The usual moves

It’s a beautiful spring afternoon (visually, at least), and I’m feeling pretty good with what we’ve done this weekend. It started with stress at so much to do, amplified by a few days of poor sleep, which was slowly dissipated by the usual moves—make a list, move through it methodically, make time for friendship, move the body, seek out the sun. Even the cats have been practicing tolerance more often than not (choosing life, as we often admonish them to do, instead of unnecessarily antagonizing each other), for which I’m glad.

• Through Sara Hendren, I learned about what Alan Jacobs calls the “Standard Critique of Technology” (SCT), referring to a collection of 20th-century writers whose names may be familiar: Franklin, Illich, Borgmann, Postman. Hendren shared it in discussing her own experiences teaching engineers to move beyond simple critiques of technology, who tend to view “ethics as a linear process”, suggesting we need simply “decide what our values are, … get on the same page, and then move from there.” Hendren offers the SCT as a starting point to nuance this view, and goes on from there. It connected to some mentions of consensus as a decision-making model, and what consensus can mean in practice, that also crossed my feeds this week.
• Writing about Max Picard’s The World of Silence, in which Picard decries the radio for adding so much noise to daily life in the last century, in a way very reminiscent of the smartphone today, Mandy Brown notes: “But as ever it feels useful to me to be reminded that many of our present-day troubles have roots in the past; not because it suggests we will never be rid of them but rather because it means we have the wealth of our ancestor’s experience to draw from.”
• Earlier this week, I read—and then cited in conversation—John Gruber’s claim that Apple Pay is uniquely privacy-preserving, in its creation of unique virtual card numbers per transaction. As it turns out, this is not unique to Apple Pay, and it’s not quite per transaction! Kudos to Gruber for sharing that correction, as I’m also about to do with my earlier interlocutor.
• Anne Helen Petersen, reflecting on the origins of the individualism myth in America (mm, always up for some Tocqueville).
• Justin Ling voyaged to Ukraine this week, offering a sober assessment of the country’s predicament and a hopeful account of its dramatically improving drone production—the latter necessary largely due to Western foot-dragging over providing money and weaponry.
• Christopher Brown shared some vignettes from his parents’ rural property, where, over the last several decades, his mother began practicing controlled burns, with impressive changes to the landscape as a result.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas