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Law in Contemporary Society
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Hey all,
First, I was hoping that, given the desire of our class to cultivate a community of some kind, we could start that with a place to share something.In that regard, please comment/reply/discuss any of your favorite podcast episodes -- any topic, related or not!
In light of some of our discussions -- autonomy, structural ecosystems, and opportunity costs in our lives -- I have been thinking a lot about students' unique, perhaps totalizing, intersection between "work" and "life," and have found technology can be a tremendous catalyst in making that relationship better or worse.
On that point, I wanted to share the most recent Ezra Klein podcast with Cal Newport. Cal is the author of books such as Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. He writes on the intersection between modern work, human life, and technology. I found a lot of the themes in the episode to touch on the ideas we have been batting around.
Description & links below. I hope you all enjoy, and I am looking forward to hearing what you think and listening to your suggestions. Cheers!
We were promised, with the internet, a productivity revolution. We were told that we’d get more done, in less time, with less stress. Instead, we got always-on communication, the dissolution of the boundaries between work and home, the feeling of constantly being behind, lackluster productivity numbers, and, to be fair, reaction GIFs. What went wrong? Cal Newport is a computer scientist at Georgetown and the author of books trying to figure that out.
At the center of his work is the idea that the technologies billed as offering us more productive, happier, socially rich lives have left us more exhausted, empty and stressed out than ever. He’s doing something not enough people do: questioning whether this was all worth it. My critique of Newport’s work has always been that it focuses too much on the individual: Telling someone whose workplace communicates exclusively via Slack and email to be a “digital minimalist” is like telling someone who lives in a candy store to diet.
But his 2021 book, “A World Without Email,” is all about systems — specifically, the systems that govern how we work. In it, Newport makes a radical argument: We are living through a massive, rolling failure of markets and firms to rethink work for the digital age. But that can change. We can change it. This conversation with Newport was originally recorded in March of 2021, but it's just as relevant today as ever.
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000551863964
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-cal-newport-transcript.html
-- ConnorHudson - 22 Feb 2022
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