Bricken, M. 1991. Virtual worlds: no interface to design. In Cyberspace: First Steps, M. Benedikt, Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 363-382.

I very much agree with this statement: “Creating a World: giving form to intention, manifesting a dream, visualizing the unseen… this is a job for the gods, is it not? We are only human, but as we develop this technology and build worlds for individual and social use, we assume certain responsibilities” (378).

Ditto this one: “There is no doubt that cyberspace and virtual world technology are empowering; but exactly who is being empowered? This is, in part, a design decision” (378). But what I’m more interested in is the way in which certain IDEAS and CONCEPTS and WORLDVIEWS are empowered above others. These, too, are design decisions; and we need to make these decisions responsibly.

Finally, Bricken’s chapter has suggested to me a methodology that is appropriate to this project: “Adopting what in Zen is referred to as beginner’s mind means approaching cyberspace without preconception, resisting the temptation to explain this new technology in terms of previous technology” (380). If I’m going to make spiritual technology, I should perhaps begin from this spiritual place of Zen beginner’s mind.

Novak, M. 1991. Liquid architectures in cyberspace. In Cyberspace: First Steps, M. Benedikt, Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 225-254.

Novak’s chapter is very interesting. It begins with the assertion that, “Our interaction with computers so far has primarily been one of clear, linear thinking. Poetic thinking is of an entirely different order” (225-6). The mission is laid out as such: “The greater task will not be to impose science on poetry, but to restore poetry to science” (226).

Novak indulges in some poetic writing about the experience of cyberspace:
“Every paragraph an idea, every idea an image, every image an index, indices strung together along dimensions of my choosing, and I travel through them, sometimes with them, sometimes across them. I produce new sense, nonsense, and nuisance by combination and variation, and I follow the scent of a quality through sand dunes of information. Hints of an attribute attach themselves to my sensors and guide me past the irrelevant, into the company of the important; or I choose to browse the unfamiliar and tumble through volumes and volumes of knowledge still in the making. Sometimes I linger on a pattern for the sake of its strangeness, and as it becomes familiar, I grow into another self. I wonder how much richer the patterns I can recognize can become, and surprise myself by scanning vaster and vaster regions in times shorter and shorter. Like a bird of prey my acuity allows me to glide high above the planes of information, seeking jewels among the grains, seeking knowledge” (230).

That’s lovely. But it’s probably complete BS. Does anyone experience the Internet like this??? The lesson from Novak’s creative writing exercise is that all sorts of not-so-great things can be justified and sold on the poetry of its description. So poetry can be “restored to science” if we’re going to force it on cyberspace thusly; but perhaps we should stop kidding ourselves, rely less on the eloquence of our optimistic dreaming about cyberspace, and actually make it, itself, inherently poetic. In other words, let’s not just describe it more poetically; let’s build it on a more poetic logic.

Then the chapter turns utopian as Novak hails cyberspace as being this turn to the poetic: “Cyberspace is poetry inhabited, and to navigate through it is to become a leaf on the wind of a dream” (229). He introduces the concept of liquidity by stating that, “Poetry is liquid language” (229) – i.e. embodied fiction, which we can rewrite, changing its meaning according to our whims. Then, he argues further:

“Cyberspace is liquid. Liquid cyberspace, liquid architecture, liquid cities. Liquid architecture is more than kinetic architecture, robotic architecture, an architecture of fixed parts and variable links. Liquid architecture is an architecture whose form is contingent on the interests of the beholder; it is an architecture that opens to welcome me and closes to defend me; it is an architecture without doors and hallways, where the next room is always where I need it to be and what I need it to be. Liquid architecture makes liquid cities, cities that change at the shift of a value, where visitors with different backgrounds see different landmarks, where neighborhoods vary with ideas held in common, and evolve as the ideas mature or dissolve” (251).

This is a great example of the libertarian vision of the Internet: liquid equals free! The problem with liquid is that when you try to grasp it, it slips through your fingers. How desirable is liquidity, really? For example, who would choose liquid friendships over solid ones? Could we not, rather, benefit from some concreteness? Further, consider the implications: “It is a symphony in space, but a symphony that never repeats and continues to develop. If architecture is an extension of our bodies, shelter and actor for the fragile self, a liquid architecture is that self in the act of becoming its own changing shelter. Like us, it has an identity; but this identity is only revealed fully during the course of its lifetime” (251). How are we to comprehend a reality that is constantly morphing? – constantly vanishing at the moment we reach out to touch it? Again, is this libertarian vision really desirable?

Novak also makes a sort of aside about the nature of our lived reality: “Cyberspace, as a world of our creation, makes us contemplate the possibility that the reality we exist in is already a sort of ‘cyberspace,’ and the difficulties we would have in understanding what is real if such were the case. Architecture, in its strategies for dealing with a constraining reality suggests ways in which the limitations of a fictional reality may be surmounted” (243). This is something that I will come back to when I write about Ryan’s book Narrative as Virtual Reality.

A more useful invocation of poetry in this cyberspace discourse has to do with the ways in which poetry forces us to stretch our imaginations, thus allowing us to see beyond what we might have before. Novak discusses what this means to architecture:

“Just as poetry differs from prose in its controlled intoxication with meanings to be found beyond the limits of ordinary language, so visionary architecture exceeds ordinary architecture in its search for the conceivable. Visionary architecture, like poetry, seeks an extreme, any extreme: beauty, awe, structure, or the lack of structure, enormous weight, lightness, expense, economy, detail, complexity, universality, uniqueness. In this search for that which is beyond the immediate, it proposes embodiments of ideas that are well beyond what can be built. This is not a weakness: in this precisely is to be found the poignancy of vision” (244).

This has become a recognized design technique: “Piranesi’s series of etchings entitled Carceri, or Prisons, marks the beginning of an architectural discourse of the purposefully unbuildable” (245). How freeing this is! I was thinking that my PhD would require that I design something that could work; but now I’m realizing the contribution that I could make by suggesting alternatives that – at least for now – are purposefully unbuildable. This might then compel people to begin to develop their thinking in a new direction, i.e. towards realizing these ‘unbuildable’ designs. Novak includes this great quote from Gropius (New Ideas on Architecture, 1919): “… build in the imagination, unconcerned about technical difficulties” (247). I shall make this my new motto.

Lastly, I was particularly intrigued by this passage: “Against the increasing constriction of architectural practice, Piranesi drew an imagined world of complex, evocative architecture. His title recalls a phrase by George Bataille: ‘Man will escape his head as a convict escapes his prison’” (245). The reason I like this phrasing is because it harkens back to the Weberian “iron cage” by which we have become imprisoned. Should we ever break out of this cage, we’re going to need to bend our minds a bit. It’s like the moment that the boy explains to Neo in the Matrix that “There is no spoon.” The cage is an illusion; to see this, you have to bend your mind (not the spoon, as it were).

Novak even suggests some good thought experiments for getting us to break out of our caged thinking: “What would it be like to be inside a cubist universe? a hieroglyphic universe? a universe of cave drawings or Magritte paintings? Just as alternative renditions of the same reality by different artists, each with a particular style, can bring to our attention otherwise invisible aspects of that reality, so too can different modes of cyberspace provide new ways of interrogating the world” (244). There are a few artists in particular that I would love to use as inspiration for the building of alternative cyber-worlds: e.g. Matta, Blake, Malevich, and my favorite architect, Zaha Hadid (and I can finally – happily – put that MFA degree to some use!).

Benedikt, M. 1991. Cyberspace: some proposals. In Cyberspace: First Steps, M. Benedikt, Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 119-224.

Despite being one of the longer chapters of the anthology, I only found two passages at all worth quoting, here:

1. “Cyberspace will not replace art museums, concerts, parks, or sidewalk jugglers’ nor sex, books, buildings, or radio. Each of these earlier media and activities will move over a little, as it were, free – indeed obliged – to become more themselves, more involved in their own artistry and usefulness. Each will be dislocated in certain dimensions but freed in others, as Innis, McLuhan, and Carpenter so clearly saw” (124).

2. “After all, ‘cyber’ is from the Greek word kybernan, meaning to steer or control” (129).

A summary of:
Stone, A. R. 1991. Will the real body please stand up?: boundary stories about virtual cultures. In Cyberspace: First Steps, M. Benedikt, Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 81-118.
(Part 2)

Stone also describes a virtual community called CommuniTree, which began ambitiously as “a community that promised radical transformation of existing society and the emergence of new social forms” (88). It was born out of New Age, seemingly, as the writers of the How To manual was a “rich intermingling of spiritual and technological imagery” with chapters such as “’Downscale, please, Buddha’, and ‘If you meet the electronic avatar on the road, laserblast hir!’” (89). I suppose this is a lesson about how not to describe spiritual technology in my PhD, lest it become laughable 30-40 years later. How easily discussions about spiritual technology can lean toward the ridiculous if words are not chosen carefully and earnestly.

Unfortunately, CommuniTree failed: “Within a few months, the Tree had expired, choked to death with what one participant called ‘the consequences of freedom of expression’” (91). That seems ominous. I suppose it’s a lesson about a lack of purpose that members could coalesce around, something which requires thought and design. This does imply some need for control: “Thus, in practice, surveillance and control proved necessary adjuncts to maintaining order in the virtual community” (91).

I should probably study CommuniTree and its death in more detail. I should also probably have a look at another early community and see what inspiration can be mined from it, namely Habitat, designed by Chip Morningstar and Randall Farmer (93).

I have noticed that “success” of a virtual community tends to be measured in the amount of time people spend on it. I’m starting to wonder if this is a useful measurement for an alternative vision of the Internet. Is less but more meaningful engagement a more useful metric? – surely we don’t aspire to be plugged into our computers to a greater and greater extent!

There is a quote in this chapter from Steve Williams: “The illusion will be so powerful you won’t be able to tell what’s real and what’s not” (99). This made me think that one could equally make this substitution – and this is the one that interests me: ‘The illusion will be so powerful you won’t be able to tell what’s valuable and what’s not’; i.e. the more we are engaged with a technology that seeks an illusionary, mesmerizing power, the less we are able to recognize our own human values as separate from those generated by the technology.

A summary of:
Heim, M. 1991. The erotic ontology of cyberspace. In Cyberspace: First Steps, M. Benedikt, Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 59-80.

In this chapter, Heim describes the way in which cyberspace lures us in with its “erotic ontology,” i.e. the way it is enveloped in an aura of pleasure. We are, as a result, blinded to the more nefarious side of the Internet; e.g.: “Unfortunately, what technology gives with one hand, it often takes away with the other. Technology increasingly eliminates direct human interdependence. While our devices give us greater personal autonomy, at the same time they disrupt the familiar networks of direct association. Because our machines automate much of our labor, we have less to do with one another. Association becomes a conscious act of will. Voluntary associations operate with less spontaneity than those sprouted by serendipity. Because machines provide us with the power to flit about the universe, our communities grow more fragile, airy, and ephemeral, even as our connections multiply” (74). This is very insightful. It’s not so much that the Internet is making it more difficult to form communities; but rather its making doing so less important, therefore meaning that fewer of us make the effort to do so.

Heim also discusses the erotic allure of becoming part cyborg ourselves, and warns: “The darker side hides the sinister melding of human and machine. The cyborg or cybernetic organism implies that ht conscious mind steers – the meaning of the Greek kybernetes – our organic life. Organic life energy ceases to initiate our mental gestures. Can we ever be fully present when we live through a surrogate body standing in for us? The stand-in self lacks the vulnerability and fragility of our primary identity. The stand-in self can never fully represent us. The more we mistake the cyberbodies for ourselves, the more the machine twists our selves into the prostheses we are wearing” (74). Gibson’s The View from the Edge: The Cyberpunk Handbook itself states that, “Each time you add a cybernetic enhancement, there’s a corresponding loss of humanity…. Walk carefully. Guard your mind” (20-22; in Heim, 75).

I think that Doctor Who also provides useful fodder in the form of a parable, i.e. the story of the Cybermen. This quote is my favorite, taken from the episode “Age of Steel” (Series 2, Episode 6):

The Doctor: [Looking at a fallen Cyberman] Now, let’s have a look. Know your enemy. Got a logo on the front. Lumic’s turned them into a brand. Heart of steel. But look.
Mrs Moore: Is that flesh?
The Doctor: Hmm. A central nervous system. Artificially grown and then threaded throughout the suit so it responds like a living thing. Well, it is a living thing. Oh, but look. Emotional inhibitor. Stops them feeling anything.
Mrs Moore: But why?
The Doctor: It’s still got a human brain. Imagine its reaction if it could see itself. Realise itself inside this thing. It would go insane.
Mrs Moore: So they cut out the one thing that makes them human.
The Doctor: Because they have to.

In this episode, The Doctor defeats the Cybermen by shutting down all of their emotional inhibitors, causing them to shut down or explode out of horror at what they had become.

This warning (from Heim and from the writers of Doctor Who) doesn’t only apply to the possibility of becoming cyborgs in the Cybermen sense; it is already happening when we are becoming reliant on our technologies to the degree that we can’t function without them (see Carr, 2008). The question we have to ask ourselves is if, when we take a good look at what we have become, we are not going to be horrified at the prison we have caged ourselves in.

Heim also makes this simple statement: “Cyberspace without carefully laid channels of choice may become a waste of space” (78). Yes, because while we are quick to hail cyberspace as the ultimate liberator, we may soon find that there is a great deal less freedom and choice than we imagine as it is defined now. The mission for my PhD, I have come to realize, is about designing real choice for the Internet, i.e. designing real alternatives that do not force people to morph and adapt themselves to the parameters the current Internet prescribes. For example, Heim points out: “The ideal of the simultaneous all-at-once-ness of computerized information access undermines any world that is worth knowing” (80); yet for some of us, we don’t have any real choice about whether or not to go with the times, because not doing so, not being “included” as the Missionaries of the Internet might call it, amounts to falling behind, or even failing to evolve (and getting picked off like a limping gazelle).

Heim concludes with this strange, evocative paragraph: “As we suit up for the exciting future in cyberspace” – note the parallel, again, with the Cybermen analogy – “we must not lose touch with the Zionites, the body people who remain rooted in the energies of the earth. They will nudge us out of our heady reverie in this new layer of reality. They will remind us of the living genesis of cyberspace, of the heartbeat behind the laboratory, of the love that still sprouts amid the broken slag and the rusty shells of oil refineries ‘under the poisoned silver sky’” (80).

Amen.

A summary of:
Stenger, N. 1991. Mind is a leaking rainbow. In Cyberspace: First Steps, M. Benedikt, Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 48-57.

Wertheim’s book walked us through the evolution of our concept of ‘space’. Here, Stenger makes a point about the effect that cyberspace has had on our concept of time: “If there is something that computers have forced into our society, it is a different sense of time. We still conceive of time within the mental framework of the eighteenth century: time is what is set by a clock, God as ‘the Great Clockmaker’ (Voltare), and so on. The (re)emergence of different senses of time will not destroy the traditional one, but make it relative” (55). She draws on Eliade, who writes about the sacred nature of time, or perhaps better phrased as the nature of sacred time. He writes: “’Religious man lives in two kinds of time, of which, the more important, sacred time, appears under the paradoxical aspect of a circular time, reversible and recoverable, a sort of eternal present that is periodically reintegrated by means of rites’” (in Stenger, 55). Stenger writes, “Eliade’s sacred time is nonhistorical. It is the time that ‘floweth not,’ that does not participate in the profane duration” (55).

I don’t know how useful this is for my purposes, but there it is anyway.

Stenger concludes with a hyperbolic, utopian paragraph, one that is fairly representative of that breed described by Wertheim as hailing the Internet as an opportunity for almost religious rebirth: “According to Satre, the atomic bomb was what humanity had found to commit collective suicide. It seems, by contrast, that cyberspace, though born of a war technology, opens up a space for collective restoration, and for peace. As screens are dissolving, our future can only take on a luminous dimension! / Welcome to the New World” (58). I think Hawken would agree with this. I, however, find this hopelessly naïve (but a great quote!).

A summary of:
Thomas, D. (1991). Old rituals for new space: rites de passage and William Gibson’s cultural model of cyberspace. In Cyberspace: First Steps, M. Benedikt, Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 30-48.

In this chapter, Tomas looks at cyberspace “from an anthropological, indeed ritual, perspective” (32), using William Gibson’s Neuromancer (and others) as a kind of relic encapsulating a culture, arguing that “science fiction is an important tool that allows us to make sense of a rapidly emerging postindustrial culture” (32). He emphasizes in particular a rite of passage from the secular/profane social ordering to a liminal period: “This phase is marked by a time of ritual metamorphosis that mediates between the initiand’s or group’s previous and subsequent state” (37).

What’s important for our purposes is Tomas’s argument that “one of cyberspace’s more fundamental social functions is to serve as a medium to communicate a form of ‘gnosis, mystical knowledge about the nature of things and how they came to be what they are’ (Turner, 1977a: 107)” (41). Tomas relies heavily on Turner throughout this chapter. Here again: “Turner has proposed a distinction between ‘liminal’ and ‘liminoid,’ or ‘ergic-ludic ritual liminality and anergic-ludic liminoid genres of action’ (1974: 83) that acknowledges an important, indeed decisive, difference between types of society called ‘tribal’ and ‘post-tribal’ or pre- and post-Industrial Revolution societies” (41). In English, this means, “The transition from the liminal to the liminoid is broadly marked by a transition from the ritual collective to the secular individual, individualistic, or individualizing;” (42) “Liminal behavior is constrained by obligations associated with status, while liminoid behavior is characterized by relative contractual freedom” (42). In other words, post-Industrial Revolution = the age of selfishness.

How this relates to Gibson’s Sci-Fi novel is the following: “Gibsonian cyberspace exhibits liminoid characteristics connected to its economic functions as articulated in a complex open-ended post-industrial society. First, it exhibits a specific logic that structures the matrix in the name of a transnational information economy. This logic, replicating the binary (0-1) logic of computer languages, is visibly articulated in the matrix, sculpted in the copyrighted forms of data that structure, in turn, social activity. Walls of data, rather than walls of brick and glass, divide a hardwired, or postorganic, humanity into economic protagonists – those included and those excluded from, say, the dominant military/industrial complex. Those, in other words, that do and those that do not have direct access to information, hardware technology and software expertise” (44). Is this a longwinded way of describing the modern knowledge economy?

I like this quote from Gibson’s “Rocket Radio”: “The world before television equates with the world before the Net – the mass culture and mechanisms of Information. And we are of the Net; to recall another mode of being is to admit to having once been something other than human” (in Tomas, 45). The point here, and it’s something I realized early on, is that there’s no turning back to an earlier time, to a naivete. Even if the Internet were to die, we would still understand our world from the perspective of people who at one point had the Internet; and with that comes a worldview that cannot be denied simply by taking away the toy.

A summary of:
Hawken, P. (2004). Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World. Penguin Books: New York.

I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed with this book. It’s very optimistic, which is nice; but it didn’t sell the optimism to me. For the most part, it seemed like wishful thinking. I’m not entirely convinced of this great social movement; though I wish I could believe like Hawken. I wish, specifically, that I could believe that “the shared activity of hundreds of thousands of nonprofit organizations can be seen as humanity’s immune response to toxins like political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation” (141-2) and that this movement had any chance of succeeding in healing the world; or even better, if the “underlying values of the movement,” which I happen to really sympathize with, “are beginning to permeate global society” (186). In some areas of my life, I’m an optimist; but in this case, I tend to think that things are just getting worse and worse.

There were, however, some interesting points to consider. And there were some fabulous quotes within and from it, worth capturing.

One of the main unifying beliefs of this so-called movement has to do with the perversity of our economy, which in turns justifies and necessitates all sorts of human horrors: “If there is a pervasive criticism of global capitalism that is shared by the actors in the movement, it is this observation: goods seem to have become more important, and are treated better, than people” (14). Interestingly, Hawken later writes the following:

John Maynard Keynes cautioned that we live our lives under the illusion of freedom but are likely to be ‘slaves to some defunct economist.’ Even that description understates the problem. The world may be caged by a defect of the entire economic profession – namely, the idea that we can assess value in banknotes, or that we can undertand our relationship to the material world using an absttract metric rather than a biological one. The extraordinary advances made by Western societies will, in the end, be subservient to the land and what it can provide and teach. There are no economies of scale; there is only nature’s economy. We cannot turn back the clock, or return to any propr state on the planet, but we will never know ourselves until we know where we are on this land. There is no reason that we cannot build an exquisitely designed economy that matches biology in its diversity, and integrates complexity rather than extinguishing it. In accomplishing this, there is much to be fained from those who have not forgotten the land (100).

I think there are two lessons to be taken from this quote. The first is that there is something undeniably broken about our relationship to our abstract metrics of value. How did money become the only thing we value? What has happened to social values, to spiritual values? As Hawken says, “A free market, so lovely in theory, is no more feasible in practice than a soceity without laws” (132). It is so important that there are people fighting against this disease (…though unfortunately, I am not as optimistic as Hawken, and I think that this is a case of David and Goliath, one in which I’d be shocked if David prevailed). Why are we not sickened by the fact that all our activity on the Internet, from using Google to posting on Facebook has a commoditized value to those companies? How is one to disengage from this sick relationship with money?

And the second is that it may apply in some respects to the Internet as well. Yes, there is no way to return to a time when we had not yet imagined the Internet. The world is forever changed. But that does not mean that it must always exist in its current form. It can become more resolutely a vehicle for social justice, for spirituality, for humanity. The key is to never forget where we came from.

Here’s just a small point worth considering: “Language is nothing less than the living expression of a culture, part of what [anthropologist Wade Davis] calls an ethnosphere, ‘the sum total of all the thoughts, dreams, ideals, myths, intuitions, and inspirations brought into being by the imagination since the dawn of consciousness’” (94). Bearing this in mind, I wonder what it means for us culturally that our language is morphing into text-speak, punctuated by emoticons. I’m sure it at the very least reflects our subordination to technology and our sick ambitions to become like the machines.

I found it surprising that Hawken described Wikipedia as one of the manifestations of this supposed social movement. His justification is that it demonstrates a committment to collective activity, dependence, and “the rise of the amateur” (158). I do wonder whether the promotion of the amateur is part of what’s not so great about the Internet, as I mentioned in a previous post. But the message from this to me is that much of this is a matter of interpretation: Two people can look at the same thing, say Wikipedia, and one can see it as a wonderful thing embodying what’s best about humanity, while another person can look at it and see it as a symptom of the great illness our age. I’m beginning to realize that this is going to be one of the major struggles of my PhD, i.e. making a case for why things need to change when some people see the Internet as it is as one of (if not the) greatest liberators of humanity.

Hawken sees ideologies as harmful, and makes no bones about this:

• “This is the first time in history that a large social movement is not bound together by an ‘ism’” (15-6).
• “Ideologies prey on these weaknesses and pervert them into blind loyalties, preventing diversity rather than nurturing natural evolution and the flourishing of ideas” (16).
• “In contrast to the ideological struggles currently dominating global events and personal identity, a broad nonideological movement has come into being that does not invoke the masses’ fantasized will but rather engages citizens’ localized needs. This movement’s key contribution is the rejection of one big idea in order to offer in its place thousands of practical and useful ones. Instead of isms it offers processes, concerns, and compassion” (18).
• “Ideologies exclude openness, diversity, resiliency, and multiplicity, the very qualities that nourish life in any system, be it ecosystem, immune system, or social system” (162).
• “History demonstrates all too eloquently that no ideology has ever amounted to more than a palliative for any dire condition” (163).

I do see his point. And I am leery of building a case or designing something based upon a given ism, hence part of my aversion to religion. But I think the line between ism and worldview or morality is blurred. After all, he later goes on to describe a shift in worldview that Karen Armstrong had termed The Axial Age, and suggests that what we are seeing now is the latest manifestation, the latest flare of this moral shift. First of all, it’s important to understand what the first Axial Age is all about, in the words of Karen Armstrong:

“The Axial sages were not interested in providing their disciples with a little edifying uplift, after which they could return with renewed vigor to their ordinary self-centered lives. Their objective was to create an entirely different kind of human being. All the sages preached a spirituality of empathy and compassion; they insisted that people must abandon their egotism and greed, their violence and unkindness. Not only was it wrong to kill another human being; you must not even speak a hostile word or make an irritable gesture. Further, nearly all of the Axial sages realized that you could not confine your benevolence to our own people: your concern must somehow extend to the entire world…. If people behaved with kindness and generosity to their fellows, they could save the world” (185 – from The Great Transformation).

This was the time of Socrates, Plato, Lao-tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Buddha, Jeremiah, Isaiah… and it later saw a “second flowering” (184) in Christianity, Islam, and Rabbinical Judaism. Hawken’s point is that this represents a movement recognized best in hindsight: a movement for spirituality and humanity. But further, he thinks that the same is happening now, though it is similarly difficult to see without the benefit of hindsight. “Just as today, the Axial sages lived in a time of war. Their aim was to understand the source of violence, not to combat it. All roads led to self, psyche, thought, and mind. The spiritual practices that evolved were varied, but all concentrated on focusing and guiding the mind with simple precepts and practices whose repitition in daily life would gradually and truly change the heart. Enlightenment was not an end – equanimity, kindess, and compassion were” (185).

There is much to absorb from this above quote. I think it really highlights what is universal about spiritual practice, which is helpful for my purposes as it will be necessary to distill the essence from these if I am to propose a spiritual technological alternative. How can a new Internet be designed to cultivate the self (in an egoless way), psyche, thought (deep thought), and mind? How grand this ambition is, if it is really an effort to create an entirely new kind of human being! Dream big, eh?

Consider these two quotes:

• “Friedrich Hayek, Novel Prize-winning economist… was one of the first to recognize the dispersed nature of knowledge and the effectiveness of localization and of combining individual understanding. Since one person’s knowledge can only represent a fragment of the totality of what is known, wisdom can be achieved when people combine what they have learned” (21).
• “Not suprisingly, people don’t know that they count in such a malordered, destabilized world, don’t know that they are of value. A healthy global civilization cannot be constructed without building blocks of meaning, which are hewn of reights and respect. What constitutes meaning for human beings are events, memories, and small dignities – gifts that rarely emerge from institutions, and never from theory. As the smaller parts of the world are knitted into one globalized unit, the one thing we can no longer afford is bigness. This means dismantling the big bombs, dams, ideologies, contradictions, wars, and mistakes” (23).

What I wonder is whether we need to design a localized alternative to the Internet, i.e. a space where people can feel important and create meaning and forge real friendships. This would be, as Wendell Berry (quoted by Hawken) describes it, an instance of “solving for pattern… a solution that addresses multiple problems instead of one…. Solving for pattern is the de facto approach of the movement because it is resource constrained. It cannot afford ‘fixes,’ only solutions” (178).

The real question this book has made me ask is whether the Internet as it is now is really the appropriate tool to support such a movement (assuming it exists). Perhaps it is worth considering whether there are ways to design a new Internet that could better support people fighting for humanity. How do we support compassion and cooperation, for example?:

We are surfeited with metaphors of war, such that when we hear the word defense, we think attack, but the defence of the world can truly be accomplished only by cooperation and compassion. Science now knows that while still in diapers, virtually all children exhibit altruistic behavior. Concern for the well-being of others is bred in the bone, endemic and hardwired. We became human by working together and helping one another. According to immunologist Gerald Callahan, faith and love are literally buried in our genes and lymphocyte, and what it takes to arrest our descent into chaos is one person after another remembering who and where they really are (165).

I think this is where the immune system (as network, i.e. Internet) metaphor falls down. We seem to presume that because we are interconnected on the web, this fosters greater communication and cooperation (I don’t think we can pretend it supports compassion). Does it? Or does it just support the illusion of these? We need to consider how it is we can genuinely design for this so that we can do great things as a species.

Some brilliant quotes from others found in this book:

• How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsiliby for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light. – Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams
• What we call Man’s power of Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. – C.S. Lewis
• There is an answer from every corner of the globe… the enslaved, the sick, the disappointed, the poor, the unfortunate, the dying, the surviving cry out, it is here. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals
• Let no man pull you own so low as to make you hate him. - Booker T. Washington
• The modern conservative… is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. - John Kenneth Galbraith
• But limits nonetheless exist and we know it. In our wildest madness we dream of an equilibrium we have lost, and which in our simplicity we think we shall discover once again when our errors cease – an infantile presumption, which justifies the fact that childish peoples, inheriting our madness, are managing our history today…. We turn our back on nature, we are ashamed of beauty. Our miserable tragedies have the smell of an office, and their blood is the color of dirty ink. - Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays
• I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time! – Helen Keller

A summary of:
Vowell, S. (2008). The Wordy Shipmates. Riverhead Books: New York.

I’ve been meaning to read this book for a long time. Sarah Vowell is fabulous – she manages to make even the Pilgrims entertaining! But the reason I finally read it now is because I began to think while reading Schultze’s book that perhaps there is a connection between America’s religious foundations and the particular way in which the Internet has developed. And if perhaps there was no truth to this theory, understanding how the Pilgrims attempted to establish a religious society in America might offer some insight into how to (or not to) develop a more spiritual ‘space’ within or in conjunction with cyberspace. In the end, I’m glad I read this when I did.

I don’t know how well respected Vowell is as a historian; but I don’t know how much it matters for my purposes, firstly, because she cites primary sources, which I can extract and interpret for myself; and secondly, because my PhD is not in history. I will begin my own dissertation by making a historical/sociological argument, but the purpose of this is only to articulate my research biases and make a case for the need for more spiritual technology. Now that’s out of the way, here’s what I learned from the Vowell book:

1. Exceptionalism (and lessening the “digital divide”)

In his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” John Winthrop utters the famous, quintessentially American imperative: “‘We shall be as a city upon a hill” (11); and from then on, these words have been appropriated by politial leaders who have failed to assimilate the profundity of its implications. The immediate impact, Vowell argues, is that speeches such as this were “watering the seeds of American exceptionalism that will, in the twenty-first century, blossom into preemptive war in the name of spreading democracy in the Middle East…,” (6) etc.. For a people who became increasingly unsure about their own salvation, Americans latched onto the idea of themselves as having a special “calling” (Weber) in this world, namely to save everyone else. And thus in a continual and ever more manic sucking-up to God, America made its mission the liberation of the world… whether or not anyone asked for America’s help. Vowell writes:

The most ironic and entertaining example of that mind-set is the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s official seal. The seal, which the Winthrop fleet brought with them from England, pictures an Indian in a loincloth holding a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. Words are coming out of his mouth. The Indian says, ‘Come over and help us.’ That is really what is says. The worldview behind that motto – we’re here to help, whether you want our help or not – is the Massachusetts Puritan’s most enduring bequest to the future United States. And like everything the Puritans believed, it is derived from Scripture (24-5).

This exceptionalism is so ingrained in the American psychology that it is still very much manifesting in our foreign policies today. “Soon enough we were helping Europe in two world wars, helping South Korea, helping South Vietnam, just as we are now, as I write this, hleping Iraq” (206). And the justification provided by Cheney (not that I believe anything that Cheney says, but it’s important that many Americans gobbled up Cheney’s rationalization for the invasion of Iraq): “My belief is that we will, in fact be greeted as liberators” (26).

There is clearly a humility problem here. Vowell writes, “This contradiction – between humility before God and the egomania unleashed by being chosen by God – is true of both Winthrop and the colony of Massachusetts itself. This man hopes for tallness for himself as well as for his future city, pitched, in his mind, above sea level, on yonder hill” (39).

The point that’s important for my purposes is how this very same logic is the motivation behind the liberal ideals of lessening the “digital divide.” We think that we must share what we have created with all of humanity, whether or not they asked for it, assuming that we know better than they what they need. Technology, we know, is the way. Where’s the humility in this, I ask? Furthermore, while people are beginning to wake up to the fact that forced democratization on the world is perhaps immoral, and increasingly people of my generation are creeped out by missionaries, the discussion about the morality of forcing technologies on people under the auspices of equality if it is happening at all, is not yet reaching audible decible levels. Yes, there is a digital divide; perhaps this is because other cultures do not want technology taking over their lives the way it has for Americans. In short, we need to cultivate greater humility.

• Implication one: Responsibility

For Winthrop, being as a city upon a hill meant that this position came with tremendous responsiblity. “In Matthew 5:14, Jesus said to the throng before him, ‘Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.’…’The eyes of all people are upon us,’ warned Wintrhop, ‘so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken… we shall be made a story and a byword through the world’” (58). And as Vowell says far better than I possibly could:

The thing that appeals to me about Winthrop’s ‘Christian Charity’ and Cotton’s ‘God’s Promise to His Plantation’ from this end of history is that at least the arrogant ballyhoo that New England is special and chosen by God is tempered by the self-loathing Puritans’ sense of reckoning. The same wakefulness that individual Calvinist was to use to keep watch over his own sins Winthrop and Cotton called for also in the group at large. This humility, this fear, was what kept their delusions of grandeur in check. That’s what subsequent generations lost. From New England’s Puritans we inherited the idea that America is blessed and ordained by God above all nations, but lost the fear of wrath and retribution (71-2).

I have to wonder if our seeming loss of responsibility is a direct result of the soul-crushing dogma of Calvinism, the belief in predetermination, so harsh that it made Bishop Laud proclaim, “My very soul abominates this doctrine, for it makes God, the God of all mercies, to be the most fierce and unreasonable tyrant in the whole world” (110). In other words, I do wonder if the impossibility of knowing whether one is going to be saved fosters what Weber calls “unprecedented inner loneliness” and possibly, I would argue, bitterness toward the unfairness of it all… and a subsequent rejection of the responsibility (like the case of the woman who, so perturbed by her constant questioning about whether or not she was one of the chosen one, drowned her child because being a murderer solved the puzzle once and for all: she was going to hell).

Yet at some point along the way, the notion of responsibility was swapped for glittering fakes. Vowell quotes from a speech by Cuomo during the time of the Reagan administration’s more egregious ethical violations: “We give money to Latin American governments that murder nuns, and then we lie about it…. We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship to the reality, the hard substance of things. And we’ll do it not so much with speeches that sound good as with speeches that are good and sound; not so much the speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that will bring people to their senses. We must make – We must make the American people hear our ‘Take of Two Cities.’ We must convince them that we don’t have to settle for two cities, that we can have one city, indivisible, shining for all of its people” (62-3).

It seems that it is getting harder and harder to hold one another accountable in a world in which we can hardly differentiate fact from fiction. We exist in a plurality of truths, which seems to equate to a confusion of morality and responsibility. It doesn’t help, I imagine, to allow anyone and everyone to have a microphone in order to voice non-truths to confuse the matter even further. Again, as I wrote in one of my posts about Schultze’s book, it seems our only responsibility at this point is to the commandment: “Thou shalt not inhibit another’s freedom of speech.” And now we live in a world in which news programs quote Newt Gingrich’s venomous tweets and Sarah Palin’s moronic Facebook posts. Where’s the responsibility to the truth? Surely this is the foundation of responsibility for greater moral causes, e.g. ensuring America is, indeed, as a city upon a hill.

• Implication two: Salvation

Vowell makes an interesting point about the centrality of the concept of salvation to the Puritan: “…to Winthrop and his shipmates, the tradition of a covenant – a handshake deal between man and God in which man promises obedience and God grants salvation in return – extends, writes Perry Miller, ‘unbroken from Abraham to Boston’” (50).

This made me think again of Wertheim’s video conference (posted earlier) when she mentions the work of Jesuit scholar Michael Buckley who argues that traditionally in Christianity, there were two conceptions of God. This persisted until the birth of modern science, where now we focus on the glory of God’s creations at the expense of focusing on his redemptive purpose. For example, Newton and Copernicus believed that the purpose of exploring the works of God’s creations was to sure up the idea of God as the redeemer; but we are now completely obsessed with the former (e.g. Big Bang). The result is that God now is becoming almost merely a metaphor of physical laws, and sadly, this completely misses the point about redemption; “If God’s only purpose is to be God the creator, and he doesn’t play any salvific role, it actually becomes a kind of meaningless concept, at least in the context of Christianity” (Wertheim). If you never bridge this chasm, you never get to redemption… which is what brings you to morality; or to responsibility, for that matter.

• Implication three: Compassion

I don’t have a great deal to say about this at the moment, but I did want to capture this brilliant Winthrop quote which may serve as inspiration for the design of more “compassionate” technology:

“We must delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body” (51).

• Implication four: Charity

Vowell notes that “‘Christian Charity’ begins: ‘God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean in their subjection’” (37). This means that although Jefferson later pens the ‘self-evident truth’ that all men are created equal, “Winthrop is saying the opposite – that God created all men unequal” (37). But this is not – as it later became – a justification for capitalistic inequality (see forthcoming post on Weber); rather it a call for charity on behalf of Puritans. “Winthrop asserts, ‘There is a time when a Christian must sell all and give to the poor, as they did in the Apostles’ times.’ (It is so curious that this sermon, in my lifetime, would become so identified with the Communist-hating, Communist-baiting Ronald Reagan, considering Winthrop just proclaimed that a follower of Christ must be willing to renounce property. Utter Commie talk.)” (48-9).

• Implication five: We art holier than thou

The very reason that the Puritans sought to establish their own separate society is because they “became convinced England was courting the wrath of God” (28). Hooker wrote:

So glory is departed from England; for England hath seen her best days, and the reward of sin is coming on apace; for god is packing up of his gospel, because none will buy his wares…. God begins to ship away his Noahs, which prophesied and foretold that destruction was near; and God makes account that New England shall be a refuge fro this Noahs and his Lots, a rock and a shelter for his righteous ones to run unto; and those that were vexed to see the ungodly lives of the people in this wicked land, shall there be safe (29).

I can’t help but see similarities between this kind of thinking and early utopian visions of the Internet as being a haven away from the crass materialism of the real world. Alas, how things get perverted over time…

So an important message from this book is that no matter how admirable your aims, things tend to take on a life of their own. The Puritan society has morphed over time into consumerist, anti-intellectual, rock-loving America. This, too, will inevitably happen for whatever I design: if it takes off, it will morph; it will likely corrupt. I think the lesson is not that it’s not worth trying, but rather that this work is never done and requires constant reexamination / redesign.

• Implication six: Information seeking

One of the major premises of Protestantism, one of the key features that sets it apart from Catholicism, is the idea that: “The word of God, not a man of God, is The Man. For that reason, Luther translated the Bible into German so Germans could read it for themselves” (7). Being a good Protestant thus requires that the individual take responsibility for understanding the Bible, and otherwise educating themselves. In the words of preeminent Puritan scholar, Perry Miller, “Puritanism was not anti-intellectual fundamentalism; it was a learned, scholarly movement that required on the part of the leaders, and as much as possible from the followers, not only knowledge but a respect for the cultural heritage. Being good classicists, they read Latin and Greek poetry, and tried their hands at composing verses of their own. The amount they wrote, even amid the labor of settling a wilderness, is astonishing” (15). Furthermore, part of their education involved a commitment to writing their thoughts down. This, writes Vowell, created a society of “quill-crazy New Englanders” (13). But here’s the crucial bit:

So an English subject of Henry VIII who already had a soft spot for the innovations of Luther rejoiced at the king’s break with Rome (while trying not to picture Henry and Anne Boleyn doing it in every room of every castle). That is, until the Protestant sympathizer went to church and noticed that the Church of England was just the same old Catholic Church with a king in pope’s clothing. Same old hierarchy of archbishop on down. Same old Latin-speaking middlemen standing between parishioners and the Bible, between parishioners and God. Same old ornamental gewgaws. Organ music! Vestments! (It is difficult to understate the Puritan abhorrence of something as seemingly trivial as a vicar’s scarf.) Same old easily achieved, come-as-you-are salvation. Here’s what one had to do to join the Church of England: be English. But we want getting into heaven to be hard! said the Puritans. And not for everybody (7)!

The point is, being a Puritan is hard work. Salvation is not guaranteed, but earned. Part of that is proving one’s worthiness of salvation through strict and dedicated education of oneself.

But then, here’s the irony: “The United States is often called a Puritan nation. Well, here is one way in which it emphatically is not: Puritan lives were overwhelmingly, fanatically literary. Their single-minded obsession with one book, the Bible, made words the center of their lives – not land, not money, not power, not fun. I swear on Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston’s communitarian English majors” (13). How has America become so anti-intellectual? Here’s Vowell’s explanation:

Anne Hutchinson is merely taking Protestantism’s next logical step…. [She] is pushing American Protestantism further, towards a practice approaching the more personal, ecstatic, anti-intellectual, emotional slant now practiced in the U.S.A., especially in the South and Midwest….
Protestantism’s evolution away from hierarchy and authority has enormous consequences for America and the world. On the one hand, the democratization of religion runs parallel to political democratization….
On the other hand, Protestantism’s shedding away of authority, as evidenced by my mother’s proclamation that I needn’t go to church or listen to a preacher to achieve salvation, inspires self-reliance – along with a dangerous disregard for expertise. So the impulse that leads to democracy can also be the downside of democracy – namely, a suspicion of people who know what they are talking about. It’s why in U.S. presidential elections the American people will elect a wisecracking good ol’ boy who’s fun in a malt shop instead of a serious thinking who actually knows some of the pompous, brainy stuff that might actually get fewer people laid off or killed (213-5).

The point of interest for my research is that there are religious roots to the kind of individualistic, anti-authoritarian information seeking behavior we now practice on the Internet. There is no one in cyberspace that we can go to for all the answers. And there is no Bible for this space. But what we do have is the freedom to go in search of our own answers. As such, we become constant bricoleurs, assembling our own individualized knowledge from scattered information we find on the web.

• Democracy
  

Consider this quote from Ronald Reagan’s farewell address:

I’ve spoken of a shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still (64-5).

Firstly, this is rather different from the Puritans’ exclusionary beliefs (i.e. that getting into heaven should be difficult and not for everybody), reflecting the growth of democratic thinking. But again, I see a parallel between this kind of rhetoric and that of utopian cyberspace. In fact, this could equally be a description of cyberspace if you take out the allusions to physicality. My point is that the idea of the justice of democracy as evidenced by this speech is undoubtedly influencing the emerging emphasis on the democratization of technology, mass creativity and the like, evidenced by the EPSRC’s call for study of “Democratisaiton and Open Innovation”: “This theme would study the emerging phenomenon of the democratization of innovation and its technical, business and design implications as a key strategic contribution to the digital economy. Areas of activity would include, citizen journalism, open source, co-creation, open innovation, post-participatory design and mass creativity.”

• Losing my religion
  

Vowell writes:

So I always cringed, wondering why, when the English showed up, most of the Cherokee dropped whatever they were doing and adopted English ways on the spot, from becoming Christians and speaking English to eventually printing their own newspaper, ratifying a constitution, and owning black slaves like white Southerners they aspired to be. Perhaps this is why: they ‘despaired so much that they lost confidence in their gods and the priests destroyed the sacred objects of the tribe.’ It makes so much sense. Some microscopic predator comes along and wipes out most of the tribe and of course they would abandon their gods. Their gods abandoned them (34).

I feel exactly the same when I think of the way the West is homogenizing the world by spreading their technology and destroying local beliefs and culture in the process. I can’t help but feel like Roger Williams felt about imposing a new religion on the natives: “…he points out that Jesus ‘abhors… an unwilling spouse, and to enter into a forced bed: the will in worship, if true, is like a free vote.’ Thus, imposing Christianity on American Indians (or anyone else) is, to Williams (and, according to Williams, Jesus) a rape of the soul” (160).

I just think that it’s important that there be greater choice in the technology that these countries can adapt so that they can use something that fits with their lives without destroying their gods and cultures.

• Final thoughts
  

I thought this was a really interesting insight into American culture:

In the U.S.A., we want to sing along with the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues. That is why the ‘city on a hill’ is the image from Winthrop’s speech that stuck and not ‘members of the same body.’ No one is going to hold up a cigarette lighter in a stadium to the tune of ‘mourn together, suffer together.’ City on a hill, though – that has a backbeat we can dance to. And that’s why the citizens of the United States not only elected and reelected Ronald Reagan; that’s why we are Ronald Reagan (63).

The message from this is that it’s naive to think that anyone can change something that is so ingrained in culture. The Internet as it is now perfectly fits this sing-along-with-the-verses lifestyle. No matter how brilliant any alternative vision of it might be, most people are not going to want to change. The alternative vision will only appeal to those that do not feel at home in this world; the ones who play the blues, as it were. For them, I would like to offer more options. (For a model of this, see Stuart Walker’s conceptual designs for mobile phone varieties ranging from a phone that comes in pieces in a bag that you have to assemble whenever you make a call, all the way up to the kind of convenient mobile phone we see all around us.)

A summary of:
Schultze, Q. J. (2002). Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age. Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Chapter 8 – Sojourning with Heart

This is a pretty cheesey chapter to conclude the book, full of cliches about technology and cyber-life. I won’t do a full summary, but just include some quotes that I did like:

• “Lost in the miasma of evaporating information, we cannot help but feel the lightness of digital being” (192).
• “Tom Wolfe overstates the case only moderately when he says that the Web ‘does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, messages, and images, partly eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mailbox to picking up the phone to get a hold of your stockbroker or some buddies to shoot the breeze with’” (194).
• “Virilio rightly contends that rationality and science in the modern world create a deus ex machina (a machine-god) that negates the transcendent God of revealed religion” (195).
• “…religious wisdom reminds us that we are always in the midst of creating a conditional future. It helps us to remember that we are responsible today for maintaining the traditions that will usher in a good tomorrow” (197).
• “At the heart of the Hebrew and Christian traditions is the mystery of friendship with God and neighbor” (201).
• “New beginnings too easily focus on ever changing identities and intimacies with no respect for intrinsic meaning or greater moral purpose. The information society constantly revises reality and updates experience so that the transformations themselves become our sole bearings” (205-6).
• “Running after change, we become techno-evangelists, surfing after the latest fads with no clear route or destination. Some people might call this freedom, but it is the freedom of the unatached and restless tourist, not the contemplatice freedom of the sojourner” (206).
• “Havel describes this tourism: ‘Yet though we live, find pleasure, think, suffer, meet, part, pass each other by in various ways, that fatal lack of focus or perspective makes everything around us and within us somehow unstable, disconnected, confused’” (207).
• “The sojourner repeadedly poses the ‘primordial questions’ in order to examine the direction he or she is going…. As the Hebrew prophet Micah puts it, the sojourner seeks to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God (Micah 6:8)” (207).