Hello, Blog. It has been a while.

Mainly, I’m writing this to share a couple of videos I came across this morning, that I enjoyed, a couple of Vlogbrothers entries from the past few days. The Brothers Green are not everyone’s taste, but I usually enjoy them, and these two videos in particular tickled my fancy.

First, Hank Green, “The Forgotten Viral Video that Could Never be Made Today”

Second, John Green, “You have no chance to survive make your time”

I like these little glimpses into Internet Past, and probably one of the things that I enjoy about Hank’s and John’s work is that (even though I did not start following them until COVID times), they’re Early Internet people, with whom I feel a lot of kinship. And one of the things I like is how these kinds of discussions help us think about not only how we got where we are, but the contingency of the current way of things, which also entails the possibility of a different future than the trajectory we seem to find ourselves on. (Which, when it comes to technology, the internet, and media, seems like a trajectory that mostly sucks.)

I am not sure when exactly I became fascinated with technology/digital/media history, but I can point towards a few things. In 2009 I was hired at UT Dallas, primarily to teach Philosophy of Technology to undergrads in the relatively new Arts and Technology (ATEC) major. Despite what I said in my application letter, I didn’t know much about philosophy of technology, so for the first few years, I taught a pretty standard version of it (Heidegger and Marcuse, oh my). During these first few years, I became increasingly connected with the Emerging Media and Communication (EMAC) group, which created a new degree program out of ATEC.

At some point in late 2012 or early 2013, I encountered Anil Dash‘s “The Web We Lost,” which also has a video version:

I was an early adopter of Movable Type for my blog back in the day, and have enjoyed Anil’s ideas from all they way back. At this point, I was very much starting to worry about how the Open Web was being replaced by walled-garden social media, a trend that has only gotten worse over the decade+ since then.

In 2014, I redesigned Philosophy of Technology to better fit the idea of thinking critically about the internet and digital technologies that I wanted to teach ATEC, EMAC, and the odd engineering and computer science student who ended up in that class. I included a section on “Lessons from the History of Technology” that included Neil Stephenson’s In the Beginning… was the Command Line and Ted Nelson‘s cranky Computers for Cynics YouTube videos.

This led to a session I ran with Andy Famiglietti at the 2015 Digital Frontiers conference, “Silicon in August: In search of a usable past for alternative digital futures” (sad note that the “Digital Frontiers” website exists only in the Internet Archive). This was a session where we asked a lot of questions, but didn’t come up with a lot of answers. It was fun, and interesting, and I thought it might lead somewhere.

One of the reasons that I study the history of philosophy, and one of the things that I think is interesting about integrating the history and philosophy of science, is that it provides us with a sense of perspective, a sense of the contingency of the questions, approaches, and answers that we focus on in the present, and allows us to have a broader view of where we might go in the future. I like how Dewey’s pragmatism breaks us out of the narrow bounds of contemporary professional philosophy, and how Marston’s weird century-old ideas about psychology can help us think differently about what contemporary psychology and cognitive science could be. Hasok Chang’s “complementary science” has been a huge inspiration for me in this respect.

I wanted to bring the same approach to digital technology. Ultimately, I wanted to start working with students to dig into the material histories of these systems, including getting hands-on experience with old computers, old software, old communication systems, very different from the ones they were used to in their day-to-day lives, as a way of starting to think about alternative futures. But things changed, people moved institutions, programs appeared and disappeared, and my work down that road did not really take off.

Early this week, my good friend Bryan sent me a link to the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) at CU Boulder, run by Lori Emerson (a colleague of our mutual college friend Professor Casey). They have been doing since 2009 something I start thinking about only around 2014, research and teaching the history of media and technology through hands-on material interaction and recreation. Some of the work there is truly fascinating, and I strongly recommend you lose an afternoon looking around MAL’s and Professor Emerson’s websites. (Somewhat similar work was also being done at UT Dallas by Anne Balsamo and Sean Landers before I left, and I wonder if I would have picked this up again had I stayed in Dallas instead of moving to SIU in 2022.)

There never was an attempt at a robust history and philosophy of technology to the same extent that there has been such an attempt with the history and philosophy of science (not that the partnership there has been a successful and happy one). I think in part that it has to do with very different attitudes towards the subject by historians of technology and the philosophers of technology. But I do think that contemporary philosophy of technology and the developers of contemporary technology could do better to understand the history, understand what we have lost, to help us find a better way forward.