the Salon

Three years ago I happened upon a group of very cool people who, having recently graduated from college, were trying to recreate the intellectual stimulation they relished in class. I found this group through a discussion on intentional community with one of the members, and out of this meeting has come the strongest friendship I've experienced yet in my life.

That group disbanded several months later, after many rewarding and revealing conversations. But several of us have continued the practice, over beers, around a bonfire, by email, whenever the desire to understand or explore overwhelms us. More valuable, telling discussions than I can recount here.

We're formalizing again, moving the discussion into our house (where a few of us live cooperatively) and focusing on culture, it seems.

The first discussion was not quite a flop, but close. We discussed Kaczynski's Industrial Society and Its Future, (a.k.a. The Unabomber's Manifesto). I admit to enough frustration in reading it that I did not finish the text (not even half of it, I'm embarassed to say) before the group met. I'd figured the discussion would be broken up into multiple sittings, and we could start with less than the whole ;-) What we got instead was a disjointed, unfocussed and generally unsatisfying mishmash. I'll finish the text next time! (In my defense, half of us didn't read the whole thing.)

I did take one important thing from the meeting, though - the idea of giving another's argument 'integrity'. In conversation or conflict such an idea would have been very clear to me - listen before you judge. It had never occured to me in terms of what I read - I always judge as I 'listen' to the writer, and thus had a difficult time with much of Kaczynski's writing. (I will state that he makes some very interesting points, and his idea of power process and surrogate activities seems to have significant merit.)

Our discussion proceeds in a couple of weeks, looking at the integration of technology and culture - or, in a more Kaczynski-esque approach, the appropriation of culture by technology. Our next step is to address a future terminal point, technological Singularity a la Vinge and Kurzweil, with a little Bill Joy thrown in for balance. I hope we also go back through the history of technology, and question what it means to be without technology - without, for example, the internet, printing, books, paper, language. Anarchoprimitivism to an extreme.

We're also preparing to read Eros and Civilization, by Herbert Marcuse, for future discussion, and one member has prepared notes on A Social Onto-epistemology of Sex: A Pragmatic Narrative, which perhaps he will share in his own blog.