The Tribe of Cool: Information Culture and History

Alan Liu will be reading from the conclusion to his book-in-progress on "The Laws of Cool." The book is about the way information culture both serves and—not quite the same—expresses the dominant forms of postindustrial "knowledge work." Where once workers wanted a "decent wage for a decent day's work," now decency is not the ethos under which knowledge workers make an equivalent demand for dignity. Instead, as expressed in the way they use and view information technology, knowledge workers want to be "cool." What is postindustrial "information cool"? How does it focus or transform the industrial-age ethos of social cool that originally emerged in the 20th century? Why is "cool" so often expressed as a fundamental misalignment between cutting-edge technologies and socially "residual" techniques? And in the age of perpetual speed-up and "innovation," is such creative misalignment in the techniques that allow people to enjoy working with technologies all that remains of the sense of history (i.e., the sense of a living past)? The talk finishes with speculations about the primary mission of humanities education in the age of information technology.