#6. L.M. Sacasas on Ivan Illich, Technopoly, and Human Flourishing

Here at Lost Prophets, we are interested not only in the seminal mid-century figures we feature, but also in those contemporaries who have imbibed their ideas and are extending them today. So we were happy to speak recently with one today’s great theorists of technology, L.M. Sacasas.

A few years ago L.M. posted on his blog 41 (!) thoughtful and provocative questions we should ask of the technologies we use — not just our computers and AI and Zoom, but also tables and alarm clocks and ovens. That inspired the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, one of L.M.’s enthusiastic readers, to contact him for an interview, which you can read here.

L.M. extends a tradition of technology’s skeptical questioners, joining figures such as Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, and Neil Postman. In an homage to Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality (1973), L.M. even named his Substack, launched in 2018, the Convivial Society.

In this conversation with L.M., we talk about discovering Illich, the importance of starting from the vision we want (not from the tools), what the Amish have figured out, the “post-human future”, why our embodied condition matters, and where we see signs of hope.

Recommended:

* Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich (1973)

* The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul (1964)

* Technopoly, Neil Postman (1993)

* The Religion of Technology, David Noble (1999)

* American Technological Sublime, David Nye (1996)

* The Frailest Thing: Ten Years of Thinking About the Meaning of Technology, L.M. Sacasas (2019)

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