“Maybe what we’re looking for is fewer robot vacuum cleaners and more compost toilets.”
We stumble into a new series of The Great Humbling with an episode that revolves around shit and technology. This is also our first video episode, so you can watch our beardy faces on Substack or YouTube.
Shownotes
Ed’s been reading The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, alongside How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm.
Also Andrei Kirkov’s Death and the Penguin.
Dougald talks about Em Strang’s novel, Quinn. Also her newly launched Substack, Emerging Hermit – and especially the ‘Our Violent Men’ series that she is embarking on.
Ed talks about Simeon Morris’s one-man show, Square Peg.
Dougald introduces a little book called Notes on Nothing by Anonymous.
Also an episode of the Spiritual Teachers podcast called The Hillbilly Sutra, a one-off telling of the story of a Nashville banjo player who had a similar experience – and who, despite the podcast’s title, has no interest in selling himself as a spiritual teacher.
‘My iRobot vacuum found dog poo and almost created World War III’
Cory Doctorow’s original post about “enshittification”.
Paul Virilio’s observation that every new technology brings into being a new kind of accident can be found in The Politics of the Very Worst.
Ed talks about meeting Jess Groopman of the Regenerative Technology Project.
Dougald remembers the vacuum cleaner scene in the first episode of Meet the Natives, the 2007 documentary series in which a group of men from a village in Vanuatu came on an anthropological expedition to study the three tribes of the British Isles: the middle class, the working class and the upper class.
Ed introduces us to the art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast and we talk about trickster ways of using technology.
Marvin Kranzberg’s Laws of Technology.
The episode from Season 5 when we talked about Neto Leão’s idea of the “low agreements”.
Carl Jung did indeed have a vision of a giant turd landing on Basel Cathedral.
Thanks for listening, sharing and getting in touch! Look out for
’s public events in London next week – and a new five-week online series with a school called HOME, starting on 6 & 7 November.
The Great Humbling S6E1: When the Shit Hits the Roomba