Was St. Francis of Assisi the First Silicon Valley Critic? Dan Turello on 800-Years of Tech Anxiety

00:00] Andrew Keen: Hello. My name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

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[01:00] Andrew Keen: Hello everybody. A couple of months ago, a very interesting piece appeared in the New Yorker by my guest today, Dan Turello, called "The Robot and the Philosopher." It was an essay about photography in some ways — photography and technology — a story of how Turello photographed the humanoid robot Sophia and the tech philosopher David Chalmers. It's part of a book that Turello has just out this week, called Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans. Dan Turello is joining us from Washington, D.C., where he lives. Dan, has technology made you a better human, especially your use of photography?

[01:54] Dan Turello: Good to see you, Andrew. Thanks so much for having me on the show. I guess it all depends on what we mean by "better," and that's always been the big question mark for the title. I tend to think of technology as a tool that gives us more protected space. It provides a greater sense of agency, it provides more opportunities — it can provide more opportunities for personal interactions and for all of the ceremonies and rituals and relationships that can — again, "can" being the operative word — make our life rich. So in terms of photography in particular, I think there are two sides to the story. On one hand, I'm very resistant to the type of photography that takes cell phones everywhere and is constantly trying to capture the moment and in a way takes away from the experience of being present and embodied with someone. On the other hand, if photography and cameras, like any other technology, are used in a conscious, deliberate manner, they can be an amazing avenue for self-reflection, for philosophical reflection. It's a way of viewing and seeing the world, and it can be an invitation to slow down and take the moment more seriously. So in that sense, yes, absolutely.

[03:22] Andrew Keen: That's the question, of course, when you come out with a book called Connection and a subtitle How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans. The question is what exactly a "better human" is — and indeed what a human is. What's wrong, though, Dan? You're a semi-professional photographer; your portraits are wonderful. I've been looking at your website, and anyone interested should follow up on your work. But what's the difference between your work, which is carefully thought out — and this is what you examine in your New Yorker essay, the skill it requires in taking photographs — you quote the great photographer Bresson, who talks about, I think, the "perfect moment" or the "ideal moment" for taking a photograph. And the people who just pull out their iPhone to snap a nice view — is there any difference in those two actions in terms of making us better humans? Does using one's iPhone to photograph the world make us worse humans?

[04:24] Dan Turello: I would argue that it's actually not about the technology. This photo I have right behind me — it's an orange cushion —

[04:34] Andrew Keen: Some people will be listening to this, Dan, so you should probably describe it to them.

[04:38] Dan Turello: Oh, right. So I was at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and of course there was amazing art on the walls, but there was also this orange cushion with a beautiful shape and color and texture. And so I snapped a photo with my iPhone. I call it my "Ode to Imperfection," because when I blew it up, there were blemishes; the lens was not ideal, the lighting was not ideal, and yet it was a moment I cherished. So I would strongly suggest that it's not about the technology — it's about the attitude and awareness one brings to it. You can be out with your iPhone and be in a very present, embodied state and take wonderful, amazing photos and portraits.

[05:39] Andrew Keen: And I wonder whether that orange — the orange on your wall behind you — shows up also on the cover of Connection. Do you have a thing about orange, Dan?

[05:49] Dan Turello: I do love orange, for whatever reason! But my primary request to Columbia University Press and to the designer — I didn't specify any colors. I simply wanted to avoid gadgets and widgets and wires and chips — anything that would be stereotypically thought of as current, contemporary technology, I wanted to stay away from. Because really my definition of technology, my way of using technology, goes back much further in history and is less about the artifact and much more about relationships.

[06:27] Andrew Keen: And you are a cultural historian of the medieval period and an expert on everyone from St. Francis of Assisi to Dante, the great Italian philosopher-poet. Dan, from your historical vantage point, are we living in particularly anti-tech times? My show — I could do a show every day on a new book suggesting that technology, AI, social media, the internet is destroying humanity. Has that always been the case? Was it true in the time of St. Francis of Assisi and Dante? Were they as obsessed with criticizing technology? Of course they didn't have iPhones or the internet or AI, but they had technologies which, in some people's minds at least, interfered with what it meant to be human.

[07:22] Dan Turello: Let me answer that in a few different ways, and I'll provide a spoiler alert here. When people hear I'm talking about technology, they typically assume I'm talking about social media and, of course, large language models, because those are what's on our minds these days. And LLMs are a whole different story — we can get into that. But social media, at least, I think I have a somewhat unconventional view. My wild prediction is that 100 or 200 years from now, when historians look back, they will view this phenomenon as profoundly disruptive, but it's only been around for about 20 years. In a way, I see it like a virus we haven't quite metabolized yet. We're still getting used to it, still figuring out what it means. But we're also developing new technologies to help us interact in a more fruitful way — everything from apps that limit the time we spend on Instagram and TikTok, to all the studies coming out now showing how detrimental social media can be for childhood development. So I think we're going to move past that, and that's maybe wildly optimistic and somewhat speculative, but that tends to be my take.

In terms of the Franciscans and Dante — the technologies they were reacting to — "technology" as a term itself really only goes back to the 1860s in the U.S. context. So what I'm referring to analytically as technology during earlier periods was the mechanical arts, devices, or simply materiality. But what was happening in 13th-century medieval Europe was the beginning of a commercial revolution. A lot of the mechanisms we would recognize as modern today had their beginnings during this time. We see the beginnings of double-entry bookkeeping; the first insurance mechanisms are taking shape; inter-city trade from Italy into France and North Africa is developing. And St. Francis really comes of age during this period, in the 12th century and the early decades of the 1200s. I call him a "trust-fund kid avant la lettre" — his father was a wealthy silk merchant. As the story goes, Francis decides he wants to renovate a church that had fallen into disrepair, takes some of his father's silk, sells it, donates the proceeds — and when his father summons him before the bishop to return the goods, he strips in public and returns his inheritance. This is the beginning of the Franciscan order. It was really one of the first counterculture moments in Europe, a movement away from mechanisms that were seen as depersonalizing — pulling people away from their families into other cities and countries, increasing trade, generating a general sense of movement of people and goods. Those are all things that Francis, and later Dante, would react to.

[11:27] Andrew Keen: So are you implying — and I know the book is quite ambitious, a short book that covers a lot of material — you bring up the Marxist Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, the great critic of capitalism. Are you tying the origins of modernity and modern technology with the origins of capitalism? Particularly in your analysis of St. Francis of Assisi, double-entry bookkeeping, and wealthy kids rebelling against their parents — is there a connection between our ambivalence, our love-hate relationship with technology and perhaps our love-hate relationship with capitalism?

[12:12] Dan Turello: That's part of the story, though I would go back even further. I really think of technology theoretically as everything that goes beyond the naked human body. This of course ties into myth: when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, they were naked — the first thing they did was find fig leaves and animal skins to cover their bodies and mitigate their shame, in a sense. In this way, the idea of technology is really metaphysically destabilizing — and we can come back to Žižek in that context — because technology is designed to make something better. You're trying to fix something, improve something. So that begs the question: is history moving in a direction? Is there a sense of cultural and technological evolution? Are things getting better? And I think a lot of what we see in parts of the environmental movement and parts of religious movements is this desire to return to a pre-technological innocence — a Garden of Eden where technology was not a factor and things were simply good the way they were. We also see this in thinkers like Graeber, who are looking back to the origins of —

[13:50] Andrew Keen: David Graeber, of course, who is no longer with us. Intellectually and philosophically, we might trace this school back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who offers an alternative notion of progress to perhaps Marx. I mentioned to you earlier, Dan, that I know you haven't come across Kevin Ashton's new book. Kevin Ashton is a technologist who coined the phrase "The Internet of Things." His new book, The Story of Stories, suggests that we invented language to tell stories — that something in us wants to tell stories, and that impulse came before language, so we created words in order to tell stories. Reading between the lines of what you're saying, you seem to be suggesting that we also use technology — and that's a very loose term to include everything from iPhones to clothing — to tell stories. Is that what you're suggesting?

[15:00] Dan Turello: One of the stories I like to tell goes back to Italy in the early decades of the 20th century. It's a fascinating time, culturally. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was in Paris and then Milan, and he wrote the Futurist Manifesto in 1908 — kinetic, virile, masculine, based on the cult of speed and beauty. Meanwhile, in a different city just to the east — Trieste, a port city on the Adriatic that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I — a gentleman was writing under the pen name Italo Svevo, which literally means "Italian" and "Swabian." His real name was Ettore Schmitz. He was friends with James Joyce — Joyce was in Trieste around the same time and was actually Svevo's English teacher, which is how some of his novels came to be known outside Italy. One of the essays Svevo wrote was titled "L'uomo e la teoria darwiniana" — "Man and Darwinian Theory" — and in it he tells a fable about our ancestors. He speculates that at some point early man was running around outdoors, exhausted by the elements and other beasts. So what does he do? He finds the biggest beast he can — a mammoth — and says, "Let's make a deal. I'll scratch your back; in return you protect me from the elements." Svevo calls this a "pause." It's what gives human beings a chance to develop other implements and tools, to develop the ceremonies and first iterations of cultural expression. My takeaway is that even before language, and in addition to language, the real beginnings of technology are rooted in the development of relationships — mutual relationships with the environment, with other creatures, with other human beings.

[17:54] Andrew Keen: So the "social" is core — something that keeps coming up. Another very influential philosopher from roughly the same era as Marinetti and your Austro-Hungarian friend Svevo was the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin. His book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction seems to cover a lot of the same ground you address in Connection. What is the relationship, in your view, between modern technology and our ability to reproduce art — whether photograph, music, or writing — so easily? Has that made us better or worse humans?

[18:49] Dan Turello: I talk about Walter Benjamin in the context of a chapter about The Matrix. Benjamin was writing about film and cinema's ability to reproduce a scene and create an environment almost indistinguishable from reality. My sense of its importance is that at the end of the day, technology is about power — about who controls the storyline. Being able to identify who is telling the story, how they're telling it, what sources they're drawing from, how they're constructing the narrative — that ultimately determines who has the greater sense of agency and the broader view of what's actually going on. So yes, reproduction is incredibly important, but even more important, I would argue, is the sense of lineage — being able to trace where ideas come from. We're seeing that challenge now with LLMs. LLMs, which are in some ways amazingly creative, generate all sorts of material and information — but then it really becomes a matter of triangulating: where did that come from? What sources did it derive from? Can it be validated? Does it actually match what's real in the real world?

[20:51] Andrew Keen: And this gets back to your book, or at least the purpose of a writer, photographer, or filmmaker today. Is it to pass down wisdom — special kinds of wisdom — or is it to empower one's reader, viewer, listener? You, like most contemporary artists, I'm guessing, wear two hats. In your New Yorker piece, adapted from one of the chapters in Connection, you quote Bresson — I mentioned him earlier — and his phrase "the decisive moment." As a photographer, you capture images at decisive moments, just as a writer reaches a climax. And yet in the introduction to Connection you also quote Nietzsche and suggest that readers should in some sense blow your book up and start again — that you shouldn't begin at the beginning but should perhaps find a later chapter: seven or eight or six. So what's the point of Connection, Dan? Did you write it to empower your reader? Or to reach that decisive intellectual moment and pass down some wisdom?

[22:25] Dan Turello: When I think about what I really hope for — for a reader of my book, and really for any human being anywhere — my hope for humanity, as grandiose as that may sound, is that we would recover a sense of agency. I think agency is under attack these days. There's the idea of technological determinism — technology having the upper hand, guiding our decisions, being a system out of control — and I really want to fight back against that. The sense that agency matters; that we have the ability to make decisions that influence our lives, our personal choices, our friendships, our relationships, our communities. We need to reclaim those.

The second big idea in the book is embodiment — the sense that our felt experience matters, matters a lot. It's fundamental. And so going back to where we started: the idea that social media will no longer dominate our lived experience in the future. Coming back to being present with people, with our communities, with those who surround us. The introduction acknowledges that the reader will probably not read the book cover to cover —

[24:16] Andrew Keen: It's a short book, though — they should be able to.

[24:18] Dan Turello: They should, yeah! It's open! But what I'd actually rather people do is read it and then gather in community and talk about the ideas — what they mean off the page. I hope it's an existential book that will provide perspectives and greater opportunities for choice. And there is a little nostalgia in it, though I'm not a big believer in nostalgia. But if there's any, it's certainly a sense that we've lost our ability to concentrate. I remember being in my 20s and being able to sit down and read a Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky novel cover to cover in a week or two. I seem to have lost that ability, at least for now, and I think a lot of people around us have as well. I hope we're able to get back to that. But there's a bit of a tactical retreat here — I understand that you're driven by curiosity and you'll read the book as you see fit, dipping into whichever chapters appeal to you.

[25:47] Andrew Keen: It's a short book, so if you can't read this one, you're certainly not going to read Crime and Punishment or War and Peace. These issues around reading books cover to cover are something we've talked about endlessly on this show; my old friend Nick Carr, the author of The Shallows, has been on when we've discussed this in many different conversations. Dan, I'm sniffing a little bit of the cult of the social about you. What's so good about the social? Why can't we read on our own? Why do we have to talk about it with others? Why should we share our photography, our poetry, our songs? What is it about the social that makes us more human or better humans? Why can't we just be alone? Other philosophers — Hobbes, for example — suggested that by nature we're solitary. Why shouldn't we celebrate that?

[26:54] Dan Turello: I love the question because it's wonderfully ironic for me. I've been a lifelong introvert. My natural habitat is with a book on my own, and I'm perfectly comfortable in that scenario. Opportunities for peace and reflection are fantastic. That said, I think it was C.S. Lewis who said something to the effect — or at least it was in the movie Shadowlands; I'm not convinced he actually said it —

[27:30] Andrew Keen: If he said it in the movie, he really did say it, Dan! We're all hyper-realists on this show.

[27:36] Dan Turello: He said we read so as not to feel alone. We're able to connect with other people, their emotions, their ideas. And you may have mentioned this too at some point — there's a wonderful letter by Niccolò Machiavelli, who of course is remembered as a Realpolitik political theorist and perhaps a little ruthless. But in this letter he talks about returning to his study at the end of a long day, donning distinguished robes, and spending three or four hours reading the classics — feeling very much at home and very much comforted in the company of those ideas. So I don't think it needs to be an either-or. When we're reading, we're engaging with ideas across time, with other minds, other human beings. And that's all the more reason to do it in community as well. A little bit of both.

[28:44] Andrew Keen: I love that Machiavelli story — that he donned the robes of the past not just to think but to write. Coming back to your point about technology making us better humans: you suggested earlier that clothing is technology. So Machiavelli putting on the clothing of the past is in a way making him a better human. And you suggested earlier that you didn't much care for nostalgia — but Benjamin makes this point brilliantly: that our love of technology is a form of nostalgia. And that might not be such a bad thing; it's again what makes us human.

[29:30] Dan Turello: I think of nostalgia in a couple of different ways. There's the viral variety, identified by Swiss doctors as literally the longing to return home — a longing that can never be fulfilled; you can't go back into the past, you can't recreate a situation or a body politic or anything else you're trying to recreate. Where I identify with nostalgia is in the idea of a felt sense — we long for the days from our childhood when we felt safe and protected, or when we were in a particular geography or landscape or home. And that emotional import we're longing for, I think we can recreate, thanks to our choices, thanks to how we choose to interact in the world.

[30:29] Andrew Keen: The subtitle of your new book — How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans — is very provocative; everyone will have strong views on it. You've mentioned AI. We live in an age of AI — a recent big story was about Anthropic's dispute with the U.S. government, with Anthropic expressing reservations about its AI technology being controlled by the government. Anthropic has strong feelings about technology making us better humans. But isn't all technology, and in particular AI, ultimately just a reflection of us? There's no real separation between the clothing, the computers, the phones, the artificial intelligence we make, and us. So "technology can make us better humans" might be rephrased as "humans can make us better humans."

[31:30] Dan Turello: I think I would agree with that. Ultimately, I think of technology as embedded. Another viable subtitle for the book might have been Why Agency and Embodiment Still Matter — which would have been a little more —

[31:51] Andrew Keen: I don't know if you want to add "embodiment" — that might put people off buying the book. But certainly "agency."

[31:58] Dan Turello: Agency, yes. The other big philosophical debate the book tackles is simply: is now the best time to be alive? I mention Pinker and the idea that we generally have fewer wars, more peace, more opportunities for self-development. But there are some big problems with that view, one of which is that even if we are in an age of relative peace — and I say relative — all of that could go away in the blink of an eye. In twenty minutes we could have a nuclear holocaust or some other cataclysm. So it's a somewhat precarious time to be alive. That said, I come back to the thought experiment: if I had the chance to choose when to be alive, it would certainly be now. Not any other time in the past. I'm cognizant of the fact that I'm sitting in a privileged position — I'm a white man living in the United States — and I might have a different take if I were working in a mine in Central Africa or a factory in China.

[33:38] Andrew Keen: If you could change anything, what would you have? A full head of hair, Dan?

[33:43] Dan Turello: No, I would not go back to that! This is incredibly convenient! Absolutely.

[33:51] Andrew Keen: For listeners, Dan doesn't have a full head of hair, to put it politely. You look a little shocked, Dan. What would you change? Anything, in your current situation?

[34:06] Dan Turello: What would I change in society? If anything, I would want to go to the future. That's what really makes me most curious —

[34:17] Andrew Keen: And you touch on some futurists in your book. It's a very ambitious book — you write about everyone from St. Francis of Assisi to adrienne maree brown and the great science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Let's end here, Dan. There's so much to think about — a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation. Your academic expertise is in medieval Italy, St. Francis of Assisi, Dante — what do you think these figures (and I know it's hard to generalize) would make of AI, of Anthropic, of OpenAI, and of our outsourcing of our writing, our thinking, our photography to artificial intelligence, to smart machines?

[35:16] Dan Turello: What always amazes me about Dante is that he managed to pen the entire Divine Comedy — an extraordinary macrocosm of the medieval world — without being able to go back and edit and rewrite in any meaningful way. So I think he might be rather concerned that we are losing our memories, our ability to tell a coherent narrative for our lives, and that our lives have become too fragmented. It's a great question. Dante wanted to return to the ancient walls of Florence — going back to Machiavelli and his robes, what Dante idealizes in the Comedy and the Paradiso was actually an earlier version of Florence, what scholars have called "paleolithic chic." He goes back to the days when people did not wear makeup and did not wear ornate clothes. So I think he would want to return to a much more intimate, small, congenial community. But again, coming back to my thoughts on nostalgia, I'm not a proponent of that view — because I think it's trying to reconstruct a past that will never return.

[37:05] Andrew Keen: Which you recognize — and which may be the great challenge. Finally, you're a photographer who has taken wonderful photographs of all sorts of things — people, nature — your X page is a wonderful gallery of unspoiled nature. In your New Yorker piece you talk about working in Lightroom, the Adobe platform that enables you to manipulate photographs. What's the best experience of Lightroom for you as a photographer? What does it enable you to do as a human? It's hardcore technology — how does Lightroom make you a better human when you go in to develop your photographs?

[37:54] Dan Turello: The wonderful thing about Lightroom is that you get to see a catalog of everything you shot. Say you're photographing someone for a portrait — you shoot over 15, 20, 30 minutes — and you get to see the entire range of someone's emotions. Some are comical, some are just absurd. What's always remarkable is how quickly human emotions change, how much expression you can see in someone's eyes, in their micro-movements, their micro-expressions. Micro-expressions last for a fraction of a second. At any given moment, someone may be recalling a childhood memory, or thinking about what they had for breakfast, or feeling a particular mood because it's raining or the sun is out. All of that shows up in their facial expressions and how they're presenting to the world. Going back in Lightroom, you have a record of all of that — you see these emotions playing out in real time.

[39:26] Andrew Keen: Dan Turello, a wonderful, wide-ranging conversation — philosophy, medieval Europe, photography, AI. The new book is out; it's called Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans. Best of luck with the book, Dan, and thanks so much for appearing on the show.

[39:48] Dan Turello: Andrew, thanks so much for a wonderful and engaging conversation.

[39:53] Andrew Keen: Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We're on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify — all the places. And I'd be very curious to hear your comments on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests you'd enjoy hearing from in future. Thank you again.