Tag Archives: Technology

The author on a blue background wearing Apple AirPods.

On Machinery

On Machinery – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, for the penultimate post of the Wednesday Blog, how machinery needs constant maintenance to keep functioning.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:%5B1%5D Surekha Davies, “Walter Raleigh’s headless monsters and annotation as thinking,” in Strange and Wonderous: Notes from a Science Historian, (6 October 2025).[2] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.
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This week, for the penultimate post of the Wednesday Blog, how machinery needs constant maintenance to keep functioning.

I am just old enough to remember life before the ubiquity of computers. I had access to our family computer as long as I can remember, and to my grandparents’ computer at their condo when we stayed with them in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago. Yet even then my computer usage was limited often to idle fascination. I did most of my schoolwork by hand through eighth grade, only switching from writing to typing most of my work when I started high school and was issued a MacBook by my school. I do think that a certain degree of whimsy and humanity has faded from daily life as we’ve so fully adopted our ever newly invented technologies. Those machines can do things that in my early childhood would’ve seemed wonderous. Recently, I thought how without knowing how powerful and far-reaching my computer is as a vehicle for my research and general curiosity, I would be happy, delighted in fact, if my computer could conduct one function, say if it had the ability to look up any street address in the United States as a device connected to the US Postal Service’s database. That alone would delight me. Yet that is the function of not just one application on my computer but merely one of many functions of several such programs I can load on this device, and not only can I look up addresses in the United States but I can look up addresses in any country on this planet.

With the right software downloaded onto this computer I can read any document printed or handwritten in all of human history and leave annotations and highlights without worrying about damaging the original source. Surekha Davies wrote warmly in favor of annotating in her newsletter this week, and I appreciated her take on the matter.[1] In high school, I was a bit of a prude when it came to annotating; I found that summer reading assignment in my freshman and sophomore English classes to be almost repulsive because I see a book as a work of art crafted by its author, editor, and publisher to be a very specific way. To annotate, I argued, was like drawing a curly-cue mustache on the Mona Lisa, a crude act at best. Because of this I process knowledge from books differently. I now often take photos of individual pages and organize them into albums on my computer which I can then consult if I’m writing about a particular book, in much the same fashion that I use when I’m in the archive or special collections room looking at a historical text.

All of these images can now not only be sorted into my computer’s photo library, now stored in the cloud and accessible on my computer and phone alike, but they can also be merged together into one common PDF file, the main file type I use for storing primary and secondary sources for my research. With advances in artificial intelligence, I can now use the common top-level search feature on my computer to look within files for specific characters, words, or phrases to varying levels of accuracy. This is something that was barely getting off the ground when I started working on my doctorate six years ago, and today it makes my job a lot easier; just my file folder containing all of the peer-reviewed articles I’ve used in my research since 2019 contains 349 files and is 887.1 MB in size.

Our computers are merely the latest iterations of machines. The first computer, Charles Babbage’s (1791–1871) counting machine worked in a fairly similar fashion to our own albeit built of mechanical levers and gears where ours have intricate electronics in their hard drives. I, like many others, was introduced to Babbage and his difference engine by seeing the original in the Science Museum in London. This difference engine was a mechanical calculator intended to compute mathematical functions. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) both developed similar mechanisms in the seventeenth century and still older the Ancient Greek 2nd century BCE Antikythera mechanism can complete some of the same functions. Yet between all of these the basic idea that a computer works in mathematical terms remains the same even today. For all the linguistic foundations of computer code, the functions of any machine burn down to the binary operations of ones and zeros. I wrote last year in this blog about my befuddlement that artificial intelligence has largely been created on verbal linguistic models and was only in 2024 being trained on mathematical ones.[2] Yet even then those mathematical models were understood by the A.I. in English, making their computations fluent only in one specific dialect of the universal language of mathematics making their functionality mostly useless for the vast majority of humanity.

Yet I wonder how true that last statement really is? After all, I a native English speaker with recent roots in Irish learned grammar like many generations of my ancestors through learning to read and write in Latin. English grammar generally made no sense to me in elementary school, it is after all very irregular in a lot of ways, and so it was only after my introduction to a very orderly language, the one for which our Roman alphabet was first adapted, that I began to understand how English works. The ways in which we understand language in a Western European and American context rely on the classical roots of our pedagogy influenced in their own time by medieval scholasticism, Renaissance humanism, and Enlightenment notions of the interconnectedness of the individual and society alike. I do not know how many students today in countries around the globe are learning their mathematics through English in order to compete in one of the largest linguistic job markets of our time. All of this may well be rendered moot by the latest technological leap announced by Apple several weeks ago that their new AirPods will include a live translation feature acting as a sort of Babel Fish or universal translator depending on which science fiction reference you prefer.

Yet those AirPods will break down eventually. They are physical objects, and nothing which exists in physical space is eternal. Shakespeare wrote it well in The Temepst that 

“The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.” (4.1.170-175)

For our machines to last, they must be maintained, cleaned, given breaks just like the workers who operate them lest they lose all stamina and face exhaustion most grave. Nothing lasts forever, and the more those things are allowed to rest and recuperate the more they are then able to work to their fullest. So much of our literature from the last few centuries has been about fearing the machines and the threat they pose. If we are made in the Image of God then machines, our creation, are made in the image of us. They are the products of human invention and reflect back to us ourselves yet without the emotion that makes us human. Can a machine ever feel emotion? Could HAL-9000 feel fear or sorrow, could Data feel joy or curiosity? And what of the living beings who in our science fiction retrofitted their bodies with machinery in some cases to the extent that they became more machine than human? What emotion could they then feel? One of the most tragic reveals for me in Doctor Who was that the Daleks (the Doctor’s main adversaries) are living beings who felt so afraid and threatened that they decided to encase the most vital parts of their physical bodies in wheelchair tanks, shaped like pepper shakers no less, rendering them resilient adversaries for anyone who crossed them. Yet what remained of the being inside? I urge caution with suggestions of the metaverse or other technological advances that draw us further from our lived experiences and more into the computer. These allow us to communicate yet real human emotion is difficult to express beyond living, breathing, face-to-face interactions.

After a while these machines which have our attention distract us from our lives and render us blind to the world around us. I liked to bring this up when I taught Plato’s allegory of the cave to college freshmen in my Western Civilization class. I conclude the lesson by remarking that in the twenty-first century we don’t need a cave to isolate ourselves from the real world, all we need is a smartphone and a set of headphones and nothing else will exist. I tried to make this humorous, in an admittedly dark fashion, by reminding them to at least keep the headphones on a lighter mode so they can hear their surroundings and to look up from their phone screen when crossing streets lest they find themselves flattened like the proverbial cartoon coyote on the front of a city bus. 

If we focus too much on our machines, we lose ourselves in the mechanism, we forget to care for ourselves and attend to our needs. The human body is the blueprint for all human inventions whether physical ones like the machine or abstract like society itself. As I think further about the problems our society faces, I conclude that at the core there is a deep neglect of the human at the heart of everything. I see this in the way that disasters are reported on in the press: often the financial toll is covered before the human cost, clearly demonstrating that the value of the dollar outweighs the value of the human. In abdicating ourselves to our own abstractions and social ideals we lose the potential to change our course, repair the machinery, or update the software to a better version with new security patches and fixes for glitches old and new. In spite of our immense societal wealth, ever advancing scientific threshold, and technological achievement we still haven’t gotten around to solving hunger, illiteracy, or poverty. In spite of our best intentions our worst instincts keep drawing us into wars that only a few of us want.The Mazda Rua, my car, is getting older and I expect if I keep driving it for a few years or more it’ll eventually need more and more replacement parts until it becomes a Ship of Theseus, yet is not the idea of a machine the same even if its parts are replaced? That idea is the closest I can come to imagining a machine having a soul as natural things like us have. The Mazda Rua remained the Mazda Rua even after its brakes were replaced in January and its slow leaking tire was patched in May. Yet as it moves into its second decade, that old friend of mine continues to work in spite of the long drives and all the adventures I’ve put it through. Our machinery is in desperate need of repair, yet a few of us see greater profit from disfunction than they figure they would get if they actually put in the effort, money, and time to fix things. If problems are left unattended to for long periods of time they will eventually lead to mechanical failure. The same is true for the machinery of the body and of the state. Sometimes a good repair is called for, reform to the mechanisms of power which will make the machine work better for its constituent parts. In this moment that need for reform is being met with the advice of a bad mechanic looking more at his bottom line than at the need of the mechanism he’s agreed to repair. Only on this level the consequences of mechanical failure are dire.

[1] Surekha Davies, “Walter Raleigh’s headless monsters and annotation as thinking,” in Strange and Wonderous: Notes from a Science Historian, (6 October 2025).

[2] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.

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A landline telephone in a classroom.

Electronic Signals

Electronic Signals – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, the coalescence of my thoughts over the last few months about how the way we communicate today in 2025 is so rooted in our technology.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, the coalescence of my thoughts over the last few months about how the way we communicate today in 2025 is so rooted in our technology.

For most of my life I tended to write a lot of ordinary quotidian things out by hand on paper either in notebooks, on notepads, or on the backs of receipts, envelopes, or whatever paper I had around. I kept up a good cursive hand and used it on a regular basis. Yet in the last decade technology has caught up to the humble notepad; a decade ago when I was living in London and trying to write out ideas for my first round of graduate essays on my phone’s Notes app while I was on the train or walking about, I often found that app in particular drained my phone’s battery at a considerable and worrisome rate. Then again, that particular smartphone tended to die if the battery dropped below 40 percent, so it had a bad battery. Still, that led to me continuing with the practice of keeping notes and scribblings in little notebooks or on notepads that I carried with me in a pocket. 

It’s funny then that it’s only now in 2025 that I notice how little I write these same notes anymore by hand; in 2021 when my Mom came to visit me in Binghamton, she brought me a couple of notebooks emblazoned with pictures of various national parks on their covers, a new trend in notebooks that began around then. I was a little taken aback by this gift because by that point I’d largely done away with handwritten notes all together. In fact, my Binghamton years launched me head-first into doing as much as possible on the computer so that I’d have less paper and books to carry back and forth between Upstate New York and Kansas City. Like printed books over digital ones, when I returned to Kansas City I began to write handwritten notes again. This is largely thanks to my employers at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts; in our department we still carry around paper performance notes on our shifts. When I started, I was surprised to realize that at some point in the last 5 years I’d stopped carrying a pen with me on a daily basis. Since then, in April 2023, I’ve always had a pen in my pocket.

The pandemic reinforced our digital communications in ways which pushed us firmly forward toward more frequent videocalls and texting to the detriment of the telephone in particular. Most of my friends and family tend to prefer text messages over phone calls, especially among my fellow millennials, to the point that I often second-guess myself as to whether I should try calling someone in the first place. Is a phone call intrusive, whereas a text message is like a telegram or a letter? It can be replied to in the recipient’s own time, though with a text the response time is usually expected to be faster than with a letter that’ll take days to arrive, or even an email, which I see as slightly more formal. Since the invention of Samuel Morse’s electrical telegraph in 1838, our communications have moved into a realm of electricity which was foreign to our conversations and our lives beyond lightning strikes and the daily shocks one gets in a dry climate.

This Spring then, when I was regularly on videocalls–usually over Zoom–with friends, colleagues, and family alike a thought occurred to me that all of our communications are being translated down to electrical signals being sent over wires from one person’s device to another. Those messages, no matter the content, all buzz and fizzle through our wireless data signals and across our telephone wires, through our data centers and bouncing off our satellites all to better communicate to anyone whether on the planet or high above us in orbit or beyond. It’s made us all so much closer to one another. Today, I’m regularly in contact with people in North America, Europe, and Asia and that contact is often almost as instantaneous as if we were together in the same room. It’s what makes my solitary life feel lived in community with the people I like. And yet it’s also spoiled us for the slower communication of the written letter or even the face-to-face conversation that started all these “words, words, words” as Hamlet says that we “might unpack my heart with words.” We communicate to do just that: to speak our thoughts and to live in the strange and beautiful worlds we build around ourselves. So often now, those conversations are not only occurring with the aid of the electrical signals pulsing about our minds telling us how to react and what to say and do, but also through their extracorporeal currents which connect us through our technology across vast distances to one another.

You are listening to my voice filtered by the microphone and my audio editing software being transmitted to anyone with an internet connection. While naturally we aren’t supposed to hear it, as my hearing isn’t quite as good as it should be, I can now hear the differences between sound frequencies in a finer detail yet to the point that if two voices are speaking with the same frequency, I only hear ringing at that frequency and no words or other noise. This was demonstrated to me with dramatic and terrifying effect several years ago when I was nearly t-boned by a Kansas City fire engine roaring along at full speed because I didn’t hear its siren, which wails at the same frequency as the particular section of the 1st movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto that I was listening to in my car at the time. So, when you hear my voice what you’re hearing is an electronic recording of my voice being transmitted to you. Often, I sound higher pitched on the recording even by just a half-step, than I do to my ears when I’m doing the recording. I’m a tenor, so I’m okay with that. Still, it’s noticeable especially if I record later in the day or at night, or if I’m nervous.

After I began my graduate studies in History back in August 2017, I started making a practice of recording any conference presentation or invited lecture I gave. I’d usually only make a sound recording, not wanting to deal with a camera. This way too, if someone missed a talk and wanted to see it, I could lay the slides over the recording in iMovie and turn it into a video to send around. This has turned into a wonderful tool for listening to changes in my voice over the years. Yet it’s also interesting now because I not only use this tool for recording the actual performance but also the rehearsals as well, and sometimes when I’m editing papers. I gave a lightning talk last week that was part of a webinar hosted by the Graduate Student Advisory Committee of the Renaissance Society of America about animal intelligence titled “Animals Adapting to Changes in Nature: Perceptions of Animal Intelligence in the Renaissance?” The paper itself was pretty quick and easy to write; it maybe took me an hour to make the first draft several months ago. Yet I began recording rehearsals and making edits after each one up to the minutes before I went live on Thursday morning. I was a bit nervous when I presented, so in the end the cool and practiced pace I’d planned with a mid-range voice ended up being a minute faster than expected and closer to my upper register. When I’ve thought about what to do if anyone asked to hear this talk after the fact, I’ve considered possibly sending out my last rehearsal recording from an hour before the performance, after all many speakers would in decades past make a separate recording of their lectures & speeches from the actual live reading. Yet to keep it authentic to the talk as it went ahead, I also feel inclined to send out the one that I gave on Thursday morning to the 16 other panelists and organizers on the call and the 35 attendees listening in from around the globe. This question gets to the heart of my talk because I made the case that André Thevet’s sloth showed signs of intelligence by refusing food it didn’t want to eat and not falling to the same bad practices as the Frenchmen who captured it or the native Tupinambá who were more familiar with it. Those practices, human faults one might say, include indecision.

Rather than flip a coin or pick another method of choosing, I’m instead going to play for you now the last rehearsal recording for one very simple reason. The main benefit of my recording of the actual talk is that it ought to have captured the organizer’s introduction and the questions that followed my presentation. Yet, my phone’s microphone couldn’t pick any of that up because my computer’s sound output was going into my headphones. So, without any more gilding the lily here are my thoughts on Renaissance sloths adapting to changes in nature, brought to you through a most electronic form of communication.

~

Animals Adapting to Changes in Nature:

Perceptions of Animal Intelligence in the Renaissance?

I want to begin by thanking the members of the RSA Graduate Student Advisory Committee for holding these lightning talks and accepting my proposal among the speakers today. When considering this question of animal intelligence, I’m drawn back to the Aristotelian notions of the animal sensitive soul in contrast to the human rational soul; Erica Fudge put it well, writing that animals can feel, perceive, and move, yet humans are the only natural beings to express intellect.[1] Animals were used as stand-ins for humans in allegory and vivisection, and an over-exertion of passion could drive a human into a state of animality, yet the human was understood to be fundamentally different because of our facilities of reason developed through experience over one’s lifetime.[2]

Newly encountered American animals played a disruptive role in this dynamic. Anatomically, many such animals defied European expectations for their size, or their chimerical character appearing as a composite of unrelated creatures known to exist in the wider Mediterranean World. Chief among these in my research is the three-toed sloth which was described by the French cosmographer André Thevet (1516–1590) in his 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique. There are many different aspects of Thevet’s sloth which allowed it to stand out as a singularity among singularities from its appearance as a bear-like ape to its vocalizations “sighing like a little child afflicted with sorrow” to its general disregard by the indigenous Tupinambá people who explained aspects of its manner to Thevet.[3] I’ve written and spoken extensively about this, I know several of you have heard me talk about Thevet’s sloth at a number of conferences in the last several years. Today though, I want to discuss something I haven’t addressed yet in all these presentations; namely the signs in Thevet’s text which point toward some sense of the sloth’s intelligence.

The sloth’s intelligence is seen in its abstention from eating the food Thevet provided it. Thevet wrote “I kept it well for a space of 26 days, where I knew that it never ate or drank, but was always in a similar state.”[4] This reaffirmed Thevet’s assertion that “this beast has never been seen to eat by a living human,” either by the Tupinambá or the French.[5] This abstention from eating could well be understood as a sign of the sloth’s lack of a rational soul which would know to eat; yet I think it is better to perceive the sloth’s abstinence as an active choice made by an animal who didn’t favor the food it was offered. Thevet wrote that “some believe that this beast lives solely on leaves of a tree named in [the Tupi language] Amahut,” which is one of the Cercopia species known to live along the Brazilian coast.[6] Yet a 2021 sloth behavioral study published in the journal Austral Ecology has proven that this claim is less grounded in the genus’s actual experience.[7]

Perhaps the sloth can be best contrasted with the dogs which killed it at the end of that 26-day captivity, or even with the accused descent from humanity by first the Tupinambá and later the French in accusations of cannibalism. Unlike the humans who occupy these stories from France Antarctique who so often fall so far from their rationality to eat each other, the sloth simply refused to eat at all. This small creature, taken from its forest home and left in the care of an unfamiliar human who didn’t know what to feed it, chose to preserve its nature and not eat what was foreign to it. The sloth adapted to changes in the nature around it and expressed an intelligence perhaps more elevated than the humans who captured it. I’m drawn to one of the most poignant lines in Montaigne’s essay “Des cannibales” in which the erstwhile political animal himself wrote “I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling.”[8] In all of the variations on his sloth account, Thevet published this same story twice first in the Singularitez of 1557 and later in the Cosmographie Universelle of 1575, the dominant sense I get from Thevet’s text is one of befuddlement at an animal that defied his expectations in so many ways. In the tradition of animal allegories from Aesop to Renyard the Fox the sloth fills the role of an exotic oddity, a stranger in the canon of European natural history which didn’t quite fit any mold available. Even after Thevet’s sloth was christened by Conrad Gessner an Arctopithecus in 1560 and by Carolus Clusius as an Ignavus in 1605, this fact that it refused to eat or drink what Thevet offered it for 26 days remained a constant in its story. I see in the sloth a sign of intelligence beyond expected human norms and rules which rendered it exceptional. Any assimilation of the sloth was an artifice laid over its character, a colonial imposition. Still, its abstinence fit the framework of the sensitive soul, reflecting a delicate sensitivity toward things it found unfamiliar.

~

How does a 450 year old sloth’s intelligence have any bearing on the electronic signals which carry our communications in this new century? I wouldn’t have been able to study Thevet’s sloth in the way I have without the internet and all our technology. So much of my work is with digitized primary sources, mostly printed books, that I do almost all of my research on the computer. It’s a rare occurrence that I get to go into an archive to look at a source in the flesh. Yet I think there’s another interpretation we can take here: like the sloth we choose how much we are in touch with each other, how much of our lives are spent with our phones in our hands. My weekly screen-time report tends to fall in the 3 hour range per day. Yet I’m not only checking my social media accounts or texting with people on my phone, but I’m also reading books and writing notes and ideas down on my phone or using the camera to try and capture an artful reflection of the lived world around me. Recently on Instagram I saw another person’s screen-time report say they spend 14 hours on their phone per day, which is essentially the entirety of my waking hours. To me that is unhealthy to an extreme. Yet that’s how that individual has chosen to live their life.

I know that no matter where I end up, I will remain connected to others through our technology. Somedays I do miss the slower pace of sending letters or calling family and friends on the phone as things were when I was a child. I’d rather talk with someone face-to-face or voice-to-voice than text. As I wrote in January, I feel that we’ve allowed texting to take the place that videocalls were supposed to hold in the 21st century. We’re not constantly talking to people over monitors beyond Zoom calls that are scheduled and with that pre-arrangement more formal than the quotidian string of text messages. Today, I do have a notepad on my desk, one that was given to me among the materials of a workshop I attended at the École des Hautes-Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris last summer. It’s gotten some use, yet one year later I’m still only halfway through the gridded pages. As with so much of life in general, I feel that I’m trying to find a balance between the digital and the manual, between life online and life in this place where I find myself in a given moment. All I know for certain is that over all else, I long for connection.

[1] Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England, (Cornell University Press, 2019), 13.

[2] Fudge, 17.

[3] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 99r.

[4] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 99v–98r.

[5] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 99v.

[6] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 98r.

[7] Gastón Andrés Fernandez Giné, Gastón Andrés, Laila Santim Mureb, and Camila Righetto Cassano, “Feeding ecology of the maned sloth (Bradypus torquatus): Understanding diet composition and preferences, and prospects for future studies,” Austral Ecology 47 (2022): pp. 1124–1135, at p. 1132.

[8] Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame, (Stanford University Press, 1965), 155.

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Distractions

Distractions – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

How distractions can be beneficial or detrimental, from a certain point of view.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkaneI recommend you now listen to: On PausesA link to the WBEZ Chicago story referenced in this episode.
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How distractions can be beneficial or detrimental, from a certain point of view.

On February 21st, a story appeared on the WBEZ Chicago website with reactions to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s proposal to restrict cellphone use in all public and charter school classrooms. Mine was the first generation of students to have access to cellphones, and from day 1 it was a noticeable distraction for everyone in the room when someone brought their phone to class. Whether looking at the teacher who was trying to do their job in spite of a new topic to chide students over, or to the other students who see that one of their fellows is challenging the classroom’s authority so brazenly, to the student carrying the phone who now had a ready means of ignoring the teacher and missing out on the lesson, phone use is a problem for all.

In all honesty, I’ve been that student from time to time. In some classes it wasn’t a cellphone as much as it was a computer or a tablet that distracted me from the lesson or lecture at hand. In other cases, it was the unavoidable glow of the screen in the row in front of me shopping for shoes or looking at Spring Break trip ideas that drew my attention away from the topic at hand. Looking back, I recognize a noticeable drop in my attention and focus when these technologies began to enter the classroom, just as I notice now how I stopped reading nearly as many books once I discovered YouTube.

The idea of the distraction is often subjective; sure, in the classroom the student is supposed to be paying attention to the instructor, yet beyond that setting what are all the trappings of life but distractions from other facets which to varying degrees we ignore? This isn’t inherently a bad thing. Considering how troubled our times are fast becoming I have made a point of trying to find happy things to look at every day, and in some instances, I send these along to friends who I hope will benefit from smiling at something no matter how inconsequential.

In WBEZ’s report on student reactions to the Governor’s proposal to ban phones from classrooms the reactions were mixed. Some reactions speak to concerns about staying in touch with parents during the school day, especially in case of safety issues. I understand this point, it speaks to the reality that we’ve allowed ourselves to live in an increasingly dangerous society, and to that danger we need resources to mitigate it all while ignoring the underlying problems. We can distract ourselves from addressing gun violence, yet the shootings will continue all the same.

In my own experience the best classroom settings were those where the students either were mature enough to not pull their phones out in class or where they didn’t have their phones with them at all. In a recent substitute teaching job, I found that I was not only competing with student apathy toward following a sub’s instructions but that I also had to compete with students watching all manner of videos on their phones from Netflix and YouTube to TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. I simply can’t compete with these bright screens, and as most schools don’t inform their substitutes of any school policies (which allows students to abuse those policies when a sub is in the room), I’m at a tremendous disadvantage in that position.

Today, as I write this blog post I have one conference presentation I need to write and an article submission that I need to revise. The former needs to be done in the next month and the latter by June 1st. In short: I have things I need to be doing right now, yet I can be more flexible with these extended deadlines and keep the Wednesday Blog going for another week. This publication of mine may seem like a sort of distraction to some of my colleagues, yet I feel it is a tremendous opportunity for me to write about topics that I have ideas about which my research doesn’t cover. After I write and record this blog post I will take full advantage of the good weather today (sunny with a high of 65ºF / 18ºC) and go for a long walk this afternoon. After that, I might look at these two projects again. As I said earlier in this paragraph: I have time to wait on both of them.

Returning to the topic at hand: whereas in my teenage years I found it empowering to have a school-issued laptop which I could use in class, today I yearn more for the days before that technology became so accessible to me for the sole reason that I could focus more on the moment at hand. Perhaps the greatest distraction that we’ve created for ourselves is our indefatigable busyness that keeps us moving at full speed whenever we’re awake. We fear boredom because we haven’t allowed ourselves to spend enough time surrounded by the silence that it brings. I wrote about this in October in the context of pauses in the dialogue of the Kate Winslet film Lee. I don’t know if I have any suggestions for systemic change this week, merely advice that each of us ought to look at what we think is most important for our lives and our enrichment. We only have so much time around, so the best thing we can do is to use it wisely.

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The Second Quarter-Century

The Second Quarter-Century – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, looking ahead to the next 25 years here are three things that I hope we see become ordinary things by 2050. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://wwww.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, looking ahead to the next 25 years here are three things that I hope we see become ordinary things by 2050.

Last week I started the New Year off in this publication with a reflection on the technologies that I remember looking forward to in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Today then, I want to look ahead to the next quarter, to the years leading up to 2050. On New Year’s Day of that year, I will be 57 years old, well into my career with hopefully a good wind in my sails from successes and contributions to society in the decades previously built upon the work that I am doing now. Perhaps by then I will watch the New Year’s ball drop in Times Square with my wife and children to be, though that’s one dream that remains more elusive to imagine than any professional triumph. 2050 feels like a strange milestone to me, in part because 1950 feels far more tangible to me growing up surrounded by people who were beginning their own lives in that middle decade of the twentieth century. Yet as much as I feel a bond to the century of my birth, my own legacy will likely be numbered among the figures of the current century rather than the last.

Our century has tremendous potential to be one of the most consequential in the long history of humanity. We’ve already seen dramatic changes in the first 25 years which have defined the break in our current moment from the century we left at the millennium from new wars and economic recessions to the COVID-19 pandemic and dramatic advances in technology and global interconnectedness. A significant cause for discomfort in this century is the rift between those who see globalization as a threat to individual, local, regional, and national identity and the increasing interconnectedness of our world. At the beginning of this century the easiest and most affordable way for us in the United States to be in touch with relatives in Britain and Ireland was by letter, whether handwritten or typed, and sent by air mail to arrive within the next two weeks at its destination. We could place international phone calls, I remember doing this in early 2001 when my Mom was in London on a business trip, but those were far more expensive. The expense of international calling over regular phone networks remains an annoyance, yet today we have other options of placing voice and video calls over the internet that have existed since near the beginning of the century which fill this role.

The increasing ease of global communication is one clear sign of the advances of this century that I applaud. Just before writing this, I spent a delightful hour watching a live public lecture from the Linnean Society of London over Zoom in which I was able to pose a question in the Q&A box that was read by the moderator at her desk nearly 7,000 km across the Atlantic and answered soon after by the speaker. Throughout my undergraduate I often heard the maxim that I should earn my doctorate in the country in which I wish to teach, yet the little islands of national academies that we’ve built in the last two centuries are fast growing into each other’s back gardens to the extent that in my experience there isn’t so much an American and a Canadian academy but a North American academy which also has close links with the republics of letters in Britain, Ireland, and across Europe with more disparate connections in East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand or even South Africa. I’ve yet to present at any conferences on the far side of the Pacific though I have attended conferences held at the Universities of Auckland and Sydney over Zoom that were held the following day, or thanks to the disparity of time zones late in the evening here in North America.

The lecture in question

Yet again, these are technologies which already exist and even if they have room for improvement, they fit better into that first of these two entries about the technological innovations of the twenty-first century that I am most excited by. This week then, I intend to discuss three technologies which I hope will see fruition in the next 25 years that would have a noticeable influence on all our lives for the better. All three of these technologies are already being developed, and in some cases merely need implementation here on this continent as they already are elsewhere. We seem to be in a moment of reaction when the parking brake is firmly grasped in the hands of those who fear any further forward motion on the part of our society whether for their own portended loss of power or their general fear of the unknown. Both are understandable, yet as Indiana Jones learned in his last great challenge in The Last Crusade there comes a point in life where each of us needs to take a leap of faith and trust in ourselves and our future.

The first of these three technologies which I’ve read a great deal about in the last several years and which is proven in a laboratory setting is the use of nuclear fusion to create a new source of energy and ideally power to keep our lights on. One great worry I have among many others about the incoming administration which will take office next week in this country is that they will slow or even stop the construction of new renewable energy facilities: solar and wind farms in particular without any significant scientific foundation for that decision. We ought to be developing ways that solar panels can be integrated into the shingles and tiles atop our roofs so that they aren’t an extra addition to any edifice. Likewise, wind farms in places like the deserts, the Great Plains, and off our coasts (ideally still out of sight of the beachgoers) where the wind is strongest and most usable would help to eliminate our use of fossil fuels including natural gas and coal which are still in use in parts of this country.

A drawing of the ITER Tokamak and integrated plant systems now under construction in France. CC by 2.0 Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The prospect of nuclear fusion to be downsized from its current necessary laboratory dimensions to something that can be implemented on a local level in cities and towns around the globe is what I look forward to most. The effects of human influenced climate change are well and visible around us. Look no further than the extreme shifts in weather year round, or the prolonged droughts across much of this continent. Look at the winter wildfires that burned around Boulder, Colorado and west of Kansas City in Central and Western Kansas in December 2021. Look at the wildfires burning down neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area today! We need renewable and clean energy sources that will continue to power our civilization if we’re going to survive in this brave new world that we’ve created for ourselves. We’ve already reached the threshold of a 1.5ºC increase in mean global temperatures, and we only seem to be letting things get worse. I’m reminded of the beginning of the story of the Flood in Genesis and how “the wickedness of human beings was on the earth” and “[corrupted] the earth” itself. Are we not doing the same thing by not wedding our continued innovation and progress with a heart for preserving the Earth that has nurtured us to which we too contribute? If we can develop technologies from our own invention which will cultivate a stronger relationship with the rest of nature on this planet in whose cradle we evolved as every other living thing we today know did then what are we doing?

Secondly, one of my great passions outside of academia is the promotion of high speed rail here in the United States. The YouTuber Alan Fisher recently released a video which spells out the utility of high speed rail as a realized technology in contrast to the fantasized options like the Hyperloop that caught our national attention several years ago and even resulted in a thorough study by the State of Missouri to build a hyperloop line between Kansas City, Columbia, and St. Louis. I’ve had my fair share of experiences on high speed rail in Europe and having that option alongside air travel would go a long way to building a far more equitable society in this country. Today, unless you choose to drive the 3.5-4 hours it takes to get between Kansas City and St. Louis, you have the choice of 2 daily flights on Southwest, 2 daily trains on the Missouri River Runner, or 8 daily bus services provided by Greyhound and Flix Bus. While the flight itself is quite short, rarely more than 45-50 minutes from takeoff to landing though including travel to & from each airport and waiting time this option grows closer to 4-5 hours in length. Meanwhile, the train takes 5.5-6 hours and the bus usually 4.5 hours to cross the state. With high speed rail we could certainly cut the travel time either along the Missouri River Runner or a new route along the I-70 corridor with one intermediate stop in Columbia for a service that could well be faster and more convenient than driving. The Missouri state high speed rail proposal from the High Speed Rail Alliance, of which I am a member, calls for 10 daily roundtrip services between KC and St. Louis at least making it possible for residents of either city to make day trips to the other, something that is very difficult to do by any option today.

The Eurostar hall at St Pancras International in London. Photo by the author, 2016.

In Kansas we have a more tangible possibility for high speed rail thanks to the work of a YouTuber who goes by the channel name Lucid Stew. He released a video this summer theorizing what a High Plains HSR line between Denver and Kansas City would look like. The total travel time largely following I-70 would take 3.5 hours compared to the 4 hours it takes to fly between the two cities with airport transfer times included. There are currently on average 7 flights per day between these two cities offered by Frontier, Southwest, and United and there is at least 1 daily bus between the two cities. The drive across Kansas is a dull one, the Great Plains really do get to seem flat once you get west of Salina until essentially the Denver Airport exit. I remember falling asleep in the passenger seat on my last drive from Denver back to Kansas City in June 2021 in a trip featured in the Wednesday Blog two-parter “Sneezing Across the West” and dreaming that there was a high speed train running between the two cities that ran frequently enough (a minimum of 10 trips per day each way) that allowed your average Kansas Citian the opportunity to get off work on a Friday afternoon and go spend the weekend in Denver or up in the Rockies with enough time to come back on Sunday evening to make the start of business on Monday. It was one of those dreams that really sat with me, and made me wonder whether it could be possible to build this line in the future? I think the key feature that would make this happen would be if it were the primary transcontinental link between a Midwestern high speed rail network centered around Chicago and the easternmost node in a Western network that included lines reaching as far as the Pacific Ocean. While it’s far less likely that most travelers would take high speed rail from Kansas City to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, or Vancouver, we should still think on a continental scale because there could be travelers leaving from Denver who might want to make that trip, putting the High Plains HSR line into the broader North American network.

The Southwest Chief in Kansas City, photo by the author 2023.

I for one would gladly take a high speed train to Chicago over flying or driving. I already enjoy taking the Southwest Chief, though I was lucky the last time I took it that we arrived on time. Our current passenger rail network is hampered by the lack of enforcement of the federal law which says that Amtrak should have the right of way over freight, yet the host freight railroads now run trains so long that it’s much harder to manage Amtrak schedules in the face of mile-long freight trains that take up much more of the space along these lines. This is a problem for both the long distance routes like the Chief, which runs on BNSF tracks between Chicago and Los Angeles, as it is for the state-sponsored routes like the River Runner which runs on the old Missouri Pacific line now owned by Union Pacific. With the same sorts of amenities as the current trains, the option for private compartments (roomettes, rooms, and bedrooms), sleeper capabilities, a fully stocked dining car, and the observation & café car, I’d happily spend a couple hours more traveling by train on a high speed line between Kansas City and Chicago via St. Louis rather than take the more direct, if slower, route on the Chief. It seems more likely that the Missouri River Runner will get the high speed upgrade than the Southwest Chief because it’ll serve more people: the Southwest Chief’s primary metropolitan areas east of the Great Plains are Kansas City and Chicago alone. If we had an express train that ran just between those two cities along the Chief route that could be another good option that’d cut the journey down from 7 to closer to 5 hours.

RideKC’s Streetcar service at Union Station, photo by the author 2016.

All of this would need to be complimented by better public transportation on the regional, metropolitan, and local levels. We will soon see the opening of the southern extension of the Kansas City Streetcar down Main Street from Union Station (23rd Street-ish) to UMKC (51st Street). This will get the Streetcar right to the top of my neighborhood, Brookside, and just within reach that I will probably begin to take it when I’m going downtown for work or a day out. Yet our local transit agency, RideKC, needs to expand bus service south of 51st Street now to feed people onto the extended streetcar line. Currently we have 20 minute frequencies on the Main Street Max line south of the Country Club Plaza (47th Street), which have been the case since the Max line opened in 2005. I for one want to see at least 10 minute frequencies all the way to Waldo (75thStreet) if not even further south to 85th Street or even to the I-435 loop around 103rd Street. This is a problem that needs to be addressed nationwide. I firmly believe that no one in an urban or suburban area should live further than a half a mile from a transit line, whether that be a bus, streetcar, light rail, metro, or regional rail. When I worked at the Nativity Parish School at 119th Street and Mission Road in Leawood, Kansas the closest bus line to the school was the 57 bus stop at the intersection of Minor and Wornall Roads just north of Avila University (Minor Road becomes 119th Street at State Line Road, aka the Kansas-Missouri border). The walk from there to the school is 2.1 miles (3.38 km) in length and according to Google would take about 45 minutes to complete and while there’s a sidewalk for most of the way on the north side it does end at the property of the Church of the Nazarene just 528 feet shy of the border. Here the pedestrian can cross the street and continue on the south side of the street, but that’s not always the safest prospect on what is a fairly major street on both sides of the border.

In Kansas City we need more streetcar lines and a robust regional rail network that can connect the disparate suburbs together as a supplement for our existing highway network. Thinking about this over the weekend I came to the thought that perhaps if we had a strong enough passenger rail network it could leave more space on the highways for freight traffic which already makes up a fair share of the interstate network’s users. Here if we had a system of through services connecting at Union Station on the tracks of the Kansas City Terminal Railway (KCTR) we could have north-south routes running from St. Joseph to Gardner or Lee’s Summit that would connect points in between including KCI Airport, suburbs in the Northland, Downtown, and neighborhoods and suburbs on the southwest and southeast sides of the urban core. Likewise, an east-west line ought to run as far west as Topeka and as far east as Grain Valley or beyond along the I-70 corridor would do a great deal to connect this region.

I’ve digressed a great deal here about transportation, and rail in particular. So, let me finish with something that’s on a smaller scale yet seems to be growing into something far more robust. In the last decade 3D printing has really developed into a new art form that has a great deal of utility to offer. My parents have developed a hobby of 3D printing with both uses. I’m quite proud of the one print that I’ve completed with my Mom’s help. Just before Christmas we made an old World War I biplane with red filament leading to my declaration that this year the Red Baron would be visiting the Baby Jesus in our manger scene. I’ve seen newer models of cars and trucks, the Ford Maverick in particular, which have interior parts that are 3D printed. 

The Red Baron biplane as it appeared when it finished printing. Some assembly required. Photo by the author, 2024.

In October 2016, NASA launched Phase 2 of its 3D printed habitat challenge to see what could be designed as homes “where future space explorers can live and work.” One of the problems to be solved here is that for every kilogram of mass which is carried into Space whether for a Lunar or Martian destination the spacecraft will need to carry more fuel. So, why not bring lighter materials that can be assembled on arrival? The advent of 3D printing technology will allow this to happen with the understanding that the technology will continue to advance in the coming years as the Artemis program brings humanity back to the Moon in the 2020s and 2030s and a future program takes astronauts to Mars for the first time. I don’t know if we’ll see humans on Mars by New Year’s 2050. It’s possible, but with all the delays that the Artemis II launch has faced it seems like the days of rapid-fire launches from the Apollo era are more a distant memory than a part of the present moment.

The Tiki Taco Surf & Turf Burrito, not 3D printed. Photo by the author, 2024

Other innovations in 3D printing stand as challenges to be faced: ghost guns made from 3D printed parts are a new threat to public safety, and the fact that these filaments are largely plastic concerns me from an environmental standpoint. I’m curious however about the prospect of 3D printed food. A long term vision I have for this technology is that it may lead to some sort of device like the replicator we see on Star Trek, and should my preference for beef over other meats become unsustainable and too expensive for me to continue in the next 25 years then I’d be open to considering an artificial alternative that is less taxing on the Earth and its environment alongside eating other meats: bison, chicken, lamb, and pork as well as the varieties of seafood. Yet with this last one there’s the problem of over-fishing. By any natural measure we in Kansas City shouldn’t have as easy access as we do to saltwater fish, shrimp, and the like. I’ve recently discovered the surf & turf burrito at Tiki Taco, a Kansas City Cali-Mex chain with 3 locations. This burrito’s main ingredients are shrimp, steak, with either rice or fries and several other fillings, and yes, I do love it. Yet again, if cattle produce more methane than is safe for our climate and if industrial shrimping is bad for the long term viability of shrimp populations and the oceans in general, shouldn’t we look for alternatives, even ones that have their origins in laboratory experiments?

Finally, I don’t quite know what to make of advances in artificial intelligence quite yet. The means in which it’s become most visible in our lives is through crafted sentences and generated images. I’ve seen some examples of good AI and many of AI that is obviously computer generated. I freely admit to using an AI program, DALL-E 2, to create the images I used in my story “Ghosts in the Wind” from the Season 2 finale, and again I used a separate AI program to create the portrait of Carruthers Smith which appears at the top of my story “Carruthers Smith’s Museum” and its follow-up appendix. I’ve taken advantage of the vast database behind Chat GPT to confirm it’s not aware of more secondary sources in projects where I’m less familiar with the scholarship, a sort of streamlined version of the databases I’ve used throughout my career to find peer-reviewed articles and books. Yet I have too much pride in my own scribblings to use an AI program to write for me. If I want to find a fancier way of saying something, I’ll turn to my trusty thesaurus instead and decide for myself which of the synonyms I like best.

I do think we can find examples of computerized systems that work well to enhance the lived human experience of all three of these technologies. Computers with human supervision will be one of the better ways of monitoring nuclear fusion reactors to ensure their safe operation. Driverless trains already operate in cities like London and Paris, and while it’s disconcerting when you first board the front carriage of a DLR train or a Line 1 train in their respective cities you get used to it. On a less labor-pinching model using automatic train signaling systems and AI driven algorithms to determine schedules and monitor bus & train maintenance will help streamline things. Meanwhile in the world of 3D printing the flaws in current printers certainly can be ironed out with assistance from artificial intelligence to build things in regular patterns and to warn the operators if the machinery involved needs to be fine-tuned or replaced. As a comparison: Teslas have sensors in each wheel which keep track of individual tire pressures. These sensors are accessible on the central display screen. My own Mazda Rua has similar sensors, but they don’t differentiate between each of the four tires and so there’s the one light that will illuminate when there’s a problem. To find which tire has the low pressure I need to leave my car and check each one manually, which really isn’t a problem, yet it’s become an annoyance on my long drives when I’ve had to stop repeatedly to check tire pressures because of the poor quality of road surfaces on our older highways in this country.

As I’m writing this, I’ve been watching the notifications pop up on my computer from new emails coming in. A recent software update from Apple introduced Apple Intelligence to my computer, and now I get brief summaries of each email as they arrive. This means that the pop ups appear a second or two slower than before, and so if I’m not busy as I often check the email before the pop up appears. However, one that did appear while I was finishing the last paragraph announced several new books for sale at a local bookshop. One category of these was “Dystopian fiction.” I for one don’t care for dystopias, I’d rather spend my days thinking of utopias. Sure, the word utopia is St. Thomas More’s way of saying “nowhere is perfect,” but isn’t the human ideal that we’re foolhardy enough to strive for things that seem impossible only to find we actually got close to making those things happen?

Today, high speed rail is slowly being developed in this country. The Central Valley leg of the California High Speed Rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco continues its slow march, even as its detractors try to see it shut down. At the same time, Brightline West’s efforts to build a separate high speed line between the eastern LA suburb of Rancho Cucamonga and Las Vegas seems more likely to open in this decade. Once we see those lines open in California, will the rest of the country begin to take notice and start planning their own high speed lines? By the time we reach the middle of the century it’s possible our energy sources will come from nuclear fusion generators as well as solar and wind farms, hydroelectric dams like the ones around Niagara Falls, and some as yet unknown or unfamiliar technologies that will help our civilization to progress further in communion with nature rather than in contrast to it. This could well be done using the descendants and successors of our current 3D printers. This technology will likely be instrumental in the establishment of the first permanent human settlements on the Moon and Mars and could prove just as useful here at home. Maybe the interiors of those trains will largely be made from 3D printed materials and parts not unlike the prefabricated houses that’ve been built now for generations. I remember seeing a news story in 2019 or 2020 about a company building prefabricated homes that didn’t require air conditioning because of strategic window placement near the roofline which allowed for the wind to naturally cool the space.

There are a great many prospects to look forward to in the next 25 years, and I hope come New Year’s 2050 that we will be living on a far healthier planet and will have worked through the gridlock that keeps us held back today. I hope that 2050 will beckon in a happier time in a way that 2025 doesn’t seem to be.

So, Happy New Year!

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Asking the Computer

Asking the Computer – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I address news that the latest version of ChatGPT will help with your math problems. — Links: New York Times, 12 Sep. 2024, Cade Metz, "OpenAI Unveils New ChatGPT That Can Reason Through Math and Science." Eddie Burback, 1 Sep. 2024, "AI is here. What now?" YouTube.
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This week, I address news that the latest version of ChatGPT will help with your math problems.

I’ve used ChatGPT on occasion, mostly to test the system and see what it will do if I prompt it about very particular things. What does it know about André Thevet (1516–1590), or about the championship run of my beloved Chicago Cubs from the 80s, the 1880s that is. I even asked it questions in Irish once and was startled to see it reply with perfect Irish grammar, better than Google Translate does. I’ve occasionally pulled up my ChatGPT app to ask about the proper cooking temperatures of beef, pork, or chicken rather than typing those questions into Google, and in one instance I used it to help me confirm a theory I had based on the secondary literature it had in its database for a project I was writing. The one thing that I would’ve expected ChatGPT to be best at from the start are logical questions, especially in mathematics. 

There are clear rules for math, except that in America it’s singular in its informal name while in Britain it retains its inherent plurality. As much as I acted out a learned frustration and incomprehension when posed with mathematical questions in elementary, middle, and high school, I appreciate its regularity, the way in which it operates on a universal and expected level. Many of the greatest minds throughout human history have seen math as a universal language, one which they could use to explain the world in which we live and the heavens we see over our heads. The History of Science is as much a history of knowledge as it is the history of the development of the Scientific Method, a tool which has its own mathematical regularity. All our scales and theorems and representations of real and unreal numbers reflect our own interpretation of the Cosmos, and so it is logical that an advanced civilization like our own (if I may be so bold) would have developed their own language for these same concepts which are inherent in our universe. Carl Sagan took this idea to a fuller level in his novel and later film Contact, in which the alien signal coming from Vega is mathematical in nature. 

Often, the lower numbers are some of the easiest words in a language for learners to pick up on. The numbers retain their similarities in the Indo-European languages to the extent that they were used as early evidence that the Irish trí, the English three, and the Latin trēs are related to the Sanskrit trī (त्रि) and the Farsi se (سه.) The higher the numbers go the more complicated they get, of course. An older pattern in Irish which I still use is to count higher numbers as four and fifty or ceathair is caoga, which is similar to the pattern used in modern German, and something that appears far more King James Bible in English. I love the complexity of the French base-twenty counting system, where the year of my birth, 1992, is mille neuf cent quatre-vignts douze, or one thousand nine-hundred four-twenties and twelve. Will the Belgian and Swiss word nonante to refer to the same number as quatre-vignts-dix ultimately win out in the Francophonie? Peut-être.

I was surprised to read in the New York Times last Friday that the latest version of ChatGPT called OpenAI o1 was built specifically to fix prior bugs that kept the program from solving mathematical problems. Surely this would be the first sort of language that one would teach a computer. As it turns out, no. Even now, OpenAI o1’s mathematical capabilities are limited to questions posed to it in English. So, as long as you have learned the English dialect of the language of mathematics then you can use this computer program to help you solve questions in the most universal of languages.

It reminds me of the bafflement I felt upon first seeing TurnItIn’s grammar correction feature, the purple boxes on TurnItIn’s web interface. For the uninitiated, TurnItIn is the essay grading and plagiarism detection system that most academic institutions that I’ve studied and taught at in the last 15 years use as a submission portal. I was proud to program into my Binghamton TurnItIn account several hotkeys that would allow me to save time retyping the same comment on 50 student essays every time they had a deadline. Thousands of essays later I can squarely say these hotkeys saved my bacon time and time again. Like legal documents, especially the medieval and early modern kind that I’ve read and written about in my studies, they are formulaic and expectable in their character.

The same goes for math: even with the basic understanding that I have (I only made it as far as Algebra II) the logic when explained well is inherent in the subject. Earlier in my doctoral studies, beginning in 2020, my two-sided approach to developing my own character and intellect beyond my studies came in the form of first signing up for Irish classes again, and second picking up where I left off with my mathematical studies in college and trying my hand at a beginner physics course. I’m sad to say I really haven’t had the time to devote to this mathematical pursuit as much as I would like. Perhaps I will be able to work it in someday, alas I also have to eat and sleep, and I’ve learned my attention will only last for so long. I too, dear reader, am only human.

Yet this is something where Open AI o1 differs from the average bear, for it is decidedly not human. How would we try to successfully communicate with a non-human entity or being when we have no basis for conversation to start with? The good thing about o1 and other AI programs is these are non-human minds which we are creating in our own image, ever the aspirant we are wrestling with the greater Essence from beyond this tangible Cosmos we inhabit. We can form o1 and its kind in the best image of our aspirations, a computerized mind that can recognize both empathy and logic and reflect those back to us in its answers to our questions. In the long run, I see o1’s descendants as the minds of far more powerful computers that will help our descendants explore this solar system and perhaps even beyond. 

From the first time I saw it in work, I saw in ChatGPT a descendant of the fictional computers of Starfleet’s vessels whose purpose in being is to seek out new life and new civilizations and to boldly go where no one has gone before. Perhaps that future where humanity has built our utopia in this place, our planetary home, will be facilitated by AI. Perhaps, if we use it, build it, and train it right. 

That said, the YouTuber Eddie Burback made a video several weeks ago about how he has seen AI put to use in his daily life in Los Angeles. In it, from the food delivery robots to his trips in several self-driving Waymo cars (manufactured by Jaguar), to his viewing of several AI films, Burback concluded that AI at this moment in 2024 is a net negative on human creativity and could remove more of the human element from the arts. I have seen far more AI generated images appear on my Instagram and Pinterest in the last year. I like Eddie’s videos, they may be long, but they are thorough and full of emotion, heart, and wit. They do a great service to their viewer at taking a long look at the world as he perceives it. I see much of the same thing, yet as the good Irish Catholic Cub fan that I am, I hold out hope that what today seems impossible to some: AI used morally and for the future improvement of our species and our advancement out of this adolescence in our story may still happen. I believe this is possible because I believe in us, that once this Wild West phase of the new Information Age settles down, we will see better uses of our new technologies develop, even as they continue to advance faster, higher, and stronger with each passing day.

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On Technology

On Technology – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Last week, I returned to Chicago, this time on a business trip to attend a conference, and on the way took time to slow things down and enjoy the lived experience. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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Last week, I returned to Chicago, this time on a business trip to attend a conference, and on the way took time to slow things down and enjoy the lived experience.

On Wednesday last week I boarded Amtrak’s Southwest Chief at Kansas City Union Station bound for Chicago. This visit to the metropolis of my birth was less for family affairs and instead for business. I spoke on Friday at the Renaissance Society of America’s conference at the Palmer House Hotel about how toucans were seen by sixteenth-century French merchants as economic commodities first and foremost. It was an unusual topic, but one that fluttered enough feathers in the organizers to earn me a travel grant from the RSA and a matching grant from my own History Department back in Binghamton to cover about half of my overall expenses for the trip.

In recent months, as I’ve had this trip and all the other ones planned in 2024 in mind, I’ve found myself growing evermore tired of being in constant contact with people near and far. Our technology allows us to make wonders, and to inspire ourselves to newer and greater heights with those wonders, yet I’ve found myself asking more lately how much we really ought to rely entirely on our technology? Every so often throughout the year I will find myself with a physical book, whether a paperback or a hardcover, that seems appealing, and I’ll stop and read. I used to read constantly. 

When I was in elementary school my grandparents gave me their 1979 World Book Encyclopedia set that had gone through several moves with them over the years. That year, feeling the effects of insomnia for the first time that I can remember in my life, I often stayed up late in my room reading these encyclopedia volumes. My parents eventually gave that set away, admittedly now the knowledge contained in them is 45 years out of date, it still showed Jimmy Carter as the sitting President, yet I remain forever grateful for that gift in all its thousands of pages. I can still remember the smell of those books in particular, and the charming and sometimes funny black-and-white pictures they contained.

Later, when I was in middle school I read several large and complex books in a row, including Thomas Kinsella’s translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, an Irish epic set 2,000 years ago, and Frank Delaney’s book Ireland: A Novel, which my Dad bought for me at a Hudson’s in O’Hare on the way back from another trip up to Chicago to see family during my eighth grade year. Perhaps the last of these memories of endless hours reading for fun was in preparation for the release of the last Harry Potter book, the Deathly Hallows, when I read the other 6 books in 3 days.

All of this changed when I started high school. I chose St. James Academy for two main reasons: they offered Latin as a foreign language, and they offered MacBooks for all of their students. With easier internet access than ever before and the creation of YouTube around that time, I found myself hooked reading more things online and watching videos. Today, I’m often more likely to open YouTube on my computer during some downtime than I am to pull up a book on my phone. I’ve gone through waves of enjoying reading books on my phone here and there, yet these are again just waves.

I spoke to my friend, Carmelita Bahamonde, who I’ve known now for over a decade since we met as undergraduates at Rockhurst University. She gives up her social media accounts every year for Lent, and now during Holy Week is nearing the end of that technological fast for its 2024 occurrence. 

Seán: “I worry that because it’s how I connect with so many people professionally, and cousins in Europe and across the United States, that it’ll minimize how much I’m in touch with them.”

Carmelita: “Yeah, I do, and I do take time off during Lent, yet I take it further, so the longest I’ve gone was to the end of June and start of July. It’s hard to keep that up.”

Seán: “June or July! That’s a long time to keep that up.”

Carmelita: “Yeah, the first time I did it I think I made it through May, and I came back for my Masters, and I decided this was something to come back for.”

So, when I saw that I could afford to purchase roundtrip sleeper tickets on the Southwest Chief for this trip, I jumped at the opportunity to not only enjoy the best that Amtrak’s western services have to offer, but to also enjoy 7 hours of disconnection from my technology. I spent those 7 hours reading Megan Kate Nelson’s book Saving Yellowstone about the first federal expeditions to the Yellowstone Basin, the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad, the decline of the Lakota’s autonomy, and the foundation of Yellowstone National Park. I brought two other books, three magazines, and all the books downloaded on my phone with me on this trip, figuring I’d have a fair bit of time to read. (On the return trip, rather than reading the materials I brought with me I ended up reading a book I bought in Chicago at the Field Museum’s bookstore by Jay Kirk called Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve the World’s Great Animalsabout Carl Akelely, the first Taxidermist-in-Chief at the Field Museum. I’m going off script here to say how wonderful it is.)

Seán: “And, I know people who have very full and happy and lovely lives and they’re not on social media, so it’s not necessary to be on it. Yet, it seems that’s how people connect nowadays, right?”

Carmelita: “Yeah, though I only post happy, lovely things, even when I’m at my lowest. So, I always see that so and so is travelling, and man I’m falling behind this year. Yet I wonder how much over time they’ve been doing this year that they can do that?”

Beyond even disconnecting to read, I feel a pull towards stepping back a bit from my complete adoption of all of this technology. I see myself looking more at the screens before me than at the world around me. A friend recently pointed me toward a book which considers that the decline in recreational bowling leagues in this country can be tied to an overall decline in a communal spirit and a deconstruction of our bonds of trust, which have contributed to the current sense of mass isolation, fear, and mistrust which have contributed in turn toward our present political paradigm. I haven’t read this book yet, to be clear, yet I see how the premise works. I love coming to conferences like the RSA to experience the community that these events foster. There are people here who I met last Fall at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Baltimore or last March at the 2023 RSA in Puerto Rico. I’ve had the opportunity to tell people here how much I appreciate their work, and to talk a bit about my own, to hear the affirmations that I so often miss in my daily life about the actual research I do.

Carmelita: “Yeah, you have both positives and negatives, you get to connect with family and peers who are far away, yet you also can lose yourself in our technology.”

We could certainly meet remotely using our technology to foster connections, yet those bonds would be far less strong than they are now that we’ve met and know some more about each other. Our technology allows us to instantaneously talk with people whole continents and oceans away, even to the astronauts orbiting our planet on the International Space Station. It has allowed us to even communicate with our furthest satellites that have reached far beyond where any human has gone before. Yet those connections are proxies for the real, physical connections we inherently desire by our basic evolutionary biology. I have trouble sometimes overcoming my own shyness in public settings, I certainly felt that at certain points on this trip, at times I’ve found conferences unbearable because I don’t feel up to talking to people I don’t already know, even when I’ve read and enjoyed their work. I do feel I would be more comfortable in these situations if I were less technologically connected and more connected to the human.

Seán: “What are some alternatives to social media that you’ve found useful?”

Carmelita: “I still have [Facebook] Messenger on my phone, so I use that to stay in touch with people. I sent a message this year to my friend in the Netherlands to say ‘Hey, just to let you know I’m taking my yearly break from social media,’ and she said ‘hey, no problem,’ and she’ll continuously text me and send me things, and my parents will show me things on social media if they’re really necessary. The people who, like you, really want to stay in touch will do so, and I really appreciate that.”

Seán: “It speaks to Robin Dunbar, who’s a primatologist and sociologist, who wrote about this idea called Dunbar’s number where there’s this maximum number that a human can have in their social circles, and I think it really speaks to that culling of that number. I’ve probably got 1700 friends on Facebook, and excluding family which is 30-40 people, there might be 10 people who I stay in touch with, and you’re one of them.”

Carmelita: “Yeah, and you are too. And I’ve actually had people reach out to me in the past and say ‘Hey, I haven’t seen anything from you, are you actually alive?’ and I’ll reply, ‘Hey, yeah I’m actually kind of better!'” (laughs)

My roomette on the Southwest Chief on the way up to Chicago.

I admire my friends and family who can give up some of this technology for extended periods of time. There are things to appreciate about the connectedness our technology provides to be sure, I appreciate seeing the social media posts of those who I care most deeply about, yet within that outer circle there are the few who I see on a daily basis, and I wonder how much I really pay attention to them, or them to me, with these screens in front of us all the time?

It strikes me that more often than not, when I’m mindlessly scrolling through YouTube on a given evening at home, I’m often finding the same music as I had the evening before, listening to the same songs or variations of those songs over and over again. Those songs evoke certain emotions for me, emotions tied to dreams and memories both. Yet I ought to really be focused on the people around me, for as much as our creations may have achieved a sense of immortality with their technological life spans far outpacing our own, those whom I love will only be with me for so long.

Carmelita: “It feels like if you didn’t post it, it didn’t happen; and so last year I went on a family trip, and at the end of the year I didn’t have any pictures and it feels like it didn’t happen, so that’s why I appreciate my social media. Yet like you said earlier today, you don’t have to post everything.”

There ought to be a balance between connection and relief, between all our noise and the silence, which is an acquired taste to be sure, yet is beautiful in its own way. I appreciate the assistance that my technology can provide in my work; it is far easier to do my research using PDF copies of these sixteenth-century books than having to rely on quickly written notes made during a rare research trip to a distant library. When I did my first research trip as an undergrad in 2013 to the Library of Congress, I actually took handwritten notes of the books I read. I quickly realized it was far more efficient to take notes by computer, to type things out at 70 words per minute than to write them by hand in my elegant if at times slow cursive script. This has meant that in the 11 years since I’ve found myself writing by hand less and less, even perhaps risking the loss of the art of penmanship, and calligraphy (if I may be bold to call it that).

Seán: “What’s the underlying purpose of posting? Is it self-gratification, is it to say ‘look what I did!’ is it say ‘look at how cool I am,’ or something like that? I always try to think of the underlying reasons for what I do.”

Carmelita: “I once had a friend who asked me why I post everything, and I said ‘well, I wanted to post pictures of this trip,’ and I think it’s a good way to show what I’m doing to more distant family who I haven’t seen in twenty years. I do sometimes wonder, ‘is this for showing off?’ I don’t like to post things that are show-offy. Several years ago, I got a promotion at work and I wanted to post about it but I sat on it for a while and ended up deleting it because I can’t brag, and so it is a double-edged sword, because you don’t want to brag but you should at the same time. It comes down to perspective: who do you want to know about your successes? Graduating from my Masters, I wanted everyone to know, ‘hey, look I worked my butt off!’ but a trip to Disney isn’t something for everyone to see.”

Let me close with this: I could have all the efficiency in the world with my computer and smart watch and smart phone and voice-activation software in my car and my headphones that connect wirelessly to my other devices so I can talk and take notes on my phone at the same time. I can learn so much from watching all the videos anyone has ever made on a subject and imagine wonders I might never otherwise consider with the invention of film, television, and the videos we upload to the internet. Yet none of it is as rewarding or as joyous as seeing a friend smile, and feeling the warmth of our interaction in that one specific moment in which we are living. Perhaps we need a little more of our human nature in our lives after all.

Seán: “Let me ask you one final question and then we’ll get back to lunch here, this meatball sandwich is giving me a look: do you think technology makes us more or less human? If you think about how we originally evolved in our nature as humans, as Homo sapiens, as wise people, as learned people, and yet do our creations diminish our base humanity if we’re too focused on them?”

Carmelita: “I think it depends on what you post on social media and if you’re fake about them. We talk about influencers who post amazing photos but are broke because of it, then it’s not worth it. Social media allows us to stay connected, and that’s a wonderful thing. So, as long as you’re being true to yourself then that’s the key.”

Seán: “Excellent, I like the connection between philosophy and real life there.”

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Finally, for your viewing pleasure my view facing north crossing the Mississippi at Ft. Madison, Iowa.

Correction

Corrected on 28 March 2024 to reflect the correct spelling of Carl Akeley’s name. I’ve misread it now for 31 years as Akerely.

Supplementing Human Nature

Supplementing Human Nature – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how technology enhances and supplements human nature. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, how technology enhances and supplements human nature.

Just before the New Year began, I paid a visit to the new aquarium at the Kansas City Zoo, a new favorite haunt of mine. Because the high holiday week between Christmas and New Year’s Day was in full force, we were joined by a sizable crowd curious at what this new aquatic construction might contain. This was my third visit to the new Sobela Ocean Aquarium, so while some of the wonder had faded, I was still fascinated to see some of these creatures up close and in person.

Amid all the fish though I paused in front of a shark, caught in thought about its method of propulsion. How is it that this animal is able to glide so smoothly through its space with so few motions of its fins when we need to move our legs for each step? Our language for motion itself is biased towards human propulsion, we move forward step-by-step, pace by pace. There is little sensible movement that the human body can make without moving our arms or legs. Other life forms––floral and faunal––have other means of moving about their world, yet for us and most life that we find sensible there’s an inherent reliance on feet, legs, and even arms to move.

As I stood there, I thought about Prometheus, the titan in Greek mythology who formed all mortal life out of clay saving humans for last. Yet when he came to creating humans, he found he had used all the claws, fangs, furs, scales, feathers, and fins that he had, leaving humanity more naked and exposed than any other species. To rectify this the cunning Prometheus guided humanity towards wisdom and stole fire from Zeus “which, unknown to Zeus, he had hidden in a stalk of fennel,” wrote Pseudo-Apollodorus in the Bibliotheca (1.7.1). In the Abrahamic traditions, humanity’s original sin was to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and to question God. Zeus punished Prometheus for his theft by chaining him up onto the side of Mount Elbrus where each day an eagle was sent by Zeus to eat out his liver, which would grow back only to be eaten again the following day.

Plato wrote in his book the Protagoras that humanity supplemented our standing and raised ourselves above other life by adopting the creative power demonstrated by Prometheus, whose name means “forethought” in Greek. Our use of techne (τέχνη), our skill and inventiveness, drove us to create not only with our hands like other animals do but with our minds as well. Mel Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man joked that as soon as one of his pet cave chickens walked through a fire and cooked itself, he and his companions realized that cooked meat tasted good. So too with most things, we can discover wonders with the things we’ve made for ourselves. Today the human eye extends far beyond that of any other known life. 

This weekend I went to see an IMAX film called Deep Sky about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) which launched from the European Space Agency’s spaceport in French Guiana on Christmas Day 2021 and six months later began transmitting images back to Earth of the earliest moments in the Universe’s long story. There are glimpses of light, whisps of dust, and clouds of matter that were unknown to humanity until just now yet predate our evolution by billions of years. We can now see that, well beyond what our own evolved eyes can see. Yet is our nature evolved only to perceive certain things with our senses, only those things we can immediately touch, smell, taste, hear, and see? Knowledge could be a sense of its own, one which perceives further using supplements from technology and reliance on other people alike. Yet knowledge is what sorts through all the signals coming from our senses and, well, makes sense of them.

Yesterday afternoon on our drive back to Kansas City from seeing that film at the St. Louis Science Center I awoke in the front passenger seat of the family car to see a snowplow in the lane next to us. I watched as it drove past us and was at first startled by what I thought I saw, a man hanging onto the back of the plow moving at 70 mph (112.6 km/h) only to blink again and see that what I thought was a man hanging on for dear life was actually an assortment of things hanging down from over the rim of the back of the plow that holds the road salt, with a large box in the back near the middle that my sleepy brain mistook collectively for a person.

Knowledge could be a sense of its own yet unlike the others I can’t say if it contributes its own information to the assortment that is our understanding of the world around us. Everything enters our mind through our senses, I saw those images captured by the Webb Telescope just as I’ve heard, read, and seen retellings of the ancient myths of Prometheus and stories of Genesis time and again. In some ways then, the reflective pause that I experienced watching that shark two weeks ago was less a reaction to the shark itself and more a realization of my own human nature in contrast to the shark’s. I may be able to dream, and often do, of flying or floating distances without moving my arms or legs yet those visions remain encased in my mind, thoughts to return to in my sleep or in those quiet moments fit for daydreaming.

And yet those same thoughts are what propel us as a species forward. We supplement our human nature with those thoughts, and work through the questions they raise until we have solutions which can make our lives better. I have always lived with this understanding that human history is one of overall general progress, that our finest minds are always finding ways to improve the human experience, to raise humanity’s stars so that we can hold onto that dream, that belief which is fundamental to human nature that we can better ourselves and the lives of future generations.

We offer these thoughts and all their creations as our inheritance to posterity, that they may make of what we left unfinished something even more wondrous than what we and our forbearers aspired to.

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Tools and Eyes

Tools & Eyes – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week on the Wednesday Blog, how we enhance our vision with innovation. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week on the Wednesday Blog, how we enhance our vision with innovation.

When I was 5 years old, I remember one Spring afternoon as the Sun was beginning to set when my friends and I were still at our school in the Chicago suburbs out climbing on the playground. I was near the top of the play structure when I saw a car pull in and a woman climb out of the passenger’s seat. I recognized the car and the figure coming towards me and excitedly climbed down from my perch to greet my Mom, thinking she’d gotten off work early and was coming to pick me up at the end of the day. As I got closer to the woman, I was shocked to see it wasn’t my mother but someone else.

Two years later, during my first March in Kansas City we had state-mandated vision and hearing tests in school at which time I was sent home with a note for my parents that my vision was poor enough to require glasses. I got my first pair on 20 March 2000 at a shop in Oak Park Mall and have remained bespectacled every day since. It amazes me somewhat that I remember the day like that, or that I can remember it was a sunny 56ºF that day, yet there you go. I’ve probably gone through 20 or more pairs of glasses, or speclaí as they’re called in Irish, in the years since. For a while I was getting a new pair each year, though in recent years I’ve deferred that insurance benefit to use it only when I absolutely need new frames.

Still, one recurring feature of the quieter moments in my life since that sunny Monday just after the turn of the new millennium has been that my world changes each night when I set my glasses aside to sleep. For the longest while I would have dreams in which dimensions didn’t match my expectations––rooms that were long and slender and filled with cartoonish clutter, buildings that seemed comically curt in their width that I could surround them with the fingers of one hand, held up before my eyes.

These visions remained in my dreams alone until after our move to Kansas City. In those first bespectacled years I began noticing my dreams seemed to come to life before my own eyes on those nights when sleep evaded me, and I lay awake without my glasses for hours on end. Lights and colors seemed to blend in unfamiliar ways, echoes of things I knew from the daytime danced before my eyes when I should’ve been asleep, and shapes never were quite what they seemed.

Without my glasses, the eyes I use to behold all that I have known in these last 23 years, that reality seemed to burn away on whisps of air. I’d imagine the faces of people I knew into being before my eyes and see them in strange ways that my limited vision could allow. Yet throughout this process I found all of this strange, for I knew what these faces and places looked like. My eyes and my mind could not work together as they once did now that my eyes relied on lenses to see.

How then would we react if all the creations we’ve devised were taken from us and we were left with our natural abilities alone to survive? Without glasses, my world would be quite different. I would likely have known my parents’ faces differently than I do now. The course of my career is as much defined by my access to information thanks to the internet and computers as it is by what was available to me as a child in the early 2000s when I had a computer that was linked to a far less interwoven internet. How would we’ve handled the pandemic differently if we lacked the quick transportation between continents, let alone the ease of spreading information within our own countries to stay at home, wear masks, and such in 2020? Certainly, air travel helped spread the pandemic across the planet faster, yet to the rest I’m unsure what to say.

In the middle of the last decade, I grew so used to my transatlantic connections that seeing those largely stripped away in 2020 left me feeling this sense of isolation that reminded me of the incomplete interpretation of the world by my unspectacled eyes. I grew further and further distant from my old life and developed new attachments here domestically that I’d not noticed before. For one, I stopped watching Doctor Who in 2020 and started watching Star Trek, moving from a show produced in Wales to one in California (and now also Canada) as my main source of escapist entertainment. Now again, having physically returned to Britain, my mind keeps returning there during the quiet moments.Yet those memories are inherently incomplete, filtered by a vision begotten by wishful intent to return to something long left behind. Like my moments each night gazing out before I drift off to sleep on a scene lacking clarity yet filled with enough quirks to keep me focused, and yes entertained. After all, what are our memories for but to keep us company in those quiet moments, a sort of built-in cinema in which the documentary features are about our own pasts, the blockbusters those stories we create just for ourselves. Some of those will find their way onto paper and maybe out into the world for others to one day read. Without all of the tools we’ve created, those stories would take much longer to travel far, and would see their fullest life in their original telling for us alone.

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The Syntax of Internet Culture

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The Syntax of Internet Culture – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some things I've noticed about how people communicate online.

I’ve had access to computers for as long as I can remember. My parents work in the tech world, so naturally I was probably one of the first people in my class to have an email address. I still remember that first email I sent, it was to my Aunt Jennie in Kansas City. Even then at the spry young age of 3 or 4 I was already growing into an expected typical Midwesterner: I asked her about the weather where she was. Over the years my access to the internet have only increased to the point where today it is ubiquitous. I’m rarely, if ever, away from a data signal, and any simple question I have can be easily answered by a quick question to Siri or a Google search.

The amount of technology in our lives today is sometimes scary. The fact that it surrounds us at all times, in all places makes us all the more dependent on it. What’s more, it’s changed the way we talk, the way we solve problems, and quite possibly the way we think too. In the last couple years, the majority of my time online has shifted from being spent reading long-form articles on the New York Times, the BBC, and such to watching videos, both long and short, on platforms like YouTube and Instagram. In the early years of YouTube, content on that platform tended to be much more diffuse with different creators crafting different sorts of videos in their own style, yet as that frontier continues to be settled YouTube videos have become more standardized. There’s the catchy title that’s supposed to get the algorithm to convince you to watch the video. There’s the introduction, the body, and the conclusion, demonstrating how so much YouTube content is essentially an extension of the essay. 

And of course, there’s the sponsored content thrown in there for good measure. I admire quite a few of these YouTubers and have a handful that I’ll watch on a regular basis. I even tried publishing short history videos on YouTube a few years ago, they’re still out there, but I found the work needed to get those videos out simply was too much for my production abilities and schedule. This podcast has ended up being a happy medium for me, something that I can write, record, edit, and release in a couple hours on a weekday afternoon. Of any transformational aspect of our current time, YouTube and podcasts and the democratization of knowledge that they embody have to be some of the most critical aspects.

Then there are the shorter videos, pure mind-numbing entertainment. I tend to have a soft spot for cat and dog videos on Instagram, many of which were originally made for Tik Tok, one platform I continue to avoid. There seem to be a few usual tropes and themes that run through all of these, identical music, identical storylines, say a cat or a dog doing something silly. Then there are the videos that try to express situational emotions, that take the subtext of life and turn it into a loud and proud declaration of what the person on camera is thinking or more often feeling. I feel that these sorts of videos are an outgrowth of memes that I’ve seen on Facebook in particular for over a decade now. Memes that often include the horrendously poorly worded phrase “be like…” as one example. If anything marks out the syntax, the sentence structure, of English internet culture most clearly it’s the disregard for grammar and the fluidity of English. On the one hand it has a tendency to annoy me, yet on the other hand I recognize that this is likely the development of new forms of English that will be how this language is expressed and used as our current century continues. After all, my own English is the product of both generations of immigrant interpretations of this language and official dictates of varying degrees of linguistic validity.

The one great problem with internet culture is how much content is processed and released at any given moment. After the tenth video using the same song to varying degrees of effectiveness, I get even more annoyed than I already was at the whole conversation underway. This Sunday and Monday for example I only lasted half an hour scrolling through Twitter and Instagram before I was annoyed at all the memes trying to interpret excessively diffuse meanings from Will Smith’s altercation with Chris Rock at the Oscars. That’s the beauty of more traditional forms of media: they limit how many voices are speaking at once. As anyone who has sat through endless Zoom calls over the last two years will know the signal connecting everyone attending can only pick up 1 voice at a time, and as much as we want to believe we can multitask that’s simply not the case.

I’ve thought about dropping some of my social media accounts. I’ve been on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit for a decade now, and on Instagram for almost that long. I recognize the ability of social media to distract from work and more importantly from living my own life rather than watching other people and their pets do silly things online. I still see some utility in social media though, it’s the primary way that I promote this blog and podcast, I still have thoughtful conversations every so often over news articles or essays that I’ll post online with other intelligent people. There have even been opportunities I’ve taken because I saw an announcement or some other listing online. But compared to the overwhelming cacophony of the internet, and to the things that really make me happy, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d be happy if I did drop some of my social media accounts.

In short, our ability to communicate without boundaries has expanded far faster than any guidelines for how to do so safely and civilly have been able to be set in place. There is so much potential in the internet, we just have to recognize that like with everything else we need to keep that space tidy, and that we need to find a balance so we can live full and fruitful lives while enjoying the benefits of this greatest creation of our global world.