Introducing The Widening Gyre: A Technology Newsletter

The advent of artificial intelligence has done more than just push the frontier of the digital age; it’s opened questions about consciousness, labor, and what it means to be human. 

Such far-reaching implications demand sustained inquiry. The popularity of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas speaks to the hunger for guiding voices that are neither hysterical nor accelerationist. We need steady, sober minds parsing through the good and the bad of AI.

Our answer to this demand is a new newsletter: The Widening Gyre, written by Ned Desmond. The first edition launches tomorrow. 

Ned has thirty years of experience around Silicon Valley as a journalist, investor, executive, and founder. He is also Catholic and has contributed several excellent pieces to the AI conversation in these pages.

On the title, he writes,

I borrowed the newsletter’s name from the opening stanza of W. B. Yeats’s 1919 poem “The Second Coming”:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer . . .”

Given the horrors of that era, Yeats had every reason to be gloomy. He subscribed to an esoteric view that human history moved in two-thousand-year cycles, and that his days marked the end of one, when “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

The imagery of “widening gyres” and falcons deaf to the falconer is, to my mind, a cautionary metaphor for the technology-driven times we inhabit. Unlike Yeats, however, I don’t hold that any future is inevitable or pre-ordained. I believe God gave us tremendous capacity and the freedom to shape our lives and the world. We can choose to think and act, for good or ill, or to be passive, and let events sweep us away. This newsletter’s aim is to help thoughtful readers shape their perspective on technology so they can exert authority and control over technology’s advances, whether at home or in the world at large. Both matter a lot.

Each issue of The Widening Gyre will feature Ned’s commentary on the latest developments in the technological sphere, from AI escaping containment to the data center boom. He comes with an insider’s knowledge and a knack for turning tech garble into stories accessible to the layman. 

Subscribe for free to The Widening Gyre by clicking here or by visiting wideninggyrenewsletter.com. It will hit your inbox twice a month and won’t be available to read anywhere else.

This project is made possible through the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, allowing First Things to launch a series of newsletters about the topics that matter most to our readers. The Widening Gyre joins The Fourth Watch, a newsletter about Catholicism written by James F. Keating (subscribe here); The Protestant Mind by Dale Coulter (subscribe here); and The Jew From Nowhere by J. J. Kimche (subscribe here).

Image by Fabio Gaglini via Creative Commons. Image cropped.