Home

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 theology 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. A technology’s story lives in that argument, and learning begins when both sides get a fair hearing. And be able to put your four or five main points on an index card.

What I am after in all of it is the difference it makes to be human.

The autonomous revolution won’t stop, and I have never argued that it should. I argue it must 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.

See the talks and workshops
Book a session

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.

See all posts →

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑