What is Nature/Culture?
Nature/Culture is a newsletter about the promise and peril of technology. It seeks synthesis out of thesis and antithesis. And it orients the reader toward building and cultivating, not just criticism or navel-gazing.
Nature/Culture releases on the 4th Tuesday of each month, at 11:00AM ET.
About me
My name is John Fechtel. In my day-to-day life, I am the Product Director at Generate, where we make tools to transform the way buildings are built.
I am an architect by training, and a writer by interest and necessity. My work has appeared in The New Atlantis, The Hedgehog Review, and Front Porch Republic.
I am a graduate of the University of Florida and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where my latent interest in nature, culture, and technology was activated both by the unique technical and cultural environs of MIT and by a course entitled Technopolitics, Culture, Intervention.
Why you should subscribe
Technology in the broadest sense is a mediating object between us. We are in what I’ll call the third, synthetic stage of modern life:
First, humans just did things: lived, loved, fought, worshiped.
Then, modern life arrested and chopped and ate these things up.
And now finally, the blended bits are being repackaged into minimal viable products for us to consume again.
I’m curious about the substitutionary, palliative, and narcotic nature of these synthetic, atomic bits of life and the inchoate, instinctual longings we may still have for them in their previously-constituted forms.
I’m also interested in the a-historical and unprecedented changes wrought by the 20th century (and so far, the 21st century) and the way our own concept of life, culture, and our own history is shaped by misconceptions about the way things are now and were before the eternal present.
And moreover, I want to do something about it. Nature/Culture is the intellectual vanguard of my personal effort in that initiative.
