News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We have our first round of seeds in the ground, and I'm watching over many starts in our basement. We've had a late spring here, but bulbs and many trees are in full bloom now.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about handshakes, extinction, and chess.
- Elizabeth Stice questions what lies behind the animosity toward certain professions, such as college professors: "One feature of college that seems to annoy many people is, in fact, a vital good: the number of people who spend a lot of time studying irrelevant things."
- Ben Darr probes the source and power of names: "Nicknames, like all names, are special because they are given. Even if your nickname is well earned, you don’t get to claim it for yourself. It is given you by the community, by those who preceded you and who welcome you into this new place."
- Reid Makowsky expresses gratitude for the joys of gardening with children: "Wasn’t the garden an ersatz child during our seven years of childlessness? We might always enjoy gardening, but it wouldn’t matter as much anymore. This is the story of how we were wrong, how, since our first son was born, and especially since our second came along in late 2023, we’ve gardened more, not less."
- Alice Evans praises humble, hidden acts of love, thoughts sparked by listening to Nick Offerman: "He talked about the importance of doing good deeds. Small, good deeds, like greeting someone. Making something with your hands. Being peaceable. Using your talent and making good choices. Avoiding things that bring harm to yourself or others. Showing up when you say you will. All these things combined, he said, could change the world if more people did them. They might reduce war. And make everyone happier. I looked around at the luncheon audience, each person listening as intently as me. I no longer saw fancy people, just good people. An epiphany sprouted in my heart. Can good deeds become like murmurations?"
- David Bannon celebrates a birthday while waiting for a phone call that will not come: "Jess died in January, 2015. She was twenty-six. I still mute the television when I think of her. April 22 is my birthday. Despite our long-running joke about not answering the phone, Jess never missed calling me today, even when I was half a world away. This marks the eleventh year that my phone will not ring."
- Michial Farmer writes a delightfully spicy review of Ross Benes’s book 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times: "It’s strange for Benes to complain about the sanctimony of the critics of low culture and then engage in some fairly serious sanctimony of his own. As things stand, contemporary cultural critics could use some more sanctimony—at least for matters outside partisan politics, which seems to have a monopoly on sanctimony these days."
I recently read Thomas Rid's The Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History. It's a well done long survey of cybernetics, and Rid's narrative shows how humans have tried to imagine the ways dependence on and cooperation with machines changes the experience of being human. Along the way, I came across William Gibson's apt definition of cyberspace: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” Rid perceptively describes how computers came to reshape our cultural imaginary:
The most obvious comparison was the human brain. If the thinking machine was a simplified brain, then the reverse question was practically asking itself: Wasn’t the actual brain just a complex machine? The mind suddenly became something that could be understood and described and analyzed with language borrowed from engineering. And cybernetics provided that language: input and output, negative feedback, self-regulation, equilibrium, goal, and purpose. All this had a literally spiritual, drug-like appeal.
Seeing the mind as a machine was liberating. The reason was simple. Man could understand machines, make them, control them, tweak them, fix them, and improve them. If the mind was simply a kind of machine, then humans could understand it, control it, tweak it, fix it, and improve it. Doing so was only a matter of finding the right levers to pull and cogs to turn. No longer was human psychology something mysterious, something unknown, something beyond the comprehension and imagination of ordinary people.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro