What's up for spring '22
Marginal comments and first drafts of drafts -- 12 topics for weekly posts to kick off 2022. Next letter in January 2022!
Maybe there’s a topic in here that you’d like? Here are some of my ponderings and playthings that are likely to come up on Technocomplex in the first weeks of 2022.
“Whaddya name yours?” People treat their cars like pets. Or children. Ever name a car you owned? You probably did or if you didn’t, you knew someone who did. I rode around in a friend’s “Vincent Van Go” — a VW van from the 1970s. My cars, however, had names that couldn’t be said in polite company.
My Martin Heidegger T-shirt design. You can get Heidegger T-shirts that say “I’m sorry” or simply declare “Dasein.” But no where could I find the Heidegger T-shirt that I want to wear. Time to fix that. (I might even take orders.) The guy is problematic, so to speak.
Thank God for the “uncanny valley.” It’s warned us that an artificial human-like creation is, well, not human. Part of an exploration of very-human-like AIs and robots. They are becoming uncannily canny, you know.
Pygmalion again, or the problem with sex robots. I promise this one will be safe for work, but if you click a link or two, you might want to be in incognito mode. (I’ll try to warn you.) The topic is gaining attention from mainstream academics, too, which means of course that it’s not just a topic for the future.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun came out in March 2021. Told from the perspective of an “AF” — an “Artificial Friend” — the novel explores humanness and the inklings of empathetic AI.
Car clubs, car forums, car shows. She showed up on the car forum wanting help with her dad’s Jaguar E-type. He died of cancer, leaving it to her in half-restored state. How an online car forum helped her keep a car and a memory alive.
After the car, what? Is “automobility” also an inevitability? Like: the set of assumptions about mobility with automobiles, the infrastructure that’s required to support it, and the societal superstructure that sustains cars and drivers? If you’re like me, you can hardly imagine a world where cars are not an essential element. What if we moved to a world where they were less essential?
Retooling re-seen. In July 1971, Bernadette Meyer wrote daily journal entries and took a 36-exposure roll of 35mm film every day. She attempted to capture Memory. I tried a similar project in January 2021, a wet and cold pandemic month. A year later, I sift through the data, in all its boringness and tedium, to see if there is something there after all worth a memory.
Mind the chickens, please! A review of caricatures and drawings that trace ways the automobile remolded civic life in America in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Ungrading. Resisting the demand to sort. A consideration of my quest to recenter a class’ focus on learning rather than on grades. Drawn from experience in the fall 2021 run of “From Siri to Skynet: Our Complex Relationships with Technology” a seminar for first-year students at Duke.
Motor mania of 1910 makes digital enthusiasms of 2010 look boring. There’s something about technological thresholds that’s exciting. Mr. Toad was a type, not an outlier.
And after all of this, probably a recap of why writing is hard.
I think it’s time for you to subscribe now if you haven’t already, and maybe forward this to a friend.