The NetFuture email newsletter, begun in 1995, is fully archived here. These archives contain a vast range of commentary on many aspects of science, technology, and society. You will find convenient access to all these contents via the topical index, as well as the other routes listed under “Guide to the Site” below. See what others have said about Netfuture.

Please Note:

What is the new content about?

NetFuture was for many years focused on technology and its social implications. Newer writings (on the “Biology Worthy of Life” — https://bwo.life website) are directed more toward the problems of a science influenced by visions of technology, as when biologists conceive organisms on the model of the machine. In particular, most articles are currently dealing with issues in genetics, molecular biology, evolution, and the nature of the organism. The aim is to overcome the limitations of the naïve nineteenth-century materialism that still dominates biological thinking.

The aim, in other words, is to find a more living approach to the dynamism, plasticity, and intentionality of the organism. Organisms are creatures of directed striving — agents pursuing their own meaningful ways of being — and their activity is a kind of speaking. But while these central features are often implicit in biological descriptions, a recognition of them has yet to transform the deeply-rooted, mechanistic thought habits of the biologist.

The editor of NetFuture since its beginning has been Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org), currently a senior researcher at The Nature Institute. For a guide to all his writings, you can visit his home page.

An opportunity to help

Guide to the site:

• Search the NetFuture site
• Topical index to all issues
• Index to books reviewed
• Past issues and tables of contents

  2013 (issue #186 - 189) 2012 (issue #184 - 185) 2011 (issue #182 - 183) 2010 (issue #179 - 181) 2009 (issue #175 - 178) 2008 (issue #172 - 174) 2007 (issue #166 - 171) 2006 (no issues) 2005 (issue #160 - 165) 2004 (issue #153 - 159) 2003 (issue #141 - 152) 2002 (issue #127 - 140)

  2001 (issue #116 - 126) 2000 (issue #100 - 115) 1999 (issue #82 - 99) 1998 (issue #63 - 81) 1997 (issue #37 - 62) 1996 (issue #3 - 36) 1995 (issue #1 - 2)

• Archives for the (short-lived) NetFuture forwarding service

  1998 1997

Associated resources:

• The Nature Institute also publishes a hardcopy newsletter, In Context. Subscriptions are free for those living in the U.S. For more information, visit the In Context website.
• For examples of a qualitative and holistic approach toward the animal and plant kingdoms, see these papers by Nature Institute director, Craig Holdrege.
• Stephen Talbott's 2007 book, based on writings in NetFuture, is Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines. Michael Pollan (author of The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma) has written of this book: "Nothing is as rare or sorely needed in our tech-enchanted culture right now as intelligent criticism of technology, and Steve Talbott is exactly the critic we've been waiting for: trenchant, sophisticated, and completely original. Devices of the Soul is an urgent and important book." You will find more information about the book (and can order it) here, and can read the introduction here.
• NetFuture editor Stephen Talbott is deeply indebted to the work of the British philologist and semantic historian, Owen Barfield. You'll find an introduction to some of Barfield's thought in an appendix to Stephen's earlier book, The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst. (The book itself is fully available online.)

Steve Talbott :: NetFuture — Science, Technology, and Human Responsibility