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 public historian of technology and culture, 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.
What I study is the Anthropology of Technology. It treats technology not only as instruments and machinery but as practice, embedded in social and cultural life, shaping human behavior, knowledge, and organization, and shaped by them in turn. The range is wide: traditional crafts and small-scale tools, contemporary digital systems and scientific innovations, and historical technologies known only through archaeological evidence.
Before I entered technology, I taught and coached high school debate. Debate asks a student to argue both sides of one resolution, and the habit never left me. It shapes how I read history and how I read a new system: build the strongest case for it, build the strongest case against it, then judge. The story of a technology lives in that argument, and learning begins when both sides get a fair hearing.
What I am after in all of it is the difference it makes to be human.
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.
- The Girl on the StampSee, Judge, Act in the age of algorithms. This is part one: See. In August 1910, a photographer put a notebook in his pocket and stopped next to a girl working at a spinning frame in the North Pownal, Vermont… Continue Reading →
- The Monk Both Sides Called a LiarIn late May 1966, a thirty-nine-year-old Vietnamese monk named Thich Nhat Hanh arrived at a Trappist abbey in Kentucky’s hill country to meet a man he had corresponded with but never seen. He was partway through a tour of the… Continue Reading →
- The Clause and the Wall.The rise of Christian nationalism in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia In 1894, a Seventh-day Adventist in Sydney was convicted of violating the Sunday laws. The sentence offered two options. Pay the fine or sit in the public stocks for two… Continue Reading →
- 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 →