The Convivial Society

Mar 08 2024 50 ep. 23 mins 119

The Convivial Society Podcast artwork

Audio version of The Convivial Society, a newsletter exploring the intersections of technology, society, and the moral life.

theconvivialsociety.substack.com

Technology Society & Culture

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Secularization Comes For the Religion of Technology (Audio Version)

Mar 08 2024 32 mins

Hello all, The audio version keep coming. Here you have the audio for Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology. Below you’ll find a couple of paintings that I cite in the essay. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoy it.Cheers,Michael Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

Vision Con (Audio Version)

Mar 06 2024 15 mins

I continue to catch up on supplying audio versions of past essays. Here you have the audio for “Vision Con,” an essay about Apple’s mixed reality headset originally published in early February. The aim is to get caught up and then post the audio version either the same day as or very shortly after I publish new written essays. Thanks for listening! Get full access to The Con

Learning to Receive the Day (Audio Version)

Mar 04 2024 10 mins

Just before my unexpected hiatus during the latter part of last year, I had gotten back to the practice of recording audio version of my essays. Now that we’re up and running again, I wanted to get back to these recordings as well, beginning with this recording of the first essay of this year. Others will follow shortly, and as time allows I will record some of the essay from the

Embrace Your Crookedness (Audio Version)

Jul 31 2023 13 mins

At long last, the audio version of the Convivial Society returns. It’s been a long time, which I do regret. Going back to 2020, it had been my practice to include an audio version of the essay with the newsletter. The production value left a lot to be desired, unless simplicity is your measure, but I know many of you appreciated the ability to listen to the essays. The practice b

Year End Miscellany and "What You Get Is the World" (Audio Version)

Dec 30 2022 14 mins

Welcome back to the Convivial Society. In this installment, you’ll find the audio version of the latest essay, “What You Get Is the World.” I try to record an audio version of most installments, but I send them out separately from the text version for reasons I won’t bore you with here. Incidentally, you can also subscribe to the newsletter’s podcast feed on Apple Podcast

"Lonely Surfaces" (Audio Version)

Dec 14 2022 21 mins

Welcome again to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. This post features the audio version of the essay that went out in the last installment: “Lonely Surfaces: On AI-generated Images.” For the sake of recent subscribers, I’ll mention that I ordinarily post audio of the main essays (although a bit less regularly than I’d like over the past few m

"The Pathologies of the Attention Economy" (Audio), Links, Miscellany

Oct 07 2022 23 mins

Welcome back to the Convivial Society. In this installment, you’ll find the audio version of two recent posts: “The Pathologies of the Attention Economy” and “Impoverished Emotional Lives.” I’ve not combined audio from two separate installments before, but the second is a short “Is this anything?” post, so I thought it would be fine to include it here. (By the way,

Taking Stock of Our Technological Liturgies

Sep 15 2022 11 mins

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. In this installment, I explore a somewhat eccentric frame by which to consider how we relate to our technologies, particularly those we hold close to our bodies. You’ll have to bear through a few paragraphs setting up that frame, but I hope you find it to be a useful exercise. And I welcome your comments

What Is To Be Done? Audio Version

Sep 02 2022 20 mins

This is the audio version of the last essay posted a couple of days ago, “What Is To Be Done? — Fragments.” It was a long time between installments of the newsletter, and it has been an even longer stretch since the last audio version. As I note in the audio, my apologies to those of you who primarily rely on the audio version of the essays. I hope to be more consistent on th

Audio Version: "LaMDA, Lemoine, and the Allures of Digital Re-enchantment"

Jul 01 2022 16 mins

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. This is the audio version of the last installment, which focused on the Blake Lemoine/LaMDA affair. I argued that while LaMDA is not sentient, applications like it will push us further along toward a digitally re-enchanted world. Also: to keep the essay to a reasonable length I resorted to some longish foo