{"id":551,"date":"2026-06-12T02:06:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T02:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/?p=551"},"modified":"2026-06-12T02:06:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T02:06:19","slug":"new-book-chapter-edgar-allan-poe-the-mechanical-turk-and-technological-purism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/?p=551","title":{"rendered":"New Book Chapter: Edgar Allan Poe, the Mechanical Turk, and Technological Purism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I contributed a chapter to the new book <a href=\"https:\/\/edinburghuniversitypress.com\/book-dis-trusting-the-digital-world-in-imaginative-literature.html\">Dis\/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature<\/a>, just published by Edinburgh University Press. My chapter examines Edgar Allan Poe&#8217;s attempt to discredit <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mechanical_Turk\">the famous chess-playing Turk hoax<\/a>, along with &#8220;The Raven,&#8221; Poe&#8217;s essays, and contemporaneous works by Charles Babbage. Poe&#8217;s account of the hoax, I argue, exemplifies a persistent value judgment that I call \u201ctechnological purism\u201d: a belief that autonomous machines are stronger testaments to the skill of their designers than machines that work together with human intelligence. This assumption, I argue, has become problematic in the age of AI, disrupting systems of trust that have attended (supposed) machine intelligence since the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"500\" height=\"749\" src=\"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-552\" srcset=\"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image.png 500w, https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image-200x300.png 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I contributed a chapter to the new book Dis\/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature, just published by Edinburgh University Press. My chapter examines Edgar Allan Poe&#8217;s attempt to discredit the famous chess-playing Turk hoax, along with &#8220;The Raven,&#8221; Poe&#8217;s essays, and contemporaneous works by Charles Babbage. Poe&#8217;s account of the hoax, I argue, exemplifies &#8230; <a title=\"New Book Chapter: Edgar Allan Poe, the Mechanical Turk, and Technological Purism\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/?p=551\" aria-label=\"Read more about New Book Chapter: Edgar Allan Poe, the Mechanical Turk, and Technological Purism\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,16],"class_list":["post-551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ai","tag-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":553,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions\/553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}