Theses of Technology

Some surprisingly good [theses of technology](http://iasc-culture.org/THR/channels/Infernal_Machine/2015/03/79-theses-on-technology-for-disputation/) by [Alan Jacobs](http://ayjay.org/). He’s really not a fan of [Kevin Kelly](http://kk.org/). A few of my favorites:

* To “pay” attention is not a metaphor: Attending to something is an economic exercise, an exchange with uncertain returns.
* Mindfulness reduces mental health to a single, simple technique that delivers its user from the obligation to ask any awkward questions about what his or her mind is and is not attending to.
* The only mindfulness worth cultivating will be teleological through and through.
* Digital textuality offers us the chance to restore commentary to its pre-modern place as the central scholarly genre.
* [Kevin] Kelly tells us “What Technology Wants,” but it doesn’t: We want, with technology as our instrument.
* The contemporary version of the pathetic fallacy is to attribute agency not to nature but to algorithms—as though humans don’t write algorithms. But they do.
* What does it say about our understanding of human intelligence that we think it is something that can be assessed by a one-off “test” [the Turing Test]—and one that is no test at all, but an impression of the moment?
* The chief purpose of technology under capitalism is to make commonplace actions one had long done painlessly seem intolerable.
* Embrace the now intolerable.
* Everyone should sometimes write by hand, to recall what it’s like to have second thoughts before the first ones are completely recorded.
* To shift from typing to (hand)writing to speaking is to be instructed in the relations among minds, bodies, and technologies.
* The always-connected forget the pleasures of disconnection, then become impervious to them.
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