Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
June 2, 2016
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Adam Roberts has been blogging about the Aeneid, prompted by his reading of Seamus Heaney’s fragmentary translation. Adam concludes his most recent post on the subject with these thoughts: One of the biggest questions about the Aeneid, one critics and scholars still debate, is whether it is a simply...
June 1, 2016
The promise and peril of algorithmic culture is a rather a Theme here at Text Patterns Command Center, so let’s look at the review by Michael S. Evans of The Master Algorithm, by Pedro Domingos. Domingos tells us that as algorithmic decision-making extends itself further into our lives, we’re going to become healthier, happier, and...
May 31, 2016
So my theses for disputation on technology, which began life as a series of tweets, were refined into a blog post, almost became a short book, and finally emerged in their final form as a long article, may be found here. Please feel free to dispute them in the comments below. Go ahead, dispute them. I dare you.
May 31, 2016
In a recent post I spoke of what we might call the Defiling of the Memes, and suggested that Paul Ricoeur’s work on The Symbolism of Evil might be relevant. Let’s see how that might go. In that book Ricoeur essentially works backwards from the familiar and conceptually sophisticated theological language of sin to what underlies it,...
May 30, 2016
When I think, as I often do, and will continue to do in a slow way* for the next few years, about a possible technological history of modernity, I am always aware that this account will be for me a theological account. That is, the history will be done from within, and on behalf of, a Christian understanding of the world. This poses...
May 28, 2016
from the Life magazine archives Ray Monk’s biography of Robert Oppenheimer is a long but fascinating book. (Monk is also the author of a brilliant biography of Wittgenstein — I’m looking forward to reading him on Bertrand Russell at some point, though two volumes of Lord Russell may be more than I can handle….) I admire what...
May 26, 2016
I think it’s now generally understood that the disaffected cultural left and the disaffected cultural right have become mirror images of each other: the rhetorical and political strategies employed by one side will, soon enough, be picked up by the other. At this particular moment, the right seems to be borrowing from the left —...
May 25, 2016
Austin, Texas, after the departure of Uber (artist’s representation) It turns out that the voters of Austin, Texas have amazing powers to distort time: according to Neal Pollock, “Austin has gone back in time 20 years” by ditching Uber, even though Uber was in Austin for just two years and the company was only founded...
May 21, 2016
In a post this morning on Seamus Heaney’s fragmentary translation of the Aeneid, my friend Adam Roberts (inadvertently I’m sure) sent me down a trail of memory. He did it by writing this: It’s a little odd, actually: the Iliad and the Odyssey are, patently, greater works of art; yet however much I love them and return to them,...
May 20, 2016
Everything connects; but teasing out the connections in intelligible and useful ways is hard. The book I’m currently writing requires me to describe a complex set of ideas, mainly theological and aesthetic, as they were developed by five major figures: W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, and Simone Weil. Other...