Ever Not Quite

Patrick Jordan Anderson

Audio essays from Ever Not Quite: Essays About Technology and Humanism https://evernotquite.substack.com/ By Patrick Jordan Anderson

  1. 06/29/2025

    And Death Shall Have No Dominion

    Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism. This one is about the tech-entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s much-publicized designs on biological immortality and the Don’t Die movement of which he is the founder and leader. With the help of the American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, whose 1973 book The Denial of Death has influenced a generation of readers from diverse disciplines, I interpret this new form of death-denial as a manifestation of modern mainstream cultural assumptions. If you are interested in learning more about Becker’s ideas, I highly recommend a recent documentary called All Illusions Must Be Broken, which is a contemporization of Becker’s work for our technologically-mediated world of today. As always, thank you for reading. If you’d like to support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber and/or sharing this essay around within your circles.

    43 min

  2. 03/28/2025

    The Anthropological Aura

    Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism. This essay attempts to name something for which—or so it seems to me—we have lacked a satisfactory term. I have argued before against the reasoning which attempts to defend human preeminence by insisting that “no technology could ever do ‘X’”, however sophisticated or impressive the ‘X’ in question might be. This, it seems to me, is a weak position from which to secure humanistic values, for reasons which I’ll explain below. Here, I offer an alternative basis on which to think about what distinguishes us from even the most powerful simulations of human competencies. I am calling this the “anthropological aura”. These reflections, of course, don’t exhaust all we might wish to say about what is at stake in the present unfolding of artificial intelligence, but I hope they provide a helpful category which may perhaps be of some use in your own thinking about these issues.

    20 min

  3. 03/11/2025

    Without Regard For Persons

    How industry is talking about the AI rollout

    22 min

  4. 02/22/2025

    Building in the Ruins

    Building in the Ruins On what comes after techno-optimism

    28 min

  5. 02/22/2025

    Crisis and Revelation

    Crisis and Revelation “Things Aren’t Getting Worse. The Truth is Just Being Revealed.”

    32 min

  6. 02/22/2025

    Strange Shadows [Part II]

    Strange Shadows [Part II] Two centuries of photography have prepared the way for algorithmically-generated images. Now the image-world is becoming a Museum of Babel.

    32 min

  7. 02/22/2025

    Strange Shadows [Part I]

    Strange Shadows [Part I] Two centuries of photography have prepared the way for algorithmically-generated images. Now the image-world is becoming a Museum of Babel.

    33 min

  8. 02/22/2025

    This Is Not an Automated Message

    This Is Not an Automated Message On what we lose when machines do the writing

    40 min
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About

Audio essays from Ever Not Quite: Essays About Technology and Humanism https://evernotquite.substack.com/ By Patrick Jordan Anderson

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  • Creator
    Patrick Jordan Anderson
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    14
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Patrick Jordan Anderson
  • Show Website
    Ever Not Quite