https://vegasharmon.com/authors/jon-askonas/ Recent content in Jon Askonas on Vegas Harmon Hugo en Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/ai-kicks-away-the-ladder-of-mastery/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/ai-kicks-away-the-ladder-of-mastery/ The digital era has ushered in a further phase of the technological destruction of tradition. Whereas some kinds of automation create new demand for higher-skilled work, digital automation based on even rudimentary forms of artificial intelligence can instead increase demand for low-skill work pushing buttons. Training on the collective efforts of thousands of years of culture, machine-learning algorithms aim to supplant human performance for classification, writing, drawing, coding, driving, making music, and a host of other practices. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/build-the-future-don-t-subsidize-it/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/build-the-future-don-t-subsidize-it/ If we believe in a human future, we must build it, not with kind words or tax credits, but with a serious program of technological development. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/freed-from-tradition-s-rearguard-the-nomad-walks-ahead/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/freed-from-tradition-s-rearguard-the-nomad-walks-ahead/ Realizing what time it is, that we are living after tradition, isn’t a counsel of despair. Those who look to build a human future have been freed from a rearguard defense of tradition to take up the path of the guerrilla, the upstart, the nomad. We can bid farewell with fondness to the modern defenders of tradition. But we must heed the words of the Lord: “Let the dead bury their dead. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/lose-the-economy-lose-the-culture/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/lose-the-economy-lose-the-culture/ Conservatives “lost the culture” not because they lost the battle of ideas, but because they lost the economy. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/modernity-s-balance-sheet-liquidating-tradition-for-capital/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/modernity-s-balance-sheet-liquidating-tradition-for-capital/ Modernity liquidates traditions for the same reason that a firm might liquidate an underperforming factory: to improve the allocation and return of capital. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations,” as Marx put it, “with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” Technology, for Marx, is the true revolutionary principle, destroying traditions by shifting their foundations faster than they can adapt. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-as-the-new-engine-of-social-transformation/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-as-the-new-engine-of-social-transformation/ Marx showed how a material transformation of the economic order could have enormous social and cultural effects. Forging the human order anew means building technologies that make it easier to live well. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-didn-t-ask-permission-before-dissolving-tradition/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-didn-t-ask-permission-before-dissolving-tradition/ When you descend from lofty rhetoric about “Traditions” and “Values,” it becomes apparent that a huge number of the actual practices and social institutions which built those virtues have disintegrated, not because of Progressivism or Socialism but because of the new environment and political economy generated by technology. For decades, sociologists have charted the decline of two-parent families, hobbies, local newspapers, churches, stable employment, women’s clubs, libraries, amateur sports, political rhetoric, neighborhood barbecues, Boy Scouts, small businesses, classical music, credit unions, and on and on. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-dissolves-the-ground-tradition-stood-on/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-dissolves-the-ground-tradition-stood-on/ But the tensions between these factions—“whose tradition? which conservatism?”—aren’t the real problem today. Rather, it is that the conservative defense of tradition has failed—not because the right lost the battle of ideas, but because technological change has dissolved the contexts in which traditions once thrived. A technological society can have no traditions. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-s-revolution-conservatism-s-blind-spot/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-s-revolution-conservatism-s-blind-spot/ The modern conservative project failed because it didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos of sheer profit. Decrying left-wing revolutionary politics and postmodern anarchy, conservatives missed that the real moral relativism was to believe that one could change the material form of society without directly affecting its substance or its ends.