For thirty-five years I helped build the systems I now ask questions about.
I sat in the rooms where these decisions got made. I sold the platforms. I wrote the strategy decks. I finished as a Chief Information Security Officer, which means I know precisely what an organization can learn about a person, and precisely how little stands between the knowing and the using.
I am not a professional academic. I am a practitioner who reads, and the writer I keep returning to is a Trappist monk who read Marshall McLuhan with a pencil in his hand in 1964, from a hermitage in Kentucky, while the machinery was still being assembled. I study The Anthropology of Technology (AoT), which investigates technology not solely as instruments or machinery but as practices deeply embedded in social and cultural contexts—practices that both shape and are shaped by human behavior, knowledge, and organization. Together we study a wide spectrum of technologies, ranging from traditional crafts and small-scale tools to contemporary digital systems and scientific innovations, as well as historical technologies examined through archaeological evidence. We come to understand the difference in being human and the difference it makes.
The autonomous revolution will not be stopped, and I have never argued that it should be. I argue that it has to answer four questions.
- People. Who does this make larger, and at whose expense?
- Planet. What does it cost the ground we stand on, and who is sent the bill?
- Purpose. Does it enlarge what a person is for, or narrow it?
- Prosperity. For everyone, or for a few?
Four tests, not four values. A value is something you hold. A test is something you can run on Monday, on a hiring system, a data center, or a parish app.
And that is Wisdom Speaking.
New writing
Essays most weekdays on Thomas Merton, Marshall McLuhan, Catholic social teaching, and what the machines are doing to the human person. Julie Peller, Ph.D., writes Green Junction here on the environment, which is the Planet test with a chemist doing the arithmetic.
- Liturgy and Community, Part Two.Liturgy Part II: Sent Liturgy and Community, Part Two. Where We Left the Monk Recap in three sentences, using the cards from Tuesday. God gathers the assembly. The assembly receives before it acts. The test of a liturgy is the… Continue Reading →
- Liturgy and Community: Gathered & Sent Part I & IIThis will be two blog posts: one for today (Tuesday) and the other for Thursday. The Monk Who Could Not Pray In 1930, a Benedictine at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, was coming apart. His eyesight was failing. He… Continue Reading →
- Have You Ever Thought about the smell of Fertilizer? By Julie Peller Ph.DGreen Junction On recent walks around my neighborhood, I noticed the smell of lawn fertilizers. The use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides – a choice to make lawns look more like carpet than natural grass/plant growth – exposes people, animals,… Continue Reading →
- The Mountain Merton Never ClimbedIn late November 1968, Thomas Merton rode in a car near Madras, heading to see the ancient stone temples at Mahabalipuram. Spotting hills in the distance, he asked his Catholic driver if those were the mountains where Ramana Maharshi had… Continue Reading →
- Eighty Acres of DharmaOn April 18, 1951, Vinoba Bhave visited the Harijan colony in Pochampally, a village of seven hundred families in present-day Telangana. Two-thirds of these families had no land. At fifty-five, Bhave was an experienced follower of Gandhi, shaped by years… Continue Reading →
- The Monk Rome Silenced for Reading the Bible Too CarefullyOn 15 November 1890, in a former Turkish slaughterhouse on the edge of Jerusalem’s Old City, a French Dominican friar named Marie-Joseph Lagrange opened a school with one ambition: to bring the full machinery of modern historical study, languages, archaeology,… Continue Reading →
- This beautiful earth that is shared by 8.3 billion Who Leads? By Julie Peller Ph.D.Green Junction Everything that people consume, use, and create comes from the earth’s resources. In the sustainability course I teach, we often reflect on human technological advancements over the past 100 years and the strain on the earth’s resources. For… Continue Reading →
- Learning to Close the DoorBuddhism, Catholic Social Teaching, and the common good in the age of artificial intelligence In late May 1966, a slight Vietnamese monk, 39 years old, walked through the gatehouse of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He was on a… Continue Reading →