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Tag: technology

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    Technology as becoming

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    1–2 minutes

    Realizing yourself through the machine is to remain underdeveloped: to become yourself as an executor of technology is not of the heart, leading to subversion or perversion.

    Using the prosthesis of the machine grants power as you subvert nature. The trade is to become a perpetual functionary of the machine, enslaved to its dictates until its desires are yours.

    The tool as facilitator and benefactor is a provider and, as such, can be worshiped and fetishized. Still, as reliance moves into deification, similar to religion, we forget the role of metaphor: we make the “thing” that seems to do the work universally applicable and appropriate for every situation, forgetting it is merely a tool or extension.

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    Progress versus progressivism

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    1–2 minutes

    Who can be against progress? Don’t you want "change" so that everyone is treated well and fairly? Yes, of course.

    However, progress is merely the process of moving towards a goal, not the goal itself.

    The confusion is that progressivism co-opts the term "progress" to mean a singular vision: a neo-liberal techno-rationalist future of egalitarian leveling that will be beneficial for human enlightenment, comfort, and peace.
    Yet, to many citizens palatable progress is a retroactive return to traditional micro-social communities, which carry the negative connotations of religious fundamentalism and Luddites.

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    More technology to solve technology problems

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    1–2 minutes

    Being a distracted driver by using your cell phone is more dangerous than driving drunk.

    How did we reduce drunk driving? By increasing pre-driving pressure, social ostracization, and outrageous fines. The social component targeted people before they got in the car, crowd-sourcing concern as a form of communal policing.

    However, social pressure cannot alter our phone behavior once we are alone in our car: we feel autonomous and bored inside our sheet metal and glass bubbles hurtling down the highway, though we are amongst others.

    A reversion to heads-up awareness and concern for the safety of others (and yourself) seems unlikely.

    The only solution (it seems) is auto-driving vehicles (expensive) or cell phone blocking (unlikely), which will only put more money in the pockets of the companies that created the problem in the first place.

    From Matthew Crawford

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    The Modern Medieval

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    1–2 minutes

    The Enlightenment championed the democratization of knowledge, emancipating society from the information monopoly of the clergy. This heralded a new era of freedom.

    Yet, in our contemporary, information-saturated world, often basic knowledge (like a specific component’s dimensions or materiality) remains elusive. We’ve supplanted clerical gatekeepers (the human compendium) with intricate systems of knowledge (the digital table), bureaucratic formalities and complexities, and capitalist-driven reductive efficiency.

    These layers obscure direct access to information, ironically mirroring the medieval period’s hierarchical information control. Our ‘hypermodern’ society re-enacts the constrained knowledge dissemination of the medieval.

    {from Matthew Crawford}

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    social media captures leisure, which is us

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    1–2 minutes

    Labor used to be bodily work with limits, meaning your leisure time was yours while your labor time created capital through products and services.

    Sociologists once thought the only way to know someone was by what they did in their free time; at work, they were compromised.

    The miracle of social media is how it has converted “disposable time” into fixed capital; the mechanics of capture bypass physical labor limits to consume thoughts, style, and representation, altering it into material, structural wealth.

    The machinery of capture has ensnared us, but we have gone willingly out of awe and fear. Beginning with industrial bodily factory ballet and permeating to our mind and time, we are now devoted to the mechanics of the algorithmic desire.

    “but this is the art of the machines—they serve that they may rule.” Samuel Butler, 1897

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    the gremlin in the machine

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    1–2 minutes

    When you are working on a complex machine, or maybe even a simple device like a bicycle, its ability to thwart you repeatedly, despite your persistent efforts, feels like you are struggling against the stubborn will of another person.

    Machines seem to possess a will: a determined antagonistic force that requires arcane psychological voodoo to overcome.

    To get your way and coax the cantankerous machine to abide by your control (temporarily) requires an affinity that finds life in the inanimate: a gremlin or golem soul invested in the stuttering steel to whom relational attunement cedes benefit.

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    Reinstating Natural Rights

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    1–2 minutes

    A coercive government cannot reinstate man’s “natural rights” because natural rights are a by-product of a peaceful industry.

    Granted, war may have been necessary to achieve temporary peace, but war is precisely when natural rights are suspended.

    Also, one cannot appeal to a current, settled state of peace and freedom to have “natural rights” reinstated because large businesses, industries, and machines maintain dominance. In fact, these very systems, devices, and bureaucracies are why we need to reestablish human rights: these dominant systems undermine natural liberty.

    In this conundrum, re-awakening “natural rights” implies a split from both war and managerial industrial systems that maintain servitude. It isn’t easy to imagine how a revolution that could accomplish this may manifest and engender awe in a time that could introduce such notions as “natural rights.”

    ~ from #Accelerate (the accelerationist reader)

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    the appeal of certainty, the inoculation of the bizarre

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    1–2 minutes

    The cybernetic system approach (machine-like control) to shaping your world is predicated upon the appeal of certainty. In cybernetics, influences are cataloged and countered, inefficiencies blocked and reduced. This allows for toggling of controls to better predict and influence the future.

    Raised in controlled systems, we seek more certainty, which does the disservice of softening us to the intrusion of reality: the unexpected conundrum is devastating, and we have no resilience upon which to parry it.

    The ripples of this systematized way of thinking, arguably rejects reality and thus our resilience to unexpected conundrums, converting them to catastrophe.

    The opposite, perhaps the antidote, is a surreal fuel logic; for instance, the Hopi would not plaster a certain spot on the wall, so that the unseen, spiritual Otherworld, the shadow world could also have an unfinished piece of plaster on their house, which they could then plaster over, of course, this plaster would remain unseen, but allow the spirit world to complete the house.

    This ritual introduces a complex nonsense that cannot be controlled and instead is folding the bizarre, the insane, into the every day. In such a manner, it is an inoculation against the odd shock.

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    Two reactions to Precarity: optimization and vitalism

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    1–2 minutes

    One reaction to the precarity is to return to the body, eschew ecstasy and escapism, get more sleep, optimize your schedule, and stabilize your relationships. This bodily discipline manifests targeted outcomes, and with goal attainment, it swells self-assurance which imbues a sense of control: mastery over your life.

    The problem is, it takes cybernetic and Taylorism principles (that is machine orientation) and applies them to the human, creating a series of autistic self-soothing mechanisms that produce a reduced harder, hollower self.

    Another reaction is the vitalist, who returns to nature by reanimating their animal spirit. It’s esoteric emotive entrancement provides an independent, esoteric mastery, highly romantic and ephemeral, but leaves little room for readmission to civilization.

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    machinic man

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    1–2 minutes

    If we are programmed, the question is: “how do we know that we are alive and free rather than performing scripted responses?”

    Consider this: It appears that our conscious attempts to dissuade us from painful actions, yet once we are comfortable, we seek out and find more pain and revel in it. This new pain we embrace gives us a new purpose: avoiding pain again.

    This causal circularity allows us to continually overcome or to continually fail, both of which provide movement, purpose, and drive even if they achieve nothing.

    For comparison, we have programmed machines that also attempt specific repetitive actions and either succeed or fail but look as if they have drive and purpose through movement. They just don’t rationalize their behavior through happiness, contentment, or pain.

    (from Samuel Butler)