The best books about technology

are not about technology. They’re not about the latest innovation or invention. They’re not an intervention in the news cycle, much less punditry about A.I. or the internet or digital or television or motion pictures or radio or the automobile or the printing press. They’re not dated the moment the car rolls off the lot.

The best books about technology are about humanity—about what it means to be human and about life well lived and urgent threats to the good life. Because technology is essentially a human thing, good writing about technology is good writing about human things. A doctrine of technology is only as good as its doctrine of man; indeed, not only depends upon but is a doctrine of man. The technologist is an anthropologist, from first to last.

Which is why, incidentally, the best technologists are philosophers and theologians. In Calvin’s words:

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other. For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone. In the second place, those blessings which unceasingly distill to us from heaven, are like streams conducting us to the fountain.

What, then, are the best books (not) about technology that I have read? A short list would include Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath; Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos; François Mauriac’s The Eucharist; Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir; Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture; Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope; Stephen King’s On Writing; Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans; Pascal’s Pensées; and many more.

These are my models for good technology writing: not because they talk about technology but because they comment—uniquely, stylishly, with voice and perspective and courage—on the human condition. Today’s apps are yesterday’s fads, but the human condition isn’t going anywhere. Write, therefore, when you set out to write about technology, about what it means to be human today; seek the latter and the former will be added unto you.