Theorists of technology are becoming the most significant sources of political ideas; theorists of politics are becoming incapable of understanding significant technological ideas.Unschooled in perceiving the development of digital technology for what it is, political leaders now frenetically throw around appeals to concepts—slogans, “values,” “ideals”—that have come unglued from the reality formed by our surrounding digital environment.... [These] destabilizing trends raise (significantly) two linked issues, one more abstract and one more particular. First, is the Western political tradition obsolete? Second, is America, because of its regime, worth the trouble of trying to preserve?
It's a longer argument, but if any of you are drawn into it I'd like to discuss it with you. Just to raise one point that he only briefly mentions, digital pornography seems to me to be at the back of this explosion of genders. In the digital world, and only there, these things can seem as if they have some reality: it might carry a kind of sense to say that one is a 'pansexual otherkin,' because as a search term that (and maybe only that) reliably hooks you up with content that floats your boat. The digital space creates its own reality, and people who live more or less exclusively in it can come to believe that reality is more meaningful than the physical one.
That kind of thing leads to a basic disruption of the categories of ordinary life in the physical world, especially when it passes into political organizing. Whereas it was once obvious that one is male or female -- indeed, one's physical body knows what it is and broadcasts it to everyone else via pheromones -- the departure from the physical reality into the digital one creates an alienation and detachment from the physical constraints.
Yet the digital identifiers don't carry meaning the way the embodied reality does.
Whiteness is evil, but deprogram the evil, and whiteness is empty—hollow, meaningless, obsolete. We already see the same experience at work with maleness: deprogram the evil that defines it, according to the vanguard Left, and what is left is a disgusting, disenchanted neuter. Take away fatherhood (patriarchy), priesthood (molestation), military or law enforcement service (racism), business leadership (capitalist greed), and what is left is a civilization of post-boys, autogynephilic, cripplingly awkward, knowingly purposeless....
This leads to a politics, but not one of equality as you might expect. Discovering all previously powerful categories to be empty in the new reality, you might think they would simply be jettisoned in favor of a kind of perfect equality: everyone is the same, they just have different tastes. As the article goes on to explore, that is not at all what is happening; perhaps, the author suggests, America can salvage what is becoming in the minds of our youth.
A recent book, 'Strange Rites' (by Tara Isabella Burton) is relevant here...just finished it and I found it insightful, important,depressing, and irritating. The author argues that America has *not* become a secular nation; rather, we have seen a proliferation of many different forms of religion, often not recognized as such. She notes that the printing press is often credited for the rise of Protestantism:
ReplyDelete'The technology that gave us the ability to sit with a text in the privacy of our own home and internalize and interpret its message for ourselves a profound sense of agency and a retraction of the boundaries of a public sphere. Protestantism is, perhaps, the ultimate religion of the printed book. The Remixed religions we're about to explore are religions of the Internet.'
She also asserts that printing was 'perhaps the most individualizing piece of technology ever created'.
The 'Remixed' religions that she describes range from New Age beliefs such as astrology and 'spiritual energy in physical object' to Yoga with a spiritual overlay to meaning-seeking consumerism to Jordan-Peterson-Style Self-Help and the 'Red Pill' Manosphere and also a particular Rave scene in which she was herself involved.
The book is irritating most importantly because the author accepts too many of the shibboleths of the Woke, such as the authoritarian nature of Trump and the assertion that he wasn't interested/effective as regards policy...and also because the book is just too long. It's an important and in many ways insightful book, though, and I wish some others here would read it and maybe even write a proper review of it.
Like many thought-provoking writers, he's big on outlining the problem, but not so much on solutions.
ReplyDeleteI agree that a lot of people, even well-educated and / or powerful people, really do not understand what is happening with technology. The generation growing up right now will be quite different from what's come before; digital natives is one term for them, although that is a broader term.
There's no reason this can't change, but at the same time, there are tens of millions of small reasons it can't change. I think it has little to do with the inevitableness of change and a lot to do with all of us being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But this are just quick thoughts. I'd have to read it again and take some time to think about it more to give better.
I think it is well worth considering that living online creates differences we do not fully understand. I think much of the foolishness about gender is doomed to collapse of its own weight because the underlying biological reality will eventually assert itself. Because I grew up in that reality, I believe it will win.
ReplyDeleteBut what if things really are that different among those who live in the house of cards that is the internet, which will be able to quickly reconstitute after every collapse? What if they really can go and live there? Yes, rough realities will persist for some time - yet what if they are increasingly temporary and less common?
Changes in communications technologies really do have an impact on how people think and perceive...Marshall McLuhan got some things wrong, but he was correct with this basic insight: the nature of the medium matters, not only what is communicated over it.
ReplyDeleteIn the early 19th century, a journalist writing about the introduction of the telegraph marveled:
"This extraordinary discovery leaves…no *elsewhere*…it is all here."
Heinrich Heine, living in Paris in 1843, made a similar observation about the coming of the railroads:
"I feel the mountains and forests of all countries advancing towards Paris. Already, I smell the scent of German lime-trees; the North-Sea breaks on my doorstep."
Joseph Roth, living in Berlin in the 1920s, found the radio, the phonograph, and photography to be rather disorienting:
"There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct."
and
"People who had completely ordinary eyes, all of a sudden obtain a look. The indifferent become thoughtful, the harmless full of humor, the simpleminded become goal oriented, the common strollers look like pilots, secretaries like demons, directors like Caesars."
It seems there's both bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition in Congress to restricting the power of our tech monopolies.
ReplyDeleteThe House Judiciary Committee just passed 6 bills to do that, including one that could break up some of them. The linked article is an analysis of these bills and why they passed the committee. Now we'll see what the rest of Congress thinks.
Might be time to write your representatives.
There is also the whole issue that we who are parents now can't really know what it's like for our children the way parents used to fairly well understand the life of their children as they had lived a similar life. It changed dramatically for my grandparents, born in the late 19th c. or very early 20th c. with their children born a quarter to a third of the way into the 20th c., and accelerated from there- but it's been a huge step away from the past for us, especially, because of the increasing speed of change, both technologically, and culturally. Perhaps things can change a bit as our children get a grasp on the new realities and are able to relate to theirs better than we can to ours.
ReplyDeleteDF: I wouldn't mind reading that book. Let me see if I can get it from the library, if the library has re-opened. They were dragging their feet.
ReplyDeleteTom: He does propound America as an ideal as the solution; the road to getting there is a little light, but it is at least an idea of a way forward.
AVI: Yes, exactly. If the technological society collapses so that people are forced back into something more like the old, physical reality, then of course the new consciousness will also collapse. It will quickly come to be seen as a sort of illusion, because in the physical world it cannot and does not apply. It only applies in the realm of imagination detached from physical reality that the digital enables.
But maybe that will be the new reality; maybe, at least for the ruling/upper classes, life will become centered there instead of here. The guys fixing the internet cables will still lead physical lives, but they'll be governed by people who neither understand them nor respect them, even though they utterly rely upon them.
Douglas: That is definitely an issue at play here. I've heard it said that Generation X is the last one that grew up in the physical world, but was introduced to the digital world early enough to understand it. The younger generations didn't have a childhood framed in exclusively physical terms: riding bicycles to visit friends even miles away as children, exploring the woods with your dog and a knife, staying out until dark then coming home for supper. The world even of my youth is quite entirely gone.