Whether it’s environmental issues or artificial intelligence, I’ve tried to invoke a most levelheaded view of things: long-term ideals are just as important as short-term gains.
Lately though I’ve been trying to grapple with the realization the most glaring limitation we face as a society is our ability to communicate—with each other, ourselves, and our machines—and this starts with how we process, consume and publish the written word. This, I believe, is the context in which writing can be considered a virtue worth pursuing — as the foundation of arete, the process of living up to one’s highest potential.
Our species’ seemingly intractable inability to manage foundational ideas like democracy is the function of not just digital technology — but the very language we use to communicate, empathize and learn. Because we don’t write as much, we haven’t arrived at the language to communicate the complexities of the digital world in the context of complex topics like political philosophy.
This generates a certain acedia that has in turn made us more easily addicted to consuming media on our devices, allowing us to offload our thinking and behaviors to technology akin to our broader society’s overdependence on fossil fuels. In this way, a restorative sense also shapes my approach to the craft.
It may be human nature to fall into progress traps, but it is also human nature to mythologize, philosophize, and devise — a universal, eternal battle against the repetition of ancient mistakes. I tend to think about nature and mythology in amoral terms, so I don’t extend outward judgment on any of this. All I can say is what I feel, which is objectively bad that so many of us seem trapped, enslaved by our technology and the culture that upholds its primacy over more humanistic affairs. Unable to properly conceive of the realities we experience, we fall victim to false images and other digital perversions of physical reality.
Guided by this understanding, I’ve come to believe that as we learn how to communicate about digital technology more effectively, it may be possible to liberate both oneself and society from our miscommunicative condition.
In these contexts (and more which I’m always writing about and sometimes discuss on my blog), I believe I can best help the world become a better place by simply writing toward such ends.