As sociologist Richard Sennett reminds us, humanism “requires the embrace of chance and rupture” by recognizing that these things are a necessary part of the human experience, not problems to be wished away by a new app or more sophisticated algorithm. The very things that many of our technologies want to make seamless and “frictionless,” as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is so fond of saying, such as the awkwardness of face-to-face conversations and the quirks of our physical bodies, are precisely the “ill-fitting pieces of experience” that, taken together, make us human.
