The Big Five-O.

A modest milestone, a delightful holiday offer, & access to everything!

O World! Where The Jester And The Scholar Reflect Each Other. Contradictions are often the highest truth. France, 1517.

This is my 50th post since July 22, when I began this project. In terms of total words, it’s nearing the collective length of a slim volume of essays. To those of you reading them on a regular basis, my thanks. I’ve heard many nice things about them, both in person and in the public comments. These mean a great deal to me.

I’m not wild about the name “Technohumanism.” It’s clunky, and just a hyphen away from something entirely different, an optimistic belief in a future where humans and machines merge.¹ My name is intended to convey an appreciation of human creativity and creativity’s near relation, the search for meaning in life.

My own experience² tells me that the “two cultures” of science and the humanities are much closer than people believe. As much as there is a genetic drive to perpetuate the species, there is a personal drive in each of us to encode creatively some essence of our unique selves. I believe that the works of Science, Technology, and the Arts are all a means to realizing that goal. They are all creative; as I wrote recently, Artificial Intelligence doesn’t create, the people who build AI create.

As heavy as all that sounds, this Substack aims to keep things accessible, surprising, and fun. Assisted by my collection of inexplicable marginalia from Medieval manuscripts I have known.

You’re welcome. The anonymous geniuses who did these during the tedious one-year process of making a book have a place in my heart..

It’s a point of pride that this is not a Substack for the latest think piece about the newest political or social outrage. There are enough of those. At times like ours, it’s also good to tend one’s mental and emotional garden.

Free columns on art and tech? Par-ty!

To commemorate today’s milestone, I’m being contradictory. I’ve removed the paywall from my columns, but I’m asking for money. If this has been of value to you, please become a paying subscriber, or gift a paid subscription to someone you think might enjoy these.

I’ve lowered two settings; “monthly” has a minimum. Think of the new settings as “generous,” “really generous,” and “exceptionally generous.” I appreciate all donations.

For those of you who are newer here, I’ve made a list of links to some of my favorite work over the past five months. The full collection of 49 pieces are on my homepage, here.

Technology, reconsidered

1. What a close reading Alan Turing’s foundational paper on Artificial Intelligence tells us about his spiritual yearnings, and the pitfalls he foreshadowed for AI. In two parts (one, and two).

2. How the history of modern measurement explains the march to AI, and a look at our culture of precision in perpetual change. A three-part series (one, and two, and three).

3. How the scale of technology production has changed so much of life. Make a billion cellphones a year, and it shakes up a lot of things.

4. On being laid off from a cushy tech job.

5. What “compute” as a noun tells us about how technology has changed itself and the world.

When we do battle with the unknown, sometimes we realize we’re a little strange ourselves.

Art and consequences

1. How the painterly development of Linear Perspective gave us Science, a three-part series. (one, and two, and three.)

2. An ancient Greek tragedy, and how being brave for each other teaches us how to endure the madness of today.

3. On being conned. What you learn about yourself, and the goodness that bad people leverage.

4. Caravaggio’s great and grotesque visual pun.

5. How Impressionism was a market response to the technology of representation.

Cultivate yourself, you are more than you know. Also: If you don’t want to give a subscription, how about a cool tattoo idea?

Personal history.

1. How a short conversation at San Quentin taught me a profound lesson about story structure.

2. The follow-up: How far people will go to express their individuality, and how far the state will go to squelch it in prisoners.

3. My grandmother’s horrifying first memory, still raw after almost a century, and how I experienced a human loss that rarely happens today.

4. Gratitude.

5. My personal favorite among all these: Growing up in the PTSD of history’s greatest tragedy, and how we were schooled to be complicit in the silence.

Again, thanks for reading. Be in touch, and let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see more or less of in the New Year. The next post is a little out of the ordinary, and may be followed by a brief interlude.

“Thou shalt not bore.” Admire the careful shadows this illustrator put in there, 600 years ago. Well done, shipmate.

1. I only found about this after I’d started the Substack.

2. I have been educated in Literature, Art History, and International Relations, and I spent most of 13 years working in and around Pacific Asia. For several decades I covered Finance and Technology at The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The New York Times, and taught a seminar on technology and communications at U.C. Berkeley’s School of Information.

From 2017-2024 I was at Google, where I had a newsletter, moderated a number of events, and did a lot of interviews, ghostwriting, and coaching. I now do similar work independently. If you want to contact me for that, my professional website is here. I’m currently turning away new work, but am always happy to chat.