Gray Area Grand Theater: Cybersentics Book Club May 2026: Ars vs. Techne – A False Dichotomy?

Drawing on lectures Lewis Mumford delivered at Columbia University in 1952, “Art and Technics” maps a tension between two seemingly disparate ways of navigating the world — one oriented toward efficiency, the other toward meaning — and argues that modern society’s fixation on technics has deprived daily life of symbolic concerns.

This divide is rather visible in the Bay Area, where the worlds of aspiring tech entrepreneurs and embattled humanists exist in parallel, with strikingly little overlap in values and an ever-widening gap in socioeconomic power. With Mumford as a guide, we will also consider AI and surveillance systems as technologies increasingly deployed not as tools of knowledge, but of control.