🎧 Ideas That Matter: Discussing Against Identity & Standing by Words

Now available for members: two feature-length probes into the mind-altering work of Alex Douglas & Wendell Berry, and why it matters to the philosophy of technology.

Our two most recent study group discussions were absolute bangers.

Both are now available below this post’s paywall members:

Here’s some context:

🎭 On Alexander Douglas’ Against Identity

Has selfhood outlived its usefulness?

The first, on one of my favorite reads of 2025, drew a curve through Taoist philosophy to Baruch Spinoza to René Girard in order to ask deep questions about selfhood in the age of social media and AI. Douglas joined us for a lively exchange that reached far beyond the pages of his book:

• We discussed research critiquing reinforcement learning via intrinsic causal learning, novelty search, and the link between world models and agency, and probed the potential of psychedelics as disrupting perceptual “placeholders.”

• We framed the history of civilization in terms of successive collapsing “identity regimes” (sincerity/roles, authenticity/inner self, and today’s profile-based identities) in which identity destabilizes as its technologies succeed, and contrasted this with the principle of Wu Wei and the 21st Century’s demand for ongoing transformation.

• We touched on Markov blankets as relational, enacted boundaries rather than fixed essences, and how social legibility pressures lead to evolutionary coordination mechanisms that have become maladaptive in the Digital Era.

• And we riffed on The Hermit, process philosophy, relational self-body mapping, how new media ecologies bury and surface different worlds, and why identity conflict characterizes our social lives in spite of being so very stupid. And more.

All of us left with new perspectives. It was incredibly rich.

🌾 On Wendell Berry’s Standing by Words

What does it mean to live in right relationship with our home, with technology, and with one another?

The second, a series of reflections and riffs on poet-farmer Berry’s excellent 1980 essay collection, examined the relationship between land, community, language, and technology in which I compared and contrasted his critiques of industrial modernity with the positions of two other major influences: Indigenous author and scholar Tyson Yunkaporta, and legendary protopian techno-enthusiast Stewart Brand of The Whole Earth Catalog and Long Now Foundation (who was, alongside Berry, a fellow member of the Lindisfarne Association).

Drawing on Berry’s essays as well as his notorious 1988 Harper’s Magazine article on why he refuses to use computers, we looked at how Berry’s tool-ethics—repairability, local production, non-disruption—depart and converge with Yunkaporta’s fraught relationship with the machine and Brand’s very different vision for custodial long-term thinking.

Berry doesn’t mince the words he stands by when it comes to how modern “internal accounting” hides vast externalities (industrial dairy, nuclear risk)—and we looked at how his argument informs present-day AI debates, contrasting Yudkowsky-style existential risk abstraction with proposals for community stewardship and maintenance.

We wrestled with what it means to live by Berry’s principles in a world that powerfully constrains our choices: the outlines of a planetary culture grounded in place, the extractive material and energy demands of AI, how to resolve “work-life” tensions, and whether scale necessarily means dislocation, never straying far from Berry’s central question: How appropriate a tool is to work, other needs, and the health of the household of all creatures?

Some additional topics:

• Poetry, Protest, and Public Voice
• Nonduality, Embodiment, and Living Paradox
• Pace Layers and Society’s Internal Contradictions
• Ivan Illich and Ursula Franklin on “Convivial Tools”
• “Stickers” vs. “Boomers” & The Commitment to “Here”

This one ended up being more of a prompted mind-jazz session than a regular book club, but it encapsulates so many of the big ideas of this project—and carries them into some awesome new places I haven’t seen explored with Berry’s work— that I’m glad to share this kernel of what I hope will be many more pieces to come!

Enjoy both conversations below—we welcome your own reflections in the Discord server, and hope you’ll join us for our next community call!

Poll coming soon for our next study group topic and timing...