The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) is its essential dependence on the book. The dissemination of the novel became possible only with the invention of printing. What can be handed on orally, the wealth of the epic, is of a different kind from what constitutes the stock in trade of the novel. What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature — the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella — is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular. The storyteller takes what he tells from experience — his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life’s fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living. Even the first great book of the genre, Don Quixote, teaches how the spiritual. greatness, the boldness, the helpfulness of one of the noblest of men, Don Quixote, are completely devoid of counsel and do not contain the slightest scintilla of wisdom. If now and then, in the course of the centuries, efforts have been made — most effectively, perhaps, in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre — to implant instruction in the novel, these attempts have always amounted to a modification of the novel form. The Bildungsroman, on the other hand, does not deviate in any way from the basic structure of the novel. By integrating the social process with the development of a person, it bestows the most frangible justification on the order determining it. The legitimacy it provides stands in direct opposition to reality. Particularly in the Bildungsroman, it is this inadequacy that is actualized.

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today’s large language models are powered by data and statistics. Though some rules still shape them, their outputs are driven by changing data, not fixed protocols.

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In this sense, ChatGPT isn’t the eolith itself—it’s too amorphous, too shapeless, too generic—but it functions more like the experimental workshop where the eolithic flâneur takes his discovery to see what it’s really good for. In other words, it lets us test whether the found stone is better suited as a spearhead, a toy, or an art object.

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For all the ways tools like ChatGPT contribute to ecological reason, then, they also undermine it at a deeper level—primarily by framing our activities around the identity of isolated, possibly alienated, postmodern consumers. When we use these tools to solve problems, we’re not like Storm’s carefree flâneur, open to anything; we’re more like entrepreneurs seeking arbitrage opportunities within a predefined, profit-oriented grid. While eolithic bricolage can happen under these conditions, the whole setup constrains the full potential and play of ecological reason.

Here too, ChatGPT resembles the Coordinator, much like our own capitalist postmodernity still resembles the welfare-warfare modernity that came before it. While the Coordinator enhanced the exercise of instrumental reason by the Organization Man, ChatGPT lets today’s neoliberal subject—part consumer, part entrepreneur—glimpse and even flirt, however briefly, with ecological reason. The apparent increase in human freedom conceals a deeper unfreedom; behind both stands the Efficiency Lobby, still in control. This is why our emancipation through such powerful technologies feels so truncated.

Another pivotal figure in this intellectual milieu was Oscar Varsavsky, a talented scientist-turned-activist who championed what he called “normative planning.” Unlike the proponents of modernization theory, who wielded computers to project a singular, predetermined trajectory of economic and political progress, Varsavsky and his allies envisioned technology as a means to map diverse social trajectories—through a method they called “numerical experimentation”—to chart alternative styles of socioeconomic development. Among these, Varsavsky identified a spectrum including “hippie,” “authoritarian,” “company-centric,” “creative,” and “people-centric,” the latter two being his preferred models.

Computer technology would thus empower citizens to explore the possibilities, consequences, and costs associated with each path, enabling them to select options that resonated with both their values and available resources. In this sense, information technology resembled the workshop of our eolithic flâneur: a space not for mere management or efficiency seeking, but for imagination, simulation, and experimentation.

While we do so, we must not forget the key insight of the Latin American experiments: technology’s emancipatory potential will only be secured through a radical political project. Without one, we are unlikely to gather the resources necessary to ensure that the agendas of the Efficiency Lobby don’t overpower those of the Humanity Lobby. The tragic failure of those experiments means this won’t be an easy ride.

Boston Review

The AI We Deserve - Boston Review

Critiques of artificial intelligence abound. Where’s the utopian vision for what it could be?

Winograd, to his credit, proved far more self-reflexive than most in the AI community. In a talk in 1987, he observed striking parallels between symbolic AI—then dominated by rules-based programs that sought to replicate the judgment of professionals like doctors and lawyers—and Weberian bureaucracy. “The techniques of artificial intelligence,” he noted, “are to the mind what bureaucracy is to human social interaction.” Both thrive in environments stripped of ambiguity, emotion, and context—the very qualities often cast as opposites of the bureaucratic mindset.

is that the stones were picked up . . . in a form already tolerably well adapted to the end in view and, more important, strongly suggestive of the end in view. We may imagine [the ancient man] strolling along in the stonefield, fed, contented, thinking preferably about nothing at all—for these are the conditions favorable to the art—when his eye lights by chance upon a stone just possibly suitable for a spearhead. That instant the project of the spear originates; the stone is picked up; the spear is, to use a modern term, in manufacture. . . . And if . . . the spearhead, during the small amount of fashioning that is its lot, goes as a spearhead altogether wrong, then there remains always the quick possibility of diverting it to some other use which may suggest itself.

This is Veblen’s idle curiosity at work. Separated from it, design principles are fundamentally limited because they require fixed, predetermined goals and must eliminate diversity from both methods and materials, reducing their inherent value to merely serving those predetermined ends. Storm goes on to argue that efforts to apply design to solve problems at scale, using the uniform methods of mass production, leave people yearning for vernacular, heterogeneous solutions that only eolithism can offer. Its spirit persists into modernity, embodied in unexpected figures—Storm identifies the junkman as the quintessential eolithic character.

Can we really talk about means and ends as separate categories, when our engagement with the means—and with one another—often leads us to revise the very ends we aim to achieve? In Storm’s terms, purposive action might itself emerge as the result of a series of eolithic impulses.

With this, we have arrived at a picture of human intelligence than runs far beyond instrumental reason. We might call it, in contrast, ecological reason—a view of intelligence that stresses both indeterminacy and the interactive relationship between ourselves and our environments. Our life projects are unique, and it is through these individual projects that the many potential uses of “eoliths” emerge for each of us.