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 thinker and technology futurist, 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.
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.
Underneath all of it is one question: what does it mean 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.
Every system I worked on in thirty-five years had a model of the person inside it. Most of those models were a false self: a bundle of clicks, purchases, and predictions, treated as more real than the human being they described. Thomas Merton spent his life on the other self, the true one, which is not built from what we perform or own. The four tests are what that true self asks of a machine.
Every great shift in how people work has forced the same argument. The printing press forced it, and so did the factory. The autonomous revolution is forcing it now. The choices in front of us are not finally about budgets. They are about values, and a society that will not name its values will have them chosen by whoever owns the machines.
Four Guides
Thomas Merton. The true self and the false, and what a technological order does to a person.
Marshall McLuhan. The medium shapes us before we argue about the message.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. When a nation’s church blesses the wheel, someone has to jam it.
Joseph Cardijn. See, Judge, Act: conviction turned into a decision somebody can make on Monday.
And that is Wisdom Speaking.
For working people asking what their work is for, and for retired people with the time, the experience, and the freedom to act on the answer.
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 Night After the CatacombsOn the evening of 17 November 1965, in a parish church on the working-class edge of Rome, an eighty-three-year-old cardinal sat among about twenty bishops who had once served as his chaplains. The church was Saint Michael Archangel in Pietralata,… Continue Reading →
- The Thursday GroupA storyline of the Rule of Saint Benedict for laypeople, guided by See–Judge–Act At Easter 1912, a twenty-nine-year-old curate in a working-class parish outside Brussels was handed the job nobody wanted: the women’s projects. He started by asking young seamstresses… Continue Reading →
- The Cable OfficeSee, Judge, Act in the age of algorithms. This is part two: Judge and Act, moving from seeing to judgment and action. Part one, See, opens in a Vermont cotton mill in August 1910. Part two: On 21 May 1930,… Continue Reading →
- The bottom line is that healthy living requires low exposure to manufactured chemicals. By Julie Peller Ph.D.Green Junction The American Lung Association describes indoor dust as “animal dander (including dead skin cells), dust mite matter and pollen.” Interestingly, the website also states, “The American Lung Association has partnered with Swiffer to inform Americans about why they… Continue Reading →
- 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 →