Examined readings on technology (and more): from disenchantment to helpless growth

The Monday edition, March 11th, 2024

In the Monday edition of the newsletter I am sharing observations about books or articles I am currently reading or have recently finished. The Friday posts, such as the latest one on AI, are the longer essays inspired by the literature and other sources.

I am excellent at starting books, less good at finishing them — another book always begs starting! But I am also wary of quoting out of context, i.e. I hold it important to try to understand a book or an article in the broader body of work by the author (which takes time and effort!)

When possible, I will add the books to the Unexamined Technology page at bookshop.org with an affiliate link, i.e. if you purchase a book that way it helps me a little and independent bookstores even more. That’s for full disclosure. (The occasional Amazon link, when a book is not available elsewhere, is not affiliate.)

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Pick’s for Monday, 11th of February 2024

Examined book of the week

Sharon Blackie: The Enchanted Life: Reclaiming the Wisdom and Magic of the Natural World

Occasionally, I will also mention books that I have only recently started, but I’ve immediately found inspiring. The Enchanted Life by

Dr Sharon Blackie

is such a book. The author makes a strong argument for rediscovering enchantment in our everyday lives by letting go of the indoctrination to consumerist behaviour and bleak rationality.

This is not a unique argument, but Blackie articulates it in engaging and sophisticated ways. I will draw from her ideas to future posts — actually, the one landing on Friday touches on similar themes. For now, the quote (pp. 8-9) will do:

We imagine we’re thriving, but we’re not. We have allowed ourselves, as the price we pay for so vigorously enrolling in the prevailing Western cult of progress and growth, to become disenchanted with ourselves and each other, and with our lives. […] We’re yearning for meaning, for ways to feel at home in the world. We long to see it as we once saw it when we were children: a world that’s full of mystery, bursting with possibility; a world that will challenge us to become all that we could ever hope to be.

Examined Substack of the week

Dougald Hine’s At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies is high on my reading list and I hope to cover it in a future Monday edition. His Substack

Writing Home

explores similar themes of our current metamodern predicament of climate change and erosion of meaning.

Recently, Hine wrote about the helplessness we face in front of climate questions in a way that I think many of us may find resonating.

”I suggest that the best response to the helplessness which many of us experience when the realities of climate change come home to us is to recover another sense of growth: not as an ever-increasing bundle of commodities, traded through markets and treated as though they were interchangeable, but the cycle of seasonal growth on which all of our lives continue to depend. I mean this literally: contrary to the logic of progress and the pride it encouraged us to take in our distance from the land, it would be a good thing for far more of us to get back involved with soil and gain at least some skill and experience in growing food.” - Helpless growth

Thank you for reading — next post will follow on Friday.

With love and kindness,

Aki