“[H]igh tech, like any human artifact, is not culturally tasteless, odorless, colorless. It contains attitude, mind-set, philosophy; and with geeks, the attitude, mind-set, and philosophy is libertarianism, in many-blossomed efflorescence. The libertarian-technology axis has been solidly in place long enough that the phrase ‘a self-described neopagan libertarian who enjoys shooting automatic weapons’ required no further explanation when it appeared as part of a technology news feature in an April 1998 issue of the online magazine Salon. A Wall Street Journal front-page feature by Gerald Seib in June 1998 described how ‘by wading into the world of computers, federal trustbusters also have waded into the country’s foremost hotbed of libertarian political activism.’ Northern California’s high tech community is a libertarian psychographic hot zone, and this guy’s mate-quest had to be the Real Deal.
“Yet high tech’s dominant libertarian mind-set is less well known than the obvious wealth and new ways of living and working it keeps spinning off — and, upon close inspection, is also far less appealing. It’s a pervasive weltanschauung, ranging from the classic eighteenth-century liberal philosophy of that-which-governs-best-governs-least love of laissez-faire free-market economics to social Darwinism, anarcho-capitalism, and beyond. It manifests itself in everything from a rebel-outsider posture common in high tech (I program, I attend raves, and I practice targetshooting with the combat shotgun on weekends) to an embarrassing lack of philanthropy (unless it involves the giving away of computers). The technolibertarian stance can be well thought out or merely a kind of reflexive guild membership (all my geek friends and coworkers think like this, so why not join the fun?).
“My fascination, mongoose-to-cobra style, with the romance between libertarianism and high tech has existed for quite a while. I was first startled by what I’ve come to call technolibertarianism when I started knocking around high tech in the early 1980s. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I have spent most of my adult life, most liberal-arts flakes ineluctably end up working with computers, because that’s where the jobs are. So it was for me back in 1981, a few years out of UC-Berkeley with a degree in psycholinguistics, a smattering of acting classes, a lot of waitressing, and a few crabbed little published poems to my name. Initially, the geek-world I was running into seemed peopled with characters very like the familiar Cal Tech/Jet Propulsion Lab/Southern California aerospace guys I fondly recollected from my childhood in Pasadena. There, the engineers and scientists more likely than not shared a vaguely New Deal mentality. They were of a generation that had seen what good things the government could do, from winning World War II to putting a man on the moon. And even if some were strong on anticommunism, conservative rather than liberal, they believed that the government could do great and good things. The unspoken cultural assumption was that progress in our shared civilization was helped along by government programs supporting scientific research, public health, education, and the bringing of electricity and telephony to rural areas. And if quizzed, these technologists would probably all have agreed that there was a shared civilization worth fostering, for geek and nongeek, rich and poor.
“On first inspection, the 1980s and 1990s nerds as people didn’t appear that different from the ones I’d known as a kid. But I came to realize that their values, politics, and orientation to the world were very very different from those of the benign guys in my childhood who, yes, actually had carried slide rules and worn pocket-protectors, as no one in hightech actually does now. It took many years of personal observation — while I moved from technical-writer positions at software firms to staff positions at computer magazines to, starting in 1989, freelance gigs for high tech corporations and for the glossy, glamourous high tech style sheet Wired — to piece together a picture of an emergent social and political subculture, one that can seem dangerously naive and, at its worst, downright scary.
“Attending technical conferences and trade shows, getting to know and making friends with computerists, eavesdropping and reading, I was trying to make sense of the libertarianism I found all around. The belief systems I ran into were confusing, for this passionate libertarian population has for the most part only experienced good things, and not bad, from government. And they were disturbing, for beneath them I sensed nastiness, narcissism, and lack of human warmth, qualities that surely don’t need to be hardwired into the fields of computing and communications. . . .
“An essay I wrote for Mother Jones magazine in July 1996 articulated more directly my unease with technolibertarianism and focused on the aggressive lack of philanthropy in high tech and the contempt for government when government had been so very verrry good to high tech. As I wailed,
Without government, there would be no Internet. . . . Further there would be no microprocessor industry, the fount of Silicon Valley’s prosperity (early computers sprang out of government-funded electronics research). There would also be no major research universities cranking out qualified tech workers: Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and Carnegie-Mellon get access to state-of-the-art equipment plus R&D, courtesy of tax-reduced academic-industrial consortia and taxpayer-funded grants and fellowships.
“High tech’s animosity toward government and regulation goes beyond the animosity that exists in most of the general population and is stridently opposed to other views.
“‘Cyberselfish,’ the essay, is tied for first place on my life list in terms of the amount of email generated by something I’ve written. It seemed to have externalized the dismay other folks have felt with this high tech political culture. It flew around the Internet and got me interviews on radio and speaking gigs at conferences — yet was also the first thing I have ever written that got me flamed (Netspeak for being the object of electronic vituperation.) ‘Cyberselfish’ achieved a modest amount of net.fame; two Usenet groups (the Internet’s public electronic chat forums) devoted themselves to trashing the piece and questioned my personal and professional integrity, which only shows the state folks get themselves into when their religion, masquerading as politics, gets attacked. Libertarianism on the Net, in spite of more than twenty years of government support for the Net’s creation and development, is a seed culture that continues to self-propagate for intellectual generation after generation.
“ОТОН (Internet acronym for On The Other Hand), that same Mother Jones essay got me responses from young people working in what’s known as South Park [i.e., the San Francisco epicenter of late ’90s tech startups], saying they had never heard this counterversion of reality before. It seemed to address the vague disquiet they had been feeling about the grim fairy tales of Big Bad Government versus the unlimited free market. Prosperity, goodness, and health were supposed to be everyone’s destiny once Toffler Second-Wave old-and-in-the-way Machine Age bureaucrats got out of the way. These South Parkers had been wondering if what they had been promised would turn out to be Potemkin villages for a new age, and, to mix metaphors, though not countries, if that Mother Jones essay was samizdat, Voice of America broadcast, circa 1957. It’s as if naming the demon — technolibertarianism — drained it of some of its power, much as in psychotherapy, the first step toward solving a problem consists of observing it and describing it.
“And the demon does have plenty of power. It was the inspiriting force behind Wired under its original owners, when it was the Playboy/Rolling Stone/Vogue for twenty-first-century digital boys (in spirit, if not the flesh), tastemaker/marker of this culture. Part of the magazine’s transgressive sexiness historically stemmed from its sassy enraged libertarianism: What adolescent male (in thought, if not biological fact), the original target in sensibility (bratty, precocious for the magazine), doesn’t want to rebel against nannies, even in the form of the Nanny State?
“When I have run into liberal elder statesmen and women of high tech — meaning people over the age of thirty — they sigh with only a small amount of hope and a great deal of resignation when I say I am trying to document high tech’s default political culture of libertarianism. Like weary Resistance fighters too long without succor, they have almost given up speaking out against the consensus reality in which they live and work. Libertarianism is a computer-culture badge of belonging, and libertarians are the most vocal political thinkers and talkers in high tech.”
— from Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-tech (PublicAffairs, 2000)
An interview with Pauline Borsook, recorded in 2000, was re-published in the Friday Feature of January 24, 2025.
An interview with the president and co-founder of WIRED Jane Metcalfe was heard on Volume 7 of the Mars Hill Tapes and has been re-issued as an Archive Feature.
Related reading and listening
- In technology, we live and move and have our knowing — George Parkin Grant on technology’s establishment of a framework for thinking about technology
- On the Degeneration of Attentiveness — Critic Nicholas Carr talks about how technology-driven trends affect our cultural and personal lives. (56 minutes)
- Gratitude, vitalism, and the timid rationalist — In this lecture, Matthew Crawford draws a distinction between an orientation toward receiving life as gift and a timid and cramped rationalism that views man as an object to be synthetically remade. (52 minutes)
- Humans as biological hardware — In this essay, Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell decry how modern technology tends to hack the human person in pursuit of profit. (55 minutes)
- Choices about the uses of technology — This Feature presents interviews with David Nye and Brian Brock related to how we evaluate adoption of new technology and how technology influences our thinking. (31 minutes)
- The problem with dynamism without direction — Paulina Borsook on the biological paradigm of technolibertarianism’s love of spontaneous dynamism, whatever the costs
- Tech bros and public power — Paulina Borsook discusses the “bizarrely narcissistic” and ultra-libertarian culture of Silicon Valley. (22 minutes)
- Voluntarily silencing ourselves — FROM VOL. 39 John L. Locke discusses the value of personal communication and how technology is displacing it. (12 minutes)
- Life in a frictionless, synthetic world — FROM VOL. 17 Mark Slouka explores the worldview of techno-visionaries who aim to create a new era of human evolution. (11 minutes)
- The digital revolution and community — FROM VOL. 7 Ken Myers talks with Jane Metcalfe, the founder of WIRED Magazine, about technology and community. (8 minutes)
- Paradoxical attitudes toward plastic — Jeffrey Meikle traces the technological, economic, and cultural development of plastic and relates it to the American value of authenticity. (15 minutes)
- Technology and the kingdom of God — FROM VOL. 63 Albert Borgmann (1937–2023) believes Christians have an obligation to discuss and discern the kind of world that technology creates and encourages. (12 minutes)
- The recovery of true authority for societal flourishing — Michael Hanby addresses a confusion at the heart of our current cultural crisis: a conflation of the concepts of authority and power. (52 minutes)
- A fearful darkness in mind, heart, and spirit — Roberta Bayer draws on the work of George Parkin Grant (1918–1988) to argue that our “culture of death” must be countered with an understanding of reality based in love, redemptive suffering, and a recognition of limitations to individual control. (33 minutes)
- Questioning “conservatives” — John Lukacs asserts that believers in unending technological ‘progress’ can’t really be conservatives.
- Living into focus — As our lives are increasingly shaped by technologically defined ways of living, Arthur Boers discusses how we might choose focal practices that counter distraction and isolation. (32 minutes)
- Albert Borgmann, R.I.P. — Albert Borgmann argues that, despite its promise to the contrary, technology fails to provide meaning, significance, and coherence to our lives. (47 minutes)
- Art as aestheticism, love as eroticism, politics as totalitarianism — Augusto Del Noce on the “technological mindset” and the loss of the sense of transcendence
- The consoling hum of technological society — Jacques Ellul on the danger of confusing “technology” with “machines”
- What happens when the Machine stops? — David E. Nye provides a context for evaluating the prospect of life in the Metaverse
- Technological choices become culture — David E. Nye insists that societies do have choices about how they use technologies, but that once choices are made and established both politically and economically, a definite momentum is established. (19 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 141 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Grant Wythoff, Susanna Lee, Gerald R. McDermott, Carlos Eire, Kelly Kapic, and James Matthew Wilson
- The priority of paying attention — Maggie Jackson talks about the increased relevance of her 2008 book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (15 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 129 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Nicholas Carr, Robert Pogue Harrison, R. J. Snell, Norman Wirzba, Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski, and Peter Phillips
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 116 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stratford Caldecott, Fred Bahnson, Eric O. Jacobsen, J. Budziszewski, Brian Brock, and Allen Verhey
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 111 — FEATURED GUESTS: Siva Vaidhyanathan, John Fea, Ross Douthat, Ian Ker, Larry Woiwode, and Dana Gioia
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 89 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jerome Wakefield, Christopher Lane, Dan Blazer, Fred Turner, Barrett Fisher, and Thomas Hibbs
- Better things for better living — Richard DeGrandpre: “When a thousand points of light shine upon you in a commercial war for your thoughts, feelings, and wants, your mind adapts, accepts, and then, to feel stimulated, needs more.”
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 81 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, Joel James Shuman, Brian Volck, Russell Hittinger, Mark Noll, and Stephen Miller
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 48 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jon Butler, Gary Cross, Zygmunt Bauman, Pico Iyer, Richard Stivers, Larry Woiwode, Alan Jacobs, and James Trott
- The Word Made Scarce — Barry Sanders discusses teaching in the age of technology, the effects of literacy on society, and the links between illiteracy and violence. (54 minutes)
Links to posts and programs featuring Richard DeClue:
- The problem with dynamism without direction — Paulina Borsook on the biological paradigm of technolibertarianism’s love of spontaneous dynamism, whatever the costs
- Tech bros and public power — Paulina Borsook discusses the “bizarrely narcissistic” and ultra-libertarian culture of Silicon Valley. (22 minutes)
- What happens when the Machine stops? — David E. Nye provides a context for evaluating the prospect of life in the Metaverse
- Voluntarily silencing ourselves — FROM VOL. 39 John L. Locke discusses the value of personal communication and how technology is displacing it. (12 minutes)
- The Word Made Scarce — Barry Sanders discusses teaching in the age of technology, the effects of literacy on society, and the links between illiteracy and violence. (54 minutes)
- The recovery of true authority for societal flourishing — Michael Hanby addresses a confusion at the heart of our current cultural crisis: a conflation of the concepts of authority and power. (52 minutes)
- The priority of paying attention — Maggie Jackson talks about the increased relevance of her 2008 book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (15 minutes)
- The digital revolution and community — FROM VOL. 7 Ken Myers talks with Jane Metcalfe, the founder of WIRED Magazine, about technology and community. (8 minutes)
- The consoling hum of technological society — Jacques Ellul on the danger of confusing “technology” with “machines”
- Technology and the kingdom of God — FROM VOL. 63 Albert Borgmann (1937–2023) believes Christians have an obligation to discuss and discern the kind of world that technology creates and encourages. (12 minutes)
- Technological choices become culture — David E. Nye insists that societies do have choices about how they use technologies, but that once choices are made and established both politically and economically, a definite momentum is established. (19 minutes)
- Questioning “conservatives” — John Lukacs asserts that believers in unending technological ‘progress’ can’t really be conservatives.
- Paradoxical attitudes toward plastic — Jeffrey Meikle traces the technological, economic, and cultural development of plastic and relates it to the American value of authenticity. (15 minutes)
- On the Degeneration of Attentiveness — Critic Nicholas Carr talks about how technology-driven trends affect our cultural and personal lives. (56 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 89 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jerome Wakefield, Christopher Lane, Dan Blazer, Fred Turner, Barrett Fisher, and Thomas Hibbs
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 81 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, Joel James Shuman, Brian Volck, Russell Hittinger, Mark Noll, and Stephen Miller
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 48 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jon Butler, Gary Cross, Zygmunt Bauman, Pico Iyer, Richard Stivers, Larry Woiwode, Alan Jacobs, and James Trott
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 141 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Grant Wythoff, Susanna Lee, Gerald R. McDermott, Carlos Eire, Kelly Kapic, and James Matthew Wilson
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 129 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Nicholas Carr, Robert Pogue Harrison, R. J. Snell, Norman Wirzba, Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski, and Peter Phillips
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 116 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stratford Caldecott, Fred Bahnson, Eric O. Jacobsen, J. Budziszewski, Brian Brock, and Allen Verhey
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 111 — FEATURED GUESTS: Siva Vaidhyanathan, John Fea, Ross Douthat, Ian Ker, Larry Woiwode, and Dana Gioia
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
- Living into focus — As our lives are increasingly shaped by technologically defined ways of living, Arthur Boers discusses how we might choose focal practices that counter distraction and isolation. (32 minutes)
- Life in a frictionless, synthetic world — FROM VOL. 17 Mark Slouka explores the worldview of techno-visionaries who aim to create a new era of human evolution. (11 minutes)
- In technology, we live and move and have our knowing — George Parkin Grant on technology’s establishment of a framework for thinking about technology
- Humans as biological hardware — In this essay, Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell decry how modern technology tends to hack the human person in pursuit of profit. (55 minutes)
- Gratitude, vitalism, and the timid rationalist — In this lecture, Matthew Crawford draws a distinction between an orientation toward receiving life as gift and a timid and cramped rationalism that views man as an object to be synthetically remade. (52 minutes)
- Choices about the uses of technology — This Feature presents interviews with David Nye and Brian Brock related to how we evaluate adoption of new technology and how technology influences our thinking. (31 minutes)
- Better things for better living — Richard DeGrandpre: “When a thousand points of light shine upon you in a commercial war for your thoughts, feelings, and wants, your mind adapts, accepts, and then, to feel stimulated, needs more.”
- Art as aestheticism, love as eroticism, politics as totalitarianism — Augusto Del Noce on the “technological mindset” and the loss of the sense of transcendence
- Albert Borgmann, R.I.P. — Albert Borgmann argues that, despite its promise to the contrary, technology fails to provide meaning, significance, and coherence to our lives. (47 minutes)
- A fearful darkness in mind, heart, and spirit — Roberta Bayer draws on the work of George Parkin Grant (1918–1988) to argue that our “culture of death” must be countered with an understanding of reality based in love, redemptive suffering, and a recognition of limitations to individual control. (33 minutes)
Links to posts and programs featuring Brady Stiller:
- The problem with dynamism without direction — Paulina Borsook on the biological paradigm of technolibertarianism’s love of spontaneous dynamism, whatever the costs
- Tech bros and public power — Paulina Borsook discusses the “bizarrely narcissistic” and ultra-libertarian culture of Silicon Valley. (22 minutes)
- What happens when the Machine stops? — David E. Nye provides a context for evaluating the prospect of life in the Metaverse
- Voluntarily silencing ourselves — FROM VOL. 39 John L. Locke discusses the value of personal communication and how technology is displacing it. (12 minutes)
- The Word Made Scarce — Barry Sanders discusses teaching in the age of technology, the effects of literacy on society, and the links between illiteracy and violence. (54 minutes)
- The recovery of true authority for societal flourishing — Michael Hanby addresses a confusion at the heart of our current cultural crisis: a conflation of the concepts of authority and power. (52 minutes)
- The priority of paying attention — Maggie Jackson talks about the increased relevance of her 2008 book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (15 minutes)
- The digital revolution and community — FROM VOL. 7 Ken Myers talks with Jane Metcalfe, the founder of WIRED Magazine, about technology and community. (8 minutes)
- The consoling hum of technological society — Jacques Ellul on the danger of confusing “technology” with “machines”
- Technology and the kingdom of God — FROM VOL. 63 Albert Borgmann (1937–2023) believes Christians have an obligation to discuss and discern the kind of world that technology creates and encourages. (12 minutes)
- Technological choices become culture — David E. Nye insists that societies do have choices about how they use technologies, but that once choices are made and established both politically and economically, a definite momentum is established. (19 minutes)
- Questioning “conservatives” — John Lukacs asserts that believers in unending technological ‘progress’ can’t really be conservatives.
- Paradoxical attitudes toward plastic — Jeffrey Meikle traces the technological, economic, and cultural development of plastic and relates it to the American value of authenticity. (15 minutes)
- On the Degeneration of Attentiveness — Critic Nicholas Carr talks about how technology-driven trends affect our cultural and personal lives. (56 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 89 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jerome Wakefield, Christopher Lane, Dan Blazer, Fred Turner, Barrett Fisher, and Thomas Hibbs
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 81 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, Joel James Shuman, Brian Volck, Russell Hittinger, Mark Noll, and Stephen Miller
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 48 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jon Butler, Gary Cross, Zygmunt Bauman, Pico Iyer, Richard Stivers, Larry Woiwode, Alan Jacobs, and James Trott
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 141 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Grant Wythoff, Susanna Lee, Gerald R. McDermott, Carlos Eire, Kelly Kapic, and James Matthew Wilson
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 129 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Nicholas Carr, Robert Pogue Harrison, R. J. Snell, Norman Wirzba, Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski, and Peter Phillips
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 116 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stratford Caldecott, Fred Bahnson, Eric O. Jacobsen, J. Budziszewski, Brian Brock, and Allen Verhey
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 111 — FEATURED GUESTS: Siva Vaidhyanathan, John Fea, Ross Douthat, Ian Ker, Larry Woiwode, and Dana Gioia
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
- Living into focus — As our lives are increasingly shaped by technologically defined ways of living, Arthur Boers discusses how we might choose focal practices that counter distraction and isolation. (32 minutes)
- Life in a frictionless, synthetic world — FROM VOL. 17 Mark Slouka explores the worldview of techno-visionaries who aim to create a new era of human evolution. (11 minutes)
- In technology, we live and move and have our knowing — George Parkin Grant on technology’s establishment of a framework for thinking about technology
- Humans as biological hardware — In this essay, Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell decry how modern technology tends to hack the human person in pursuit of profit. (55 minutes)
- Gratitude, vitalism, and the timid rationalist — In this lecture, Matthew Crawford draws a distinction between an orientation toward receiving life as gift and a timid and cramped rationalism that views man as an object to be synthetically remade. (52 minutes)
- Choices about the uses of technology — This Feature presents interviews with David Nye and Brian Brock related to how we evaluate adoption of new technology and how technology influences our thinking. (31 minutes)
- Better things for better living — Richard DeGrandpre: “When a thousand points of light shine upon you in a commercial war for your thoughts, feelings, and wants, your mind adapts, accepts, and then, to feel stimulated, needs more.”
- Art as aestheticism, love as eroticism, politics as totalitarianism — Augusto Del Noce on the “technological mindset” and the loss of the sense of transcendence
- Albert Borgmann, R.I.P. — Albert Borgmann argues that, despite its promise to the contrary, technology fails to provide meaning, significance, and coherence to our lives. (47 minutes)
- A fearful darkness in mind, heart, and spirit — Roberta Bayer draws on the work of George Parkin Grant (1918–1988) to argue that our “culture of death” must be countered with an understanding of reality based in love, redemptive suffering, and a recognition of limitations to individual control. (33 minutes)