Daily Writing
a cancerous garden
“The uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of humanity…” - Neil Postman
Gardening is the grounded art of taking what needs attention and cultivating something fresh from something inert. It is a beautiful expression of so many metaphors and allusions to the human heart and spirit. The patience, care, and knowledge required for this task represents what many have recognized in the struggle for meaning. The cardinal virtues are those qualities that theologians and philosophers have told us we must guard, prune, and nourish to produce fruit. These parts of us are essential to right living.
Technology’s growth can be described in two ways. A cancerous growth finds weakened areas of the body to attach to as it sucks away at life, slowly atrophying what was once vibrant and clean. A plant’s growth, absent a gardener, rewilds a space to create an ecosphere of life fit for all kinds of other plants and animals to thrive within. The parallel between these two metaphors is that they are both biomes unfit for human life.
Today, we find ourselves in a world of technological progress that has planted deep roots and sprouted weeds. Social media has inadvertently effected more than just our social lives. It has been a detriment to our reasoning and sense-making, political struggles and unity, and our lifestyles and health. We collectively witness our time slip from the hourglass never to return. We know the dangers of investing too much of ourselves to an online mirage that hides from the fact that our growth as a species is stunted. Yet we persist.
Neither a gardener nor a surgeon has appeared to prune the overgrowth. Every technology brings with it a new set of privileges, laws, and social norms that should be interrogated and pruned as needed.
We should be conscious of this fact: the platforms we use everyday have been linked directly to the mental health crisis we are facing in the west today, and frighteningly little has been done to curtail these harms.
We are playing in a toxic environment, pretending our gas mask doesn’t have a leak.
We are hoping the smoke won’t kill our lungs while taking a bigger draught.
the banality of more
What does it mean when you find an exponent atop impermanence?
We’ve entered an era of new-school platforms where Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram no longer hold all the cards. Through scandals, missteps, and market share losses, the monopoly seems to be loosening as user’s attention is directed elsewhere online. People may still hold accounts with the giants, but they are increasingly likely to step one foot in a different direction, for ill and for good.
To experience moments captured by friends and influencers, trendy apps like BeReal, Journal, and Vero have appeared. Public discourse alternatives to the toxicity of Musk’s misadventure have proliferated with apps like Mastodon, BlueSky, and Threads. Discord and Reddit still hold large audiences captive with their community and information-centric approach to media. TikTok and Lemon8 continue to engineer scarily persuasive algorithmic content for the masses.
Every one of these apps adds time, attention, and data to the arsenals in the Valley. Each one subtracts time, attention, and data from our lives, making them less meaningful and more full of meandering.
Our itinerant use of these platforms is a formative part of who we become. We place precious life-energy into a digital persona that dies within a hype cycle or, worse, metastasizes throughout our online presence to create a false reality we can begin to believe.
As more social media options emerge, as both our inputs and outputs online increase, as the way we interact with the internet becomes increasingly more trivial and banal, what will be left of our minds and hearts inside this new world? Will we continue to engage in more digital spaces that dilute our contribution and identities? Or will we start to create authentic places that encourage our humanity and creativity?
quid est veritas?
2023 is the year photo and video evidence are no longer proof for belief.
The first wave looked like a swaggy pope, robo-cats, and a deep-fake Tom Cruise.
The second wave saw falsified bombings, sextortion victims, and disinformation at large.
With an election around the corner, what will the third wave entail? Does our coverage of wars in Ukraine and Yemen accurately depict the conflict, protagonists, and antagonists? How can a public figure fight the tide of hate from an off-color, falsified recording purporting their prejudiced character traits? Will the next “Tidepod challenge” be one that more than simply uneducated and attention-seeking teens try?
These are part of the dangers of democratizing access to a weapon of mass destruction. The companies leaking language models are unable to vigilantly police bad actor’s use of emerging tools. The fight to understand and regulate AI is already underway in congress, and the stakes are clear: the breakdown of liberal democracy and the extinction of our current way of life.
More fundamental to what the fight for AI represents is a question of truth.
What is truth in a world where our five senses can no longer be trusted?
The morosely comforting truth is that we’ve been nearly at this point for a long time. We shifted our thinking circa 2008. The internet introduced us to the idea of bots and false facing. We quickly understood that not everything online is vetted by editors, publicists, and the library of Congress. Our social media personas are just that-
“personas.”
[1734] nn. pl. outer or assumed aspects of character.
Now that images, videos, and recordings require a tale of provenance (on a scale of accessibility unseen in history), our habits around consuming media must shift again. We must become better at two things to avoid falling prey to mistruth and emotional manipulation:
indifference and contextualization.
Billions of dollars and thousands of engineers lie in wait behind your computer’s screen to ensnare your attention. The so-called economy has perfected techniques and models that permeate our lives. A viral dance video appears next to a politically charged rant, but we fail to ask why, much less comprehend the disjointed nature of such a sequence. Our brain, fully immersed in primal emotions of joy, amusement, intrigue, or attraction receive an ice plunge-like shock into the harsh realities of disgust, distrust, rage. This rapid pendulum swing of emotions breaks down our reasoning. No longer are we being fed “harmless” entertainment but the machinations of a polarization engine that elongates our latitude of acceptance.
There is a balm in an unlikely place for us. The Ignatian order of spiritually encourages an unattached-ness in decision-making processes where emotions and biases create tension. This “Ignatian Indifference” has equal merit in the realm of our judgement of media. Step back. As we scroll, our limbic system fires on all cylinders from the dopamine rush each video triggers. When the twist comes, and we feel our fight or flight (most commonly “fight” will be activated as it increases engagement and TOS- time on screen) responses activate, we can choose to be indifferent. Begin an examination with analytical and undisturbed thoughts. Don’t jump straight to an emotional response, even if it’s only unspoken.
(Of course, this is far easier said than done. None of us are emotionally regulated and spiritually wise enough to be on these platforms yet we choose to engage them regardless.)
When indifference is found, we must begin an investigation. Every news article, piece of media, and social post is affixed within a unique ecology. Hyperlinks abound in our content in a literal and metaphorical sense. You can’t read an op-ed on record-breaking summer heat without asking a certain set of questions. Who is writing this? Why are they writing it? Which of my emotions, if any, are being tampered with by the writer? Is this event/idea/news even possible given what I know about the affair? Who sent me this and how reliable/gullible are they?
Very quickly our analysis leads to telling answers about the veracity of content we stumble upon. The student in each of us taps into a learned behavior to check sources, a skill we rapidly developed just this past century. The deconstruction of today’s activist finds new fodder if they are willing to pause for context. The tools we need are available but latent in this realm of our lives. Contextualization could save us all from jumping to the island of conclusions where so many get washed away.
This may be the year truth can’t be found in a picture, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be found at all. When a Roman governor asked the itinerant Nazarene, “what is truth?” he desired no answer, for to a chronic worshipper of sensual impulses, the question didn’t matter. Does it matter to you?
a trivial culture
"We were keeping our eye on 1984. when the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares..."
The year is now 2023. Almost 40 years since Orwell's prophecy expired and a perpendicular one fully rendered. We are caught up amidst hype cycles and disruptive innovations. We have accommodated our lives to the plug and screen. In Neil Postman's time, the screen was large, the plug stationary. Today, the screen is pocketable, ubiquitous, and targeting each user’s unique brain patterns. What this shift indicates has only been uncovered by very few willing to admit their own culpability in the state of the world.
"But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another- slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World..."
Huxley paints a picture of a self-enslaved people. He envisions a world where we have come to love our captivity. We struggle even to see the point of breaking our chains because it's more convenient, clean, and nice to simply wear them. The savagery that would overtake us without the protection of our bonds and narcotics terrifies our addled minds.
Are we not the same, in our love of the very technologies that undo our capacities to think?
"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one... Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture..."
A prudent observer of cultural trends and idiosyncrasies discerns the truth. What Postman did to elucidate this and excavate it for an age dedicating itself wholly to the first-wave of entertainment technology, the TV, has been lost. We are in a moment where we need to proceed, in his words, "with eyes wide open." The mental health crisis, political polarization, misinformation, digital addiction, overwork, environmental degradation- all problems correlated to the improper use of digital technology in one way or another. This ever-growing list of potentially catastrophic risks is easier to access in our minds today because of the internet. In spite of its persistence, have we become too trivial to make meaningful progress on any one of these? Does distraction rule us with more power than discipline? Are we so incapacitated that the solutions of the online era are blockaded by their harms?
"...we are in a race between education and disaster... For in the end, Huxley was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking..."
what's the cost?
The focal point of all technological innovation for two decades has been the computer. The condensation of focused engineering and dreaming, the smartphone- a "bicycle for the mind" promised to change the world and usher in a new era of prosperity and connection.
It’s too easy to overstate how much this promise came to fulfillment, so I leave the conflicting diatribes and sermons to those concerned with the direction our species will venture en masse. My concern is you. What does the mass adoption and subsequent integration of the smartphone into all of human life signal for the average Jen and Joe?
Researcher and entrepreneur Andy Crouch unpacks the loaded offer technology presents as a diminished tradeoff. Tech begins with the opportunity that "now you'll be able to" and ends with the hidden caveat of "you'll no longer be able to" and "now you'll have to." These terms and conditions are the unseen expectations of our lives. They are the beliefs that become entrenched as access and connection make way for distraction and addiction. We think of the constellation of connections that make up our social spheres and find ourselves bound to a digital etiquette of "staying in-touch,” replying to long-lost friends, and fielding potential spam and DM inquiries. These things are not inherently bad, they are new. And novelty, in any part of our lives, should invite interrogation.
Social media creates a cognitive load unknown to man until the 21st century. "You’ll no longer be able to” maintain anonymity and keep your life private from the world. For the first time in history, families put their kids on display for millions, unaware of the long-term ramifications. We have instigated self-surveillance behind closed doors and willingly offered ourselves as court jesters for the masses. In efforts to “bring the world closer together,” we have brought down walls which were previously vital to the functioning of democracies and societies at large. Propriety and discretion, once taken for granted, are obliterated in a digital ecosphere unkind to nuance and understanding. Dogpiles, doxxing, and detritus from digital deconstruction abound.
Now, this is a rather cynical view of “influencer culture” and the dangers therein, but it’s one I feel is already justified by a rising response from Gen Z to platforms like TikTok and distrust in devices. An increasingly common story is that of the pioneer high-schooler ditching their iPhone for more paired-down options. The trade-off is clear: prioritize in-person, non-digital interactions by introducing friction and restriction through a simplified interface.
Exchanges like these are subjective. Every life is unique. Circumstances and lifestyles dictate a person’s need and reception to the adoption of any kind of technology. What’s important is circumspection- are we aware of what we will lose? Do we understand what is required of us? Is every innovation worth each cost?
richly nourished
I’m going to cheat here and write about writing again. The daily blog is a practice in noticing. The trouble with noticing, I’ve found, is that it takes a while to “boot-up,” so to speak. My awareness muscles are cold. The past few months have dulled my senses for preparing each morning’s practice. On a normal week in this rhythm, I would have an abundance of ideas, quotes, arguments, and novelties to share. The dailies practically write themselves in a season of plenty.
Then there are seasons of transition. A path arrests me with new styles, new interests, and new leanings. My usual entries begin to shift in a direction wholly unexpected and uncomfortable, and it takes time to adjust my thinking and habits for this kind of work.
Currently, this looks like a shift from technology to philosophy. My work has always been littered with philosophical ideas and influences, but, as of late, has donned a new mask entirely obsessed with the abstract. More than that, my inputs from the realms of technology have shifted. Instead of consuming news and history and analyses of technological changes, my feed is entirely devoted to news. I’m swimming in innovation.
This problem is common for us today because of the newly minted twenty-four hour news cycle, instantly accessible internet, and invasive marketing schemes of tech companies. Getting sucked in is the new normal. But despite its ability to lend us a grasp of cultural conversations, this rhythm leads not to wisdom, but to ignorance. One can easily read all there is to know about the current month’s happenings that fly by in a week having not amounted to anything. It takes and gives greater strength to look back and understand those things which shape cultures eternally. History and philosophy, comparative religions and natural phenomena.
These things lend themselves to the cultivation of an ordered mind and virtuous heart. Thinking and writing on these leads to a level of depth unmet by doing the same with current events. A daily practice requires more. It demands more. Writing from abundance is only possible when nourished by rich sources.
notice more fractals
Fractals are infinite permutations of complexity. They are repeating sequences of lines of code that define a thing. They tell a story that gets deeper with every double-take and every return.
We often fail to notice the fractals that walk by us constantly. People with idiosyncrasies and dreams, formative habits and trauma-informed pasts. The closer you look, the more their name evolves. ‘Worrier.’ ‘Zealot.’ ‘Friend.’ There are patterns unseen to explore should we look.
Characters in a book often go through journeys of understanding. They create constellations of connections that inform their perspective and indoctrinate them into relationships of depth with their fellow fictions. Sherlock Holmes famously could look at a person and see their untold story. His sense of presence in the world of Doyle gives definition to the existence of fractals in us all.
Experts appear around works of art, commerce, and science because of the fractal effect. A piece begins with a simple premise. It is traced by instruments, language, and emotions. Only those eager enough to chase its premise around a tree find its repetition written in the patterns uncovered.
The question of time becomes relevant when the practicality of these thoughts are interrogated. How is one expected to find the time to dig so thoroughly into the soil of these shapes? Time is not infinite, where these are. The struggle to find fractals and unlock hidden mysteries is left undone by all in the end. The path leads to greater, not full understanding. Augustine of Hippo taught us that when we say “I love you”, we’re really saying “I want you to be.” For those seeking to know, their pursuit is a resounding statement of “I want you to be. Keep existing, so I can see your depths.” This in turn relates that which can change a heart on a dime and turn a heart of stone: love.
a new refrain
You must remind yourself: your audience is one, the work is the end, failure is the path.
I’ve always thought writing to be a primal thing for me, but if that were true the opposite statement would manifest. Writing is the highest form of thought. At present, I’m resuscitating my thinking from the pit. I remember what I once wrote, I see what I now read, and I cringe. The reminder is that I write because I have to, and I write for the person I am becoming.
The practice has always fit the identity. Right now, I am no writer. I strove for my creation to be finished while forgetting the need to create. There is no work without the practice for the practice is the end. In order to reengage the process that can propel me to this end, I shun looking back and let my mind draw out it’s meanderings, let the muse provide its song.
The path may be made of stones that look the same, but their quality differs tellingly with every step. If I choose to walk this path again, my vision will deceive me. Progress is not seen in hindsight, but in constancy. So too will my art’s strength be measured in each moment I create it rather than in every time I look back at it. This romantic view leads through blind ignorance to shepherd in transformation.
The path, the work, and the audience all point ahead. I follow.
the internet: ecosystem, engine, escape
The internet is all three.
We find inputs around which to orient ourselves for "nourishment". These our feeds.
We find tools to accelerate our actions and answer our questions. These our browsers.
We find opiates to numb ourselves amidst a torrent of identityless "others" in this pool. These our content.
You see, not only did the internet result in a change of these 3 E's, but it created new categories for them. New barriers and pitfalls, languages and psychologies, rules and rewards.
It created a new ecosystem within which, without virtues or a guide, we revert to a war of all against all. It created an engine without which we have become unable to understand, reason, or engage the world. It created an escape that takes us farther away from our humanity than we've ever gone.
A perfectly analogous relationship is to the vast exploration of space we peek over the cusp of. Astronauts experience a disembodied realization of their untethered souls from the earth. A whole new landscape is laid before them with fundamental laws in an altered state. An engine of philosophy and progress, space presents us with reasons to strive or spiral in whatever direction our bias directs. Escape from a so-called sinking ship, framed in wonder and excitement when the reality, though inspiringly beautiful, is cold and dark.
Like this exploration, the fledgling internet age has so much on offer. Offered and accepted. We must be aware, the integration of the web into our lives is a full remodel of the human experience. We are not just encumbered by internet accoutrements, but engrossed within its whimsy.
Carr writes about hyperlinking thinking (the irony of what I'm about to do is not lost on me), Smith about binary re-identification, and Dyson about time as an illusion in the digital world. All are certain of one thing:
In the last 20 years of computing technology and the internet working upon humankind, it is hard to say we are evolved in any way.
technology and ecology
“The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological–social–psychological–economic system . We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch.”
~ Donella Meadows
Herein lies a fundamental truth we need to understand about technology:
New technologies do not simply add or subtract, rather they change everything. Technological change is ecological in nature. The environment technology is introduced into is fundamentally altered from the substrata to the heavens.
When stone tools were invented, we didn’t just have neanderthals plus stone tools. We had an entirely reinvented man because of stone tools. When Virtual Reality was invented, we didn’t just have American culture plus VR- we now have a reinvented Meta-minded man because of VR (one not distant from dystopian Ready Player One author and screenwriter Ernst Cline imagined).
The advances made by these innovations are well and good, but they are distractions; candy sprinkled by Hansel and Gretel’s witch to distract from manufactured harm.
What we must consider when bringing new technologies to the market is not what this tech can do for us, but what this tech can do to us? What are the changes following this technologies introduction? What parts of life are adjusted or completely disrupted because of this technology?
The invention of lanterns altered our relationship to work and sleep. The printing press altered society’s educational development. The smartphone has changed the way we socialize, do work, consume information, date, travel, play, and generally live.
Why is this so important?
If we are to adopt new, inventive “tools” into our ecosystem, we must do so “with our eyes wide open” (as Neil Postman was fond of saying) while a technology plays out its hand and does what its design dictates. We can’t know consequences from a technology before its release, yes, and we must allow technology to evolve in the environment it enters, also yes, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be more aware of the things under threat from new entrants.
Proceeding with eyes wide open requires asking more questions. It requires an inquisitively thorough and cautious perspective that is currently underrepresented in creative technology circles. Let’s keep being curious…
economies and ethics of scale
Each January around the post-Christmas settling, tech companies announce (or serendipitously leak) their lineup for the coming year: software updates, “improved” smartphone models, new desk or laptops, fancy tablets, and stylish wearables to anticipate. The tragedy of this time is that no one is looking forward to getting a new gadget as much as they are excited about getting rid of an old one...
This cycle, made ludicrous by the mid-year color refresh Big Tech and fueled by the planned obsolescence of phone throttling paired with intentionally low manufacturing quality, is a net negative for society.
Nature suffers. No longer are we attuned to changing seasons as much as the changing release dates of technology. We imbibe with impunity the drug of more as islands of waste pile higher for the sake of a 9% screen size increase or a sharper quality image of progressively more trivial, and cliche photographs.
Community suffers. With subtle, chosen differences in device appearance, tech companies provide upgraders with visible status symbols to (unconsciously or overtly) lord their purchases over peers who haven't rushed to their carrier for an upgrade.
Society suffers. Attracted by the promise of new and better, we trade a piece of ourselves for convenience and quality of life. We lock our lives deeper within the identities this technology happily provides us. We become comfortable within the metaworld that looks more and more like our own as the blurred lines progress faster than our understanding of them…
...And the cycle continues. We buy, we consume, we dump, and we buy again.
Why would we assume there was any other way in the system we've built upon such competitive economic incentives?
What would an alternative to a silicon valley gold-digger look like?
How would a healthy growth model unfold in markets and across the globalized world?
Where would humane designers go to build the sorts of tech that valued our attention, cognition, and emotions?
Where once an economy produced only those inventions that were mass-marketable because of their attraction, we see a new economic incentive emerge that places the user back at the center of a holistically, healthily, humanely-designed industry.
Light. Punkt. Mudita.
Tech designed differently. Tech designed to last, to improve community, to end “the tyranny of more.” Tech designed without the incentive to distract us and keep us captive to it’s whimsy. Tech designed to catalyze a more humane future.
But we need more…
These few show us only the beginnings of a world where ethics-centered startups are able to profitably produce good tech with humane values. There are still economies and ethics of scale that are barriers to entry in production, marketing, and design.
For the economies of scale we see no path to financial success for ethical tech. Too few of us are able to break from Silicon Valley to choose healthier paths. Humane tech companies can’t cost effectively produce their innovations without the fast user acquisition that tech unicorns see because of their unethical marketing and design tactics. They fall short of their needs. They struggle to scale.
For the ethics of scale, res ipsum loquitor as humane tech suffers from a conscience absent 99% of the average tech groups. To buy back shares in the attention economy, Tragedy of the Commons-type incentives are required. No distraction-free tech can, on principle, advertise to markets that would be susceptible to purchasing their products. Your tactics of scale are bound by your ethics.
You could assume that scaling issues would limit these companies from ever reaching a critical mass. Many see the entrance of new players as something unnecessary in an already crowded space. More believe redemption for technology does not lay in the hands of these few change-makers with a restriction-filled market.
But it is true, as Wendell Berry writes, that the aims of capitalistic tools of industrialization can enrich and empower the few (for a while), but they will sooner or later ruin us all… So without a system and technology rebuild upon new incentives and ethics, our softwares and devices will crumble from their base.
shovel or axe?
“When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: he could plant a tree…
When the axe was invented, he became a taker: he could chop it down…”- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Shovel or axe?
In this reflection, Leopold’s influence is the philosophical determinism and free-will debates that shaped thought for centuries.
His concern is with the offloading of responsibility by the division of labor we have created.
This disconnect prevents us from seeing a determinist’s worst fears take the reins…
Determinism is the philosophy that, succinctly stated, says,
“We shape our tools and they in turn shape us.”
- Marshall McLuhan, Father of many deterministic ideas about technology and media theory
Taken at face value, determinism implies that any technology when loosed in society can reach a state beyond programmable control.
Most determinists have hopeless views about a technology after its creation. We unwittingly created an axe with immense societal influence. Our government’s attempt to control this emergent Technopoly is equivalent to a hand grasping a river’s rapids.
What some (namely me) choose to accept is the opening assertion from McLuhan:
We shape our tools…
We have the power to ensure our tools are not chopping all the time:
We can shape them in ways that promote communal thriving. We can use them to preserve and protect historicity and cultural artifacts. We can harness their gifts to create beauty and hone our crafts. We can come together to refine education systems for the promotion of global connection.
We can become developers of a new kind of technology that won’t represent the interests of profit and corporate thriving. These, instead, can embody the qualities the shovel represents. Generosity, integrity, wisdom.
black box
The world made complex by technology will become simple again.
A core tenant of speculative fiction is technology’s eventual hiddenness behind a layer of reality. Its purpose: to reduce the cognitive load of knowledge workers and engineers, while bringing focus to work and life.
Like Ford crafting the model-T line, we’re beginning to realize civilization’s most valuable commodity. Cal Newport in his book, A World Without Email, writes that, “in Ford’s world, the workers were dispensable (supremely valuing output), while in the knowledge world, our brains are the source of all value.”
The Information Age of torrential inundation has to transform into an Age of Understanding. Understanding simplifies the data flood and leads to wisdom. To get there, we need to clear cluttered desktops.
Think about Clarke’s third law: “any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” The way we send emails today follows a process incomprehensible for a person plucked out of the 60’s who ran information through complicated tube systems to receive physical mail.
“Black box simplification” is inevitable.
We already see it in small ways. You have no idea how the black box (literal and figurative) you’re reading this on functions, but you’re still competent to access information. And while it still has a complex interface that confounds some who were not born into an iSociety, its base functions become simpler and more efficient each year.
This learning curve leads to another pillar the field of ethical technology hoists- accessibility for those on the periphery. All this complexity and overload only serves a purpose if we perpetuate it on an equitable plane.
The Center for Humane Technology established baseline conditions for humane technology to enter society:
Humane technology narrows the gap between the powerful and the marginalized instead of increasing that gap.
We will simplify to this state.
One revealing point economists always reference post-crisis refers to “civilization immunity”. After a societal state of emergency (e.g. wars, famines, pandemics…), a civilization’s immune system is triggered, so that something similar cannot happen again. This can often have unintended and far-reaching consequences for good and bad.
It’s not a leap to say a year and half with the screens of our technology more prominent and under circumspection than ever will lead to societal transformations alongside COVID-19-induced evolution…
impulse to invent
The birth of invention for half a century. San Diego. Tucked in the crook of California's Pacific coast-facing mitt. Stanford University. Squeezed between Sand Hill Road (where the VC’s reside) and Page Hill Road (where lawyers arbitrate) lies the most efficient startup-creating ecosystem ever found. Silicon Valley.
Let's talk about our "impulse to invent” and why it requires oversight.
First, inventions.
Culture is fueled by invention. By trends and ideas. Novelty and rearrangement. It happens when coders code, writers write, artists break the rules, and influencers innovate.
Its nature is progressive. Its rhythm, cyclical. Its goal, nothing short of revolution. It's available to anyone, and it awaits the first pioneer.
Invention has brought us from the Stone Age through the Ages of Bronze, Iron, and Steel to the Age of Modernity and Technology as we think of it today.
Despite lacking one, the smartphone is the invention I tend to dwell on.
Its case studies are inexhaustible with its generative nature on full display:
From the smartphone, we made countless apps. Created communities that span continents. Harnessed the power of the GPS, television, radio, and computer for miniature use (then expanded them beyond their limitations from previous forms).
The same is true of numerous landmark inventions: language, books, light, plastic. Ex uno plures. Out of one, many.
And through that many, we witnessed the boom of the world's economy. Adam Smith anointed an "economic man" in The Wealth of Nations…We haven't looked back since. This lack of hindsight clarifies our impulse's more disordered quality.
|im·pulse| n. 1 a sudden strong and unreflective urge or desire to act...
We make and make better, but we do not often make right.
We omit edits. We see ourselves as infallible. We believe the responsibility to be another's.
Our industrial complex doesn't aid the problem. On the contrary, division of labor allows us to remove ourselves from the problem's source. The smartphone engineer isn't complicit in Facebook's malpractice and outrage-mongering. The app designer isn't to blame for a device's internal notification system (aka distraction system). Lithium miners sell minerals to the best-buying smartphone manufacturer.
Users find themselves holding the bag. We experience the increasing Ledger of Harms from injurious technologies.
This is why it's fundamental that we equip ourselves with knowledge. Knowledge of how to reimagine technology that acts in our interest. That allows us to reconnect to attack large-scale problems. That removes distraction from hampering the pursuit of dreams.
silicon valley
Throughout our history, varying cities have been the crux of an emanating American spirit. New York, for many of our mid-epochal decades, embodied a spirit of freedom, dreaming, and opportunity that Lady Liberty displayed for all to see. The imagery of the torch, crown, and face evoke feelings of pride, melancholy, hope, and more across a liberal-minded populace.
Forty years ago, Neil Postman wrote about 20th Century America's symbolic move to Las Vegas as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration with iconoclastic slot machines, hookers, and entertainment inside the city of sin and sand. Postman's belief that public discourse had fully taken the form of entertainment is epitomized in this move. No longer was the dream of New Yorkers and Californians one of hard work and prosperity, but of lavish trivialities of leisure. How much this century of opulence (best exhibited in 1925's The Great Gatsby) prepared (or, rather, inhibited) us for the coming age is unknown.
Thus, in America's final emblematic move west, the 600 mile drive from Vegas to Silicon Valley displays our recent departure from the Entertainment Age to the Information Age. Restoring many of the boot-strapper tendencies of early America and the Industrial Age of progress, this new age and icon carries with it a pernicious danger in its emphases...
While progress and hard work has long been positive attributes of our Western culture, there is a distinct reason the Valley, not the barley farms of the mid-west, is our new graven image of flourishing. 80-hour work weeks and technical jobs are the new pride and drive of our educational and economic system. Physical and philosophical work have quickly fallen out of vogue.
For one, technological substitution is sought after with vigor and value. For the other, considerations of the abstracted kind are not pertinent in progress' wake.
Progress itself has been coopted by Silicon Valley's main export. No longer does culture value advances in being human, but in pushing forward technology. Presence, connection, and wisdom are rapidly undervalued. Many now see our dilemma and swiftly try to patch the ship's leakage. But how can patients, with only a minority trained in wellness, address their own illness among rooted, systemic solutions. For, truly, the problem is the system of education, economy, and government.
Many of these problems unfolded in the Enlightenment when spirit was downplayed and material was emphasized. Biotechnology now masquerades as an attempt to make improvements upon the human base model. It does so through the reduction of man to mere technological parts (not a corrective worthy of trial when the reality is in a duality). We are sent adrift from our essential components and holistic, heart-soul-mind-strength composition.
This sort-of "technological progressivism" is in our very air.
So much so that some call our disposition and governance, Technopoly, and both sides of the philosophical aisle call it, Technocracy. This means that when global, systemic problems are conjured up in our minds, we tend to think of technologic solutions. Creating (often, better or more) tech to solve climate change, income inequalities, mental health crises, or multi-year pandemics is not an effective impact strategy.
Many have pointed out the fact that societal issues should be solved using society-level changes with systemic, ecological considerations. It's easy to see the value in changing effects upstream of problems. Obesity will never disappear with increased liposuction, dietary pills, and more cardiovascular surgeries.
But still, the Techno-fixers persist.
The irony is that each problem's cause can be traced to tech that was a fatal convenience, like toxic band-aids on a gaping chest cavity. They hold together the wound long enough for more damage to seep in. These alone can never solve all of society's problems. In fact, a good majority of them hurt our epistemic capacity to work in a globalized economy. As long as we proceed with this assumption, we will find failure at each new race to capitalize on innovations.
Alas, our national symbols have moved to the very edge of the Western world.
To establish a more humane future, the solution is not to find another radiant, symbolic headquarter of international prosperity.
The solution lay in the philosophy of Emerson and the strategy of Berry to reunite what was lost in a global forrest with what thrived among our local trees. It lay not in looking to some place far off, but in finding the land to admire in our own backyard....
institutes
When Rome fell, barbarians pillaged her cities.
The Visigoth conquerors ransacked the grand mausoleums, destroyed buildings around the Senate Plaza, and burned the great courthouses that were symbols and agents of progressive Western justice. The images of Roman triumph, marble statues and paintings were torn down. The sack of Rome wasn't complete until the once-solid, but now shaky institutions of order, justice, and wisdom were unrecognizable in the dawn of a new post-Golden Age of Romanic rule.
Before Rome's fall, the court of law was the arbiter of justice, the Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR) was the first democratic government, the family was a pillar of social order, and Latin was the lingua franca (trade language) of Europe.
These institutions and innovations endured and matured as the cornerstones of western society today because of their ability to remain the control mechanisms of society, despite a geographical invasion and destruction. In the rebuilding and restoration process, their application led to a new golden era that pushed prosperity further west and through time to amass in the new world of Columbus and Washington.
As control mechanisms, these institutions act to distribute punishment and repayment (courts and legislature), to vet information and truth (schools and religion), and to establish trade and wealth (language, media, and markets). Sometimes they do this by blatantly denying access to information or regulating resources, but more often accomplish their ends by lending less weight to some knowledge and more to others.
Now we arrive at the problem of the Visigoth we have willingly loosed in society:
the foundational institutions of our day are crumbling and insufficient to cope with the nature and design of smartphone technology in its current state.
Our smartphones have created a state of mind within which we all live and act. Its bread is unlimited information, its water, the deification and goal of technological progress.
Like the Romans who became greedy and arrogant at being the pride of the western world, our technological world has created the invisible, often-lauded problem of information glut (usually called Big Data).
The supply of information increases every second on the ever-growing, worldwide web.
The equitable spread of information and access has been good for righting many wrongs in historical representation, educational inequalities, and wealth disparities, but bad for the bedrocks of social order.
The role of smartphones in this is equal parts complete and ever-unfolding.
The iPhone gave legs to search engines and media outlets running into the wall of time-on-screens in their profit equation (because potential profit equals advertising rates multiplied by consumer eyeballs). Unlocking life-hours untapped by television, radio, or computers, smartphones allowed data and ads to proliferate while citizens were away from home, in their private spaces and nature.
New influences, sources, and ideas spring from everywhere and nowhere to strain those control mechanisms that once held society together. The strain leads to new control mechanisms (Google, content moderation, platforms around niches), which further increase the supply and create dissonance between institutions and individuals.
Here we see the most consequential movement of distrust in the media, doubt in the power of officially elected positions, and a devaluing of the institutions of family, universities, libraries, post offices, and banks (and currency with the rise of crypto).
My point is not that we should place absolute faith in these entities (for many, and maybe most of them can be corrupt, bloated things). Nor that we should halt culture's evolution to rebuild systems long antiquated for an "enlightened, enriched" society.
My argument is that all institutions are failing because of smartphone technology, despite any good they bring to society, so that those who want reform over removal will see the end of any beginnings before they realize their device's hand at play in the destruction.
the search for meaning
I feel confident writing about ignorance. It's one of the subjects of which I am most aware…
What do we do when we lack context? Some of us double down. Others seek enlightenment.
We were once much better at finding answers within our own thinking. The ancients were able to orate and write without consulting databases. Philosophy, the earliest of the humanities, was accomplished void of historical records and written analyses.
But I don't want to dwell on that particular loss...
When we lack context today we ask Google. "Who won the Cold War? What makes up an ecological disaster? Who should be the next president?" Searches like these nourish our quest for knowledge, but the journey of understanding requires far greater care than a technology like Google can provide.
Humans and algorithms don't mix.
“...the closer an environment is to being genuinely good for humans, the worse it is for technology, and vice versa.”