News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Last week a neighbor shot a doe for me with an agricultural tag. Another friend let the deer hang in his walk-in cooler for a few days, and I spent Saturday processing lots of venison for the freezer. I'm not a skilled butcher by any means--as my cut hands can attest--but we'll certainly enjoy the packets of meat in the winter months to come.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about Marce Catlett, farm policy, and AI friends.
- Adam Smith takes stock of Paul Kingsnorth's arguments against the machine. He puts Savage Gods and the Buckmaster Trilogy in conversation with Kingsnorth's new book, Against the Machine, and asks hard questions about what words can or can't do to turn aside the relentless grind of the machine: "The central question—that writer’s question which is also the human question—still haunts it. Does it do any good to keep talking about it? What can a word really do against the Machine? As he says: 'It could be that even writing books about it is a trap.'"
- Raleigh Adams wonders if we can make the Internet a place once again: "Not too long ago, the internet was a place you visited. The family desktop sat in its designated closet or back office. In schools, there were rooms filled with computers blinking in tandem, waiting for your class to arrive and hop online. You had to purposefully arrive at the internet, and when done, you left it behind until next time."
- Ben Darr reviews In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, and undertakes an honest assessment of what we should learn from political responses to Covid: "For a Covid news junkie like me, a lot of this comes as old news, but I still found much to learn from in the book, especially due to Macedo and Lee’s systematic approach to each topic they take on. I have been hoping for a reckoning about Covid for years now, and this book is a major step in that direction. Here’s hoping more follow in its wake."
- Christian McNamara looks at what two recent Alex Garland films might show us about war: "In the future, the United States will almost certainly be faced with further decisions about whether to go to war. It’s even possible that we may one day find ourselves once again on the brink of civil war. At those moments, we can only hope that what Garland and now Garland and Mendoza have shown us about the nature of warfare and how it affects individual human beings will remain top of mind as we weigh what to do next."
- Michial Farmer listens to songs about parties this week. As he puts it, "we’re going to oscillate wildly between the kind of party you go home from in an ambulance and the kind of party where you sit in the corner and pet a cat."
On the recommendation of a friend, I recently read Christopher John Müller’s translation of Günther Anders’s “On Promethean Shame,” an excerpt from his 1956 book The Obsolescence of Human Beings 1. It’s quite a prescient analysis, and Müller’s commentary on it shows how Anders’s insights help make sense of our ongoing efforts to replace humans with (apparently) more capable machines. Müller summarizes Anders’s basic argument as follows:
Amidst highly capable machines, Anders suggests, being a mortal human becomes a shameful flaw, and ultimately a condition we hope to be absolved from. Put otherwise, the more limitless machine ability becomes, the more limited and finite we feel, and the more anxious we become. The anaesthetic force of technological objects, their capacity to remove us from our body thus coincides with a hypersenitivity towards our own individual limitations and exaggerates our awareness of our own potential flaws. As Michael Hauskeller has shown in a brilliant reading of ‘On Promethean Shame’ to which I will return below, the human enhancement project and the obsessive self-tracking that smartphone apps enable, can be read against the backdrop of the very feeling that Anders isolates. Put otherwise, they are motivated by a new form of bodily shame, ‘the shame of having been born rather than having been made’.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro