From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

of Living
Neil Postman was right.
So what?

Alan Jacobs

I n the 1950s and 1960s, a series of thinkers, beginning with

Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan, began to describe the
anatomy of our technological society. Then, starting in the
1970s, a generation emerged who articulated a detailed critique
of that society. The critique produced by these figures I refer to
in the singular because it shares core features, if not a common
vocabulary. What Ivan Illich, Ursula Franklin, Albert Borgmann,
and a few others have said about technology is powerful,
incisive, and remarkably coherent. I am going to call the
argument they share the Standard Critique of Technology, or
SCT. The one problem with the SCT is that it has had no
success in reversing, or even slowing, the momentum of our
society’s move toward what one of their number, Neil Postman,
called technopoly.

The basic argument of the SCT goes like this. We live in a

technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to
dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us
in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called
prescriptive (to use Franklin’s term) or manipulatory (to use
Illich’s). For example, social networks promise to forge
connections — but they also encourage mob rule. Facial-

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 1 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

recognition software helps to identify suspects — and to keep

tabs on whole populations. Collectively, these technologies
constitute the device paradigm (Borgmann), which in turn
produces a culture of compliance (Franklin).

The proper response to this situation is not to shun technology

itself, for human beings are intrinsically and necessarily users of
tools. Rather, it is to find and use technologies that, instead of
manipulating us, serve sound human ends and the focal practices
(Borgmann) that embody those ends. A table becomes a center
for family life; a musical instrument skillfully played enlivens
those around it. Those healthier technologies might be referred
to as holistic (Franklin) or convivial (Illich), because they fit
within the human lifeworld and enhance our relations with one
another. Our task, then, is to discern these tendencies or
affordances of our technologies and, on both social and personal
levels, choose the holistic, convivial ones.

The Standard Critique of Technology as thus described is

cogent and correct. I have referred to it many times and applied
it to many different situations. For instance, I have used the
logic of the SCT to make a case for rejecting the “walled
gardens” of the massive social media companies, and for
replacing them with a cultivation of the “digital commons” of
the open web.

But the number of people who are even open to following this
logic is vanishingly small. For all its cogency, the SCT is utterly
powerless to slow our technosocial momentum, much less to
alter its direction. Since Postman and the rest made that
critique, the social order has rushed ever faster toward a

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 2 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

complete and uncritical embrace of the prescriptive,

manipulatory technologies deceitfully presented to us as
Liberation and Empowerment. So what next?

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 3 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

The Rise of Technopoly

O ne must begin, I think, by grasping why the SCT has been

so powerless. First, it has been articulated primarily in
books. Not many people read books at all, and a tiny fraction of
those who do read books ever read ones that develop complex
and countercultural ideas. Second, human beings are lazy herd
animals. Or, to put it in less pejorative terms, the vast majority
of people will always choose options for action that conserve
mental energy without alienating them from their peers and
aspirant peers. The SCT offers no answer to this tendency.
Moreover, …

I’m sorry, am I depressing you? Perhaps so. A quick scan of my

emotional faculties suggests that I am depressing myself. But my
rational faculties tell me that useful thinking depends on an
accurate assessment of the circumstances under which one
thinks. And a rational assessment of the current moment must
begin with the recognition that the forces against which Illich,
Franklin, Postman, and Borgmann contended — and against
which Borgmann still contends — have progressed with
dramatic speed in the past forty years.

This progression is the inevitable result of three trends, all

occurring within the context of global capitalism:

Moore’s Law: In 1965, an electrical engineer

named Gordon Moore — then the co-founder of
Fairchild Semiconductor Laboratory, later the

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 4 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

co-founder of Intel — wrote a paper claiming

that the number of components on a given
integrated circuit had for some time been
doubling every year, and would continue to do so
for the foreseeable future. Others pegged the
period of doubling at eighteen months, but
whatever the specifics, the effect has been not
just a great increase in readily available
computing power but also the placement of that
computing power within smaller and smaller
containers.

The mining of lithium: Lithium can be mined

directly — mines may be found in the United
States (primarily Nevada), Canada (primarily
Quebec), and China, among other places — but
direct mining is prohibitively expensive in
comparison to extraction from salars (salt flats)
or briny lakes. Most of the world’s lithium comes
from salars in Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile.
Lithium is the essential component of the
batteries that power our increasingly small
devices.

The spread of wireless telecommunications

networks: Wireless telecommunications
networks are based on an astonishingly diverse
set of technologies, involving multiple means of
safely transmitting multiple kinds of signals
from one location to another.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 5 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

These three developments are of course built upon an

infrastructure subject to many other developments. And all are
able to work in smoothly harmonious concert only because of
the spread of a global economic order that allows the relatively
free passage of raw materials and finished products alike around
the world. The result is the global dominance of what Shoshana
Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism,” a dominance that is
limited only by the following factors:

A potential slowing of miniaturization, which is

to say, the possible falsification of Moore’s Law
(though quantum computing may eventually
provide a practical solution to such slowing);

Limits to the world’s supply of lithium,

potentially accelerated by the use of lithium
batteries in automobiles (though a potentially
significant new supply has just been discovered
in Cornwall, England);

Spottiness in fast wireless coverage in parts of

the world (which will likely be addressed by
various initiatives, such as the introduction of
Internet satellites by Amazon, SpaceX, and other
companies);

The possible intensification of global political

conflicts, especially between China and the
West.

Any of these, or any combination thereof, could slow the spread

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 6 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

of surveillance capitalism; but none of them promises imminent

danger to it, and there are potential workarounds for them all.

We are therefore moving ever closer to an environment in

which prescriptive, manipulatory technologies are ubiquitous
and totalizing — not to say totalitarian, necessarily, although
perhaps we do want to say that. A Uighur from western China,
faced with an open, full-scale deployment of the most powerful
surveillance technologies in the world, would probably want to
say that. And it seems increasingly likely that the Chinese
government’s treatment of the Uighurs — who, as Muslims who
are ethnically Turkic rather than Han Chinese, make
exceptionally convenient guinea pigs — is but a trial run for a
system that will ultimately be deployed in the whole of China,
and exported to other autocracies. It also seems very likely that
the Xinjiang re-education camps prefigure the future of China.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 7 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

‘Life versus the Machine’ in the West

T echnopoly in the West, by contrast, has tended to deploy

carrots rather than sticks, largely through advertising. It is
of course possible to resist those carrots, to practice what Paul
Kingsnorth calls “life versus the machine,” though only at
significant cost. It has been Kingsnorth’s writerly mission in
recent years to articulate what such resistance to the siren-song
of technopoly might look like — and why this resistance is
necessary:

Any action which hinders the advance of the human

industrial economy is an ethical action, provided it
does not harm life.

Any action which knowingly and needlessly advances

the human industrial economy is an unethical action.

The “human industrial economy” is Kingsnorth’s term for

technopoly conceived in relation to the whole of the natural
order. While the proponents of the SCT tend to focus their
arguments on what technopoly is doing to us, to human beings,
they are not unaware of the consequences of prescriptive,
manipulatory technologies for the rest of the world. By adding
Kingsnorth’s insights — and those of other thinkers of similar
character, especially Wendell Berry — to those of the SCT, we
can see more clearly that every depredation of the human is also
a depredation of the natural order, and vice versa.

We might think of the shifting relationship of human beings to

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 8 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

the natural world in the terms offered by German sociologist

Gerd-Günter Voß, who has traced our movement through three
different models of the “conduct of life.” The first, and for much
of human history the only conduct of life, is what he calls the
traditional. Your actions within the traditional conduct of life
proceed from social and familial circumstances, from what is
thus handed down to you. In such a world it is reasonable for
family names to be associated with trades, trades that will be
passed down from father to son: Smith, Carpenter, Miller. But
the rise of the various forces that we call “modernity” led to the
emergence of the strategic conduct of life: a life with a plan, with
certain goals — to get into law school, to become a
cosmetologist, to get a corner office.

Quite recently, thanks largely to totalizing technology’s

formation of a world in which, to borrow a phrase from Marx
and Engels, “all that is solid melts into air,” the strategic model
of conduct is replaced by the situational. Instead of being
systematic planners, we become agile improvisers: If the job
market is bad for your college major, you turn a side hustle into
a business. But because you know that your business may get
disrupted by the tech industry, you don’t bother thinking long-
term; your current gig might disappear at any time, but another
will surely present itself, which you will assess upon its arrival.

The movement through these three forms of conduct, whatever

benefits it might have, makes our relations with nature
increasingly instrumental. We can see this shift more clearly
when looking at our changing experience of time, and our
understanding of the values inscribed in the passage of time.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 9 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

Within the traditional conduct of life, it is necessary to take

stewardly care of the resources required for the exercise of a
craft or a profession, as these get passed on from generation to
generation. For an excellent example of how this works, see The
Wheelwright’s Shop by George Sturt, a 1923 book for which Albert
Borgmann has expressed great regard. The wheelwright must
know a great deal about timber. Knowing that good timber for
wheels is not easily found, he must also practice care for the
forests in which such timber is found. The practice of
wheelwrighting requires knowledge of and attention to an
entire woodland ecosystem.

But in the progression from the traditional to the strategic to

the situational conduct of life, continuity of preservation becomes
less valuable than immediacy of appropriation: We need more
lithium today, and merely hope to find greater reserves — or a
suitable replacement — tomorrow. This revaluation has the
effect of shifting the place of the natural order from something
intrinsic to our practices to something extrinsic. The whole of
nature becomes what economists tellingly call an externality.

It might seem useful to understand a little more clearly how the

arguments of the SCT intertwine with the arguments of
environmentalists, post-environmentalists (like the
ecomodernists), and naturalists (as they were once called) or
“nature-lovers,” if we can possibly reclaim that now frivolous
term. But to pursue this understanding would only be to expand
the population of a rudderless and leaky boat, soon to be
swamped by the wake of the mighty ocean-liner of technopoly.
We still don’t have a way to shift the course of that Leviathan,

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 10 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

much less to slow its progress. The question, as we think about

moving beyond the Standard Critique, is whether there can be
such a way. And at least one answer comes from a surprising
source: Daoism. But we can’t go there by a direct route.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 11 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

The Danger of ‘Human Resources’

T he philosophical ancestor of the Standard Critique is

Martin Heidegger. This is not to say that all the proponents
of the SCT have read Heidegger, though some of them (such as
Borgmann) have drunk deep from that peculiar well. I mean
only that Heidegger, especially in his famous essay “The
Question Concerning Technology,” provides a specifically
philosophical account of the issues that the SCT attempts to
address.

Much could be said about Heidegger’s strangely compelling

exposition — which asks what the essence of technology is —
but a few points require our attention here. First, because
“technology itself is a contrivance,” an “instrumentum,” we are
led to think instrumentally about it. It is a contrivance for
mastery, and we therefore naturally think in terms of how we
can master it.

But when we look more carefully at how technology is a means

that we try to master for specific ends, says Heidegger, we
realize that we too, as much as the Great Externality called
nature, become raw material in the process. Consider — to re-
enter via Heidegger the lifeworld of George Sturt’s wheelwright
— a modern forester:

The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled

timber and to all appearances walks the same forest
path in the same way as did his grandfather is today
commanded by profit-making in the lumber industry,
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 12 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to

the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is
challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then
delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines.

There is a whole economic system here of which the forester has

willy-nilly become a part. Trees make timber, which makes
cellulose, which makes paper, which makes newspapers — and
because the process is repeated and ongoing, all that material
has to be held in “standing-reserve,” that is, regarded as a
resource waiting to be used. And so too the forester. Now, as a
human being he is not mere standing-reserve; but as a forester
he is. Sturt’s account of the transformation of the craft of the
wheelwright provides an equally vivid account of this situation.

As Mark Blitz has written in these pages (“Understanding

Heidegger on Technology,” Winter 2014) — in one of the
clearest expositions I know of Heidegger’s engagement with
technology — within the governing logic of our current
moment

all things increasingly present themselves to us as

technological: we see them and treat them as what
Heidegger calls a “standing reserve,” supplies in a
storeroom, as it were, pieces of inventory to be
ordered and conscripted, assembled and disassembled,
set up and set aside. Everything approaches us merely
as a source of energy or as something we must
organize. We treat even human capabilities as though
they were only means for technological procedures, as
when a worker becomes nothing but an instrument
for production. Leaders and planners, along with the

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 13 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

rest of us, are mere human resources to be arranged,

rearranged, and disposed of. Each and every thing that
presents itself technologically thereby loses its
distinctive independence and form. We push aside,
obscure, or simply cannot see, other possibilities.

This is what Heidegger means when he speaks of the

technological “enframing” or “positionality” — the German
word is Gestell — of human life. It gradually turns us all into
“standing-reserve,” as when we speak with equal facility of
“natural resources” and “human resources.”

This technological enframing of human life, says Heidegger,

first “endanger[s] man in his relationship to himself and to
everything that is” and then, beyond that, “banishes” us from
our home. And that is a great, great peril.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 14 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

The Way Beyond Heidegger

T he philosopher Yuk Hui, a native of Hong Kong who now

teaches in Germany, thinks that Heidegger is the most
profound of recent Western thinkers on technology — but also
that it is necessary to “go beyond Heidegger’s discourse on
technology.” In his exceptionally ambitious book The Question
Concerning Technology in China (2016) and in a series of related
essays and interviews, Hui argues, as the title of his book
suggests, that we go wrong when we assume that there is one
question concerning technology, the question, that is universal
in scope and uniform in shape. Perhaps the questions are
different in Hong Kong than in the Black Forest. Similarly, the
distinction Heidegger draws between ancient and modern
technology — where with modern technology everything
becomes a mere resource — may not universally hold.

Hui explores, for instance, Kant’s notion of the cosmopolitan,

and the related role of print technology. A central concept in
Enlightenment models of rationality, the cosmopolitan is the
ideal citizen of the world engaged in public reasoning, and Kant
believed that a “universal cosmopolitan condition” would one
day be the natural outcome of history. But Kant’s understanding
of what that means is thoroughly entangled with the rise and
expansion of print culture. It is directly through print culture
that the “Republic of Letters,” the very epitome of
cosmopolitanism as Kant knew it, is formed. But, then, what
might a cosmopolitan be within a society whose print culture is
either nonexistent or radically other than the one

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 15 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

Enlightenment thinkers knew?

Hui’s novel approach to the question(s) concerning technology

thus begins with a pair of seemingly contradictory ideas about
whether technology should be seen as universal:

Thesis: Technology is an anthropological universal,

understood as an exteriorization of memory and the
liberation of organs, as some anthropologists and
philosophers of technology have formulated it;

Antithesis: Technology is not anthropologically

universal; it is enabled and constrained by particular
cosmologies, which go beyond mere functionality or
utility. Therefore, there is no one single technology,
but rather multiple cosmotechnics.

As I read Yuk Hui’s enormously complex argument, he claims

that we are now in a position where we can see what is of value
in the Thesis only after we fully dwell within the Antithesis.
This leads us to the generative idea of “multiple cosmotechnics.”
First, what does Hui mean by the peculiar word
“cosmotechnics”? “It is the unification of the cosmos and the
moral through technical activities, whether craft-making or art-
making.” That is, a cosmotechnics is the point at which a way of
life is realized through making.

The point may be illustrated with reference to an ancient tale

Hui offers, about an excellent butcher who explains to a duke
what he calls the Dao, or “way,” of butchering. The reason he is
a good butcher, he says, it not his mastery of a skill, or his
reliance on superior tools. He is a good butcher because he

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 16 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

understands the Dao: Through experience he has come to rely

on his intuition to thrust the knife precisely where it does not
cut through tendons or bones, and so his knife always stays
sharp. The duke replies: “Now I know how to live.” Hui explains
that “it is thus the question of ‘living,’ rather than that of
technics, that is at the center of the story.”

A jade sculpture depicting a Daoist paradise, 18th century

Metropolitan Museum of Art (public domain)

This unification — of making and living — might be said to be

the whole point of Daoism. Though the same theme is woven
through certain Confucian texts and the I Ching, it is

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 17 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

particularly notable as the incessant refrain of the Daodejing, or,

as it is more commonly called in the English-speaking world, the
Tao Te Ching. The title means something like “The Classic of the
Virtue of the Way” or “The Classic of the Way and of Virtue.” In
both cases “virtue” (Te) should be understood as something close
to the Latin virtus or the Greek aretē, meaning a kind of
excellence, an excellence that has power.

Hui says, in an interview with Noema magazine about his book,

that he has

attempted to understand Chinese cosmotechnics

through the dynamic relationship between two major
categories of traditional Chinese thought: “dao,” or
the ethereal life force that circulates all things
(commonly referred to as the way), and “qi,” which
means tool or utensil. Together, dao and qi — the soul
and the machine, so to speak — constitute an
inseparable unity.

Hui further comments that if the fundamental concern of

Western philosophy is with being and substance, the
fundamental concern of Classical Chinese thought is relation. So
it makes sense, then, that his approach to cosmotechnics would
center on the inquiry into a certain relation, that between dao
(the way) and qi (tools).[1]

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 18 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

‘They Will Sit Collecting Dust’

O ne could use many different passages in the Tao Te Ching

to illustrate Yuk Hui’s views, but the obviously central
passage is verse 80, which presents us with a vision of a wholly
local life.[2]

Neighboring villages are within sight of each other

Roosters and dogs can be heard in the distance
Should a man grow old and die
without ever leaving his village
let him feel as though there was nothing he missed

But what is especially interesting about this village is the

presence of technological sophistication:

Let every state be simple

like a small village with few people
There may be tools to speed things up
ten or a hundred times
yet no one will care to use them
There may be boats and carriages
yet they will remain without riders
There may be armor and weaponry
yet they will sit collecting dust

Powerful technologies are present — but unused. They are not

destroyed, as the Luddites destroyed industrial machinery. They
are simply ignored. Neither novelty nor power are attractive to
the residents of this village — or rather, this state that bears the
character of a village.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 19 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

Let them return

to the knotting of cord
Let them enjoy their food
and care for their clothing
Let them be content in their homes
and joyful in the way they live

This is a vision of a well-lived life, in relation to others, that may

be described generally — what the people in one village do will
resemble what the people do in neighboring villages — but
instantiated only locally and specifically. For those who live this
life, their relation to their tools will be determined by their
commitment to the Way. Tools that do not contribute to the
Way will neither be worshipped nor despised. They will simply
be left to gather dust as the people choose the tools that will
guide them in the path of contentment and joy: utensils to cook
food, devices to make clothes.

Of course, the food of one village will differ from that of

another, as will the clothing. Those who follow the Way will
dwell among the “ten thousand things” of this world — what we
call nature — in a certain manner that cannot be specified
legally: Verse 18 of the Tao says that when virtue arises only
from rules, that is a sure sign that the Way is not present and
active. A cosmotechnics is a living thing, always local in the
specifics of its emergence in ways that cannot be specified in
advance. Nevertheless, those animated by the Way will bear
certain common traits, as described in verse 15:

Deliberate, as if treading over the stones of a winter

brook
Watchful, as if meeting danger on all sides

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 20 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

Reverent, as if receiving an honored guest

Selfless, like a melting block of ice
Pure, like an uncarved block of wood
Accepting, like an open valley

It is from the ten thousand things that we learn how to live

among the ten thousand things; and our choice of tools will be
guided by what we have learned from that prior and
foundational set of relations. This is cosmotechnics.

The variability of this way of life has already been hinted at.
Multiplicity avoids the universalizing, totalizing character of
technopoly. The adherents of technopoly, Hui writes, “wishfully
believ[e] that the world process will stamp out differences and
diversities” and thereby achieve a kind of techno-secular
“theodicy,” a justification of the ways of technopoly to its
human subjects. But the idea of multiple cosmotechnics is also
necessary, Hui believes, in order to avoid the simply delusional
attempt to find “a way out of modernity” by focusing on the
indigenous or biological “Other.” An aggressive hostility to
modernity and a fetishizing of pre-modernity is not the Daoist
way.

Hui doesn’t believe we can simply return to traditional ways —

but this doesn’t mean we cannot resist technopoly. “I believe
that to overcome modernity without falling back into war and
fascism, it is necessary to reappropriate modern technology
through the renewed framework of a cosmotechnics.” His
project “doesn’t refuse modern technology, but rather looks into
the possibility of different technological futures.”

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 21 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

This project is necessary because “we are confronting the crisis

of the Anthropocene” — the term widely used to designate the
current geological age, in which human activity is largely
responsible for the transformation of the Earth. Hui describes
this shift as “the planetarization of standing reserves.” That is,
what makes this era the Anthropocene is our transformation of
Earth’s ecosystem into resources waiting to be exploited. (An
illustration: Paul Kingsnorth notes that “Ninety-six percent of
Earth’s mammals, by biomass, are humans and livestock. The
remaining 4 percent are wild creatures.”) And when we make
our world into standing reserve, we do the same to ourselves.
We divide the cosmos into “natural resources” and “human
resources.”

Therefore, writes Hui, “Heidegger’s critique of technology is

more significant today than ever before” — though not adequate
to resist “the competition of technological acceleration and the
allures of war, technological singularity, and transhumanist
(pipe) dreams.” All those forces are pushing in the same
direction — the wrong direction. “To reopen the question of
technology is to refuse this homogeneous technological future
that is presented to us as the only option.”

Further, “Thinking rooted in the earthy virtue of place is the

motor of cosmotechnics. However, for me, this discourse on
locality doesn’t mean a refusal of change and of progress, or any
kind of homecoming or return to traditionalism; rather, it aims
at a re-appropriation of technology from the perspective of the
local and a new understanding of history.” What is required,
then, is not a cosmopolitanism that unifies and regulates but

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 22 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

rather a cosmopolitanism of difference.

I would like to suggest how this cosmopolitanism of difference

can be accomplished by invoking certain concepts that are
essential to Daoism, in addition to dao and qi. The key concepts
are wuwei (“inaction,” or “acting without action”) and ziran
(“spontaneously so,” “self-deriving,” or “natural”). In verse 2 of
the Tao Te Ching we are told,

The sage acts without action [wuwei]

and teaches without talking
All things flourish around him
and he does not refuse any one of them

This choice not to refuse is a choice not to control, not to

dictate; that is the form this inaction takes. (Not all inaction
takes the same form: the character of inaction is determined
relationally.) Note how this point is illustrated in the villagers,
or citizens, of verse 80 who simply ignore massive, powerful
technologies. Their response to the invitation to dramatically
increase their power is simply inaction. Thus also verse 25:

Mankind depends on the laws of Earth

Earth depends on the laws of Heaven
Heaven depends on the laws of Tao
But Tao depends on itself alone
Supremely free, self-so, it rests in its own nature
[ziran]

So to follow the Way sometimes means to let things be, to do

nothing — not to destroy or even resist, but to be silent and still.
Perhaps to knot a cord, attending all the while to the ten

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 23 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

thousand things surrounding us that flourish by resting in their

own nature. In so doing we may be able to discern our own
nature and dwell spontaneously in it.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 24 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

Unhoarding

I n Always Coming Home (1985) — a strange, unclassifiable

book, part novel, part ethnography of an invented people of
the future, the Kesh — Ursula K. Le Guin imagines a society
governed by verse 80 of the Tao Te Ching. We first learn a great
deal about the people of the valley of the Na — their songs and
dances, their pottery, their social organization into Houses,
their rites of maturation and of marriage. Then we discover that
in one of the villages there is a computer terminal connected via
Internet to a vast AI called the City of Mind, which also knows
the very different life of a great metropolis not so far away.
(Plural ways of life indeed.) People in the villages know that the
terminal exists, but most of them aren’t interested in it.
Occasionally someone becomes interested, which is fine. The
terminal is there when needed.

But social flourishing doesn’t require the terminal. I say “social”

flourishing because the Kesh do not live very long. Their
lifespan has been diminished by a great plague that once ravaged
the world. Such plagues we cannot do very much about, nor the
resulting compromise of our collective health. But to live
virtuously, in accordance with Dao, and to be content — these
we can do. We can only hope that it will not take a truly deadly
pandemic — something far worse than the one we’ve had — to
remind us of the contentment that can be found in the
acceptance of limits.

Always Coming Home illustrates cosmotechnics in a hundred

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 25 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

ways. Consider, for instance, information storage and retrieval.

At one point we meet the archivist of the Library of the
Madrone Lodge in the village of Wakwaha-na. A visitor from
our world is horrified to learn that while the library gives certain
texts and recordings to the City of Mind, some of their
documents they simply destroy. “But that’s the point of
information storage and retrieval systems! The material is kept
for anyone who wants or needs it. Information is passed on —
the central act of human culture.” But that is not how the
librarian thinks about it. “Tangible or intangible, either you keep
a thing or you give it. We find it safer to give it” — to practice
“unhoarding.” She continues,

Giving involves a good deal of discrimination; as a

business it requires a more disciplined intelligence
than keeping, perhaps. Disciplined people come here
… historians, learned people, scribes and reciters and
writers, they’re always here, like those four, you see,
going through the books, copying out what they want,
annotating. Books no one reads go; books people read
go after a while. But they all go. Books are mortal.
They die. A book is an act; it takes place in time, not
just in space. It is not information, but relation.

It is not information, but relation. This too is cosmotechnics.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 26 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

Mocking the Proud Spirit

H ow does a Dao-inspired view of our future with

technology square with the totalizing tech-dystopian
agenda of present-day China?

It is, I think, significant that Yuk Hui is not from the People’s
Republic of China but rather Hong Kong, and was educated
partly in England before moving to Germany. This seems
relevant to his interest in and reliance on Daoism as opposed to
Confucianism, which he treats in his work but does not
emphasize to the same degree. Though Daoism is one of the
traditional Three Ways of Chinese culture, along with
Confucianism and Buddhism, it is not easily made compatible
with the interests of the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP.
There is something intrinsically dissenting about Daoism,
whereas Confucianism has for many centuries been associated
with governance and statecraft. After all, the famous imperial
examination system that for almost fifteen hundred years
produced Chinese scholar-bureaucrats was based primarily on
Confucian texts and principles.

The relationship between Confucianism and bureaucracy has

led one Chinese scholar, Tongdong Bai, in his new book Against
Political Equality: The Confucian Case, to make a provocative
argument about the world’s political future. The growing
discontent within liberal democracies might find an answer, he
says, in Confucianism. Early Confucians “more or less embraced
the ideas of equality, upward mobility, and accountability.” But

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 27 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

“they had reservations about the democratic idea of ‘by the

people,’ or self-governance. Their political ideal was a hybrid
between popular participation and intervention by the elites or,
more properly, by the meritocrats.” The rational, meritocratic,
hierarchical social structures promoted by Confucianism, he
argues, are well-suited to Chinese culture under the CCP, and
are equally well-suited to resolving the political problems of the
West.

A similar argument is made by Daniel A. Bell and Wang Pei in

their new book Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in
China and the Rest of the World. Both books contend that
Confucianism is uniquely positioned to consolidate and
rationalize the order of modernity by drawing strength from
traditional insights that modernity in the West has lost sight of,
especially the rejection of a crude universal notion of equality
and its replacement by a socially embodied just hierarchy. This
would not mark the end of technopoly but its reshaping by the
classic Confucian commitment to “benevolence.” Bell and Pei
write that for Confucians, public officials should “grasp the
moral Way … , implement benevolent policies that benefit the
people, and protect civilians from cruel policies.” The authors
even claim that “Confucianism can help us to think of how to
meet the challenge of artificial intelligence so that machines
continue to serve human purposes.”

How does Daoism fit in? Though Tongdong Bai explores it

elsewhere, in Against Political Equality he does not treat it at all.
Bell and Pei see a very limited, negative role for Daoism: For
those “left out of the political hierarchies,” a “Daoist-style

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 28 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

skepticism about the desirability of the whole meritocratic

system can help to legitimize alternative avenues for socially
valued ways of life.” Or, to put this the other way around,
“Daoist ideas can help to legitimize the system among those left
out.”

The skeptical character of Daoism is indeed the key here. As Yuk

Hui writes, in response to a scholar who argues that both
Confucianism and Daoism advocate a “return to the self in
order to seek moral principles,” the likeness is false because “the
nature proposed by Daoism is not a scientific and moral
principle, but rather a Dao that cannot be named and
explained.” (It is for good reason that Daoism features in every
reputable history of anarchism, and that people who are
interested in anarchism, like Ursula K. Le Guin, are also
interested in Daoism.) The Daoist sage, like Michel de
Montaigne — the Western thinker who most closely resembles
that central figure in the Tao Te Ching — asks, “What do I
know?” (Que sçay-je?) It is not a recipe for rule. The Daoist sage
does not seek to govern, though the Tao Te Ching makes it clear
that any community that happens to have a sage lying around
should plead with him to lead them.

The particular tone of the sage’s skepticism is ironic, and the

sage is in some essential sense an ironist, but his irony is always
directed primarily toward himself. Indeed, this is precisely why
people should seek him out to govern them: His primary
qualification for office is the gently humorous attitude he takes
toward himself, which then extends outward toward our
technological “enframing” of the world. As I noted earlier, a

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 29 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

community of Daoist sages, such as the one envisioned in verse

80 of the Tao Te Ching, wouldn’t smash machines as the
Luddites did, but rather smile at them and if possible ignore
them.

Heidegger is not known for his humor; there aren’t a lot of

laughs in Hui’s work either. But I think this ironic humor I have
been sketching out is essential to the character of the sage and,
more important for my purposes here, essential to the sage’s
role in leading us anarchically out of the technological
“enframing” of the world. Sir Thomas More said that Satan is a
“proud spirit” who “cannot endure to be mocked”; this is equally
true of the slightly lesser Power we call technopoly.

I think Hui’s cosmotechnics, generously leavened with the

ironic humor intrinsic to Daoism, provides a genuine Way —
pun intended — beyond the limitations of the Standard Critique
of Technology. I say this even though I am not a Daoist; I am,
rather, a Christian. But it should be noted that Daoism is both
daojiao, an organized religion, and daojia, a philosophical
tradition. It is daojia that Hui advocates, which makes the
wisdom of Daoism accessible and attractive to a Christian like
me. Indeed, I believe that elements of daojia are profoundly
consonant with Christianity, and yet underdeveloped in the
Christian tradition, except in certain modes of Franciscan
spirituality, for reasons too complex to get into here.
(Franciscans are in a way the Daoists of Christianity, and Saint
Francis himself, if you observe him from certain angles, a kind
of Daoist sage.)

More generally, this cosmotechnics, this technological Daoism

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 30 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

as an embodiment of daojia, is accessible to people of any

religious tradition or none. It provides a comprehensive and
positive account of the world and one’s place in it that makes a
different approach to technology more plausible and
compelling. The SCT tends only to gesture in the direction of a
model of human flourishing, evokes it mainly by implication,
whereas Yuk Hui’s Daoist model gives an explicit and quite
beautiful account. And the fact that cosmotechnics, as I noted
earlier, can be generally described but only locally instantiated
makes room for a great deal of creative adaptation.

Moreover, cosmotechnics provides guidance for ordinary people

and technologists alike. The application of Daoist principles is
most obvious, as the above exposition suggests, for “users” who
would like to graduate to the status of “non-users”: those who
quietly turn their attention to more holistic and convivial
technologies, or who simply sit or walk contemplatively. But in
the interview I quoted from earlier, Hui says, “Some have
quipped that what I am speaking about is Daoist robots or
organic AI” — and this needs to be more than a quip. Peter
Thiel’s longstanding attempt to make everyone a disciple of
René Girard is a dead end. What we need is a Daoist culture of
coders, and people devoted to “action without acting” making
decisions about lithium mining.

One reason to hope that this is possible arises from the

genealogy of what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have
called the “Californian ideology”: that peculiar combination of
capitalist drive and countercultural social preference that has
done so much to make Silicon Valley what it is. The anarchic

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 31 of 32
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis 19/01/25, 23:18

Sixties counterculture that provides half the impetus of this

ideology is of course saturated with thought from the East; and
now the whole of Silicon Valley is intricately entangled with
China — where for some years now there has been a renewal of
Daoism, one not challenged, though also not endorsed, by the
Chinese Communist Party. A synergy could emerge — if only we
can find the sages necessary to make this cosmotechnics
compelling. The question of how such sages might be formed,
and formed more in a Daoist mode than a Confucian one, is a
matter for further reflection.

[1] An earlier version of this essay, in a footnote on Yuk Hui’s rendering of qi, implied
incorrectly that the widely known qi meaning “energy” or “spirit” is the same word as Hui’s
qi, which he translates as “tool.” They are distinct Chinese characters, and Hui in his book
romanizes “energy” qi as ch’i.

[2] I quote from the translation by Jonathan Star (Tarcher, 2001). Knowing no Chinese, I
have also found it prudent to consult other translations, especially the one by Edmund
Ryden (Oxford, 2008) and the one by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall (Ballantine, 2003).
Star’s translation is an especially elegant one, and while his readings differ from some of the
more scholarly ones, the scholarly ones also differ from one another. Ursula K. Le Guin’s
version, Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way (Shambhala,
1997), is rather free but accompanied by thoughtful commentary, especially interesting for
readers of her fiction — about which more later.

Alan Jacobs, a New Atlantis contributing editor, is a distinguished

professor of the humanities in the honors program at Baylor University. He
is the author, most recently, of Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s
Guide to a More Tranquil Mind (Penguin, 2020).

Alan Jacobs, “From Tech Critique to Ways of Living,” The New Atlantis, Number 63, Winter
2021, pp. 25–42.

Header image via Alamy

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living Page 32 of 32