Mark DeLong writes about how technologies shape society and personal identities and how we live our lives as users and creators of technology. He is currently completing a book that examines the expansive personal and social echoes of last century’s defining technology: the automobile. The book focuses on cultural entanglements of the car as evidenced in art, in media, in work, in human relationships — and how they complicate solutions to challenges that the car has delivered to us in the twenty-first century. He studied philosophy, history, and literature at US and European universities and earned his Ph.D. from Duke University, where he has continued to teach a seminar on “our complex relationships with technology” after his retirement in 2021. His eclectic website ("Reader" https://read.markdelong.me/), explores technology, culture, philosophy, and literature. He lives in rural Piedmont North Carolina with his wife Arlene. Email: mark.r.delong [at] gmail.com
by Mark R. DeLong In January five years ago, amidst the turmoil and isolation of a world pandemic, I decided it was time to do a month-long art project. I was newly “retired” (a word that I then disdained and avoided using), and I was intrigued by a project that poet Bernadette Mayer took on…
by Mark R. DeLong My mother ordered the annual parcel of lutefisk from Olsen Fish Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Determined to bring some of her Minnesota Norwegian Christmas tradition to our home in Oklahoma, where our family moved when I was in high school, she phoned in the order in November or even earlier. The…
by Mark R. DeLong “People tell me that I could do much better,” David McCullough said in an interview included in California Typewriter, a documentary about typewriters “and the people who love them.” “I could go faster and have less to contend with if I were to use a computer—a word processor—but I don’t want…
by Mark R. DeLong 1. Regular snowmobile trails bored us kids in the closing years of the 1960s. They wound through the woods, dipping here and there just enough to stall my uncle’s boxy old Evinrude machine with its odd orange and too smooth track. My cousins and I wanted slopes—frozen white waves—to test our…
by Mark R. DeLong Avital Meshi says, “I don’t want to use it, I want to be it” “It” is generative AI, and Meshi is a performance artist and a PhD student at the University of California, Davis. In today’s fraught and conflicted world of artificial intelligence with its loud corporate hype and much anxious…
by Mark R. DeLong This month, I’m closing up the years-long run of my Substack newsletter. I’ve decided to stand up my own newsletter site, despite the hassle, the modest expense, and the loss of what Substack touts as its “network.” The decision revealed to me some of the usually enshrouded assumptions that writers make…
by Mark R. DeLong “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” The line from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol came to mind as I scrolled through my Mastodon account.…
by Mark R. DeLong In February, after a month-long consideration, I set my New Year’s resolutions into a five-by-five grid. I made a BINGO card—twenty-four resolutions plus the FREE space. It was my attempt to gamify the whole tired resolution process that I’ve failed at so well. Surprisingly the trick seems to have worked, at…
by Mark R. DeLong 1. Roger Ebert labeled it the one movie “entirely devoid of clichés.” “It should be unwatchable,” he said, “and yet those who love it return time and again, enchanted.” It was My Dinner with André, which I watched with my wife and a couple of friends at the Carolina Theatre in…
by Mark R. DeLong Writing about American cars stranded in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, John McElroy observed that “there’s something very appealing, almost romantic about these cars. Coated in a patina of history they hearken back to a time when Detroit iron dominated the global auto industry, a time of can-do confidence when buyers were dazzled…
by Mark R. DeLong “Computerized baking has profoundly changed the balletic physical activities of the shop floor,” Richard Sennett wrote about a Boston bakery he had visited and much later revisited. The old days (in the early 1970s) featured “balletic” ethnic Greek bakers who thrusted their hands into dough and water and baked by sight…
by Mark R. DeLong We humans grasp and use things. We dwell among things. We devise new things. As a result of being so pervasive and common in experience, things qua things are practically invisible to us. For the most part, we tend to see them as things outside of us, not as something “inside”…
by Mark R. DeLong Is successfully learning to drive a car an achievement of “mastery”? Is being able to pee in a public restroom also evidence of a certain form of “mastery”? I ask because in recent weeks, I’ve read two books that explore mastery—how you get to a level of achievement, what mastery “looks…
by Mark R. DeLong Restoration of my old car took well more than a decade before it again powered itself along US Highway 501. With time and experience, differences between a craftsman and me would continue to diminish, as my inexperienced hands layered their actions into bodily remembered history and embodied knowledge. My hands remained…
by Mark R. DeLong Duke law professor James Boyle said an article on AI personhood gave him some trouble. When he circulated it over a decade ago, he recalled, “Most of the law professors and judges who read it were polite enough to say the arguments were thought provoking, but they clearly thought the topic…
by Mark R. DeLong Human beings thought with their hands. It was their hands that were the answer of curiosity, that felt and pinched and turned and lifted and hefted. There were animals that had brains of respectable size, but they had no hands and that made all the difference. (Isaac Asimov, Foundation’s Edge) Eugene…
by Mark R. DeLong Once a real irritant and frustration, the routine has become a slap-stick show staged in our living room. Today, it’s only slightly tinged with impatience. Someone wants to watch a movie, which is a challenge itself, since that means having to find one worth watching. But there are lists, online reviews, thumbs-up…
by Mark R. DeLong Gullies had deepened, though puddles—some pond-like—had seeped into the ways, so that the challenge of driving was a matter of keeping axels clear of the swell of ground between tire tracks. Never really good, the roads still showed wounds from September’s hurricane, now known as The Great New England Hurricane of…
by Mark R. DeLong “This guy nails it IMO.” That was the message below a Youtube link. Normally, I’d be wary of a link accompanied by such a cryptic gloss, but it came from a friend and colleague so I clicked. Destination: Rick Beato’s YouTube video posted June 25 on his “Everything Music” channel. Beato…