Coming soon

A newsletter that explores technology and how it affects us

This is Technocomplex, a free newsletter with notes, links, observations, and experiments on our complex relationships with technology. Occasional posts, but from August to December also a mirror of daily missives I send to selected first-year Duke undergraduates participating in a seminar on the topic.

The newsletter kicks off in January 2022. Plans include once-weekly updates, often drawn from writing and research done that week on a book about cars, art, and the impress that automobiles have made on culture and identities. The book is part memoir, part well researched essay, begun during a years-long restoration of a 1963 Jaguar E-type that I rescued from the edge of a cornfield near Suffolk, Virginia.

And, of course, the “complex relationship” in the book is the one we have with our cars, especially the badly rusted artifacts like the one I pushed into my garage.

That book project has loomed for a long time, but I’ve gone in many other directions as well. And I’ll be reflecting on those, too. Topics like … road manners and chickens, car clubs on the Internet, “ungrading,” and, er, sex robots.

In the fall, the newsletter goes daily on weekdays.

It’s likely that I’ll try my hand at a drawing or two as well. I’m practicing scratching out a likeness of Martin Heidegger, for example, in an attempt to create the Ideal Reality Map of his “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), among other things.

It should be amusing, perhaps even enlightening.

It’s free to subscribe. Why don’t you do that right now?