The Great Humbling S6E1: When the S**t Hits the Roomba

“Maybe what we’re looking for is fewer robot vacuum cleaners and more compost toilets.”

We stumble into a new series of The Great Humbling with an episode that revolves around s**t and technology. This is also our first video episode, so you can watch our beardy faces on Substack or YouTube.

Shownotes

* Ed’s been reading The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, alongside How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm.

* Also Andrei Kirkov’s Death and the Penguin.

* Dougald talks about Em Strang’s novel, Quinn. Also her newly launched Substack, Emerging Hermit – and especially the ‘Our Violent Men’ series that she is embarking on.

* Ed talks about Simeon Morris’s one-man show, Square Peg.

* Dougald introduces a little book called Notes on Nothing by Anonymous.

* Also an episode of the Spiritual Teachers podcast called The Hillbilly Sutra, a one-off telling of the story of a Nashville banjo player who had a similar experience – and who, despite the podcast’s title, has no interest in selling himself as a spiritual teacher.

* ‘My iRobot vacuum found dog poo and almost created World War III’

* Cory Doctorow’s original post about “enshittification”.

* Paul Virilio’s observation that every new technology brings into being a new kind of accident can be found in The Politics of the Very Worst.

* Ed talks about meeting Jess Groopman of the Regenerative Technology Project.

* Dougald remembers the vacuum cleaner scene in the first episode of Meet the Natives, the 2007 documentary series in which a group of men from a village in Vanuatu came on an anthropological expedition to study the three tribes of the British Isles: the middle class, the working class and the upper class.

* Ed introduces us to the art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast and we talk about trickster ways of using technology.

* Marvin Kranzberg’s Laws of Technology.

* The episode from Season 5 when we talked about Neto Leão’s idea of the “low agreements”.

* Carl Jung did indeed have a vision of a giant turd landing on Basel Cathedral.

Thanks for listening, sharing and getting in touch! Look out for Dougald Hine’s public events in London next week – and a new five-week online series with a school called HOME, starting on 6 & 7 November.