L.M. Sacasas

In the AI Story

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 academic philosophy, and Sacasas has built a readership among technologists, teachers, parents, and civic leaders who encounter Borgmann through him.

The three-stage framework — mechanization, automation, animation — names the progression Borgmann's original analysis pointed toward without completing. Mechanization replaces human muscle; automation replaces human routine; animation, the stage Sacasas associates with AI, replaces judgment, creativity, and initiative. Each stage extends the device paradigm's reach further into what had seemed distinctively human territory.

Sacasas also developed the concept of regardless power — power that takes no thought of how it disrupts the world it acts upon. The phrase captures a quality of AI that distinguishes it from earlier devices: its structural indifference to the consequences of its own operation. The AI does not care whether the practitioner builds understanding, develops skill, or experiences centering. It delivers the commodity regardless. The indifference is not malice; it is the signature of a system designed to produce output efficiently, without reference to what production might or might not provide.

The endorsement from Borgmann — rare for a thinker not primarily known as a philosopher — is itself significant. Borgmann was cautious about which applications of his work he endorsed; his identification of Sacasas's project as one that could succeed in transforming a culture urgently in need of transformation represents a philosophical passing-of-the-torch to a thinker working in a different medium for a different audience.

Origin

L.M. Sacasas has taught in humanities programs and runs The Convivial Society as an independent newsletter. His essays appear in The New Atlantis, Comment, and other venues at the intersection of technology criticism and philosophy.

The Convivial Society title nods to Ivan Illich's Tools for Conviviality (1973), which itself shares considerable philosophical territory with Borgmann's framework — though Illich's political emphasis differs from Borgmann's phenomenological one.

Key Ideas

Mechanization → Automation → Animation. The three stages of technological replacement, culminating in AI's replacement of judgment and creativity.

Regardless power. Technological systems that take no thought of how they disrupt the world they act upon; AI's structural indifference is the defining case.

Phenomenology as newsletter. Careful attention to lived experience of digital technology, delivered in accessible serial form.

Borgmann-endorsed extension. Direct philosophical continuity with Borgmann's project, acknowledged by Borgmann himself.

Convivial as counter-concept. Drawing on Illich, Sacasas frames the alternative to device-paradigm life in terms of tools that enable rather than replace human capacity.