I’m delighted to see that The Center for the Study of Ethics and Technology is relaunching:
Our efforts will also reflect our commitment to thinking historically about technology. Again, under the temporal pressures of digital culture, we fail to think very far beyond our present moment. The proper temporal horizon of understanding for a given technology, however, may be decades or even centuries in the past. Without taking this long view, we are unlikely to get very far in our efforts to make sense of our technological situation. If our relationship to technology, broadly understood, is disordered, it is because of social, economic, political, and cultural patterns and trajectories that have been unfolding since at least the dawn of modernity if not before.
L. Michael Sacasas is one of the sharpest writers out there on the subject of technology and ethics, and so I am very much looking forward to what the Center has to offer (and perhaps even contributing from time to time). If you don’t already subscribe to his newsletter, Tools for Conviviality, I highly recommend that, too.