[P]roponents of AI argue that as long as we are masters of ourselves, we needn’t worry that AI will master us. But as all the writers of the Romantic era knew, men are helpless when in the thrall of powers greater than themselves.

Elizabeth Stice offers a Romantic reading of AI

Concerns that video game players confuse the game world and the real world, manifesting virtual into real violence, contain echoes of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

Jacob Martin on video games as time travel

Despite the arrogance of modern thinkers and the mountains of data tech companies collect about us, they still fail to know us deeply.

Charles R. Martelle offer a principal’s view on a modern crisis of attention

McLuhan sees our modern, technologically induced condition as a product of tensions between individualism and tribalism.

Éamon Brennan contests a standard reading of Marshall McLuhan

There have been drastic changes in how poetry sounds to readers over the last hundred and fifty years, troubling the illusion that reading silently can offer us access to the poem as it sounded to the writer.

Isabelle Stuart on the history of modern poetry recordings

This inability to stop engaging in unhealthy, excessive behavior is not unique to the current age.

Helena Vaughan on smartphones as a marker of modernity

What does Silicon Valley have to do with Jerusalem?

An interview with Derek Shuurman

AI gives us information. It furnishes facts. It prompts us with news headlines. But could AI also answer our religious questions?

An interview with Shanen Boettcher

[Poetry is] the closest thing—alongside music and dance and visual art—to a transhistorical technology of human expression and contemplation.

Anthony Shoplik interviews Philip Metres

Through the guise of hypotheticals and future realities, authors of the genre can critique current conditions and disseminate their ideas to a broad, sometimes international, audience.

Andrew Latham and Erica Paley on Chinese science fiction

In a time when technology has made it possible to change our very bodies in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations, are we less human than before?

An interview with Michael Hanby

In making computers to solve ethical dilemmas and robots to enter relationships, are we creating something in our own image? Is it possible to separate intelligence or emotion from the body?

An interview with Noreen Herzfeld

Early modern science emphasized an optical connection to the universe,' making its brilliance appear close enough to touch. Tragically, this optical achievement consigned the individual to reflect on an unbridgeable distance.

Michael Golec on the confluence of civilization and barbarism

We no longer connect with one another over information as often as we used to. Instead, we connect with a broker, a hub, a nexus.

Tom White and Wesley Brandon on substituting systems for people

We are not built to live in the way barbarism trains us to live, whence the widespread unhappiness and dissatisfaction of technologically advanced nations.

Brian Harding on Michel Henry, social media, and the loss of interiority

They may yet “return to tradition,” as it were—even in a land so detraditionalizing and antithetical to objective truth as the marketplace or the digital borderlands.

Esmé Partridge on truth from Plato to al-Fārābī to Twitter

The word “artifice” means handiwork, work of skill. Artificial intelligence is a wondrous work. And yet, if we allow that artifice to define our reality… we may become artifices ourselves, handiwork of our handiworks.

John Dolan and Jordan Wales on AI and us

The meaning of our personhood becomes a necessary object of examination wherever some technology is deeply entwined with our lives, particularly when that technology purports to replicate what we are.

Jordan Wales and John Dolan on AI and us

Growing dependence on technology allows the kind of independence the modern person craves: self-willed autonomy.

Catherine Yanko reads Romano Guardini during our digital lock-down

We may still take the best of what calling cards have to offer: a more robust etiquette for managing our digital, social lives on a more humane timescale.

Kirsten Hall loses her phone and looks to the 18th Century for guidance.