50 episodes

Audio version of The Convivial Society, a newsletter exploring the intersections of technology, society, and the moral life.

theconvivialsociety.substack.com

The Convivial Society L. M. Sacasas

    • Technology
    • 5.0 • 22 Ratings

Audio version of The Convivial Society, a newsletter exploring the intersections of technology, society, and the moral life.

theconvivialsociety.substack.com

    Secularization Comes For the Religion of Technology (Audio Version)

    Secularization Comes For the Religion of Technology (Audio Version)

    Hello all,
    The audio version keep coming. Here you have the audio for Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology.
    Below you’ll find a couple of paintings that I cite in the essay.
    Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoy it.
    Cheers,
    Michael



    Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

    • 32 min
    Vision Con (Audio Version)

    Vision Con (Audio Version)

    I continue to catch up on supplying audio versions of past essays. Here you have the audio for “Vision Con,” an essay about Apple’s mixed reality headset originally published in early February.
    The aim is to get caught up and then post the audio version either the same day as or very shortly after I publish new written essays.
    Thanks for listening!




    Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

    • 15 min
    Learning to Receive the Day (Audio Version)

    Learning to Receive the Day (Audio Version)

    Just before my unexpected hiatus during the latter part of last year, I had gotten back to the practice of recording audio version of my essays. Now that we’re up and running again, I wanted to get back to these recordings as well, beginning with this recording of the first essay of this year. Others will follow shortly, and as time allows I will record some of the essay from the previous year as well.
    You can sign up for the audio feed at Apple Podcasts or Spotify.



    Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

    • 10 min
    Embrace Your Crookedness (Audio Version)

    Embrace Your Crookedness (Audio Version)

    At long last, the audio version of the Convivial Society returns.
    It’s been a long time, which I do regret. Going back to 2020, it had been my practice to include an audio version of the essay with the newsletter. The production value left a lot to be desired, unless simplicity is your measure, but I know many of you appreciated the ability to listen to the essays. The practice became a somewhat inconsistent in mid-2022, and then fell off altogether this year. More than a few of you have inquired about the matter over the past few months. Some of you graciously assumed there must have been some kind of technical problem. The truth, however, was simply that this was a ball I could drop without many more things falling apart, so I did. But I was sorry to do so and have always intended to bring the feature back.
    So, finally, here it is, and I aim to keep it up.
    I’m sending this one out via email to all of you on the mailing list in order to get us all on the same page, but moving forward I will simply post the the audio to the site, which will also publish the episode to Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
    So if you’d like to keep up with the audio essays, you can subscribe to the feed at either service to be notified when new audio posts. Otherwise just keep an eye on the newsletter’s website for the audio versions that will accompany the text essays. The main newsletter will, of course, still come straight to your inbox.
    One last thing. I intend, over the coming weeks, to post audio versions of the past dozen or so essays for which no audio version was ever recorded. If that’s of interest to you, stay tuned.
    Thanks for reading and now, once again, for listening.
    Cheers,
    Michael
    The newsletter is public and free to all, but sustained by readers who value the writing and have the means to support it.


    Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

    • 13 min
    Year End Miscellany and "What You Get Is the World" (Audio Version)

    Year End Miscellany and "What You Get Is the World" (Audio Version)

    Welcome back to the Convivial Society. In this installment, you’ll find the audio version of the latest essay, “What You Get Is the World.” I try to record an audio version of most installments, but I send them out separately from the text version for reasons I won’t bore you with here. Incidentally, you can also subscribe to the newsletter’s podcast feed on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Just look up The Convivial Society.
    Aside from the audio essay, you’ll find an assortment of year-end miscellany below.
    I trust you are all well as we enter a new year. All the best to you and yours!
    A Few Notable Posts
    Here are six installments from this past year that seemed to garner a bit of interest. Especially if you’ve just signed up in recent weeks, you might appreciate some of these earlier posts.
    Incidentally, if you have appreciated the writing and would like to become a paid supporter at a discounted rate, here’s the last call for this offer. To be clear, the model here is that all the writing is public but I welcome the patronage of those who are able and willing. Cheers!
    Podcast Appearances
    I’ve not done the best job of keeping you all in loop on these, but I did show up in a few podcasts this year. Here are some of those:
    With Sean Illing on attention
    With Charlie Warzel on how being online traps us in the past
    With Georgie Powell on reframing our experience
    Year’s End
    It is something of a tradition at the end of the year for me to share Richard Wilbur’s poem, “Year’s End.” So, once again I’ll leave you with it.
    Now winter downs the dying of the year,   And night is all a settlement of snow;From the soft street the rooms of houses show   A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,   Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   And still allows some stirring down within.
    I’ve known the wind by water banks to shakeThe late leaves down, which frozen where they fell   And held in ice as dancers in a spell   Fluttered all winter long into a lake;   Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,   They seemed their own most perfect monument.
    There was perfection in the death of ferns   Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone   A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   Composedly have made their long sojourns,   Like palaces of patience, in the grayAnd changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii
    The little dog lay curled and did not rise   But slept the deeper as the ashes roseAnd found the people incomplete, and froze   The random hands, the loose unready eyes   Of men expecting yet another sunTo do the shapely thing they had not done.
    These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   We fray into the future, rarely wroughtSave in the tapestries of afterthought.More time, more time. Barrages of applause   Come muffled from a buried radio.The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.
    Thank you all for reading along in 2022. We survived, and I’m looking forward to another year of the Convivial Society in 2023.
    Cheers, Michael


    Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

    • 14 min
    "Lonely Surfaces" (Audio Version)

    "Lonely Surfaces" (Audio Version)

    Welcome again to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. This post features the audio version of the essay that went out in the last installment: “Lonely Surfaces: On AI-generated Images.”
    For the sake of recent subscribers, I’ll mention that I ordinarily post audio of the main essays (although a bit less regularly than I’d like over the past few months). For a variety of reasons that I won’t bore you with here, I’ve settled on doing this by sending a supplement with the audio separately from the text version of the essay. That’s what you have here.
    The newsletter is public but reader supported. So no customers, only patrons. This month if you’d like to support my work at a reduced rate from the usual $45/year, you can click here:
    You can go back to the original essay for links to articles, essays, etc. You can find the images and paintings I cite in the post below.
    Jason Allen’s “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial”
    Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp”
    Detail from Pieter Bruegel’s “Harvesters”
    The whole of Bruegel’s “Harvesters”



    Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

    • 21 min

Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5
22 Ratings

22 Ratings

Kettlebell Dan ,

Eye-opening

This work is the clearest, most precise thinking on technology I’ve ever heard, and a treasure-trove of sources.

efrank02 ,

Incredibly insightful

I listen to each of these multiple times, stop to really understand & process every few minutes. This should be more popular.

Cds7557 ,

Must listen

Fantastic! What a treasure!

Top Podcasts In Technology

Lex Fridman Podcast
Lex Fridman
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In Podcast, LLC
No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups
Conviction | Pod People
Acquired
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley
BG2Pod
Hard Fork
The New York Times

You Might Also Like

The Ezra Klein Show
New York Times Opinion
The Gray Area with Sean Illing
Vox
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
The New Yorker Radio Hour
WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
Open Source with Christopher Lydon
Christopher Lydon
Inside the Hive by Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair