Technology

The Borg Complex

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 13 Comments

[Update: See the Borg Complex primer here.]

“Is technology good for religion?”

Well, it was only a matter of time. Actually, I’m surprised I’ve only lately come across the question. The formulation echoes previous queries such as “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” In this case, the title does not belong to a fully developed essay in The Atlantic, but rather to a brief blogpost. It was published at The Immanent Frame, a scholarly site devoted to the sociology of religion, and it pointed readers to a recent (and not quite scholarly) piece in the Washington Post by Lisa Miller.

The title of Miller’s article dispensed with the pretense of an interrogative, opting instead for a confident declarative: “The religious authorities and pundits are wrong: Technology is good for religion.” So there you have it. Case closed. End of discussion. Although, of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

I read a lot about technology and its consequences for individuals, institutions, and society. To the writing of such articles, essays, and books there is now seemingly no end. The quality of such work varies considerably; some of it is thoughtful, some of it hysterical (and not in the humorous sort of way). Perspectives on the relative merits of technology vary greatly as well. There are unabashed critics and boosters, and more temperate souls as well. All of this is as one would expect, and I typically don’t mind reading pieces from points all along the spectrum.

But occasionally I will come across a piece that irks me. Usually it is not the content that manages to unbalance my humors, it is the tone. This tone arises from what I’ve just now decided to call a “Borg Complex.” The implicit tone of those with a Borg Complex can be summed up by the line, “Resistance is futile.” That line has entered our pop-cultural lexicon through the Star Trek franchise. I won’t pretend to be an expert on Borg lore; I’ll only note that the Borg always announced some variation of the following to their victims: “We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile.”

The spirit of the Borg lives in writers and pundits who take it upon themselves to prod on all of those they deem to be deliberately slow on the technological uptake. These self-appointed evangelists of technological assimilation would have us all abandon any critique of technology and simply adapt to the demands of technological society.  Except, of course, that when this message is articulated by humans with a Borg Complex it loses the tone of cool, malevolent indifference and instead takes on a tone of grating condescension. The tone is also characterized by the annoying self-assurance of those who have seen the light and feel a mixture of pity and disgust toward the poor souls who remain in the darkness.

Miller’s essay is a case in point. Although it displays a milder manifestation, it still helpfully demonstrates some of the standard symptoms of the Borg Complex.

1. Makes grandiose, but unsupported claims: “Technology can greatly enhance religious practice. Groups that restrict and fear it participate in their own demise.”

2. Uses the term Luddite a-historically and as a casual slur: “Luddites insist that nothing can replace the human touch of a faith community …”

3. Pays lip service to, but ultimately dismisses genuine concerns: “And this, of course, is true. But …”

4. Equates resistance or caution to reactionary nostalgia: “To insist that new ways of relating are not good or Godly ones is backward looking.”

5. Starkly and matter-of-factly frames the case for assimilation: “When new generations bring their values to religion, religion will have to adapt.”

6. Announces the bleak future for those who refuse to assimilate: “If religious groups don’t embrace and encourage the practice of faith online, the faithful might go shopping instead.”

In the coming days I might work on a fuller diagnostic guide for the Borg Complex with some suggestions for treatment.

Until then, carry on with the work of intelligent, loving resistance were discernment and wisdom deem it necessary.

_______________________________________

Read updates to the Borg Complex case files here.

While My Robot Gently Weeps

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

The possibility of a robot-apoclaypse — in which robots either enslave, destroy, or otherwise disrupt human civilization — has been a recurring plot of science-fiction for some time now. The Terminator franchise is perhaps the most recognizable and popular variation on the theme. In these stories the robots are malign in their clinical, calculating, robot-like way. Not the sorts of creatures one would envision offering comfort and sympathy by one’s death-bed. But this is the scenario Dan Chen’s installation, “Last Moment Hospital,” invites us to imagine and even experience.

The robot Chen created amounts to a padded mechanical arm that “senses” the impending moment of death and while stroking the patient’s outstretched arm offers these words of succor:

“I am the Last Moment Robot. I am here to help you and guide you through your last moment on Earth. I am sorry that your family and friends can’t be with you right now, but don’t be afraid. I am here to comfort you. You are not alone, you are with me. Your family and friends love you very much, they will remember you after you are gone.”

According to Leslie Katz’s write up of the exhibit, Chen’s intent is two-fold:

“On the one hand, the image ‘reveals the cruelty of life, lack of human support/social connections,’ Dan Chen, who created the robot, tells Crave. ‘On the other hand, the robot becomes something that you can trust/depend on. It could give you the ‘placebo effect’ of comfort.'”

This, again, is an art exhibit, but one does not have to stretch the imagination very far to imagine it as a very real feature of end-of-life care in, say, Japan, for example, where robots already serve many similar purposes.

There’s a great deal that can be said about this exhibit, its message (if I may be so crass), and its plausibility. Others will be able to say most of those things with greater depth and wisdom than I; but there’s one observation I’d like to register, however inadequately.

It will be tempting for many to see in this installation a parable of technology’s nefarious application, of the manner in which machines barbarize society. But this exhibit, and its materialization if it comes to it, signals not the manner in which machines brutalize humanity, but rather another sad truth, how humanity brutalizes itself.

Technology is not neutral. This is the point I usually stress. But we are not, therefore, absolved of the manner in which we put our technologies to use. Moreover, we are not absolved of the guilt incurred by the creation of conditions which finally necessitate the design of technologies of care that must perform the acts of love and mercy that are the proper work of human persons.

The robot-apocaplyse, if it comes to it, will not arise from the maliciousness of robots, but from the inhumanity of human beings toward each other. It is a paradox: our machines become more human to the degree that we become more machine-like. The great task before us, then, is to fulfill our humanity in such a way that robots will never be needed to do for us what we alone can do for one another.

“An Excess of Speed Turns Into Repose”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

“We must here accept a paradox , which is in fact admitted by everyone with the
greatest of ease, and even consumed as a proof of modernity. This paradox is that an
excess of speed turns into repose.” — Roland Barthes, “The Jet-Man”

The speed of motion through space is what Barthes had in mind. It was the image of the 1950s era jet-man — the pilot of a jet aircraft, who, while moving through the air at incredible speeds, sat motionless and at ease in his cockpit. Barthes was targeting as well the myth that, in the early years of the jet-age, took shape around the jet-man in his “anti-g suit” and “shiny helmet.” Today it all just sounds like campy science-fiction, these silver-suited men forming a quasi-priestly cadre of humanity mediating between space and earth. Perhaps it strikes us so, in part, because of the success of Barthes’ brand of demythologizing cultural critique. But that one line — “an excess of speed turns into repose” — has lodged itself in my mind and it has refused to budge until I do something with it.

Barthes called it a paradox and claimed that it was taken for granted in the modern age. Perhaps it is even better to see this paradox itself as the hope around which the myth of modernity coalesces. To see this we need to understand “speed” more broadly than the rate at which space is traversed. It includes as well the speed of activity (which does not necessarily involve motion across space) and the speed of information (as opposed to bodies). In each case it is assumed that once a certain threshold is crossed, “speed” will yield to repose. And, of course, it is technology of one form or another that drives the acceleration of motion, activity, or information.

But, as with the jet-man, it is in motion that repose finally comes to be found. The pilot is motionless while approaching the speed of sound. Repose is no longer understood to be the opposite of motion, nor is it what may be found at the far end of furious activity or at the culmination of rapid thought. Repose, the ideal state, is now found in the activity, in the motion, in the consumption of information.

If we accidentally stumble upon repose in the shape of the absence of motion, activity, or the processing of information, we are undone. We do not know what to do with ourselves in such instances. Repose of the sort which was formerly understood to be the goal of motion, activity, and thought now becomes a cursed and anxious state to be avoided at all costs. We are at rest only if we are in motion.

This means of course that motion, activity, and information processing have become and end in themselves rather than a means to some other end. As such, they can never cease or be interrupted. They are self-perpetuating. We pursue motion, activity, and information as if they will bring us to some longed-for state of contentment, fulfillment, or rest; but all the while we are denying or failing to recognize the real state of affairs. We are aiming at nothing so much as the maintenance of motion and activity. We have nowhere to go, but if we keep accelerating we hope not to notice.

Keeping Time, Keeping Silent

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

What shape does a well ordered life take and how does one achieve such a thing? I certainly don’t have a story of personal triumph on this score to share with you, but I’m fairly certain that if I did it would focus on the re-ordering of a disordered relationship to time. Time, in fact, is the theme of a commencement address delivered by Paul Ford to the Interaction Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. The speech, titled “10 Timeframes”, addresses the changing frames by which we measure and understand our experience of time, from the farmer whose frames are the changing season to the computer scientist who works with nanoseconds.

Commencement addresses are difficult to do well or in any kind of original fashion, but Ford managed both and my excerpts here will not convey either the feel or the insight of the whole. That said, here are the fragments of Ford’s speech I want to bring into conversation with the second piece which I’ll get to in just a minute. After giving a few illustrative examples, Ford reminds his listeners of the following:

“So it’s only a few hundred years ago that people started to care about centuries, and then more recently, decades. And of course hours and minutes. And in the last 40 years we’ve got 86 trillion nanoseconds a day, and a whole industry trying to make every one of them count.”

He introduced the nanosecond by referring back to a book published in the early 1980’s on the history of the computer, The Soul of a New Machine. After quoting one engineer describing the significance of nano-seconds, Ford then tells his audience,”One of the engineers in the book burned out and quit and he left a note that read: ‘I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.'”

Ford, who is speaking to creative types who will design digital tools that other creative types will use to do all sorts of work, concludes: “And I want you to ask yourself when you make things, when you prototype interactions, am I thinking about my own clock, or the user’s? Am I going to help someone make order in his or her life, or am I going to send that person to a commune in Vermont?”

Perhaps it would not be so bad to be in a commune in Vermont, but Ford clearly understood that one engineer’s decision to be the product of exhaustion — exhaustion that resulted from continuous work within a frame of time that led to a disordered experience of life.

Many of the discontents and disorders associated with modernity, discontents and disorders that are exacerbated by the advent of digital culture, revolve around time. Ford reminds us that our experience of time has a history, a history intimately tied to our machines for measuring time as Lewis Mumford observed many years ago. Mumford’s observations about the mechanical clock, whose origins lie in medieval monasticism, segue nicely (and somewhat paradoxically) to the second piece.

“How Silence Works”, a transcript of Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston’s email interviews with Trappist monks in the Benedictine Order living in Quebec, also dwells on the shape of the well ordered life. As the title suggests, the interviews focus on the place of silence in the monastic life. Contrary to popular belief, the Trappists take no “vow of silence,” although silence is an integral part of their communal life. As with Ford’s piece, I encourage you to read the whole, it is brimming with timely wisdom and insight.

Out of the many passages that are worth noting in the email exchanges, I’ll draw your attention to two. The first ties in nicely with Ford’s concerns. Mesiano-Crookston asks, “Out of curiosity, do the monks in the cloister watch the daily news? Are you interested in cultural changes in the world?” In response one monk wrote,

“I wonder if a lot of the cultural complexity you refer to [in a previous question] seems interesting to people because they have lost so much consciousness of [their] ancestors and the long view afforded by a knowledge of history. If you don’t know history, everything today can seem quite novel. But in the larger context of the story of human history, much of what fascinates, today, is quite redundant.”

The practices of the monastery, including the practice of silence, a practice that has the collateral effect of slowing down time, yield a frame of time (to borrow Ford’s terminology) quite different from the frame of time most of us work with in our day to day life. Saying as much is probably stating the obvious. But without suggesting that we all take up the monastic life, it would seem that with smaller gestures we might come closer to an ordering of time that was, simply put, better for us. Perhaps taking a cue  from the monastic life, we might learn to cultivate small rituals that establish a more humane rhythm for our daily life. Such small gestures are certainly within the realm of the possible for most of us. We might find that such small gestures — micro-practices to borrow sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s wording — may have a considerable impact on the shape of our experience.

Asked whether they believed the practice of silence were beneficial for all people, one of the monks replied,

“I would say the cultivation of silence is indispensable to being human. People sometimes talk as if they were “looking for silence,” as if silence had gone away or they had misplaced it somewhere. But it is hardly something they could have misplaced. Silence is the infinite horizon against which is set every word they have ever spoken, and they can’t find it? Not to worry—it will find them.”

Perhaps. It is hard to quibble with a point so eloquently put; but while silence may indeed find us, I think that we ought also to do a little searching for it ourselves. At the very least, we should be prepared to receive it when it does find us. Perhaps then, in silence, we will find ourselves better able to recalibrate our frame of time and achieve something more closely resembling a well-ordered life.

Love and the Beauty of Our Lowly Bodies

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

“They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts; instead of raising themselves, they lower themselves.”
— Michel de Montaigne 

Wim Wenders’ beautifully wrought Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987) depicts a world populated by human beings and angels.  We cannot ordinarily see or hear them, although children seem to be more attuned to their presence.  They see us and hear our thoughts.  They were here before us and they awaited our coming.  Now they watch and bear witness.  They, however, cannot touch or feel, taste or smell.  They have no weight.  In a particularly touching scene, Cassiel (Otto Sander), one of two angels through whose eyes we experience the film, is unable to prevent a suicide.  Driven by curiosity or empathy or more likely both, Cassiel imitates the fall but his weightless plummet can do him no harm.

Cassiel along with Damiel (Bruno Ganz) watch over East Berlin in the 1980’s, and through their witness to the lives of the human beings they are tasked to watch we are invited to pay lavish attention to the details of embodied life with all its attendant joys and sorrows.  Jeffrey Overstreet describes what he calls the “movie’s leisurely, telepathic stroll” which “takes us out of our pell-mell experience of life and all its worries, and it restores to us the balanced view of each moment, reacquainting us with the childlike joy of physical sensation and the holy contemplation of meaning in each tactile detail.”

The theme of childhood runs throughout the film which opens with a voiceover of Peter Handke’s “Song of Childhood”:

“When the child was a child
It walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.”

And so on it goes. At first thought, the theme suggests, perhaps, an innocence shared by children and angels. On second, wonderment. Wonder that leads to desire. Damiel expresses the correlation between desire and the body when he longs “to be excited not only by the mind but, at last, by a meal, by the line of a neck.” Earlier when comparing notes, as it were, with Cassiel, he reports:

“A woman on the street folded her umbrella while it rained and let herself get drenched. A schoolboy who described to his teacher how a fern grows out of the earth, and the astonished teacher. A blind woman who groped for her watch, feeling my presence…. It’s great to live only by the spirit, to testify day by day, for eternity, to the spiritual side of people.”

But this patient observation, this wonder yields desire:

“But sometimes I get fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I’d like to feel there’s some weight to me. To end my eternity, and bind me to earth. At each step, at each gust of wind, I’d like to be able to say: ‘Now! Now! and Now!’ And no longer say: ‘Since always’ and ‘Forever.’ To sit in the empty seat at a card table, and be greeted, if only by a nod…. Whenever we did participate, it was only a pretence. Wrestling with one of them, we allowed a hip to be dislocated, in pretence only. We pretended to catch a fish. We pretended to be seated at the tables. And to drink and eat…. Not that I want to plant a tree or give birth to a child right away. But it would be quite something to come home after a long day, like Philip Marlowe, and feed the cat. To have a fever. To have blackened fingers from the newspaper…. To feel your skeleton moving along as you walk. Finally to “suspect”, instead of forever knowing all. To be able to say ‘Ah!’ and ‘Oh!’ and ‘Hey!’ instead of ‘Yes’ and ‘Amen’.”

Damiel desires the desires that can only be realized in the body. Again Overstreet:  “There is a woman, a trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) in a traveling circus, who captures his attention. But this infatuation is more than most you’ll see in onscreen romances. Damiel is truly moved by her entire person: her innermost thoughts, doubts, struggles, and courage. But it’s not merely platonic appeal: she’s a beauty, no doubt about it.”  And so Damiel, with the unlikely help of Peter Falk (playing himself) falls. But his is not the usual sort of angelic fall. It is not a Luciferian fall away from God in rebellion, it is a fall into embodiment (quite literally depicted in the film).  It is not a fall occasioned by resistance to limits, but one that seeks to embrace them. Eric Mader-Lin’s reflections on the theme of falling in Wings of Desire is worth quoting at length:

In this dialogue, in its contrast between the two kinds of yearning, human and angelic, the film affirms a new kind of spirituality, one that is paradoxically both material and spiritual, an affirmation of the necessary and permanent tension between the two: the meaninglessness of the one without the other.

One of the motifs through which Wenders develops this tension is that of falling. We’ve always imagined that transcending the limits of our earthbound lives meant rising up: all that is banal or merely mortal would be left behind if we could only take flight ….

The angel Damiel, in his growing desire to fall into humanity, becomes more and more fascinated with Marion. We see her through his eyes and hear her thoughts through his ears. Eventually Damiel truly falls from his angelic state and comes together with Marion. What does it mean that the film’s last scene shows Marion again practicing trapeze while Damiel, erstwhile angel, holds the rope that anchors her to earth? She didn’t need to renounce her art after all. A new balance between heaven and earth has been established, a balance which, this time, is effected through the love between man and woman.”

Damiel’s fall into enbodiment prompted by desire is an evocative reminder of the beauty and love proper to the life of body. And from time to time we do good to remind ourselves of such things, particularly in an age that in its rhetoric and practice too often disparages the humble body and its limitations.