The Convivial Society

The Convivial Society
L.M. Sacasas
Over 34,000 subscribers

A newsletter about technology, culture., and the good life. The general idea is to think well about the meaning of technology and how it structures our experience while also conveying some sense of how we might better order our relationship to technology.

The main newsletter goes out two to three times monthly. Additional posts include occasional discussion threads and reading groups (for subscribers). The Convivial Society runs on a patronage model. The vast majority of what is published will arrive in your inbox if you sign up for the free emails. If you value the work, I encourage you to consider a paid subscription. A yearly subscription for $45 amounts to $3.75 per month.

Since, May 09, 2024, Sacasas has posted:

Embracing Sub-Optimal Relationships

In this post, I’m thinking about how we are starved for personal relationships yet at every point sold impersonal substitutes. I tried to keep this one brief, which means a bit of nuance and background got left behind (although I did tuck some of it into the footnotes). I hope you’ll find it helpful nonetheless.

Re-sourcing the Mind

This post about Large Language Models (LLMs) the labor of articulation, and memory began as what I thought would be a brief installment. As if to prove one of the core claims of the essay, that the labor of articulation is itself generative, it grew in the writing. I hope you’ll find some things of use in it.

The Work of Art

This installment raises the question of the relationship between labor and creativity. In fact, it is just a variation on a question of increasing importance: how do we avoid offloading or automating the kind of work that is critical to our well-being?

The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life

This is a relatively brief post taking a recent Apple ad as a point of departure. I won’t rehash the criticisms that have already been offered elsewhere, but I did not want to pass on the opportunity to reflect on how we might better conceive of the relationship between our stuff and the good life. If you should reach the end of this essay and find that you’d like to read more on these themes, you can take a look at this 2022 installment: “The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self.”

The Ambling Mind

In this installment, I offer some thoughts about walking, a core human activity, which has been increasingly neglected or marginalized in the modern world. What we stand to gain by walking reminds us of one of the key principles of a convivial society: there is a scale appropriate to the human experience, and we do well to operate within it.