Dan Turello's "Connection"

Dan Turello is a writer, photographer, and cultural historian, and a Technology and Humanity Fellow at the Center for Future of Mind, AI & Society at Florida Atlantic University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans, and reported the following:

From page 99:

How the costs required to consume and produce are measured is important, both aesthetically, in terms of how effort and striving are portrayed, as well as philosophically, because how energy expenditures are measured and accounted for influences perceptions of value, sacrifice, and perceived trade-offs. The strands of these debates, at least in the Western world where our current neoliberal ideas about markets developed, can be traced to debates that took shape during the Renaissance, and the three characters I have mentioned provide an excellent entry point.

Page 99 is remarkably representative: it sets a tone and direction for the next pages of Renaissance art and environmental history. The book, however, is not primarily a history, and this too, I hope, is evident from that paragraph—the history shows up in service of gaining our bearings philosophically and existentially, in the present moment.

The “three characters” I refer to had appeared a few pages earlier: “A German engineer, a Florentine Sculptor, and a courtier from Urbino” who, at the start of Chapter 5 (Insatiable Artists: Technology and Consumer Identity in the Renaissance) I had imagined walking into a proverbial bar. Though Benvenuto Cellini (the Italian sculptor), Georgius Agricola (the German engineer, and Baldassar Castiglione (the courtier from Urbino) never knew each other in real life, the strands of their thinking and writing reverberate down through to our time, when discussions around awareness of environmental costs, effort, labor, sustainability, and so on, have become even more important.

What page 99 does not capture quite as well is the breadth of sources I draw from throughout the book: poetry, lyric, autobiography, Medieval and Renaissance history, but also classical and contemporary philosophy, and film (a dialogue from Pulp Fiction appears just a few pages later, while The Matrix had informed an earlier chapter). All of these strands serve to give context and texture to contemporary debates around our fraught, yet ongoing and vital relationship with technology in all its forms.

Visit Dan Turello's website.

--Marshal Zeringue