Must Digital Technology Make Enemies of Us All?
The documentary film Best of Enemies (2015) is not just a compelling chronicle and contextualization of the famous 1968 television debates between William F. Buckley, Jr., and…
The New Cold War: Keeping Globalization Safe for Hot Media
Modern technological innovation has made globalization possible. And globalization’s new social reality is unparalleled in history. Accordingly, it presents politics with new challenges. But it also presents…
Whose Artifice? Which Intelligence?
Artificial Intelligence has come a long way since IBM’s DeepBlue defeated chess master Gary Kasparov (in suspicious circumstances, on its second attempt) in 1997. Our most advanced…
Thinking about Technology
Thinking About Technology: How the Technological Mind Misreads Reality. Gil Germain. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017. Gil Germain’s Thinking About Technology: How the Technological Mind Misreads Reality…
The Politics of Perfection
It is a nearly universally acknowledged fact that technology carries the potential for both great benefits and great dangers to human beings. Few question the assumption that…
Review of The Politics of Perfection: Technology and Creation in Literature and Film
The Politics of Perfection: Technology and Creation in Literature and Film. Kimberly Hurd Hale. Lexington Books, 2016. In The Politics of Perfection: Technology and Creation in…
The Election Concerning Technology
No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crises of society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life…
Voegelin Among the Machines: Teilhard de Chardin, Olaf Stapledon and the Millenarian Kernel of Transhumanism
This article is the first step towards a Voegelinian study of the history of the relationship between millenarianism and technology. In it I concentrate upon “transhumanism,” a…
Globalization, Justice, and Technology: Cosmopolitan Justice Reconsidered
Introduction The prospect of universal justice is alluring. Right-minded persons would agree that a world whose entire population were treated fairly and equitably would constitute a vast…
Scientism Unbound: Baudrillard and the Critique of Technology (Part II)
These other types of repercussion are less tangible forms of blowback, such as disease or environmental disaster, but are equally worrisome. They are perceptual in nature and…
Scientism Unbound: Baudrillard and the Critique of Technology (Part I)
“The damage of scientism is done.”1 So said Eric Voegelin in 1948, amidst the afterglow of the allied defeat of fascism on the continent. The damage he…
You Will Read a Dark Stranger: How We Read Today and Yesterday
The change from scroll to codex (aka “Book”) must have been a bit by bit business. At first, only Christians had codices for their “gospels.” Then, as…
“It’s Not Yours To Do With What You Like!” A Critical Reading of George Saunders’ Jon
Technology will in the near and in the farther future increasingly turn from problems of intensity, substance, and energy, to problems of structure, organization, information, and control.…
Virtual Reality on the Loose
Spirits in the Material World: The Challenge of Technology. Gilbert G. Germain. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. With the publication of Spirits in the Material World: The…
Values and Technology: Religion and Public Life
Values and Technology: Religion and Public Life. Gabriel R. Ricci, ed. New Burnswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2011. An Ingenious Juxtaposition The essays contained in Values…