Beauty and Technology: How both originate from eloquence

There is no science for the teguments of a leaf, for the filaments of a cell structure, the winding of a vein, the passion of a habit, or for the twists and quirks of character. 

 

        — Marcel Schwob, Imaginary Lives

 

Written by Daniel Schechter-Saavedra

 

It is too often said that beauty retains an air of “uselessness,” while technologies exemplify what is “useful.” However, that a divide exists between the impractical arts and their opposites—the instrumental and functional—is a product of contemporary social imagination.

Here I will report to you my working definition of beauty; beauty is the desire to be an integrated person. Beauty is a psychosocial process that attempts to sustain a coherent, integrated whole within ourselves and a consistent presentation to the world.  

In his book Lascaux: Or, the Birth of Art, French philosopher Georges Bataille stresses that “before the Reindeer Age, work was the sole ingredient that outwardly distinguished human from animal life. So far, we have uncovered no evidence of other important human activities in that period.”1 And in extension, notes that while art first required the possession of tools and skill, “art had in relation to utilitarian activity an opposite importance or value: it was a kind of protest against the hitherto existing world… itself indispensable to articulating that protest”2 In essence, the impulse that brought art to the historical scene was a technological one, however “useless” a compulsion, for it was an instinct that could only emerge from a developed physical existence. 

If we are to define art as the genesis of beauty for beauty's sake, then we hereby bestow to beauty those secondary qualities which humanity has, at least presently, always thought to be peripheral in the development of human civilization: the graceful, the elegant, the subjective.

What I propose is that to sharpen flint is not just a “useful” action, but when we refine flint into, say, an arrowhead, the flint takes shape towards what it could be—the same as the desire to be more complete and less opaque within ourselves. The process of internal “coherence” is as fundamental an instinct and intuition as sharpening an arrowhead. Beauty, and technology demonstrate our capacity for transformation by following a sensitivity to what we perceive as purposeful. For an impulse to refine and improve underlies both. Both are an integral part of our capacity for eloquence, for refined self-expression about our identities and values. 

This paper is a study of how we've expressed ourselves from the emergence of symbolic thought, through the formation of the skilled professions, to contemporary technology. Now we optimize processes, and dull instincts, becoming consistent externally, and less coherent internally. The natural culmination of such is our current “age of precision;” a historical moment that demands technological exactness and verifiable, documented personal identity.

I am making two claims. First, the techniques by which we cultivate eloquence are the same as those by which we cultivate technology. Secondly, that beauty, within eloquence, is a self-conscious drive towards coherence.

I. The Aesthetic Compulsion: The Greek Charities

The Charities are anthropomorphized forms of elegance. They symbolize the impulses by which we chisel away at ourselves; that our impulse towards the beautiful is the same as our impulse towards the technical. 

Under shifting name and number (although the standard is three), the Charites: Aglaea (Splendor), Euphrosyne (Joy), and Thalia (Bloom),3 came to be adored across the ancient Greek world as the deification of individual betterment. Worshiped for all sorts of artistic endeavors, the painters, architects and poets of the day found in their vestige the embodiment of beauty as more than just charm and allure, but as a measure of their work. The Athenians,4 in the third century BCE, erected a shrine connecting the Demos (the people), Aphrodite and the Charites on the northwest corner of the agora.5 This marked a sacred bond between the democratic body of Athens and the aesthetic mode of being as signified by the Charites; charm, social unity and beauty. So, rather than painting or music or architecture, beauty here is understood as inner refinement and elegance: a psychological manifestation of improvement. 

On the one hand social eloquence, spoken eloquence, and on the other the technical, the techniques of gracefulness, of refinement. We are deliberating an inner human function: our drive to become more coherent and attuned to the world, our self and each other. In one's desire to refine one's personality, beauty is not just decorative, it is formative; a psychological impulse towards how we hope reality could be, and how we could become as people. In our personal lives, the urge to become more complete, less inept, and more responsive to what matters is shaped by a sense of the beautiful as much as the functional. Let us consider how beauty extends beyond the physical and into the social, the psychological, to become fundamental to human development.

II. Understanding Beauty as an Operating System

Wanting to be beautiful is the desire to be a whole person. To be understood, acknowledged, and remembered for who you are, with all of your peculiarities. It is the desire to be more acute. 

My thesis is that both beauty and technology originate within our capacity for refined expression about who we are and what we value—within eloquence. In order to grasp this union, we must trace the development of symbolic thought: our power to reflect on and discuss what is not immediately present.6 

Beads are among the earliest human ornaments and represent eloquence in material form, as objects that communicate group belonging. In Morocco's Bizmoune Cave, an archaeological discovery of shells represents the oldest beads yet recovered, at ≥142 thousand years.7 This jewelry pushes the dates for symbolic thinking into the late Middle Pleistocene. And, if the sentiment in Fatema Mernissi's book Beyond the Veil is to be understood: that what is worn "is a boundary marker that separates… the licit from the illicit,"8 then these artifacts reveal more than just the origins of symbolic thought, but the dawn of social identity. The consistent use of the shells across archaeological sites demonstrates their function as communicators of culture and markers of in/out group identity:9 cognitive gestures toward eloquence, coherence, and consistency. What it means to be me, what it means to be you, and what it means to belong to a group. The farthest west [of the Islamic world]10 invokes Adam and Eve, the creation of what it means to be human. To see beauty as a drive behind coherence is to see it as deliberate composition, as part of the intentional arrangement of ourselves and what's around us. Therefore, technology and craft are an extension of both the desire to be understood and the desire to organize the material world.

III. Eloquence as Mobile Arrangement

It is through the study of craft making that we come to see eloquence in practice, embodied in our everyday actions. Material culture, migration, and crafts are themselves a form of eloquence. Beauty, and therefore coherence, is a continuous worldwide ontology built around the rhythms of nature and the human body,11 and a quality of symbolic thought that emerges alongside technologies. 

The work of archaeologist Sada Mire furthers the theory that material culture should be understood as repositories of memory and identity, and therefore as eloquence.12 Mire notes in "Preserving Knowledge, Not Objects," that in the Somalian communities of the diaspora "the knowledge of objects seems to remain more important than simply remembering an object as a Somali object."13 Through various interviews, as recorded by Mire, Somalian women of the diaspora are seen to intimately understand an object's artistic use and where to find its necessary materials. They prioritize, and therefore preserve, the skill of how to make everyday and ritual Somalian crafts, tools, and ornaments over the preservation of a Somalian object.14 This is a demonstration of how technique and identity are co-transmitted in an intangible way.

The Somalian "knowledge-centred"15 approach to doing frames both the elegant and the technical as a mobile arrangement, a nomadic production. We see it in the refinement of our flint, in the gradual sharpening of our knives of bone, in the dancing or grieving artist, that there exists an aspect of beauty which is an innate part of doing, and therefore being. A people's path to refinement and intergenerational coherence.

IV. The Importance of Style 

Now that the roots for eloquence have been established, we must proceed in fullness with the expression of eloquence in everyday life, in what we call style.

To have a style is to embody the diverse aspects of our character in our unique way, and to be consistent is to have those ways of doing match up to the person we want to be. Style is the process by which we tame recurring doubts and enthusiasms, expressions about ourselves we may not be aware of, thereby reconciling the expanse between how one understands oneself and what one wants to be, or thinks one is.16 

It was Paul Valéry who said that "thought has no style,"17 that is, being in itself has no differentiating standard. Thought exists in a uniformed state, it can be seen to repeat, knows no keeper, and belongs to every person. Here, style is the way one organizes individuality. Personality flushes thought with color, thereby flattening one’s character on the canvas. Style is the manner in which we express ourselves, and therefore has a place outside art, within the realm of everyday action. 

It is in these intimate ways of doing that we find the artist, inexorably linked to their art, and appearing, as each stroke reacts to the next, in a similar plane of meaning. There is something about the transition from brushstroke to brushstroke that is beyond the brushstroke itself… 

Who, then, is to say that an action—or more still, a way of doing (anything), a style—is not a product of both beauty and necessity? Again, let us turn to Paul Valéry, who, in his perceptiveness, noted that "a good style implies a kind of organization of originality, a harmony that excludes the excesses of the imagination."18 Ingenuity chips away at the expressive, bringing the concrete with the yet to be expressed. The aesthetic, then, is something that transforms, that surpasses evolution. Style is a double entendre, for even machines can have styles, characteristic ways of producing outcomes. 

V. Consistency: Technology Misapplied 

What allows style to endure, to maintain a coherent character across time and space, is consistency. Today, our desire for internal consistency, to become an integrated person—which Valéry defines within the context of a work of art, as "the sum of the qualities which enable it to stand up to scrutiny and withstand the efforts of a mind determined to analyze it away"19—is being outsourced to mechanical processes.

In the history of technique, technology has gradually invaded "every branch of human activity, substituting its innumerable subdivisions and its objective methods for the personal and complex operations of the individual."120 Every object we now make use, from the wheel to AI, is the product of an intense collaborative effort between the sciences and the professions, a conveyor belt of impersonal scientifically developed tasks leading to a consistent end product.21 The systematic consolidation of personal tasks through technology, that otherwise the human person would have to perform, has dulled our instincts and made us more likely to believe in the primacy of a single, standardized way of behaving and doing.22 At least since modernity, technology is a product of what we believe reality should look like; we hope that through technology all of reality can be systematized, computerized and understood, that somehow by cultivating technology, we ourselves will become more eloquent. We have outsourced our inner world, hollowed out ourselves. 

Hence the measure, and mistake, at hand: since our impulse towards the beautiful is as our impulse towards the functional, by outsourcing an intimate, essential navigating system to technology, we are sacrificing our capacity to create a coherent person. To maintain personal narrative, our own story, our ability to self define.

The desire to be precise, to standardize, is shared by both systems and people. Technology is not a neutral tool, but reflects and is organized by, and in turn organizes, constraints, human behavior. Technology thus shapes us, makes us, bounds us. It demarcates and constraints, for example, how a professional thinks and behaves. Abbott writes in The System of Professions: "abstraction is the quality that sets interprofessional competition apart from competition among occupations in general. Any occupation can obtain licensure… but only a knowledge system governed by abstractions can redefine its problems and tasks…"23 Abstraction allows the professional to draw borders around their discipline, say, "this is psychology," claiming academic territory, since knowledge itself knows no disciplinary boundaries. By using technology to cure ambiguity in the external material world, we attempt to cure the messiness of our inner world. This attempt to outsource consistency to the material world as an attempt to heal ourselves, is a futile, unworkable, process that leaves us disconnected from our experiences.24

The consistent technological system substitutes precision for truth, where we mistake cohesive, outward-facing intelligent function and standardization with the ability to ask open-ended-questions and to reflect. Perhaps we hope technology can "talk" for us. That it is better than us at understanding what reality really is made of. It is ironic, but not surprising, then, that precision inevitably breeds ambiguity, and vice versa.

As we stumble and slowly refine technology, each successful byproduct at once affirms what we are and what we can be. This isn't necessarily the truth, rather a conceded, resentful or enthusiastic confirmation of what we believe we are as people. What we/I need to change, or what we/I need to keep pursuing on the way towards how we should be. Similar to our anxiety to be less inept through beauty. The mechanical process is an attempt at external consistency, but forgoes the internal. It turns the aspect of human existence reliant on beauty into a paranoid search for the unambiguous. For certainty.

VI. Our Age of Precision

The age of precision is characterized by a demand for exact and verifiable identity performance. It is the opposite of the ambiguous human experience needed for coherence. Modern technology, and the internet especially, has the tendency and potential to take the place of refined self-expression. To replace our personal craft, and exercise eloquence in our stead. In all, this an erasure of our ability to psychosocially course correct and to respond to external analysis. 

The fundamental challenge of the age of precision is no longer to maintain identity through ambiguity, to be wherever is needed for us to feel like we're not missing out—the trouble of identity in modernity25—but to be exact, to portray our identity, and analyze others, with precision. While we worried about being rigid or missing out on an experience, today we need to perform identity with clarity, to embody exactly who you are with extreme consistency. That one truth exists, that we can, and should be, headed towards the particular, is the authoritarian problem of our age.

This phenomenon is understood through the way once private aspects of our lives are made public via digital networks, for example, how illness is now performed and narrated online.26 In Peter Conrad et al.'s paper, we are shown an exchange between individuals on the public Facebook page for the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness. The posts detail the experiences and symptoms the online users had during the diagnosis process. Anyone can view or access these posts, they are not anonymous conversations. These messages "exemplify the transformation of the experience of…disease from a private illness involving a change in diet to a public experience to which a community of online users contribute and provide suggestions and recommendations…"27 The Web amplifies a human impulse: to create narratives and identities about ourselves and one another. Holding community around one's illness is an attempt to create and sustain relationships, and that is beautiful and essential because we receive support, compassion and advice. However, our urge to confess comes at the expense of our external identity, wherein it becomes exact, static, and verifiable to others. This is because people get feedback in real time, while also getting so many contradictory messages. Our online interactions tie us to exact moments in our lives, hindering our ability to develop past those moments. After ten years you are a few things to different people, although those ideas are rigid. The conversation someone had on Facebook is one of many thousands of conversations, texts and images the online person has had, shared and taken.

Even though there are now more images, texts and screenshots, we suffer from a pathology to retain and remember, to say, “what did I text them,” “when did I send that,” “who remembers I said that?” Our loss of eloquence is partly a result of this incursion on memory. Each person exists in multiple places online and in person. And as we grow, what we have said, done or written stays where it is. A constant paranoia and anxiety. 

The same happens day to day in casual conversation, whereas disclosure brings us belonging, boundaries and status. Our disclosures can be true and meaningful, and have also become relational gestures. They signal permission to disclose in turn, and position the self in a seat of authority, as having access to a certain experience.

How much you have suffered is important to how legitimate your experience is. Pain gives us social access to authenticity. It is a relationship described in Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism, day to day a "relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing."28 Digital platforms; the internet, text messages, social media, blogs, etc, work as quasi photographs, capturing who you are for a moment. The digital culture of precise documentation goes beyond personal identity to how we process human experience at large, especially suffering.

VII. The Demand for Exactness: A Disdain for the Body

The demand for precision reaches an extreme in how we process suffering, whether it is worlds away or within our neighbor. Just as personal realities such as memory and intimacy are now captured and put on display, so too is our capacity to understand and witness violence.

Susan Sontag, in her seminal work Regarding the Pain of Others, details a painful vignette of the Croatian War of Independence. During the siege, the scale of destruction was staggering, where large portions of cities and villages that had come under intense bombardment became ground, flattened. This comprehensive destruction of Croatian cities was not limited to homes, but aimed at life. The souls of murdered children were pressed to the page, and during both "Serb and Croat propaganda briefings," the "same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around… [They would] alter the caption, and the children's deaths could be used and reused."29 The children were both Croatian and Serbian, depending on the heading. What this demonstrates is the precision that modern violence necessitates, that our age of precision creates authoritarian demands for exactness. Authentic suffering serves, firstly, to legitimize the technology that demands such exactness and such precise truths, and secondly, authentic suffering serves everyone except those who suffer, who the photograph directly and indirectly entails. This attitude is conducive to violence, it is dehumanization. When we start to see people as stagnant, to know and see them only through moments, violence against the body becomes much easier. 

Furthermore, this signals a larger cultural and personal shift away from the individual and the image, towards the collective and the word.

The life of the individual is "standardized" by the collective, where the nuance of the individual is collected into a broader narrative that represents "truth." People become trapped by photographs, screenshots, texts, in online forums; documented histories, to the point where individual lives can no longer be summarized. By attempting to get at something "true," something precise, something fundamental, the person, with their ambiguities, becomes lost.

The body has become a form of data, of rhetoric. There now exists a type of person who is in  love with words, (let this not be confused with poetry). They love not just the political and social rhetoric in which our values are often compiled and drummed out, but the idea of the word itself. This is because the word replaces, or overcomes the image—much like in the Croatian War of Independence—becoming a tool of representation, a technology through which we may exact our values upon others. The image represents the body, and we disdain the body because it often does not correlate with the words we use to describe it: The body must conform. This attitude allows dehumanization to become much easier, because the word and the body, rhetoric and people, are understood to be the same.

Today, this phenomenon is exemplified through the use of large language models, where vast amounts of online information is summarized.30 If someone were to write a book, their thoughts and ideas would join the chorus of the many others with similar, if not their own, ideas. The many individual perspectives are swept up, standardized, and generated with outward cohesion. This outward cohesion is thought to be representative of getting closer and closer to the precise, as seeing an overarching pattern that permeates all the available data. In this way, logic is a sleight of hand, it makes something feel true, it doesn't necessarily correspond to it.

Digital platforms where precise terms, images, words and ideas are generated and agreed upon, create what we think are "better," more "accurate" ways of behaving and doing. In turn sustaining environments that permit violence, as one is allowed to superimpose the "right" way of doing on the collective. This models the death of the individual and a movement towards the collective, where what is spoken or written comes to instantly join the pre-established. Not only is it now much more difficult to embody the nuances of our own experience, but to "publicly" change as a person. Likewise, it has become difficult to articulate the world's or a person's trespass upon us: we cannot establish how we've been affected by others without first presenting our own categorical innocence or guilt. "I am better than you because I have not done that." Which, simply put, isn't true. The age of precision requires us to scrutinize suffering, to constantly remember what exactly we've done or what other people have done. Sustained by the trauma of uncertainty and unresolved conclusions. We have become both defendant and prosecutor in a trial against ourselves, yet the evidence (precise), and the charge (only a snapshot of our character) does not encompass who we are. It is a paranoid pathology, and a disdain for the body.

VIII. Conclusion: The Stranger in the Archive, Or Healing the Body

The course of this paper has been on the nature of eloquence: the manners in which we express ourselves, and our overall aptitude for refined self-expression about who we are and what we value. I've argued that technology is not an extension, but an essential component of our capacity for self expression, just as essential as our more "subjective" arts, such as craft. In fact, both eloquence and technology share mutual underpinnings in style, consistency and identity formation. Through the lens of Somali craft making, we come to understand eloquence as a mobile worldwide production of technological and cultural value. Our identities are a function of our technology, and our technology is representative of our identities and what we value.

Our loss of eloquence—the loss of personal narrative, of control over our story and our ability to self-define—is at once the greatest challenge of this day and age. The age of leavening the soul before it is ready to be baked, of blame, judgment, shame, and guilt—of attempting to define ourselves and have ourselves be exactly defined—is by and large a byproduct of our increasing desire and need to specify. The demand for exact and verifiable identity performance has replaced the personal craft of eloquence, leaving us fragmented and opaque. In an effort to piece together our digital image, we are confronted by a stranger in the archive; nor do we recognize who searches through the archive. Childhood is a mirage as our identities and attributes solidify in the eyes of the world and our peers much faster than they actually do within ourselves. It's a less forgiving age, less inclined to let people form and take shape. Instead, we are forced to skip backwards, to attempt to keep track of all the bits and bobs of social misconduct, of places and people and actions which don't define us—can't define us in totality. A constant paranoia. It is hard to tell if we've done anything wrong in the first place. But we feel as though we must apologize, to live our lives as pure redemption. In this way, modern technology is an assault on memory, where the throughlines of our lives are now multimedia. Our energy is now dedicated to piecing together all the loose ends of what we might have done, said, or thought, but can't remember with any certainty.

This new age is conducive to violence, as the individual is inevitably reduced to the collective. In the same way that the search for precision operates: more exact, all-encompassing "truths," necessitate the observation of as much material as possible, therefore becoming ambiguous. Extreme precision and extreme ambiguity both breed violence. Within this age, as throughout our history, our impulse toward beauty, toward internal coherence, persists. The challenge is not to abandon technology but to see eloquence as both an aesthetic and technical practice. We must resist the authoritarian, technological demand for exactness.

Although I do not know, or propose, an all-encompassing solution, it is my hope that by laying out the structure of our thought process, we may change our attitude and relationship to the human body and personality. In recognizing that technology is a form of eloquence, we must ask what we want it to say about us: who we appear to be and who we are becoming. "This isn't who I am" becomes both scream and liberation, a relieved acknowledgement that our exact, documented selves are not who we are condemned to be, that our drive towards beauty, for coherence, is found in the embodiment of our values.

Notes

1. Georges Bataille, "When Men First began to play," in Lascaux: Or, the Birth of Art, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Lausanne: Skira, 1955), 27.

2. Bataille, "When Men First began to play," 28.

3. Hesiod, Theogony; Works and Days; Shield, trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), lines 907–20. 

4. The Athenas worshiped two Charities instead of three: Auxo (Grower) and Hegemone (Leader). Pausanias, Description of Greece, 9.35.1–2.

5. John Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Athens (New York: Praeger, 1971), 79–81, fig. 80B; “Dedicated [an altar] to Aphrodite Hegemone of the Demos and to the Charites." 2. IG II² 2798, PHI Searchable Greek Inscriptions, accessed July 23, 2025, https://epigraphy.packhum.org/text/5051.

6. Rachel E. White, Stephanie M. Carlson, and Philip David Zelazo, "Symbolic Thought," in Encyclopedia of Infant and Early Childhood Development, 2nd ed., ed. Janette B. Benson (Oxford: Elsevier, 2020), 305-314, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-809324-5.23266-5; Shigeru Miyagawa, Cora Lesure, and Vitor A. Nóbrega, "Cross-Modality Information Transfer: A Hypothesis about the Relationship among Prehistoric Cave Paintings, Symbolic Thinking, and the Emergence of Language," Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018): 115, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00115.

7. El Mehdi Sehasseh et al., "Early Middle Stone Age Personal Ornaments from Bizmoune Cave, Essaouira, Morocco," Science Advances 7, no. 39 (September 22, 2021), Results section, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abi8620.

8. Fatema Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, Rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 95.

9. Sehasseh et al., "Early Middle Stone Age Personal Ornaments."

10. The region west of Egypt is known as al-Maghrib, meaning “the land of sunset,” a name that reflects its position as the farthest west of the Islamic world in classical Muslim geography. Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 1.

11. Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 316.

12. Sada Mire, "Preserving Knowledge, Not Objects: A Somali Perspective for Heritage Management and Archaeological Research," African Archaeological Review 24, no. 3/4 (2007): 66-67.

13. Mire, "Preserving Knowledge," 60.

14. Mire, "Preserving Knowledge," 60–61.

15. Sada Mire, "The Knowledge-Centred Approach to the Somali Cultural Emergency and Heritage Development Assistance in Somaliland," African Archaeological Review 28, no. 1 (2011): 78-79.

16. Paul Valéry, “Style,” in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Volume 13: Aesthetics, ed. Jackson Mathews, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 183.

17. The legendary Claude Cahun, surrealist, androgynist, theatrician attempted not so much to tame the self as to stage the self as mutable. It is in their book Disavowals that we find the aphorism, “under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.” A montage linked to their photographic practice.” Claude Cahun, Disavowals (Aveux non avenus), trans. Susan de Muth (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 183. 

18. Valéry, “Style,” 184. 

19. Paul Valéry, "Art and Technology," in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Volume 13: Aesthetics, ed. Jackson Mathews, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 223.

20. Valéry, “Art and Technology,” 223.

21. Valéry, “Art and Technology,” 222–224.

22. We desire precision, and yet precision becomes mechanical. It was Tolstoy, among others, who expressed command over our use of techne on the soul. In the process of sharpening our inner tools each of us believes our “own mode of life to be the only rational way of living, while that led by [our] friend [is] only illusion.” We have convinced ourselves that techne has nothing to do with how we perceive the world, but rather what the world requires of us as human beings and the way the world truly acts. We believe technique is not based on perception, but that it corresponds to truth. Techne is faith turned outward.” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Nathan Haskell Dole, illustrated edition (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1899), Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/annakarenina00tolsuoft.

23. Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 8-9.

24. One might argue that this academic pressure to be exact has contributed to the modern replication crisis, where a majority of published studies, particularly those in the social sciences, cannot be reproduced through independent research. What if an inner world is unreplicable, but something we must sustain and create ourselves? Open Science Collaboration, "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science," Science 349, no. 6251 (2015): aac4716, Results section, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716.

25. Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 145; Zygmunt Bauman, Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004)

26. Peter Conrad, Julia Bandini, and Alexandria Vasquez, "Illness and the Internet: From Private to Public Experience," Health 20, no. 1 (2016): 23–24.

27. Conrad et al., "Illness and the Internet," 27.

28. Lauren Berlant, "Introduction: Affect in the Present," in Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1220p4w.4.

29. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 10.

30. Emily M. Bender et al., "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜," in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (Virtual Event, Canada, March 3–10, 2021), 610–623, https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.

 

References

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Abun-Nasr, Jamil M. 1971. A History of the Maghrib. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜" In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–623. Virtual Event, Canada, March 3–10, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.

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Hesiod. Theogony; Works and Days; Shield. Translated by Apostolos N. Athanassakis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

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