PERSON
L.M. Sacasas
The American writer whose Convivial Society project and three-stage framework — mechanization, automation, animation — extends Borgmann's analysis into the AI era, and whom Borgmann himself publicly endorsed.
L.M. Sacasas is an American essayist and media scholar whose newsletter The Convivial Society has become one of the most sustained attempts to apply the phenomenological and device-paradigm traditions to contemporary digital life. His three-stage framework — mechanization (replacing muscle), automation (replacing routine), and animation (replacing judgment, creativity, and initiative) — maps the technological trajectory from the steam engine through the assembly line to AI. Sacasas has drawn explicitly on Borgmann's device paradigm and, notably, Borgmann endorsed Sacasas's work shortly before his death — describing the project as potentially transformative for a culture "urgently in need of transformation."
In The You On AI Field Guide
Sacasas's contribution to the Borgmann tradition is to make it newsletter-sized. The Convivial Society operates as serialized phenomenology of digital life, examining specific experiences — the notification, the algorithmic feed, the chatbot exchange — with the patient attention Borgmann brought to the hearth and the musical instrument. The accessibility is strategic: the device paradigm needs to reach people who will never read