chip carving in basswood.

Recently, inspired by a woodcut of a field of sunflowers, I went looking for reference photos to do a carving. What interests me aesthetically about sunflowers—about any flowers, really—is their motion, the aliveness of the blossoms, the variation in form within a single species. That fits well, I find, with my chosen medium, chip carving, which allows me only crisp lines and a limited range of textures to work with. No fields of gold and green, no variation in tone, no cross-hatching, no broad swaths of anything except uncarved wood. If I don’t vary the forms, I wind up with something that looks flat.

What that means in practice is that while one perfect thing may be aesthetically pleasing, if I’m going to put several of them together, it’s their imperfections that make them visually distinct, and therefore interesting. Consider Van Gogh’s sunflowers, which as he continued to paint them grew less round, less consistently formed, their oddities and uniquenesses more exaggerated.

Now, ideally, I’d go out and find a field of sunflowers to draw. Somewhat less ideally I’d buy a bunch and stick them in a vase, as Van Gogh did. But I’m jumping the season a bit, so I went out on the internet.

Most of the photographs I found of sunflowers were remarkably similar. Even the flowers within individual photographs were remarkably similar: round, large-headed, even-petalled, face-forward. Granted that sunflowers do notoriously face the sun, granted that a photographer is likely to capture them with the sun at his back, I was unlikely to see them from multiple angles in the same shot. But why are they all so perfect?

But what’s a conspiracy theory?

Impressions

The New York Times reports on a new chatbot intended to combat conspiracy theories:

DebunkBot, an A.I. chatbot designed by researchers to “very effectively persuade” users to stop believing unfounded conspiracy theories, made significant and long-lasting progress at changing people’s convictions, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science.

The bot uses “facts and logic” to combat conspiracy theories, and in the study had some success in arguing people out of beliefs that, for example, the CIA killed JFK or 9/11 was an inside job. I do believe that most people, if guided onto a field of factual argument, can be convinced by facts and logic; the trouble is that people who hold opinions dearly may take any attempt to guide them as a personal attack. It may be that a bot, by seeming neutral and objective, may have more success.

Ah, but is the bot, in fact, neutral and objective? Specifically, what counts as a conspiracy theory? The invitation to participate in the study defines a conspiracy theory as a belief that “certain significant events or situations are the result of secret plans by individuals or groups.” But this is literally and incontrovertibly true of, for example, the JFK assassination, not to mention 9/11. Had the plans for those events not been secret, they would have been prevented! People who say 9/11 was an inside job are just arguing about which individuals or groups did the secret planning. They may be wrong, they may be nuts — but not, by this definition, because they’re conspiracy theorists.

Some thoughts on (alleged) cultural stasis

Impressions

So, this “stuck culture” thing that people keep talking about. People’s notion of normal is deeply screwed up.

The baseline—what “culture” seems to be “stuck” by comparison with—is a rapid turnover of fashions made possible by wealth and mass media. Wealth to afford new stuff all the time, mass media to disseminate fashions quickly. In one of Thomas Hardy’s novels, I believe (though can’t recall which one) he observes that while London fashions turned over every year, his rural characters wore essentially the same clothes as their 16th-century ancestors. Many folk songs recorded in 1920s Appalachia had roots traceable to the Elizabethan era. Even the “Classical Era” of music lasted nearly a century. Before the 19th century, even for the relatively wealthy, fashion turned far more slowly; for the 99% it turned on a scale of centuries.

Then came mass production, of course. But also magazines, made possible by cheaper printing, and with them the need to continually think up new stuff to publish. New dress patterns. New recipes. New stories. New ideas. The wheel of fashion accelerated. The possibilities of music publishing and the mass manufacture of pianos brought a continual demand for new music to play, and an industry that stoked that demand. Then came records, and radio, movies, and television. Each new invention disseminated new ideas faster; each required a greater source of new ideas to disseminate. The wheel spun ever faster. So that now, we are surprised to find that everybody is wearing pretty much the same clothes and listening to more or less the same music as they were ten or twenty years ago.

But that sort of rapid cultural change—which we now think of as normal—is a product of particular dominant technologies. Technologies that both enabled rapid change <i>and required it, in order to exist—which is to say, to continue to make money for the people that created them. All were, in their way, building blocks of what is now sometimes called the attention economy.

Dekay's brown snake

Say hello to my little friend: or, contra myself on reference works and conviviality

Impressions

Yesterday, out walking, I saw this little guy sunning himself on the sidewalk:

Dekay's brown snake

Apologies for the poor focus: I didn’t want to get too close until I was sure it wasn’t a copperhead. But I had to get sorta close, and even then I wasn’t sure of myself. The head was wrong, the pattern was wrong, it was quite small. But it might have been a baby.

So I pulled out my phone and opened one of the few apps that I would really miss if I switched back to a flip phone: Seek by iNaturalist. Point your camera at a living thing and it will tell you, given a reasonably good view, what species you are looking at. I got it when I was hiking out in the mountains a few years ago; it’s great for identifying wildflowers and trees in unfamiliar ecosystems. But it’s also great for figuring out what’s going on in the square mile I live in.

Earlier this year, having had my front yard ripped up to lay a new sewer line and finding myself on the cusp of summer, I tossed out a couple packets of mixed flower seed and figured whatever happened, happened. Now something is happening, but I don’t know what. I think I kept the seed packets, but where? And which flower is which? Sheepishly I pulled out my phone and resorted to using an app to tell me what I was growing myself. (Answer so far: Borage, two colors of garden balsam, pot marigolds, and some sort of blanket flower.)

Really, I ought to know this stuff. I ought to know all my local trees and flowers, and I ought to know my snakes. In fact I know an awful lot of them, but I’ve had to learn the hard way, by using field guides and websites, because nobody educated me properly when I was a kid. (That was in a different part of the country anyway, but nobody educated me properly there either.) I say this in all seriousness despite twenty years of formal schooling. Half the time I don’t know what’s going on under my nose, and I need an app to figure it out. My education was bullshit.

Reference works as tools, “convivial” or not

Impressions

On Micro.Blog @jabel (Jeremy) has been writing about so-called “artificial intelligence” (SCAI for short, my abbreviation) through the lens of Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality. It’s a matter worth taking seriously, and I always appreciate anybody reaching for Ivan Illich, even if I find his work equal parts useful and maddening. For economy, and because it has been awhile since I read Illich, I’ll borrow Jeremy’s quotes from Illich defining conviviality. In a convivial society there is “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and intercourse of persons with their environment. … [Conviviality is] individual freedom realized in personal interdependence.” Convivial tools therefore afford people “the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others.”

By contrast, as Jeremy explains,

the failure of the industrial model of tools is rooted in a key error: namely, that we could make tools that work n behalf of humanity. That, in fact, we could replace human slaves with tool slaves. But we have found that when we replace human slaves with tool slaves, we become enslaved to the tools. Once tools grow beyond their natural scale, they begin shaping their users. The bounds of the possible become defined by the capabilities of the tools.

On one use of SCAI, Jeremy writes:

I think everyone would agree that old-fashioned encyclopedias are convivial tools, i.e., they facilitate autonomous human creativity; they can be picked up and put down at will; they make very few demands upon humans, etc. Search engines, as such, can also be convivial tools in that they are faster, digitized versions of encyclopedias. AI-assisted search might also be convivial in some ways.

The question of whether something like SCAI can be convivial is tempting, but I think it’s a mistake to address it head-on. Instead I want to respond to the first sentence in this paragraph, about “old-fashioned encyclopedias.” In part I want to do this because I am incapable of reading the phrase “I think we can all agree that” without instantly, unconsciously searching for a way to disagree. But in part it may be a useful way of nibbling up to the actual problem of SCAI.

Anarchy, technology, and community: Some thoughts on The Dawn of Everything

ImpressionsReviews

A year or so ago I read The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. At the time I jotted down a few notes, and it has taken me this long, I’m afraid, to beat them into something like coherence. Hey, it’s about 40,000 years of human history: what’s another thirteen months?

I won’t attempt a summary or a proper review; for an overview of the work I recommend this review from Science News.

The authors observe, from archaeological and historical evidence, that humans long ago constituted their societies in a dazzling variety of ways, and indeed reconstituted themselves thoughtfully, deliberately, and relatively often, perhaps to ward off inequality or escape an authoritarian system. As my own study of history goes back only a few hundred years professionally and at most a thousand years in amateur terms, I’m not in a position to disagree with anyone’s meta-analysis of archaeological evidence. I do worry that it reads like a book heavily informed by, and perhaps at least partly driven by, present political concerns, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong, only that I’m wary.

I do, however, want to dissent from the authors’ optimism—that is, their belief that if our ancestors thought creatively about politics and radically changed their situations, we ought to be able to do the same. We are limited, structurally, in ways our ancestors could not. They could pack up and leave a society they didn’t like: we can’t, for there are no longer any margins to speak of. They could play with agriculture for millennia without domesticating their crops and inducing mutual dependence, but that genie is out of the bottle now. I could go on.

Maybe the simplest objection is that what looks like a rapid change in deep history or the archaeological record may have seemed a terribly long time to those who lived through it. Reading about the sundry ways people have thoughtfully organized themselves in the past (and about how deliberately and thoughtfully they seem to have done so) gives me hope that, when this civilization falls and 99 percent of the people on the planet die, the remaining few will be able to come up with something better than Mad Max, indeed to lay a foundation for a far better future. But I’m not sure most people would consider that statement optimistic.

In any case, quibbling about hope and hopelessness is boring. So let’s talk about something else.

Sometimes a pair of chopsticks is just a pair of chopsticks

Impressions

To have a meal with chopsticks is to engage in the immaterial world of relationships and ideas. People don’t use chopsticks in a restaurant to show their dexterity. Rather, it demonstrates one can navigate different cultural contexts, adapt to various social environments, and demonstrate a level of open mindedness. These are all fine purposes, but they have little to do with the pragmatic task of moving pieces of food from the plate to the mouth. And in many contexts, the temptation is to master chopsticks to fake sophistication. Seth Higgins, “On Lug Wrenches and Chopsticks, in Front Porch Republic

When I worked in an office, back in the early days of this century, I used to walk across the street to the grocery store on my lunch break to make a salad at the salad bar, which I took back to eat at my desk. I have always loved salad bars, maybe because when I was a kid they were the only chance I had to choose whatever I wanted to eat. Choice and abundance! Very American. Anyhow: I enjoyed my salad-bar lunches, but I found them difficult to eat. A fork is lousy at picking up raw carrots, no less so if they are grated — and more so if the fork is one of the plastic ones they give you at the store. Actually forks are pretty lousy at picking up raw vegetables, period. Radish? Cucumber? I felt like I was trying to kill Dracula. Have you ever tried eating raw spinach with a plastic fork? And let’s not even talk about those baby ears of corn.

Then I found, in my desk drawer, an unused pair of takeout chopsticks from a Chinese restaurant. And they worked. They worked really well. They picked up everything, from baby corn to the last little bits of shredded carrot. They worked so well that to this day I eat salad with chopsticks — at home, when nobody is watching — simply because they are more efficient than a fork.

Sometimes, to paraphrase something Freud may or may not ever have said, a pair of chopsticks is just a pair of chopsticks. And pretty much all the time, you’re better off choosing the right tool for the job instead of thinking of tools as symbols.