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Us and Our Technologies

We have always been our technologies.

We have always invented technologies (the blowgun, for example) and then changed ourselves to take advantage of these technologies. We and them have always existed as part of the same complex.

And when we speak of us – we always mean us as individuals – and as societies. Which are always in the process of changing.

Right away, we are speaking of a complicated – or more accurately, a complex situation. Where everything effects everything else.

Unfortunately, we have been conditioned by Science – or at least a particular kind of Science – that could only deal with two variables at a time – cause and effect. The Law of Gravitation (for example) only involves two physical bodies – if another is added the mathematics breaks down.

This was strange, because we had been used to dealing with complex situations for a million years (more or less) but now we could only think of simple situations. But this made it easy for us to become developed – we could concentrate on one thing at a time – and ignore everything else.

This was what the Industrial Revolution amounted to – developing one technology at a time at the expense of everything else. Which allowed us to grow from an insignificant species into a world-dominating one. Which now threatens to destroy the world.

I will now describe a very short history of us and our technologies in the last three hundred years or so.

This began with the Sailing Ship. Which created a huge demand for sailors to man those ships. Mostly by brute strength. A sailor didn’t have to be very smart – in fact, it was better if he wasn’t. All he had to do was follow orders. Other people – going up a long chain of command – would issue those orders.

You may object that somewhere in this chain of command (usually at the top) some person was in control. But this is not quite true. These people had become obsessed with power - and were not really people any more.

What we had was a mechanical (unthinking) way of being - modeled on an old pattern – the Military. But with sophisticated new technologies – that made all the difference.

Let me repeat that – we had sophisticated technologies that made all the difference. They took control of us. Or, to use language more carefully – our fascination with them took control of us. We became, in effect, their reproductive organs.

There were solid reasons for this. Those who controlled the latest technology (usually not the best of people) became rich and powerful.

This fact has an ancient pedigree. This is what built the Roman Empire – and all the empires before it and since then. And I must note – all these social edifices were unstable, and eventually collapsed.

Which is exactly where we are now.

2013: 05/13
CATEGORY: Economy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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A Society That is Both Conformist and Dictatorial

The prototype for this society, our society, was Fascism - which happened in many countries in the Thirties – especially Italy, Germany, and Japan. The German variety, Nazism, has been studied to death – without, as far as I know, any substantial understanding of it. We know almost nothing about the Japanese variety, and don’t even have a name for it. But since the Nazis are know so well known, we can take them as an example of what can happen to an advanced country faced with the stresses of post-modern life.

Americans will immediately object, pointing out that they won WWII, defeating the Germans and Japanese (and as a side-issue, the Italians). Therefore, they say, Americanism triumphed over the forces of evil and all is well with the world.

This overlooks a few things – such as the USSR, which was our ally during the war. But it also overlooks something vastly more important – the developments in America after the war. Which were unbelievable – and which I want to write about now.

These changes can be summarized easily: the Corporation (or, on the international scene, Globalization) has become all-powerful. This is organized as a combine of dictatorial societies (different interlocking companies) who were all hierarchies – with a few at the top in control, and the few getting most of the loot. China, interestingly enough, has the same type of organization – where the Party controls everything. Dictatorships, of one kind or another, now control the world.

Many of these are still dictatorships of the past. But the new dictatorships are well-worth giving some thought to.

Which plenty of people have – and they have universally condemned the organization (in its various forms) as evil – to use a good, old-fashioned, four-letter word.

I agree with them – but I think the situation is more complicated than just plain evil – or man’s inhumanity to man – which, as Jesus said – is with us always. I am a believer in complexity theory – which notes, that as situations become more complex emergent properties appear – something that was not there before – at all. To understand our new world – we have to understand these new properties.

Immediately, people will say “I don’t wanna know!” Without saying this out-loud in so many words. But anyone with the slightest social sensitivity (even me) will hear this message loud and clear – and obey.

But I am different – and I want to think about it – now. And to do that I will have to go back to when everything last changed. To the Enlightenment. Which taught that men should be free. Who could argue with that? But these thinkers (and they were thinkers) overlooked one thing – human nature.

And they overlooked one more thing – the rise of the masses – a product of the Industrial Revolution – which overwhelmed the Enlightenment completely.

I must take some time out now and discuss human nature. Other thinkers have pointed out – correctly – that human nature is dependent on its context. And have even gone so far as to say - erroneously - that individual human natures do not exist. When anyone observing any three-year old can see it plainly enough.

Human nature is the result of two things – our biology and our society. And I want to follow up on that.

Who we were back in the 18th Century depended on who were were at the time. But in the succeeding three hundred years (more or less) we have evolved – and are now something different. Our basic human nature – combined with our social conditioning – has produced something brand new.

I must now tie together the two strands of my discussion. At the macro level – our extremely unequal society. And at the micro level the masses who insist on – and enforce – this arrangement. Logically, this makes no sense – but this does not matter. It is the way it is. Sheldon S. Wolin has written about this in his Democracy, Inc. – Managed Democracy and the Spector of Inverted Totalitarianism.

But now I must talk of the masses. Something no one wants to talk about – because they have become us. Ortega y Gasset first noted these back in the Thirties – but he had no idea where they had come from. As I have said before – they appeared as the workers in the Industrial Economy. They performed the functions required by this economy – they functioned as little more than machines. And eventually they were replaced by machines – computers.

People were still left around – but they had become consumers – easily manipulated by the Media. They no longer exist as humans.

Perhaps I have left you confused. It has been a long discussion, and it really needs a book to cover it.

2013: 05/12
CATEGORY: History
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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Latin America is a Backwater of the West

If I say this to my Latino friends, or even hint at it – they get furious. What do I mean by saying they are inferior?

But being a backward country has its advantages – as well as its disadvantages. They are painfully aware of what they perceive as their inferior status (their relative poverty) – and that is why they are so sensitive about it.

They are not so aware of the advantages of their culture – at least consciously. But many of them want to have it both ways – live for awhile up North, and then back for awhile in the South. And they used to do this frequently, before the border restrictions (imposed by the North) became more severe.

I can see the advantages clearly enough. The South is still people-oriented, while the North has become machine-oriented. Few Americans are aware of this – and almost no Latinos – who would like nothing more than become like the North – and cannot understand why they have not made this transition already.

Their culture has two layers. Basically it is derived from the Spanish and Portuguese cultures of the 16th Century – late Medieval cultures. This is covered by a layer of American popular culture – American clothing and music. They have no awareness of this split – and strongly resist any such knowing. Because their basic culture (late Medieval) forbids it.

Northern culture, by contrast, is used to social criticism – and indulges its intellectual and artistic minority – who have been doing this for centuries.

You may immediately counter this by saying that Latino intellectuals and artists have been doing this also. And you would be right – but you would also be wrong. And I will spend the rest of this posting explaining this.

I will concentrate on Literature, because that is something I know about – and because I have writers from the South and the North on my desk that I can compare easily.

The first book is Children of the Days by Eduardo Galeano, translated by Mark Fried – which I just bought because of an enthusiastic review in TomDispatch. After reading it for awhile, I can only wonder why he was so crazy about it. And be forced to the conclusion that has no understanding of Western literature – or of the West itself. In other words, he is a typical American of his time – understanding very little – and satisfied with that.

For comparison, I want to contrast the book Dickinson by Helen Vendler – about the American poet Emily Dickinson. I picked the poem The Tint I cannot take is best (page 298) simply because this is the next poem I planned to read before I set the book down and neglected it. As usual, Vendler’s comments are much longer than the poem itself. It begins this way:

Dickinson’s attempt to grasp the “Graspless” import of Nature begins in delight (as Frost says it should) but end in bitterness. Just as music seems to both elude and solicit formulation in words, so Nature keeps offering tints and arrays to the eye that seem to demand that the poet find their verbal counterpart.

She then goes on to refer to Emerson and Whitman and Keats – to put Dickinson into the larger cultural context of the West. This is easy because the North represents the West – the developed part of it. The North developed some heavy metaphysics - part of its cultural infrastructure - that the South (in the Inquisition) rejected entirely. And therefore does not have.

You may object that Latin America has its poets too – but they have not been not adequately appreciated by the North. I have just such a book on my desk – one that I got at a used book store – From Eve’s Rib by Gioconda Belli. A bilingual edition with Spanish on the left and the English translation on the right.

Gioconda also wrote the book The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War - about her experiences in the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. It is excellent.

What it does not say is that since then she has lived mostly in the States – and only returns to Central America to visit occasionally. She knows that the States are where it is at. She still writes, but her audience is limited to Latin America.

2013: 05/10
CATEGORY: History
Life in Central America
Sociology
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The Ultimate Mass Movement

This movement happened without anybody knowing about it. And it is nearly impossible to convince anyone that it happened. And maybe I am making all this up – but my gut feelings tell me that I am not.

It is all quite logical, really – and that is what makes it so spooky. Everything we did was completely logical once we decided to concentrate on improving our machinery – and to exploit the world. This is what the Industrial Revolution amounted to. We now refer to this as Business – which has become our new religion – and it has become global.

Once we started down this road, we could not turn back – although we could not possibly have known where it would take us – straight into the arms of the Computer. But I am getting ahead of myself.

This story begins with the Enlightenment – which is usually considered a very good thing, but it had within it the seeds of its own destruction. Namely, the impulse towards improvement.

Now I have been obsessed with improvements of all kinds (mostly technical) for most of my life – but now, in my twilight years, I am thinking this might have not been such a good thing. Or perhaps it was too much of a good thing. One of our tendencies, as human beings, is to overdo things.

And I think we have done just that. To explain what I mean, I will have to do a fast rewind of human history – back to our first big technology – the Sailing Ship. Note that I have included technology in my basic analysis. In my opinion, any theory that ignores it is not worth considering. Someone should do a study showing what a huge impact the Sailing Ship had. It involved a complete change in the way we lived. As I wrote in The Industrial Revolution Began With The Sailing Ship.

Sailing ships had existed before, in the Mediterranean – but when they moved North – along with the Reformation – they changed fundamentally. This move coincided with the move of the Renaissance northward. This resulted in the big break between Northern Europe and Southern Europe – with the Protestant North becoming affluent, and the Catholic South remaining poor. This was blatantly obvious early in the 20th Century – when the Sociologist Max Weber discovered it. As the South (including Latin America) modernized itself later in the Century – this difference became less blatant – but still persists. But let me return to the 18th Century – where the story continues.

One huge impact the Sailing Ship had on its society was the new class of people that it provided employment for – the sailors. These people acted as machines in operation of their ships – iron men in wooden ships. They were the first example of the masses – the class of people that would eventually dominate their world. But, once again, I am getting ahead of myself.

The main thing to note was the shift in emphasis from concentrating on ourselves as humans (something we always had been) to concentrating on our machines (which were something new and exciting). And not only that – but seemed to make us much better. A new, improved kind of person was in the making – we thought.

The first technology, as I said, was the sailing ship – wind-powered machines, just like the windmills.

Next came the Steam Engine, which had multiple impacts:

Manufacturing – initially fabrics. The independent farmers were evicted from their lands – and the land used for sheep grazing – which was more profitable – and provided wool for the Mills. The impoverished workers (something new in the world) had to work long hours under inhuman conditions – to make a few (the Capitalists, that owned the machines) extremely rich.
Steamboats made transportation on the inland waterways cheaper and more reliable (since they did have to rely on the wind). And soon they did the same for oceanic travel. Powered at first by wood – and then by coal – which was abundant in England and Wales.
The Canals (which were horse-powered) also made transportation cheaper. But these were soon replaced by the Steam Locomotives and the Railroads. Which moved much faster. And became a complete obsession – in control of the economy and the government.

All this was a gradual progression, compared to what followed it. Which was a combination of Electricity and the Photograph.

The Graphic Revolution

This is what the Historian Daniel J. Boorstin called it. It has also been called the Second Industrial Revolution.

Boorstin’s book is The Image – a Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. I like its opening quote from Max Frisch:

Technology…the knack of so arranging the world so that we don’t have to experience it.

All of a sudden, information (words and pictures) could move at lightening speed – with the telegraph and the telephone.

People did not understand this – few did. They just accepted it as an overwhelming new force in their lives. They were no longer in control. But were completely unaware of this – for that matter, they are still unaware. They only wanted to be entertained – and the Radio and the Movies soon arrived to entertain them. And make them used to believing in the magic screen.

But something else also arrived – Fascism (in Europe and also in Japan). This was greatly facilitated by the Depression – that also convinced people that they were not in control. The result was WWII, the greatest tragedy in human history – up until then.

Except for America, which became the most powerful nation in history – for awhile.

At this point, I want to make two points – people were no longer in control of their destiny. But Americans felt just the opposite – that they had become all-powerful – capable of controlling history itself.

The Topsy-Turvy World (where everything was the opposite of what it seemed) was fast developing.

After World War Two

This was when things really took off – when they really got crazy. I remember it well, because this is when I became an adult – or more accurately, when I went to work. It was also when the Cold War started – and we nearly ended the world with The Bomb – and we became Consumers.

The technology here was Television – which quickly took over our lives. As McLuhan and Postman have documented so well.

But this was quickly followed by the perfect technology – the Computer. It was perfect because its basic design (its basic hardware components and its controlling software) cannot be improved on. This was amazing enough. But its effects on its society were even more amazing (as it always is).

People became convinced they are perfect also. After all, hadn’t they invented the perfect machine? They didn’t notice that just the opposite had happened – they had ceased to exist – as humans. They had become their computers – especially when they were networked by the Internet and the Wireless.

I must emphasize here the difference between people and computers. Computers are completely logical – but also stupid. An enormous amount of work (the biggest effort in history) has gone into making them seem intelligent. But this is only an illusion.

Companies have decided to save money by replacing their customer interface people with software. The result, as I can attest personally, has been a disaster. People get frustrated and simple don’t buy their products. Or they buy them, but can’t figure out how to use them – but are ashamed to admit this – park them in a corner to gather dust somewhere – and forget about them.

People, by comparison, can understand other people, have a much better idea of what is going on. And can fill in the gaps (using their imaginations) that computers always miss. Compared to computers, people are downright smart.

Any smart company keeps its customer interface people – and pays careful attention to their feedback. But there are damn few smart companies. Most figure they can bamboozle the customer somehow – and don’t want to help them – because they are not part of the company.

To summarize – the ultimate mass movement has been towards complete stupidity.

2013: 05/09
CATEGORY: Business
History
Sociology
Technology
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Social Incompetence

We are so pleased with out technical competence – the cell phone, for example, that has taken the world by storm (especially the undeveloped world) – that we have overlooked a parallel development – our spectacular social incompetence.

This is surprising. After all, we expected our new networking technologies to improve our social lives – by making it easier for us to communicate. What happened?

Our focus changed – from us to them (the various embodiments of the Computer) and we have became more interested in them than in us. Almost anywhere you can see people staring at their computers – evidently thinking somehow that they have all the answers.

We have outsmarted ourselves – by making a technology that seems to be human – and not only that, but super-human.

2013: 05/05
CATEGORY: Internet
Sociology
Software
Technology
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No Being, No Suffering

The purpose of Gautama Buddha, and his movement, was to eliminate suffering. And his techniques have been used recently in MBSR to do just that. Although most people prefer to suffer instead.

It is impossible for us now to understand his time (or any ancient time, for that matter) – which was Northern India in 400 BCE.

But in our time – in the Age of the Computer – we have a new cure for suffering. Not being at all.

This has to be seen in action to be appreciated. Its foremost practitioners when I was working in Silicon Valley in the Nineties, were the young women working in high-tech who were the living embodiment of it.

They had a very active social life, which included a very active sex life. And the music of the moment was their very body and soul. They had no other life – and didn’t want one.

What they would turn into later in life, I had no idea. But I suppose their lives became a mess – just like everyone else’s. They thought – like many other people did – that a new perfect era was dawning.

But they ended up in a world of illusion that was going nowhere. Or worse.

2013: 05/04
CATEGORY: Business
Entertainment
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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Focused Hatred

Hatred is probably our most powerful emotion – and certainly our most misused one. We must learn how to use it properly and get it under control.

Most people would agree with that statement, without giving it the slightest thought. Which proves to me how out-of-touch they are with their emotions.

They have been told, many times, that hatred is bad – while being shown, many times, that it is everybody’s favorite emotion. How do people respond to situations like this? They become completely helpless – because there is no way they can deal with it correctly. And not only that – angry!

The only safe way to handle it is to be like everyone else, and have the same feelings as everyone else does – instant by instant. In situations like this, hatred flourishes – and becomes a dominate social passion. Often masked by intense displays of love.

In America – and probably elsewhere as well – hatred has been so mixed up with everything else we have become completely incompetent. Unable to do anything but destroy ourselves.

This is hatred in it most intense form – we hate ourselves.

Is there a solution? Yes, we have to keep our hatred focused where it belongs – and there are no lack of appropriate targets. We have to practice identifying these targets – and keep refining our focus.

2013: 05/02
CATEGORY: Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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Our Historical Nightmare

In reading a book about Foucault, I find this quote from Max Weber:

The mighty cosmos of the modern economic order..the iron cage [in which] specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart [are] caught in the delusion that [they] have achieved a level of development never before attained by mankind.

A footnote says this is from Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

I would only add that he was referring to the post-modern world – since he wrote this in 1905. However this difference would not become apparent until after WWI. And would accelerate after WWII. And eventually lead to an economic (and moral) collapse.

Which has already happened – although the full impact of this has yet to be felt.

2013: 05/02
CATEGORY: Economy
History
Morality
Sociology
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The Need to be Wonderful

This, it seems to me, is one of the strongest compulsions of the modern world. It is fueled by the belief that there is something wrong with us. Something very wrong. Which comes directly from Calvinism.

We like to think of ourselves as being preoccupied with getting better – because that sounds so much better. But, in fact, we are preoccupied with how bad we are – and are desperately trying to get away from that.

This concern used to be fully conscious, at least to the religious part of the population. But it has now become unconscious, while still fully operational.

We are now intent on destroying ourselves – for the best of reasons. Because we have become such awful creatures – the opposite of what we should be.

We are now flying on automatic pilot – and consider this a huge improvement. When, in fact, it is a disaster of the first magnitude. We have, in fact, become not what we are (networks and computers) – instead of what we are (people).

It seems to us we have become gods – that we have discovered what the gods really are. What else could they be?

And we do not realize any of this at all.

We have become that perfect.

2013: 05/01
CATEGORY: Philosophy
Psychology
Religion
Sociology
Technology
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We Cannot Be Good to Ourselves

I had an unusual night last night. All kinds of things were mixing it up in my mind and body. First there was Adrianne Ross’s Dharma talk, which I wrote about on Dharma Seed. I had also finished listening to A Visit From the Goon Squad. Neither one knows what is really going on – and doesn’t want to know.

In a dream I had last night, I was in a large construction tunnel with two huge movable projects underway – both starting from opposite ends of the tunnel and meeting head-on in the middle. I was part of a small group of humans watching them meet. I was even given a video camera to record what was going on. If the dream had lasted longer, I would have seen these two projects destroying each other – with no one at ground level aware that anything was going on at all.

The Goon Squad says a lot – but says it subtly – and from all kinds of directions. In the last analysis, it comes to the same conclusion – but sugar-coats it. We think we are wonderful – do we ever! – but we are not.

I was terrifically impressed with Ms. Ross. This gal has been everywhere and done everything. But she hasn’t seen the big picture at all. I remember Spirit Rock (the finest meditation center in the world) once had a retreat that was supposed to solve this. They put all the top meditators in the world together in an a intensive situation that would guarantee great results – they thought. They even did some advance publicity about this.

When no such thing happened, they said nothing. They were telling the truth (they had no grand answer to the world’s problems) – but not the whole truth (that the world (the human world) was destroying itself). When it came to this, they were as ignorant as everyone else.

Our intellectuals cannot see this either. I am reading Foucault, for example, and was tempted to write about his ideas on normalization - one of the techniques of control that our society uses – without being aware of it. In our schools it is called grading on the curve. Everyone’s progress is compared to all the other students in the class. The teacher (who knows perfectly well what needs to be learned, and whether or not the student has learned it) is pushed out of the picture.

Applied to society as a whole – it means society has no way of detecting its overall trends – since everything is referenced to itself.

One of these trends is what I am writing about – society has become hostile to people. Something that could be easily detected if it referenced its gut feelings. Exactly what meditation is supposed to do. But meditators have the same unconscious instructions as everyone else – and do not do this. And society suffers from all kinds of problems as a result – including self-destruction on every scale.

Amazing!

2013: 04/30
CATEGORY: Meditation
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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My thoughts on how the world works