The Dark Mountain Blog
The Barcode Moment, part 3
posted by Paul Kingsnorth
4th May, 2012
There have been a lot of very interesting reactions, thoughts and questions bubbling up around this conversation about the virtual future. Originally I wrote two posts attempting to explore some of these issues, but a third installment begun to seem necessary as the conversation developed, and questions proliferated on all sides. So here it is. Like the other posts in this series, it is part of a developing conversation and an ever-shifting pattern of thought.
One of the interventions which came in as a response to all this, and which made me examine my background thinking, came from the thinker and artist Pat Kane. ‘Isn’t it deeply natural’, he asked, ‘for symbolic apes to overlay reality with abstractions/images?’ Isn’t this, he asked, what poetry does? It was a good point. It is easy to imagine that our current acceleration into narcissistic virtual reality is new. It looks new, after all: the shiny screens, the goggles, the apps. But these, really, are only an acceleration of the trend that has existed since humanity could write. What is writing, after all? It is an abstract representation of experienced reality. You look at these marks on the screen, and they communicate meaning to you. They are symbols. The word ‘tree’ represents an object in the external world which we can both relate to, but the word itself is a collection of lines on a page or screen.
I read recently – and I can’t remember where I read it, or even whether it was apocryphal or factual – of an encounter between Western culture and a man from a tribal society. Instead of being the usual story, in which Western culture comes crashing into his world, this was the other way round: it was the story of a man from an indigenous community who had come or been brought to the West. He walked into a room and was shocked to see a man standing stock still, staring down at something in his hand. This man was not responding in any way to his external environment; to the room or to the man who had just walked into it or to anything outside the window. He was motionless but for his eyes, which were moving rapidly. He seemed, to the newcomer, to be dead or comatose even though he was standing up. The object in his hand was a book.
‘Symbolic apes’, then, might be as good a general description of our species as any. When we talk about trans-humanism, or post-humanism, we need to understand that we are talking about a spectrum rather than an event. I think it is likely that in 500 years time there will be no human beings as we currently understand them in existence, for one of two possible reasons. The first possibility is that we will have destroyed the Earth, and with it ourselves. The second possibility is that we will have somehow avoided doing this and will instead have uploaded ourselves into something else: merged with our technology and become more – or less – than human. This is the ultimate progressive fantasy, and this progressive culture has been trying to access it for over a century.
But what would a hunter-gatherer from the Mesolithic think if she were somehow able to travel here and examine a 21st-century human ? If she were to look at me, with a plastic and steel contraption on my eyes to enhance my vision, and metal in my teeth and an old scar inside my throat where my tonsils were surgically removed and, who knows, in 25 years time a silicon artificial hip and a couple of new heart valves made out of parts of a pig? Would she not think that she had seen the post-human future? Jeppe Graugaard has pointed me towards an interview with futurist Steve Fuller, author of the predictably-titled ‘Humanity 2.0.’ Fuller, who is a fan of this direction of travel, says: ‘people are voting with their feet to enter Humanity 2.0 with the time they spend in front of computers, as opposed to having direct contact with physical human beings. In all this, it’s not so much that we’ve been losing our humanity but that it’s becoming projected or distributed across things that lack a human body. In any case, Humanity 2.0 is less about the power of new technologies than a state of mind in which we see our lives fulfilled in such things.’
I think he’s right, and I think that most people, given the opportunity, will want this to go further. But for those of us who don’t – those of us who think we can identify a point beyond which we are not personally prepared to plunge into this – what then? What do we do? How do we live?
This question is not new either. Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon is about a future society which has chosen to destroy all technology created after a particular date precisely because they have realised that the endpoint of technological progress would be the end of humanity as they knew it. I’ve already mentioned Orwell, who speculates at length in the Road to Wigan Pier on ‘the tendency of the machine to make a fully human life impossible’, and how the inevitable endpoint of this vision of progress is the human being reduced to ‘a brain in a bottle.’ If and when we choose to revolt personally against this, we are revolting not against something new in itself, but simply to the next logical step on a very old journey away from wild Nature and towards an internal world in which we get to create our own version of reality. And, most likely, we will be in the minority. Like the old man outside the dome in Logan’s Run, we may end up entirely shut out, if not extinct: a possibility that both Rosie and Rade touch on underneath part one of this series.
But what if that is not the point? If you treat this not as a ‘global issue’ which requires some kind of organised political response but instead as a personal experience you have to live through, things start to look rather different. I usually find that the small picture is the most important one. You can think about ‘global issues’ until your head hurts and you want to die of despair: it is another form of abstraction. We live by the small things: the things we can control or experience personally. There are fewer and fewer things, in a consumer economy, that we are encouraged or permitted to control, as this fascinating essay explains. But if we want to, we are still free to make different lives for ourselves to whatever degree we can manage it. We are as free (for now) to say no to the Google goggles as we are to say no to credit cards or cars or supermarket shopping. That doesn’t mean escaping from the machine – that’s impossible – but it means negotiating a relationship with it which gives us as much autonomy as we need or can get or can cope with. In these times, this is probably the best we’re ever going to do.
Personally, I have always been with Orwell and with Lawrence: the machine dehumanises us, sucks out of us some animal essence which it is impossible perhaps to explain but can be clearly intuited by those who are paying attention. We can’t react to this by trying to globalise these feelings. We don’t have to be activists, campaigning to try and make our particular view of virtual technology the dominant one. This kind of approach is doomed to fail and will lead to despair, just as the attempt to prevent climate change and environmental crisis in this way is leading to despair. There are tides in the affairs of men, and standing on the beach ordering the waves back does not make you brave or forward-thinking.
This is a personal view, and one I have been developing for a long time, but it seems to me that retreat is both the best way to ensure personal sanity and to keep the flame of a particular, pre-machine vision of humanity alive. We all choose our own personal visions. I have talked about retreating and withdrawing before, and it often brings down upon my head accusations of ‘defeatism‘ and the like from the activist-minded. To this, I would borrow the retort of the Scottish poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, to a friend who criticised him for moving away from Edinburgh to a remote farm, where he spent much of his time creating a beautiful, and provocative, garden. Why was he running away from urban reality and from engagement with it, asked his friend. Finlay replied: ‘Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.’
Retreat-as-attack; tending a monastery through the coming dark ages; being a poppy in the face of the machine. What more is there? It feels like enough, to me. It feels like a lifetime’s work in itself.
Posted by Paul Kingsnorth on 4 May, 12
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The last paragraph there is just it, I think… The retreat is the ultimate revolution here.Those small and quiet things we do and choose and notice every small quiet human day are enough. Are all there is anyway. Are our lives’ work. We can postulate and theorise and type all we want but outside the night is shining and the ground is dew struck and dreaming…See you in the monastery, it’ll be a beautiful garden…
Thank you Paul. I agreed with Rosie and your last paragraph. Speculation about the nature of the world and what is to be done collectively are, in my view, very much a male mania. My mother, when I was an Earnest Young Man would listen to my plans and schemes and would be all ‘that’s interesting, yes – but why don’t you ask Becky out, she’s so pretty?’ and that would have helped the world more than most of my thoughts then.
Not that I’m against epic visions though – I wonder about your two alternatives here for example. Total death vs Humanity.com uploaded to the Hive. Is there no room for metamorphosis, freedom from the Unhappy Supermind? Seems to me that deep change (and epic delight and self-breaking release) only happens through facing suffering – and more suffering will be appearing soon than we have ever faced. Don’t you think something good can come out the other side? I do.
Thanks folks. Interesting stuff. Darren, I agree about the maleness. It fascinates me that it is only ever men who seem to write these grand books and come out with these proposals or organisations founded on some enormous, epic plan for the future. This seems to be some need for total control embedded in the male ego, in this culture at least. I see it all the time in the green movement, and I have certainly in the past been very prone to it myself. Escaping from it is an interesting process, isn’t it?
Of course there are more than two options for the future, I am thinking aloud here, and in general terms. I would like to think that some transcendence can come out of suffering. I suppose we will see. As ever, it is likely to be messy.
I don’t think we should necessarily implicate “maleness” as being the source of this made quest for progress. If you look at some of the most stirring stories of the pre-modern age, most of the compelling ones are stories of defeat and doom. The Fall of Camelot, Ragnarok, various Serbian medieval epics, the Spartans at Thermopylae, while mostly dealing with defeat in war, still speak to universal theme of maintaining humanity in the face of defeat. Indeed on a deeper level, since in the final accounting most of us, if we are honest, face defeat of our best ideals and intentions every day, perhaps much of the psychological and spiritual disconnect of the modern world lies in the fact that the story of modern progress is one of winners, going from victory to victory. While in our daily lives and in the course of our lives we constantly are faced with defeat, something we cannot reconcile with the dominant story of progress around us.
I would submit that we are incapable of experiencing transcendence without suffering. This has been the great falsehood of modern industrialism (and most modern-day religions as well). The monastic ideal of retreat ought to be coupled with a renewed sense of the monastic ideal of asceticism. In most traditions this asceticism is not out of hatred for the material world, but out of a desire to free oneself from the temptations the material world offers.
It is interesting how my interpretation of the word and idea of asceticism has morphed over time…. Of course the traditional meaning of the word is renunciation of many ‘worldly pleasures’ including alcohol and sex and most cultures have some spiritual tradition of this…. Somehow for me the idea of the world asceticism has actually come quite close to the usually very different aestheticism. The two have sort of converged to bring a meaning of needing much less, on many levels, and treasuring those things of great beauty one has. That there is beauty is so important. In an ascetic ideal there is mo junk…Such that the monastic way has an aesthetic feel to it for me too…. I’m not so sure about the suffering part though.Maybe it’s just around the definition of the word sufferring. Probably the need for intense application and also work and struggle. But somehow I feel we deny ourselves our true nature if we feel we must suffer to transcend.
I think it is an unfortunate byproduct of Puritan religious ethic (and their cultural heirs) that asceticism and aesthetics have been divorced. There is a world of difference between a renunciation based in love for the world and one that is antagonistic towards the world. If you look at the Shakers and their art, or even at Russian Orthodox monasteries, you will see that a simple, ascetic way of life is not necessarily opposed to beauty.
It is hard to talk realistically about suffering when the ideology of the modern industrial world holds suffering as an intolerable evil. However any great athlete you look at achieved their status with great sacrifice and suffering. But an even better example might be childbirth. My wife gave birth to both our sons without any of the “usual” medical interventions. When she was pregnant with our first, she was horrified to discover that when women receive an epidural to remove the pain of childbirth, they become so disconnected from their bodies that they need to be told when they are having contractions to push the baby out. My wife is no masochist, but she felt very strongly that she wanted to enter into the full experience of giving birth, including the pain. So perhaps suffering isn’t required for transcendence, but instead we cannot transcend unless we are receptive to the full range of human experience, including suffering and pain. The more we insulate ourselves (especially with technology), from the full array of experience, the less able we are to know our own humanity.
“But if we want to, we are still free to make different lives for ourselves to whatever degree we can manage it. [....] That doesn’t mean escaping from the machine – that’s impossible – but it means negotiating a relationship with it which gives us as much autonomy as we need or can get or can cope with.”
But do we (do you) understand ‘the machine’ well enough to appreciate how much autonomy we can in fact get from it? And should we negotiate a relationship with it individually, or as a group. (And if we do it as a group, how do we avoid repeating the mistakes which put us on this path in the first place?)
These issues are very real. If we ask what augmented reality gives in terms of autonomy we come to find it wrapped in a wireless media bill: $80 US per month and a term agreement. Its a device from and for the market. Overlaying your vision with a cybernetic data stream is clearly a shift from information about reality such as text books, poetry, or community stories to information AS reality. Humanity’s assumed omniscience and omnipotence of data is moving nature to the background. Paul is right to shift from panoptic to focused perspective. Our path to the good life is in our local and focal things and practices. Look at the phenomena of everyday life. Center life about the garden, the table, the hearth, the water and the bed. Attend communal celebrations…The symbolic line of reasoning and human-nature interrelations is addressed in the field of ecosemiotics. Humans really are the symbolic species.
“Retreat is the ultimate revolution here”, I agree, Rosie – and I hope that as we retreat, ground into our gardens and re-wild, that we also continue to engage with our communities. That feels like my quiet revolution and activism right now. My blue-screen-zapped twenty-something students find themselves longing for something they can;t name. The more I shine the light towards a wilder way of being, the more they flock to me. This gives me great hope for the future.
I know that many have spoken this before here, but I am profoundly grateful for this blue screen for allowing me to feel the enormity of the revolution, to know that there are many, many in it with me. Paul’s suggestion that there will be a moment when we know we must unplug and walk away – yes – I wonder about that. I simply ask daily, when is it enough? And The Google Goggles – yikes!
Who knows how many possible futures we might be dreaming… sometimes I wonder whether we will all dream different ones and end up in different realities. As the shaman saying goes – the world is how you dream it.
Thanks for another engaging conversation, Paul.
There is nothing to be done save to enjoy the current moment without pursuit – however it presents itself and whatever it brings.
What is peculiar, however, is the carelessness with which these stories are channelled at us — as entertainment, a distraction from daily life ~excerpt from the manifesto.
There is nothing accidental about it
Some small advice: if you are serious about positing a coherent vilification of the model, you must understand two things: that the model works towards/subverts/exploits one/any/all ideological position(s) it finds into [capital, $, money] and that given the sophistication of the machine [and the multitude of actors within it] that nothing is careless or accidental in the larger macro-environment.
This ability is well tracked within the last 10 years of ‘counter-culture’ writing, if not the last 100 years. “No Logo” ~ subsumed, and so on.
For the record: Homo Sapiens 2.0 [an example from my desk: Enhancing Human Capabilities by Savulescu, ter Meulen, Kahane; 2011 Blackwell Publishing, 978-1-4051-9581-2] is already outmoded.
Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey.
Our best bet is to become 3.0 ~ and this doesn’t involve microchips.
With love (and pra/eying that html works here)
Fantastic conversation. I’m so heartened to see, not just in Paul’s posts, but also in so many of the comments, a moving away from arguing about grand theories, strategies, schemes, which to me are just the flipside of the schemes that got us here. In a way I think that precisely this tension between grandiose schemes and small everyday ways is peculiarly human, is where we live and what we struggle with all the time. Almost like a part of us craves one and another part craves the other. To me the loss of the immediate messy connection with the world has already gone past bearable in many areas of life, but I agree, it is all happening in degrees, by stealth. I wish I knew why so many happily pursue the ever grander, more abstract, while some of us simply can’t run along in that direction. It’s eternally fascinating to me. (It really got to me funnily enough when I watched “Tron – Legacy”, which plays out this very tension.) In this context I always think of a quote by Rebecca Solnit: “I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare, and obscure, the impractical and local and small.” I also smiled when I read Darren’s comment, and remembered the Earnest Angry Young Woman I used to be who wanted to change the world. And thought the world could be changed. But the world isn’t ours in that way, no matter what we think. Things will happen, and we’ll have to get on with them. What’s great about Dark Mountain is that I’ve met people here, for the first time in a long time, with whom I can see myself do this, get on with it.
It seems very straightforward to me that there are two possible ways of living. You either look forward to some unknowable future created largely by market oriented scientists, or you look back to history and extract from it the best, most appropriate learning (hence my earlier comments about Monasteries).
Given that the aforementioned scientifically oriented ‘progress’ seems to have delivered more problems than solutions I think looking back may be the best strategy.
No-one (yet) has ordained that we all have to look forward, so we do have this choice. Arguably some of the most rewarding, and often most celebrated, ‘projects’ recently have come from a re-defintion of techniques developed in the past (micro-breweries, artisan food, natural building, cycling rather than driving, growing your own veg, etc, etc). They also tend to be more convivial and thus give us the chance of re-creating community.
To me, looking backwards is actually full of exciting possibilities. A forward looking future looks utterly depressing given its trajectory. And, if I’m honest, I tend to find many of the people (the chap Paul debated with) involved in these technologies particularly dull, strange and on the whole unappealing characters…………
I stumbled upon this discussion by way of Pauls scythe article on the permaculture site and have been intrigued to find people talking about much that i can relate to personally.
I too was born and schooled in the middlesex of the fifties, in fact just off the great west road, in a lower middle-class family with a fridge and a tastelessly wallpapered front room sporting three flying ducks and a two channel, evenings only t.v. Now, fifty years on, it seems in retrospect a rather tame and sleepy world, but for a hyper sensitive, chronically dyslexic kid it was as close to a living hell as i hope i will ever feel, and at the age of fourteen, in the private alienation of my bedroom. i started to plan my ‘escape’ much in the way that you people are discussing the concept of retreat from an unacceptable world.
An early morning job delivering newspapers and an evening job cleaning a butcher shop gave me the finances i needed and i started looking for a way out of the world. Since then, no jobs, no cults, no england, a great deal of practical creativity, an enormous amount of luck, always a knife edge, and always the sense that im just scratching the surface.
I am now settled in a place that is distinctly ‘monastic’ in the sense that you are suggesting and i share the life of this place with a transitory turn over of people, mostly in their mid twenties, early thirties who come to me as volunteers looking for an alternative educational experience as an orientation towards a more natural lifestyle. Mostly from English speaking countries they are for the most part bright, questioning fullhearted and humanistic youngsters who i believe will be those who will populate the ‘monasteries’ of the future, and i would say they tend to be more relaxed, and not as complex as the various older types who occasionally stay, (point of interest, rather than a judgement) and we do a great deal of practical work and engage, along with the usual workaday banter, in a good deal of ethical discussion. All in all it makes for a very healthy atmosphere and everyone is on the ball. We work on the environment, build, make various artworks and experiment with the means for self reliance.
This generation grew up with, and have been fed, by the social networking information world, global warming, and the intangible threat of terrorism much as i grew up with the reality of nations fueled by national pride who fought each other outright, the threat of nuclear war, and the superficial security of a civilization which was going to finally make everything good with its free trade and the promise of a comfortable consumer lifestyle. They are used to concepts like holistic reality, the earth as a being, the brotherhood of mankind and mankind itself as being a connected part of the natural process, all of which were to some extent exotic novelty ideas within my life time.
I subscribe to the concept that original consciousness emerges out of a socio cultural matrix much as a seed germinates out of the decomposition of everything else and that as long as there are seeds there is the promise of new life and this gives the monastery idea profound relevance in the face of a world which is any way running on decomposition.
“That doesn’t mean escaping from the machine – that’s impossible – but it means negotiating a relationship with it which gives us as much autonomy as we need or can get or can cope with. In these times, this is probably the best we’re ever going to do.
“But do we (do you) understand ‘the machine’ well enough to appreciate how much autonomy we can in fact get from it? And should we negotiate a relationship with it individually, or as a group. (And if we do it as a group, how do we avoid repeating the mistakes which put us on this path in the first place?)”
This is surely the taoist insistence on not wanting to identify the tao to avoid being
misunderstood, diluted, branded……”The thing that can be thingied is not the thing” or whatever.
Certainly without wanting to be a secret society one needs to tread very carefully there.
‘You can think about ‘global issues’ until your head hurts and you want to die of despair: it is another form of abstraction. We live by the small things: the things we can control or experience personally.’
Great stuff Paul, better and better, thanks. Curious really – why am I so heartened by this? I love the Ian Hamilton Finlay quote – unforgettable.
Robert Crumb clearly knew about Middlesex:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRkq595NhD0
Paul,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! One comment. You write: “Our current plunge into ecological overshoot could lead to global economic collapse.” The word “could” has an odd smell. The global economic juggernaut is not sustainable. It has to disintegrate, sooner or later, suddenly or gradually.
The consumer worldview is carved in stone, and has become essentially invincible — for as long as it isn’t smashed to bits by a sharp turn in our way of life — collapse. It’s exciting to imagine that before long the purpose of life will no longer be working and shopping. Perhaps it’s a grand folly to presume that creative people today can imagine beautiful, sustainable, post-collapse ways of life, and that these visions will have an influence on the path of the future. But playing this game seems more meaningful than selling insurance.
Today is a good time for questioning, for throwing bullshit overboard, for trying to find firm ground in a world of roaring madness. It’s a good time for moving away from cities, and spending lots of time outdoors, and learning what’s edible out there, and celebrating the magnificence of Creation. It’s a good time for clear thinking, living lightly, feasting on the beauty, and remembering joy.
” I wish I knew why so many happily pursue the ever grander, more abstract, while some of us simply can’t run along in that direction.”
Yes i also am fascinated by this puzzle. The first part is fairly easy to grasp if you accept the premise of mass hallucination: reality being spun out by the clever for whatever reason and inherited by the many as being normal and consequently shared as the familiar. But why some people become dissoriented from that process is a bit more illusive.
Certainly it has to do with a stimulated perception of the world that allows a more inclusive or ‘larger’ perspective, and that could be the result of a number of things. Drugs certainly, the sorrow of bereavement, the shock of an unfamiliar experience etc. Maybe there is a reservoir of essential sensitivity which remains largely untapped that is being blocked by the state of mass normality but that can be released in the individual in response to his circumstances and that then, to some extent, dilutes the hallucination. This might go to explain the shift in gravity some of us feel and the sense of identifying within a larger perspective.
The dimensions of this perspective, how we define it and approach living within it are certainly major elements of what we are grappling with.
‘This is a personal view, and one I have been developing for a long time, but it seems to me that retreat is both the best way to ensure personal sanity and to keep the flame of a particular, pre-machine vision of humanity alive. We all choose our own personal visions.’
‘Today is a good time for questioning, for throwing bullshit overboard, for trying to find firm ground in a world of roaring madness. It’s a good time for moving away from cities, and spending lots of time outdoors, and learning what’s edible out there, and celebrating the magnificence of Creation. It’s a good time for clear thinking, living lightly, feasting on the beauty, and remembering joy.’
This makes so much sense.
Can´t honestly say that I can overview the whole discussion here but I just want to add a question to Paul (and others). In the blog texts you many times say that the technologies in question are narcissistic. Without being obviously good (or bad) I would say that one of my prime reasons for using stuff like facebook is social. Or the impulse is social. I want to connect, communicate, debate, be understood, entertain, be liked/loved/admired and so on. And the stuff uses or works on that impulse, perhaps deforming it? (the goggle-guy´s day peeks when he can play his ukulele for the girl…) Since at least the first half of the discussion coming from these three texts partly seems to be about interpreting the technology I thougt this could be relevant.
I still have a hard time really imagine people walk around with the glasses, a bit clumsy, don’t you think? I think I´d wait for the microchip implant. Anyway, would we really abstain from social media in the monasteries? Any comments?
When I use the word ‘narcissism’ in this context, I’m mainly talking of species-narcissism. In other words, our obsession with our internal, human worlds, and how that always trumps our connection with the rest of nature. But even at a personal level, much of current social media is deeply narcissistic, in the sense of self-obsessed. Have you ever seen Twitter?! ‘Here’s what I had for breakfast, world ….’
‘would we really abstain from social media in the monasteries?”
When people apply to join us as a volunteer they know they are being accepted for their apparent interest in what is going on rather than to help out in return for a free holiday and one of my guidelines is that they restrict their internet use to the “non frivolous’. I don’t lay down rules as i find it counter productive and i find it is easier for me to understand a person when they are acting freely but as it is our wi-fi i slip that one in and of course it is then up to them to interpret what frivolous might be. The interesting thing is that as they get involved with the scenario of new and like minded people and new and engaging activities they become increasingly less likely to be found staring at their phone. They send a few pictures, skype their loved ones, but dont find the time for, or seem to need as much, the compulsive distraction of bouncing random stuff off each others walls, liking and sharing in an interminable game of squash.
I would go as far as to say that the brain seems to prefer real experience over virtual if it can get it.
Thanks Paul,
that was a nice “mind sharpener” that made me think over my choices again. Indeed, a book can be on one level compared to electronic devices, and true it is that part of the reason why our civilisation became such was TOO MUCH STARING I THE BOOKS. Not that I don’t like the books, far from that, but is it not the intellectual vanity that was was being praised and glorified in Western schools and universities ever from the early days of medieval Christianity? Is it not one type of autism, one that glorifies only the rational intellect, and neglects other dimensions of human existence? Books, as well as any other tools, can be very helpful, but one must at any time be aware of the levels of reality: if our visible world is merely a “shadow on a cave wall” as Plato put it, what then is the book if not a shadow of the shadow? On the other hand, let me not be unjust toward art: for the literature is an artistic experience, and brings along a new dimension, true creation, and a connection with inner self or other worlds – in that sense the book transcends the papir it is written upon, or letters. In the same way, using Internet to share my thoughts may enrich me in the process of writing, but maybe also somebody who will read it. Again, if we are not totally immersed in this we remain aware of ourselves and our place in the world.
However, the new technologies differ from the books becuse they are overwhelming in the manner books never were, they are dominated by the banalities if not outright poison, they are owned by corporations and they are energy intensive. My hope is that humanity doesn’t have the time “to evolve” into automated travesty – we will most probably use up most of the cheap fuel and minerals before we merge with the machine – and will eventually find a way to truly evolve.
Kalle,
Interesting post. No-one argues that the human desire is to socialise and that there is anything wrong with that. I suspect that our (not mine) use of media such as Facebook (to socialise) is driven more by the fact that ‘modern life’ is lived so extensively (i.e. not just in your local community) and at such a pace (no time to stop and chat in the street) that ‘fast’ methods of communication are almost imposed on us. Moving to another form of socialising has, therefore, to be a conscious effort and porbably in conjunction with a change in the way we structure our lives. The idea of walking away, by definition, implies that we adopt this changed structure. I mentioned, in my earlier response, the chance that smaller scale, historically based and more local methods of production (and living)would probably be more convivial. Hence we get more communication and socialising at the local level by its very nature. This then fulfills our desire be liked/loved/admired as you say.
As regards your comment about Monasteries, it’s important to understand that by ‘walking away’ we are by definition implying a lower energy way of living. I’ve mentioned ‘energy slaves’ before in the context of what cheap fossil fuels, and the technology associated with it, gives us. A lower energy life style removes many of these energy slaves. We therefore have to do much more for ourselves of the making, mending, growing, building. This is heavily time consuming. It is also, as acknowledged by many studies, likely to result in a far more fulfilling way of living (the psychological benefits of hand working, etc). However, to get back to your point, in this ‘monastery, the likelihood that there will be sufficient free time to indulge in such activities as socialising on Facebook is very limited. I’m sure though that it will also seem an utter irrelevance anyway given the greater conviviality implied by such ways of living.
Hope that helps a bit
Cheers
Andy
I once worked for a technology company preparing a presentation for one of the directors, in which he waxed lyrical about the future of microchips — embedded in your head, internet wired directly into your brain, etc etc. He had a financial interest in seeing this future come about, of course. When I said I didn’t think I fancied that kind of future much, he replied, ‘I know, horrible isn’t it?’
What I have wondered ever since is how it came to be that a very rich man, who certainly had no need to work for a living, would pursue a future that he didn’t personally believe in. There is something about the human need for approval or ‘success’ with certain boundaries that keeps them on the treadmill, heading towards this ridiculous future. The idea of withdrawal, or worse, ‘retreat’ carries with it the stench of failure. The boundaries for success seem tightly defined, and getting tighter.
I believe most people have simple dreams, and they certainly don’t include being only partly human. The tragedy is people have to spend so long working for the machine because they love their kids that they have no time to spend with their kids.
Thanks for the response. Some bits and pieces of thought:
First I enjoy the spirit of open-minded and polyphonic discussion that this project seems to inspire. That have made me think (again) bout other contexts where perhaps arguing and principled debate (nothing wrong with that of course) is not the most creative or interesting alternative.
What I liked most about Paul´s first bar-code-post was actually when he writes ”this crosses some ill-defined but strongly-felt internal line”. If DM aims at new or reactualised stories and interpretations of where we are right now and where we´re going, to me it seems vital to share and verbalise emotinal responses, fears, worries, anger, hope and so on, and therefore to cultivate a space of conversation where these more intuitive, emotional, anecdotal (….etc) aspects are appreciated. Then of course we can explore and clarify these things further, test and revise our interpretations, but my guess is that the analytical skills of the community is not too much to worry about. Anyway I don´t find objections like ”you are writing this on a blog” to be the most interesting. Too me, the personal reaction put into writing, seems to be the point.
Species-narcissistic. I think of my father who lives in the countryside and post these beautiful little observations about how the seasons, the plants and the animal life changes. After reading one of the DM blogtexts about appreciating the local landscape he actually got more active with this.
On a personal level, I would say that time-wise I spend to much time on the internet. But ethically and aesthetically I hope to be some distance away from the breakfast-rant. I try to post things that invite discussion, annoys or reminds people of something (like the awating collapse or how our greed hurt other beings human and non-human) or just puts a new perspective on things. Last night we had a beatiful little discussion on what a virtuous bureaucrat might be. (Essential for teachers like me who are bureacrats though they rather not be).
And about the energy slaves. If I have the charachter for it perhaps I´ll try to envision (and then act on) how I would use my computer/the internet if I only hade 15 minutes per day, and perhaps were forced to generate the energy through bicycling or something like that. Like ”all the meat you want” or private cars, perhaps all this time on internet should be regarded as another excess?
Thinking of technology coming and passing: I remember my teacher in typewriting when I was 12 years old. She firmly emphasized the importance of first mastering the mechanical typewriter before moving on to the electric one.
… I have read somewhere that Marcel Proust used to subscribe to opera concerts broadcasted through the telephone.
Cheers everybody!
“That doesn’t mean escaping from the machine – that’s impossible – but it means negotiating a relationship with it which gives us as much autonomy as we need or can get or can cope with. In these times, this is probably the best we’re ever going to do.”
I find myself returning repeatedly to this concept and i am guessing that it is precisely the opportunity presented by that negotiation that is making possible a widespread shared response to a problem which is not modern in essence but is a critical culmination of a very long history of the human being not getting the picture. The value of being able to address that problem should not be underestimated.
I would guess that many of us would subscribe to the vitalist rather than mechanical view and would agree that the dynamics of biological life are actually quite beyond our intelectualy based methods of understanding and feel that we probably have some collective role to play but are blundering around blindly missing the point. If that was so i would welcome the sharing of it it as a major step forward and whatever tools would help to consolidate that step should be used thoroughly and efficiently by those who are responsible enough to manage them wisely.
If you are sharing the car that has been blindly heading towards the cliff for the last forty centuries, whatever galvanises your attention to the predicament has got to be taken as an opportunity of some sort especialy if you are one of those who jump before it goes over and can engage in survival.
Being dyslexic, i probably find the computer less of a pleasure than most. I have avoided watching television for more than forty years and i have never had a drivers license, but the opportunities presented by the internet for stimulating positive levels of autonomy are something i feel i would not want to waste during these critical times.
Loving the discussion here.
RE: ‘Isn’t it deeply natural’, he asked, ‘for symbolic apes to overlay reality with abstractions/images?’ Isn’t this, he asked, what poetry does?
Doesn’t this miss an obvious point? The meaning expressed in poetry is defined by the reader/writer. The meaning in google goggles is defined by one of the largest media corporations in the world. Isn’t that a significant distinction?
I’m a little late to the comments here, but a few thoughts did arise readings this:
Paolo Bacigalupi, a science/spec fiction author who writes post-eco-collapse stories, has written one story in which he explored what might happen if limits didn’t constrain technology. It was nominated for several awards. The link is below.
http://windupstories.com/pumpsix/the-people-of-sand-and-slag/
As for the Singularity, I think John Michael Greer summarised it best as “the Rapture in techno drag”. It’s just as unlikely, and serves a very similar purpose for a different set of believers.
Personally, what I see happening with technology in the future is that an ever smaller subset of the human race will have access to it. It’s already the case that technology is very unevenly distributed — look at how many people have access to, say, electro-mechanical replacement hearts, or Gulfstream jets, or smart phones, or motorcars (fewer than have access to bicycles).
Do we want to be members of the techno-privileged, ensconced in plasticrete castles, protected by unmanned killbots? Probably not — historically, when those kinds of inequalities have emerged, sooner or later the “less equal” have risen up and lynched the people on top.
What about the middle class (us, for the most part)? As economic growth eventually falters (as it has already begun to), I can quite easily see a shrinking middle class trapped within its trappings. Just as the rich fallen on hard times during the decline of the British Empire would starve before selling their fine clothes or property, so too will there be those who cling to their smart phones and Google goggles at the expense of basic needs.
And this is already beginning to happen. I’ve seen a story about people in the USA who can’t afford their sewage and water bills, yet who never miss a payment on their iPhones. Bruce Sterling has a word for it — “Favela Chic”, which he defines as being “when you’ve lost everything materially… but are wired to the gills and are big on Facebook.”
Certainly, in that kind of a future, “walking away”, or focusing on providing for your own basic needs rather than getting lost in expensive technological trinkets which you may one day not be able to afford, makes plenty of sense.
It’s all there in the last few paragraphs, absolutely spot on.
This maximising of autonomy in any given context, is key to our own sanity and to our own survival. The idea of creating grand movements, with disciples and everything else they require, is anathema to a more human scale, autonomous way of living.
It’s hard to see in primitivism (not that I’m labelling you with this) a clear way forward, when there are so many complex layers to civilisation. To us now, as modern western individuals, we may see a small holder’s way of life as being the most feasible way to having a connection with the Earth.
However, it is still civilised and a far cry from being in complete harmony with the wild. Domestication of plants and animals, not to mention the sedentism necessary for small holdings, are real barriers to further retreat.
Breaking through them towards something even more wild I can barely conceive of as possible whilst standing at this nadir of humanity. In order to keep this greater context, this ultimate narrative, whilst making our retreats, over generations, would require what exactly I haven’t a clue.
And so, personal retreats are all we realistically have. So be it.