Honestly trying to figure out whether the reason I see Ellul everywhere is because I’m excited about a new scholar I’ve discovered or because his ideas are so well suited for the current moment. “We can be a leader or we can be left behind” captures the opt-in determinism of Ellul’s technique so dang well.

Of course, how the heck am I going to keep expressing concern about AI (through an Ellulian lens or otherwise) if the university has already decided that we’re all getting on board?

I’m sure that I’ve read this before, and I expected to really enjoy a reread, so it was kind of a disappointment to, well, be so disappointed by it. The book is interesting for its interrogation of whether new technologies are less rich than old ones—an argument that has clear relevance today, as perhaps illustrated by Bradbury’s alleged reluctance to allow for an ebook version in the early 21st century. I’m not opposed to this kind of argument, but I think it’s easy for this kind of claim to get tied up in hand-wringing about civilizational decline and old/high culture being better than new/pop culture—and I feel like Bradbury ultimately has more to say about the latter than about the former. His 1990s comments about political correctness in the context of the book only seem to reinforce this impression, and while it’s maybe a product of the 1950s, the overwhelmingly Western and male identities of the lost authors the characters (themselves overwhelmingly male) are trying to hold onto makes so much of the book sound like it could come out of a far-right message board bemoaning so many leftist sheep. I was expecting a defense of the medium of the book, and I appreciate the questions about whether we spend enough time with critical thinking and silence, but I can’t help but see the book as an unjustified moral panic rather than the classic I think about it as.