Thesis: If the digital revolution is analogous to the print revolution, then we're entering our "Wars of Religion" phase.

I don't know, that "we can also" seems pretty incriminating.

Always read Walter Ong. But I'm not sure a "return to orality" is quite right. The message of the digital medium is not the images, texts, or sounds. Those are now merely the content of the medium. The message of the medium is in the animation and scrambling of these older forms.

Neil Postman, Technopoly (1992).

A reader recently sent me this old Calvin and Hobbes strip.

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By a logic diagnosed millennia ago, humanity's most powerful technologies of externalized memory have induced a profound forgetfulness.

Post-literacy finally arrives not through the disappearance of text but by its extreme proliferation. Post-literacy is an over-saturation event. Post-literacy does not entail a return to orality.

The last paragraph is something like a Hippocratic oath for humanities professors

Look, I realize mileage will vary on the value you assign to ancient stories, but, in our current moment, it seems at least darkly suggestive that the civilizational hubris represented by the Tower of Babel is undone when language can no longer serve to order society.

Science/religion debates yielded the ill-conceived "god of the gaps" concept, relegating god to a filler in then-current gaps in human knowledge. AI discourse offers a similarly misguided "human of the gaps" approach, relegating the human to gaps in AI capabilities.

Manufactured inevitability. yahoo.com/news/ohio-stat…

"Find out what Bill Gates wants your school to do. Don't do that." That's Theodore Roszak in 1996. Now maybe substitute Sam Altman for Gates.

"Contemporary man ... attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it." — Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)

The fervent and feverish hope in the imminent arrival of AGI that has captured segments of the cultural imagination over the last few years is properly understood as the manifestation of a recurring impulse in the distinctly American religious imagination.

This at least has the advantage of tying together various strands that feed into the anti-humanism at the root of the techno-economic order: an obsession with efficiency/productivity, a distaste for the embodied human condition, and a desire for magical frictionlessness.

Hans Jonas in a conversation with Hannah Arendt (1972).

This question sets us off on the wrong path. Being human is the thing itself, but we seem hellbent on relinquishing depth of experience for the hollow promise of efficiency, productivity, safety, ease, etc.