An independent research center in Princeton, New Jersey.
This event is a part of the Witherspoon Forum, a program which provides a space for high school students who are serious about their studies to discuss foundational questions of human existence and contemporary cultural issues in dialogue with their peers and Witherspoon’s seminar leaders. To attend, students should apply here.
How do we retain our humanity in the Information Age? What practices and institutions from the pre-computing world can guide us when social media proposes to replace socializing? All three of our authors in this series—Vonnegut, Hayek, and Lewis—lived through the civilizational cataclysm of World War II, and all of them took seriously the possibility that vast computing power would be used in an attempt to rationally organize entire societies. Today their worries seem to have been realized by the capacity of Big Tech to aggregate the data of billions of people, in collaboration with governments. Drawing on these texts, we will discuss how to master our tools rather than be mastered by them.