Category: Articles
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AI, I tried to love you
Among my peers who study the cultures and economies surrounding technology, I often find myself more tech-positive than most. On the whole I like computers, like the internet, and like in general the emergent human creativity that these things have enabled and revealed. A source of my appreciation is that I expend a lot of…
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Technology as “an all-purpose agent of change”
One thing I’ve noticed among my students is the use of the word technology as a kind of god-like force. Firstly, they use this extremely broad term to refer to a rather specific set of phenomena—more or less, the things that happen on Internet-connected smartphones or laptops. Secondly, they attribute to it a sort of…
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Humanity without superiority
I have had far too many conversations lately, and perhaps so have you, in which my interlocutor confidently or desperately attempts to assert what really, truly, and finally sets us humans apart from the increasingly clever and voluble machines. I’ve heard, for instance, that our value lies in our capacity for intention, or consciousness, or…
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A case for AI taboos
We probably all know the person, and maybe it is ourselves, who has inundated themselves in AI use, and say they are fully aware of all the dangers, but are so, so careful as to not fall into such traps themselves. They know AI can incline us to inhibit thinking, poison our relationships, and evade…
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An inference cooperative for academic AI
Universities, like other institutions, are currently being confronted with a dilemma: embrace the AI tools currently available from big-name tech companies, and be part of the future, or reject the miraculous machines and stick your head in the sand. This dilemma is a false one, on several counts. It is far from clear what role…
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Three questions on AI for you, from Pope Leo
Tonight at my church we had a discussion about Pope Leo’s recent encyclical on AI and human dignity. It was packed, and very meaningful to hear people from so many walks of life reflect together on this challenge we’re all facing. Afterward, one of the elders asked if I could write down one of the…
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Toward a durable writing stack
I have benefited over the years from others who have documented their writing setups, and so I feel some obligation to pay the favor forward by doing so with my own. The stack I’ll describe here is one I’ve been iterating on for about twenty years, starting from when I began discovering the pleasures of…
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The tech industry as a grass fire
I have spent a lot of my career trying to envision and build better versions of the tech industry. To my face, people often say that I’m optimistic, though I suspect what they mean is that I’m engaged in an act of futility. I consider this work neither optimistic nor futile; I think of it…
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A defunct email service as a template for campus AI
In the early 2000s, I visited my childhood neighbor at college. It turned out that he was smarter than I had given him credit for and was studying computer science at Dartmouth College. The few days I spent there involved learning a considerable amount of specialized ritual and terminology surrounding life in a Dartmouth fraternity.…
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Why this is not a newsletter
This summer I intend to engage in a regular blogging practice—a sort of retro endeavor in 2026, I suppose, but it has arisen for me as a necessary one. It is not about any topic in particular. It is, rather, an exercise in offering a series of interventions that have been stewing in me for…