Currently Reading: In Search of the Human Face by Luigi Giussani 📚

Nothing is as fascinating as the discovery of the true dimension of my I, nothing so rich in surprises as the discovery of my own human face.

Absolutely excellent so far. In comparison, today I was reading this review of Allison Pugh’s The Last Human Job and a few things stood out — the magic and grace of connective labor being increasingly “disenchanted and automated”; Wall Street and Silicon Valley being “epicenters of the toniest nihilism”; and there’s this lovely view from the top:

As one venture capitalist muses, people “are interchangeable and not very mysterious, with behavior reducible to sixty-five steps.” Indeed, one technologist envisions the brave new world of cyber-connection as one in which we fleshly plebeians will have to choose whether we want to be “pets or livestock.”

But the review ends with this:

The drive to automate even the most intimate of human connections reflects one of the more insidious currents of our day: the desire to enter a prosthetic sublime, shorn of all the ineptitude and mortality of our condition. If we continue to make the work of connection a matter of data and algorithms—from the arduous work of therapy to finding romance on dating apps—we would certainly make our lives more rational, streamlined, and efficient. But if Pugh and her connective workers are right, we would also forfeit moments of “magic,” communion, grace, and love—experiences that open us up to the boundless and the ineffable. Perhaps, as those terms suggest, we defend the human best when we recall what is divine about ourselves.

Giussani seems just such a defender of the human, and a powerful one. So much of the above is adressed (all of it, even?) just in this short excerpt from the introduction. I even think it would be worth downloading a sample from Kindle just read the ~7-page introduction. There was also an excellent review of the book in Comment.