Pressing Play on Techno-Visions: Getting the Summer Started

We’re beaming this letter to you through the Summer Book Club website. The purpose of the message is threefold: welcome you to the club, put the communication system through its paces, and share a lesson from Uncle Alex.

Welcome and Getting Started

First, I want to welcome you to Techno-Visions. Next week, the week of July 29, we’ll officially kick off the book club. We’ll start posting bonus content and release the schedule for the summer. In the meantime, be sure to pick up your copy of Player Piano, and feel free to start reading.

So far we have members from nearly two dozen countries, representing every continent except Antarctica. (We haven't quite figured out how to break into the South Pole market yet. As evolution would have it, penguins can’t fly or read. Well, at least for now, with the timeframe required to possibly change that fact not looking favorable.)

Your family, friends, and colleagues can read (at least for now). And there is still time to get them on board. Recently, I’ve had a number of conversations where the topic started somewhere else but found its way to AI and the future of technology. It’s a topic on a lot of people’s minds. 

Do your social circle a favor: save them from doom scrolling social media this summer by inviting them to Techno-Visions. A good book and good discussion with other people beats algorithmically-curated, race-to-the-bottom-to-get-to-the-top content every time. (It's by consuming that content that humans will end up like penguins, flightless and illiterate.)

To invite your family, friends, and colleagues, simply share the full announcement or direct them to the How to Join page.

Testing . . . Testing . . .

The book club website gives us the power to send emails, publish articles, or do both at the same time (the newsletter-cum-article popularized by platforms like Ghost and Substack). This message, if the internet gods are smiling on us, should exist as both an email and a published post on the website. 

All of the bonus content and key logistical info will similarly arrive as an email and live on the website. For brief updates, reminders, and anything else we want to keep just between us, we’ll use the email-only function. This way you don’t have to worry about saving all the bonus content somewhere in your inbox, nor do you have to worry that you’ve missed or misplaced a key logistical detail. 

As a reminder the book club website is: bookclub.behavioralscientist.org.

A Lesson from Uncle Alex

As I’ve been preparing ideas for this summer, it struck me how nice it is to be able to spend the warmer months with people who are up for going on an intellectual adventure. It seems apt to share a lesson that Kurt Vonnegut’s Uncle Alex passed on to him. Vonnegut writes:

“One of the things [Uncle Alex] found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when they were happy. He himself did his best to acknowledge it when times were sweet. 

“We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’

“So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’”

If this isn’t nice, what is?

Evan Nesterak
Editor-in-Chief