Language and Speech: The Sticks and Stones of Culture

Most of the thoughts in this volume are unorthodox because conventional thinking cannot account for the processes that evoked them: the distortions caused by digital capitalism, which has undermined our markets; the impending longevity escape velocity, which threatens to expand our lives practically to the end of time; the combined phenomena of dwindling human expertise and soaring machine mastery and skill, which promises to turn us all into sorcerer’s apprentices. One of the areas where all these developments are manifested most prominently is language. Language, the quintessential thinking tool, is gradually being supplanted by generative AI, which is now speaking for us and will soon be thinking for us as well. Or is it already? A shrinking proportion of humans has the training to process the implications of this change for life on Earth. These essays, written over many years, discuss various apparently unrelated topics (law, folklore, pronouns) and characters (Dante, Derrida, Dracula), all of them pointing in the same direction and indicating that language, like geography, is destiny-the alpha and omega of civilization. The title of the collection contains three of its primary keywords: language, speech, and culture. The essays provide snapshots of the state of these at various points in time, usually during periods of transition in the past, present, and the imagined future. Such snapshots may no longer be possible in the future, when a state of permanent transition will make it impossible to capture static representations of a reality in which by the time we put a period at the end of a sentence, what we wrote at the beginning of it is no longer true.