Before I say anything else, let me say this: I get where this is coming from, really, I do.
This is a recent xkcd comic that you may have seen in the past day or two. It makes a valid point, sort of. The point that I’d say is worth taking from this comic is this: both unbridled enthusiasm and apocalyptic fear of any new technology are probably misguided. Some people need to hear that.
That said, this comic is similar in spirt to an earlier xkcd offering that Alan Jacobs rightfully picked apart with some searching questions. Although it is more pronounced in the earlier piece, both exhibit a certain cavalier “nothing-to-see-here-let’s-move-it-along” attitude with regards to technological change. In fact, one might be tempted to conclude that according to the xkcd philosophy of technology, technology changes nothing at all. Or, worse yet, that with technology it is always que sera, sera and we do well to stop worrying and enjoy the ride wherever it may lead.
In truth, I might’ve let the whole thing go without comment were it not for that last entry on the chart. It’s a variation of a recurring, usually vacuous rhetorical move that latches on to any form of continuity in order to dismiss concerns, criticism, etc. Since we have always already been X, this new form of X is inconsequential. It is as if reality were an undifferentiated, uncaused monistic affair in which the consequences of every apparent change are always contained and neutralized by its antecedents. But, of course, the fact that human beings have always died does not suggest to anyone in their right mind that we should never investigate the causes of particular deaths so as to prevent them when it is reasonable and possible to do so.
Similarly, pointing out that human beings have always used technology is perhaps the least interesting observation one could make about the relationship between human beings and any given technology. Continuity of this sort is the ground against which figures of discontinuity appear, and it is the figures that are of interest. Alienation may be a fact of life (or maybe that is simply the story that moderns tell themselves to bear it), but it has been so to greater and lesser extents and for a host of different reasons. Pointing out that we have always been alienated is, consequently, the least interesting and the least helpful thing one could say about the matter.
[Note: This post first appeared on Medium in July. At the time, I mentioned it on this blog and provided a link. I’m now republishing the post here in its entirety.]
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Freud reportedly quipped, and sometimes technology is just a tool. But sometimes it becomes something more. Sometimes technology takes on symbolic, or even religious significance.
In 1900, Paris welcomed the new century by hosting the Exposition Universelle. It was, like other expostions and worlds’ fairs before it, a showcase of both cultural achievement and technological innovation. One of the most popular exhibits at the Exposition was the Palace of Electricity which displayed a series of massive dynamos powering all the other exhibition halls.Among the millions of visitors that came through the Palace of Electricity, there was an American, the historian and cultural critic Henry Adams, who published a memorable account of his experience. Adams was awestruck by the whirling dynamos and, perhaps because he had recently visited the cathedral at Chartres, he drew an evocative comparison between the dynamo and the power of the Virgin in medieval society. Speaking in the third person, Adams wrote,
As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring — scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power — while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.
Writing in the early 1970s, Harvey Cox revisited Adams’ meditation on the Virgin and the Dynamo and concluded that Adams saw “what so many commentators on technology since then have missed. He saw that the dynamo … was not only a forty-foot tool man could use to help him on his way, it was also a forty-foot-high symbol of where he wanted to go.”
Cox looked around American society in the early 70s, and wondered how Adams would read the symbolic value of the automobile, the jet plane, the hydrogen bomb, or a space capsule. These too had become symbols of the age and they invited a semiology of the “symbolism of technology.”
“Technological artifacts become symbols,” Cox wrote, “when they are ‘iconized,’ when they release emotions incommensurate with their mere utility, when they arouse hopes and fears only indirectly related to their use, when they begin to provide elements for the mapping of cognitive experience.”
Take the airplane, for example. In his classic study, The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, Joseph Corn summarized a remarkable article that appeared in 1916 about the future of flight. In it, the author predicted trans-oceanic flights by 1930 and, by 1970,the emergence of “traffic rules of the air” necessitated by the heavy volume of airplane traffic. Then the timeline leaps forward to the year 3000. At this point “superhumans” would’ve evolved and they would “live in the upper stratas of the atmosphere and never come down to earth at all.” By the year 10000, “two distinct types of human beings” would have appeared: “Alti-man” and “ground man.” Alti-man would live his entire life in the sky and would have no body, he would be an “ethereal” being that would “swim” in the sky like we swim in the ocean.
As Corn put it, “Alti-man was nothing if not a god. He epitomized the winged gospel’s greatest hope: mere mortals, mounted on self-made mechanical wings, might fly free of all earthly contraints and become angelic and divine.”
This may all sound tremendously hoaky to our ears, but Corn’s book is full of only slightly less implausible aspirations that attached themselves to the airplane throughout the early and mid-twentieth century. And it wasn’t just the airplane. In American Technological Sublime, historian David Nye chronicled the near-religious reverence and ritual that gathered around the railroad, the first skyscrapers, the electrified cityscape, the Hoover Dam, atomic bombs, and Saturn V rockets.
Taking an even broader historical perspective, the late David Noble argued that the modern technological project has always been shot through with religious and quasi-spiritual aspirations. He traced what he called the “religion of technology” back from the late medieval era through pioneering early modern scientists to artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.
The symbolism of technology, however, does not always crystalize society’s hopes and ambitions. To borrow Cox’s phrasing, it does not always embody where we want to go. Sometimes it is a symbol of fears and anxieties. In The Machine in the Garden, for instance, Leo Marx meticulously detailed how the locomotive became a symbol that collected the fears and anxieties generated by the industrial revolution in nineteenth century America.
As late as 1901, long since the railroad had become an ordinary aspect of American life, novelist Frank Norris describes it in The Octopus as “a terror of steam and steal,” a “symbol of vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder, over all the reaches of the valley,” and a “leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Collussus, the Octopus.”
The sublime experience accompanying the atomic bomb also inspired fear and trepidation. This response was most famously put into words by Rober Oppenheimer when, after the detonation of the first atomic bomb, he quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
This duality is not surprising given what we know about religious symbols generally. Drawing on sociologist Emile Durkheim, Cox noted that sacred symbols “are characterized by a high degree of power and ofambiguity. They arouse dread and gratitude, terror and rapture. The more central and powerful a symbol is for a culture the more vivid the ambiguity becomes.” The symbolism of technology shares this interplay between power and ambiguity. Our most powerful technologies both promise salvation and threaten destruction.
So what are the symbolic technologies of our time? The recent farewell tour by the space shuttle fleet evoked something approaching Nye’s technological sublime, and so too did Curiosity’s successful Mars landing. Neither of these, however, seem to rise to the level of technological symbolism described by Cox. They are momentarily awe-inspiring, but they are not quite symbols. The Singularity movement certainly does contain strong strands of Noble’s “religion of technology,” and it explicitly promises one of humanity’s long sought after dreams, immortality. But the movement’s ambitions do not easily coalesce around one particular technology or artifact that could collect its force into a symbol.
Here’s my candidate: Google Glass.
I can’t think of another recent technology whose roll-out has occasioned such a strong and visceral backlash. You need only scroll through a few months worth of posts at Stop the Cyborgs to get a feel for how all manner of fears and anxieties have gathered around Glass. Here are some recent post titles:
Google Won’t Allow Face Recognition on Glass Yet
Überveillance | Think of it as big brother on the inside looking out
Consent is not enough: Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Dilemmas
Stigmatised | Face recognition as human branding
The World of Flawed Data and Killer Algorithms is Upon Us…
Google Glass; Making Life Efficient Through Privacy Invasion
Glass has appeared at a moment already fraught with anxiety about privacy, and that was the case even before recent revelations about the extent and ubiquity of NSA surveillance. In other words, just when the fear of being watched, monitored, or otherwise documented has swelled, along comes a new technology in the shape of glasses, our most recognizable ocular technology, that aptly serves as an iconic representation of those fears. If our phones and browsers are windows into our lives, Glass threatens to make our gaze and the gaze of the watchers one and the same.
But remember the dual nature of potent symbols: we have other fears to which Glass may present itself as a remedy. We fear missing out on what transpires online, and Glass promises to bring the Internet right in front of our eyes so we will never have to miss anything again. We fear experiences may pass by without our documenting them, and Glass promises the power to document our experience pervasively. If we fear being watched, Glass at least allows us to feel as if we can join the watchers. And behind these particular fears are more primal, longstanding fears: the fear of loneliness and isolation, the fear of death, the fear of insecurity and vulnerability. Glass answers to these as well.
Interestingly, the website I cited earlier was not called, “Stop Google Glass”; it was called, “Stop the Cyborgs.” Perhaps Google Glass is the icon the Singularity project has been looking for. Glass is not quite an implant, but something about its proximity to the body or about how it promises to fade from view and become the interface through which our consciousness experiences reality … something about it suggests the blurring of the line between human and machine. Perhaps that is the greatest fear and highest aspiration of our age. The fears of those who would preserve humanity as they know it, and the aspirations of those who are prepared, as they see it, to trascend humanity are embodied in Glass.
Long before he visited the Exposition Universelle, Henry Adams wrote to his brother:
You may think all this nonsense, but I tell you these are great times. Man has mounted science and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.
We might think all that nonsense, but it wasn’t that long ago that fears of a nuclear winter gripped our collective imagination. More recently, other technological scenarios have fueled our popular cultural nightmares: biogenetically cultivated global epidemics, robot apocalypses, or climate catastrophes. In each case, the things we have made “become Death, destroyer of worlds.” With Glass, the fear is not that we will blow up the world or unleash a global catastrophe. It is that we will simply innovate the humanity out of ourselves. Remembering how the story turned out, we might put the temptation this way: If we will place Glass before our eyes, they will be opened, and we will become as gods.
Of course, reading the symbolism of technology is not quite like reading palms or tea leaves. The symbols necessitate no particular future in themselves. But they are cultural indicators and as such they reveal something about us, and that is valuable enough.
I’m ordinarily reluctant to complain. This is partly a function of personality and partly a matter of conviction. I’m reticent by nature, and I tend to think that most complaining tends to be petty, self-serving, unhelpful, and tiresome.
That said, I’ve found myself complaining recently. I’m thinking of two separate incidents in the last week or so. In one exchange, I wrote to a friend that I was “Well enough, in that stretched-so-thin-people-can-probably-see-through-me kind of way.” In another conversation, I admitted that what annoyed me about my present situation, the situation that I’ve found myself in for the past few years, was that I was attempting to do so many things simultaneously I could do none of them well.
I teach in a couple of different settings, I’m trying to make my way through a graduate program, I’ve got a writing project that’s taken me much too long to complete, and I’d like to be a half-way decent husband. I could list other demands, but you get the idea. And, of course, those of you with children are reading this and saying, “Just you wait.” And that’s the thing: most people “feel my pain.” What I’m describing seems to be what it feels like to be alive for most people I know.
I was reminded of Isaiah Berlin’s famous discussion of the fox and the hedgehog. Expounding on an ancient Greek saying — “the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing” — Berlin went on to characterize thinkers as either foxes or hedgehogs. Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, for example, were hedgehogs; they had one big idea by which they interpreted the whole of experience. Aristotle, Montaigne, and Goethe were foxes; they were more attuned to the multifarious particularities of experience.
Berlin had intellectual styles in mind, but, if I may re-apply the proverb to the realm of action in everyday life, I find myself wanting to be a hedgehog. I want to do one thing and do it well. Instead, I find myself having to be a fox.
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that this was, in fact, a pretty good way of thinking about the character of contemporary life and competing responses to the dynamics of digital culture.
Clearly, there are forces at play that predate the advent of digital technologies. In fact, part of the unsettled, constantly shifting quality of life I’m getting at is what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has called “liquid modernity.” The solid structures of pre-modern, and even early modern society, have in our late-modern (postmodern, if you prefer) times given way to flux, uncertainty, and instability. (If you survey the titles of Bauman’s books over the last decade or so, you’ll quickly notice that Bauman has something of the hedgehog in him.)
The pace, structure, and dynamism of digital communication technologies have augmented these trends and brought their demands to bear on an ever larger portion of lived experience. In other words, multi-tasking, continuous partial attention, our skimming way of thinking, the horcrux-y character of our digital devices, the distraction/attention debates — all of this can be summed up by saying that we are living in a time where foxes are more likely to flourish than hedgehogs. Or, put more temperately, we are living in a time where foxes are more likely to feel at home than hedgehogs. This is great for foxes, of course, and may they prosper.
But what if you’re a hedgehog?
You cope and make due, of course. I don’t, after all, mean to complain.
It’s been a while since I’ve had occasion to point out a Borg Complex case, but the folks at Google have seen fit to help me remedy that situation.
At MIT’s EmTech conference last Thursday, the head of the display division at Google-X, Mary Lou Jepsen, gave us a few gems.
Speaking of Google Glass and its successors, Jepsen explained, “It’s basically a way of amplifying you. I’ve thought for many years that a laptop is an extension of my mind. Why not have it closer to my mind, and on me all the time?”
Why not, indeed.
In any case, her division is hard at work. They are “maybe sleeping three hours a night to bring the technology forward.”
“It’s coming,” she added. “I don’t think it’s stoppable.” Then why, I ask, lose so much sleep over it. One really ought not wear oneself ragged over something that’s bound to come to pass inevitably.
But, as per Mr. Brin’s directives, she wasn’t saying much about what exactly was coming. Whatever the next iteration of wearable computing looks like, Jepsen tells us “you become addicted to the speed of it, and it lets you do more fast and easily.”
Concerns? Never you mind. Remember Mr. Schmidts’s comforting assurances: “Our goal is to make the world better. We’ll take the criticism along the way, but criticisms are inevitably from people who are afraid of change or who have not figured out that there will be an adaptation of society to it.”
Silly fearful critics. Don’t they know resistance is futile, society will be assimi … er … will adapt.
You have likely already heard two things about the space-epic, Gravity. You have heard that it is a visually stunning, anxiety-inducing thriller that immediately absorbs you into its world and does not release you until the credits roll. That is largely correct. You have also heard that Gravity is not really about space. It is really about the inner struggles of the main character, Dr. Ryan Stone played by Sandra Bullock. This is also true enough. But what exactly is Gravity trying to tell us about this inner human struggle being played out against sublimely rendered vistas of earth and space?
As Matt Thomas astutely noted, Gravity trades in both the natural sublime and the technological sublime. The first of these is a common enough notion: it is the sense of awe, wonder, and fear that certain natural realities can inspire in us. Gravity gives us plenty of opportunities to experience the natural sublime as our gaze alternates from the meticulously wrought surface of the earth to the starry, cavernous darkness of the space which envelops it.
The technological sublime is a concept developed by the historian David Nye to describe the analogous feelings of awe, wonder, and fear that we experience in the presence of certain man-made realities. Nye documented a series of human technologies that inspired this kind of response when they were first developed. These included the Hoover Dam, skyscrapers, the electrified city-scape, the atomic bomb, and the Saturn V rockets. In Gravity, depictions of the space shuttle, the International Space Station, and the Hubble telescope — even after they have been pummeled and shredded by space debris — also manage to evoke this experience of the technological sublime.
Against this double sublime, Gravity unfolds its plot of disaster and survival. [Yes, spoilers ahead.] Within minutes, Dr. Stone and Matt Kowalski (played by George Clooney) find themselves adrift after a field of space debris strikes the shuttle and kills the rest of the crew. Kowalski is preternaturally calm in the face of this unthinkable catastrophe. After he recovers Dr. Stone, the pair begin making their way to the ISS in hopes of using the station’s Soyuz capsule to return to earth. Had that initial plan worked, of course, it would have been a very short film.
Upon arriving at the ISS, Kowalski is lost in an act of heroic self-sacrifice and the capsule turns out to be too damaged to survive re-entry. Before he is lost, Kowalski lays out a plan of action for Dr. Stone. She is to take the battered capsule to the Chinese space station and then use their emergency capsule for the journey home. Stone manages to follow this plan, but one near catastrophe after another ensues maintaining a feverish pitch of suspense, or, as some critics have noted, threatening to steer the film into melodrama.
It is in the midst of one of these crisis that Stone is tempted to give up altogether. She finds that the Soyuz capsule does not have enough fuel to get to the Chinese station and so she opts to turn off the capsule’s life support systems and float off into that other dark abyss. This scene is pivotal. We have already learned that Stone lost a daughter in a painfully random playground accident. Ever since, she has lost herself in her work and driven aimlessly at night to assuage her sorrow. She is alone in space now, but she realizes that she is alone on earth as well. No one would mourn her loss, she realizes.
As she begins to doze into unconsciousness, however, Kowalski reappears, chatty and calm as always. He acknowledges that there is something appealing about the escape she is about to make, but he encourages her to reconsider and suggests a strategy that she had not yet considered. And then he disappears. We realize that she had been hallucinating, but she rallies nonetheless and determines to not give up on the hope of return quite yet.
If Kant and Nye help us to describe the sublime scenery against which Stone’s struggle is set, I’d like to suggest that Wendell Berry and G.K. Chesterton can help us make sense of the struggle itself.
Stone must learn to see life on earth — with both its heartache and tragedy, its joys and delights — as a gift, and it is through a kind of death that her perception begins to be realigned. Wendell Berry has beautifully captured this dynamic in his reflections on a wonderfully poignant scene in Shakespeare’s King Lear involving the blinded Earl of Gloucester and his son, Edgar. Gloucester is in despair, and seeks to take his life. The life he thought himself the master of has unraveled, and he has compounded this troubles by falsely accusing Edgar and driving him into exile. But Edgar, disguised as a beggar, has returned to his father to lead him out of despair so that the old man may die in the proper human position, “Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief …”
As Berry puts it, “Edgar does not want his father to give up on life. To give up on life is to pass beyond the possibility of change or redemption.” So when Gloucester asks to be taken to the cliffs of Dover so that by a leap he may end his life, his disguised son only pretends to do so. The stage directions then indicate that Gloucester, “Falls forward and swoons.” When he awakes, his son now pretends to be a man who has seen Gloucester survive the great fall. Gloucester is dismayed. “Away, and let me die,” he says. But Edgar, narrates what he has “seen” and proclaims, “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.”
It is that line, that realization that brings Gloucester back from despair. Having passed through a kind of fictive death, he has been brought once more to see his life as a gift. And so it was with Stone. Kowalski plays Edgar to her Gloucester and having flirted with death, she is recalled to life. No longer does she long for the escape into death that the dark, harshness of space represents in this film. She now determines to find her place again on earth, with all of its attendant sorrows and joys.
So much for Berry, what of Chesterton? Chesterton famously came to faith through an experience of profound gratitude for the sheer gratuity of being. While she ponders the possibility of death and laments that there will be no one to mourn her, Stone also says that there will be no one to pray for her. She confesses that she cannot pray for herself. She was never taught. When, finally, she has reentered the earth’s atmosphere and her capsule splashes down in a murky lake, Stone must make one more fight for her life. The capsule is inundated and she must swim out for air, but she is forced to struggle with her space suit, which threatens to sink her. Once she has fought free of this last obstacle, she makes her way to a muddy shore and, cheek to clay, she exhales the words, “Thank you.” She has, I take it, learned to pray.
This film about space ends on earth as Stone struggles to her feet under the pull of gravity. But by the composure of her posture and the joy of her expression, we are encouraged to conclude that now, finally, Stone is not only on earth, but she is also at home on earth. She no longer seeks an escape. She is prepared to live with both grief and joy. She knows too that for all of the sublime splendor of space, it is her life that is the most profound miracle for which the instinctive response can only be gratitude.
Glass has appeared at a moment already fraught with anxiety about privacy, and that was the case even before recent revelations about the extent and ubiquity of NSA surveillance. In other words, just when the fear of being watched, monitored, or otherwise documented has swelled, along comes a new technology in the shape of glasses, our most recognizable ocular technology, that aptly serves as an iconic representation of those fears. If our phones and browsers are windows into our lives, Glass threatens to make our gaze and the gaze of the watchers one and the same.
L.M. Sacasas 