Crazy Wisdom
Nicholas Brysiewicz of the Long Now Foundation
- technology ethics
- long now foundation
- philosophy
- martin heidegger
- technocriticism
- unintended consequences
About this episode
This is part of a new series where I ask someone what they are reading, I read it, and then we record a conversation to get the main points of the book. The point is to let you the listener get access to the wisdom of a book without necessarily reading it.
We both read the book "The New Dark Age" by James Bridle about the unintended consequences of technology.
Episode transcript
You know, for me, the kind of the foundational critic of technology in this way is Martin Heidegger, who was a German philosopher in the early 20th century, and he wrote a fantastic, scintillating book. That's so dense. I mean, I don't know if I'd recommend that to everybody, because it's not readable. It's a lot of things, but readable is not one of them. But it's called the Question Concerning Technology, and it's a brief book, and it's like just, you know, clocks in just over 100 pages. It is some of the deepest things on the essential nature of technology I've ever come across. And he inspired an entire wave of techno ethics, technocriticism.
Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. Today is a special episode. It's part of a new series I'm doing, which is called Philosophy with Friends, where I choose a book or I ask somebody what they're reading, I read it, and then we sit down and have a conversation about it. Today I talked with Nicholas Brycewitz of the Long now foundation, and we talked about a book called the New Dark Age, which is all about the unintended consequences of our reliance on technology and potentially some solutions for how to get out of the hole that we've dug ourselves in. So if you've been wrestling with this question of what is technology's purpose in your life and what is your relation to the shift to technology, I think you'll find a lot of value in listening to this episode. If you do, please find us on itunes and give us a review, or find me on Twitter and let me know what you think. Ewartalsopiii really hope you enjoy this episode. Please let me know what you think. Thanks. Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. My guest here is Nicholas Brycewitz, the director of development at the Long now foundation and also a student of philosophy. I'm really excited to sit down and talk with you, Nicholas, today about this book, the Dark Age, which Nicholas suggested that I read. And we're basically just going to have a conversation about it so that you, the listeners, can get a sense of the book and get some ideas from the book without necessarily having to read of it. Think of it like a spark Notes for Reading. So welcome to the show.
Your first full transcript is free. After that, an email opens every transcript in the index — a list of readers we can write to, not a guest book.