This Conversation Changed the Way I Interact With Technology

August 3, 2021

Guests: L. M. Sacasas

Michael Sacasas, who writes under the pen name L.M. Sacasas, is a technology critic and the author of The Convivial Society newsletter, where he brings twentieth-century philosophy of technology into conversation with contemporary digital life.

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About this episode

Klein speaks with technology writer Michael Sacasas, who writes as L.M. Sacasas and publishes the newsletter The Convivial Society, about what our tools are doing to us — not just what we do with them. Working through Sacasas's list of 41 questions to ask of any technology, they discuss why Zoom is so exhausting, how smartphones reshape attention and parenting, why Twitter turns the self into a performance, and how mundane technologies — electric light, clocks, GPS, search engines — transform our experience of time, place and other people. Sacasas argues technologies are never morally neutral: they shape perception, habit and character. They also consider the material and labor costs of digital life, strategic silence on social media, and why systems like algorithms let us evade responsibility.

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