My mission is the myth of technology
Why are you reading this, and why am I bothering to write it?
Technology is eating everything.
That’s been the gist of it since the late 18th century.
You thought fears over technology only began with the smart-phone? Ubiquitous digital media and information technology and AI are the froth on the crest of the wave of techno-science.
Uncle Ted tried to warn everyone back in the 1980s. But he’s hardly the first.
Critics of technology and prophets foreseeing our doom from it are almost as old as fire.
As Hesiod told it, Prometheus stole the sacred fire from the gods and gifted it to mankind. The rest of the story is less widely known. After Prometheus was chained to a rock waiting on the eagle’s daily mutilation of his liver, Zeus visited another punishment on the humans warming their bones by the fire.
He sent Pandora, a charming if mischievous woman, to earth as the wife of Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus.
There’s an inside joke with the names. Prometheus means foresighted. He symbolized planning, strategy, thinking ahead, predicting and calculating — the basis of technology. Epimetheus is a pun that means hindsight. You’ve heard that old saying that “hindsight is 20/20”.
Well, Epimetheus being Captain Hindsight, he didn’t clue in to the strange jar or chest (the tellings aren’t always consistent) that came with his wife, or the stern warning from Zeus to never open it on pain of Awful Things, which Zeus was well known for inflicting.
Long story short, she opened the damn thing, because you knew she would, and out raced all of the evil and wickedness that curses the world to this day.
The moral of the tale seems straightforward: play with fire and you get burned.
That’s one takeaway. Here’s another:
Even with the best of intentions, technology has a half-blind idiot for a brother.
The triumph of the will over nature, represented by fire, created warmth and light. It also led to burning at the stake and the devastation of major cities.
We may believe in the all-powerful competence of science and technology, but nature has a way of making herself compulsively felt, reaching through the mirage we’ve crafted for ourselves. We forget nature at our own risk, and yet, that’s exactly where we are heading as reality becomes more and more artificial.
The myth of Pandora is the mirror-image of the Prometheus story.
Fire seduces with its light, even as it burns. The temptation of irresistible evil is as enduring a truth of human nature as any.
What’s new is old all over again.
Our holy fire is the vast array of computing machines, information technologies, digital media, and — perhaps — thinking artifacts that now encircle the planet like the intangible silk of an electromagnetic spider.
Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote that consciousness is never pure thinking.
Each moment of awareness is accompanied by a desire, or what is the same thing, an awareness of what is missing. The price of freedom and consciousness is an appetite that cannot be satisfied.
Thought is fundamentally unsettled because thought is the product of unconscious forces.
Mastery was always an illusion.
My aim here, if I have one at all, is to highlight the failings, follies, and fallibilities of our species-wide overconfidence in the power of technology.
I don’t mean our machines and gadgets, but more what Heidegger meant when he wrote of the essence of technology, which is a human way of thinking and experiencing, a way of being, a way that things show up for us in their significance as things. He used the German word Gestell, most often translated as “enframing”, to describe the way that technology is its own kind of truth.
The tale of Prometheus highlights the central idea.
Technology is not knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Nobody would care about fire if it didn’t light homes, cook food, and keep the deep winter chill at bay.
Science, all knowledge, works at the leisure of our instruments. We know nothing that we cannot pry out of nature with a crowbar. But above all, knowledge is the errand-boy for human interests and desires.
We forget this in a time when it’s trendy and hip to “F-ing ❤ Science!”
But we forget it at our own risk.
Stay tuned. I’ve got more coming on art and creativity and such, which may be the only remedy for the appetites of tech.
-Matt
ps Tell somebody if you like my jams