In his book, Carr writes, “The importance of such skills [the ones fostered by computer game play] shouldn’t be taken lightly. As our work and social lives come to center on the use of electronic media, the faster we’re able to navigate those media and the more adroitly we’re able to shift our attention among online tasks, the more valuable we’re likely to become as employees and even as friends and colleagues” (140). Jane McGonigal takes this argument one step further, arguing that the skills developed in online game play are the skills that can help us save the world. Or more correctly, she believe that games reinforce behavior and attitudes that may prove necessary for solving our real world problems.

The first such attitude is what she describes as “urgent optimism.” Unfortunately, she admits, so far this urgent optimism translates into the belief that one can change the virtual world only, and not the real world (the very thing she hopes to change with her games). But the point is that, whereas in the real world we feel increasingly disempowered to make real change, paralyzed by the seeming impossibility of affecting big problems, in the game world, these players feel like nothing is impossible. I would agree that we certainly need more of this.

The second behavior is that gamers are really good at weaving a social fabric. I might suggest that the weaving of this fabric is a game in itself – strategic alliances. My real concern here is that it reinforces the slightly sick transformation of ‘friendship’ that is occurring with our social media. And the other is that this notion of geographically boundless collaboration itself has environmental implications, when we consider the resources that go in to maintaining these connections (see Mobile Lives). But I am torn here, because in my work, I’m arguing that we need greater social connections, and these gamers are doing this. I suppose the difference is that I’m suggesting that the connections are themselves better (i.e. they are more fulfilling, and meaningful), whereas she is implying that these connections need to be more numerous, and more organized, which itself betrays a worldview bias.

The third attitude is what she calls “blissful productivity.” This is the idea that humans are most human when they are being productive, and that we feel good about this. I find this funny, in that it seems like the latest transformation of the Protestant Ethic to fit our modern world. But yes, it would be nice if these productive efforts were focused on changing the world for the better, rather than on making money (and in turn, working to perpetuate the world as it is now).

And finally, she identifies “epic meaning” as being something that gamers are drawn to. When describing the appeal of her game, A World Without Oil, she says blithely that “nobody wants to change how they live because it’s good for the world, or because they’re supposed to,” but that if you immerse people in an epic game, they can in a sense be tricked into doing what’s good for the world (though she didn’t phrase it that way). I find this really sad on the one hand, because I can’t fathom why our sustainability problems are not ‘epic’ enough to engender this motivation. On the other hand, my research argues something not too dissimilar! – namely that I suggest that people need to be re-immersed (reminded in some cases) in a meaningfilled world, one that is passed down through great myths and spiritual traditions, in order that they adopt these more harmonious behaviors. (See Walker’s Sustainable By Design.) As she said, those who participated in the epic game, continued the practices learned years after the game ended. This suggests that this is likely the key, and that I am on the right track. You have to provide people with a greater reason to want to change the world. I just sort of wish it wasn’t by having them play games online.

McGonigal has to overcome many people’s kneejerk reaction to immersion. People might argue that immersion is bad – or if not inherently bad, that this amount of time immersed in a fictional world is to the detriment of real world health/happiness/productivity, etc.. I don’t think immersion is bad (see Ryan post). And I don’t think that the amount of time spent means that it is necessarily bad either. It all depends on what you are gaining from that engagement. My issue is that the games are built within the same paradigm that seems to be producing an unsustainable relationship between humans and the planet. They reinforce particular kinds of thinking (as I mentioned before about collaboration/information exchange, for example), and they increase our addiction to computer technologies, which has both psychological and environmental implications. For example, she quickly mentions how many more gamers will be using mobile devices to connect to these games, and dismisses the environmental impact by saying that the power they use will be increasingly ‘green’. I worry that there will be a point at which these lines cross on the graph, and that as we use more and more devices/energy, we are running out of time to use these games to solve these huge problems – or indeed to do anything to solve them. Increased gaming accelerates the crises in some ways, just in terms of the energy cost of doing so.

And as for the ‘escapism’ arguments against immersion, she is not advocating exodus into virtual reality. She doesn’t want to make better games so that we have a better place to escape to. She wants to make better games that help us make our real world better. I think this is a great mission.

Finally, I must come back to the question she asks, which is: In all of the zillions of hours we spend gaming, what exactly are we training for? She quotes a figure that the average young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming, which, according to Malcolm Gladwell’s research, means that we are producing a fleet of gaming ‘virtuosos’. But really, are these individuals ‘virtuosos’ or ‘idiot savants’? I guess I think that being a great computer gamer may not be that helpful when the time comes that we disengage from computer technology. If we are creating a generation of people who are excellent at solving problems specifically with computer – or a she suggests, we are evolving to think like this – then we may be in big trouble because. What happens when we try to unplug? Do we know how to function without these tools? We are not preparing ourselves for Power Down. And as Carr shows, using computers to help us solve problems does not make us better problem solvers, but worse….

Re-posted from two years ago
Reflections on:
Carr, N. (2008). The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from “Edison” to “Google”. W. W. Norton & Co.: New York.

Having finished this book, I’m hesitant to blog at all (really quite disturbing how much the information we put on/in the Internet is being monitored and used for creating more control and more advanced marketing/advertising tools). Ah, well. I’m blogging this so that I remember it (as, it was argued in the book, is the result of the World Wide Computer: a dumbing down of humanity, using computers to do our thinking and remembering for us).

Most of the book was devoted to describing and highlighting the often invisible changes that technology is having on our world. Very eye-opening.

• the emergence of Internet businesses has accelerated the economic division between the richest and the poorest, since fewer people are needed to run a successful Internet business (like PlenyOfFish.com, run by one man!) and because human labor is being cheapened by the ability of technology to perform tasks for us

There are assembly lines today, but they are without workers… they are managed by computers in a glass cage above, with highly skilled engineers in charge.

Computerization hence puts many American wage-earners in a double bind: it reduces the demand for their jobs even as it expands the supply of workers ready and able to perform them.

• advances in technology have led to “The Great Unbundling” – we are able to pick and choose with advanced selection tools what we read/consume, etc., leading to a greater symbiosis between media and advertising (news stories are selected on the basis of their ability to get individuals to click on advertisements, rather than their substantive quality) and also to greater polarization of beliefs

Not only will the Internet tend to divide people with different views…, it will also tend to magnify the differences.

• humans are becoming controlled by the same forces they had hailed as liberators (i.e. once the Internet was seen as a Utopian equalizer and unifier, not to mention a tool to free individuals)

In using a computer, a person becomes part of the control mechanism. He turns into a component of what the Internet pioneer J.C.R. Linklider, in his seminal 1960 paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” described as a system integrating man and machine into a single, programmable unit.

…the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom – control has existed from the beginning…. What’s different, in comparison to the physical world, is that acts of control become harder to detect and those wielding control more difficult to discern.

• companies like Google, which aim to create artificial intelligence (according to their creators!), are very close to producing systems that will succeed in making humans (and the human mind especially) subservient to the machine

But the most important point for me, and the reason I read the book, had to do with the ways in which technology was changing the very ways we think and act. Carr argues:

• humans are becoming inextricably incorporated into the Internet’s computing web, dangerously so, perhaps to the point of becoming unable to function without computers

What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows – about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won’t feel like themselves – as if they’d had a lobotomy. (Kevin Kelly)

As machines become more and more intelligent… people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off
would amount to suicide. (Theodore Kaczynski)

I see within us all… the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’…. As we are emptied of our inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance…, we seem to be turning into pancake people – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button. (Richard Foreman)

The most revolutionary consequence of the expansion of the Internet’s power, scope, and usefulness may not be that computers will start to think like us but that we will come to think like computers. Our consciousness will thin out, flatten, as our minds are trained, link by link, to ‘DO THIS with what you find HERE and go THERE with the result.’ The artificial intelligence we’re creating may turn out to be our own.

• and our technology ends up changing and influencing our worldview

The printed page, the dominant information medium of the past 500 years, molded our thinking through, to quote Neil Postman, ‘it’s emphasis on logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity, detachment, and discipline.’ The emphasis of the Internet, our new universal medium, is altogether different. It stresses immediacy, simultaneity, contingency, subjectivity, disposability, and above all, speed. The Net provides no incentive to stop and think deeply about anything, to construct in our memory that ‘dense repository’ of knowledge that Foreman cherishes…. On the Internet, we seemed impelled to glide across the slick surface of data as we make our rushed passage from link to link.

I think the last quote is, in itself, an argument for the need of ethnography in a world that increasingly demands quick (mostly quantitative) data. And this book has strengthened my resolve to work with designers to re-empower humanity, to sharpen rather than dull our minds. It is clear that going against the forces that are carrying us toward these undesirable fates is not easy, but I think there is potential to use creative design to create systems that improve our abilities to be human, not make us better machines.

A summary of:
Borgmann, A. (1984). Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL.

“…it is widely admitted that there is a problem of orientation in the technologically advanced countries…. Science may be a necessary condition of disorientation. But to repeat an earlier point, it is not the task of science, in its central sense as a body of laws and theories, to ascertain the conditions that are prominent and abiding and allow us to be at home in the world. Disorientation is the result, at least approximately, of a certain way in which we take up with reality, and the loss of the traditional points of reference may not be experienced as debilitating at all” (79).

Borgmann suggests that the ills of society may in fact be more intimately linked with technology – or more aptly, the mindset that comes along with technology – than we have thought. One of the sources of this illness might be that technology forces us to abstract; these abstractions lead to alienation (in the Marxist sense). He argues that theoria – the (Aristotelian) calm and resourceful vision of the world – is eclipsed by the rise of the modern period (6). He clearly argues that while technology and science are often considered two aspects of the same enterprise, this is fatally misleading (15). What is the nature of the technology mindset? – that “the deplorable chaos of the contemporary world results from our failure to carry the scientific enterprise to its conclusion by explaining and shaping human behavior according to the best available scientific knowledge” (28). Scientific progress is always couched as liberation from, not liberation for (29) (think of Fromm). Hans Jonas argues that “modern science has not only withdrawn its support of established world views but promoted their dissolution and the establishment of an alternative vision. The world’s cosmic architecture is denied and replaced by the infinite manifold of one homogenous substrate. Manipulation and novelty are integral parts of this promotion, and it has technology as an inevitable if not immediate consequence. Technology ceaselessly transforms the world along abstract and artificial lines” (29). And some argue that technology’s power is threatening to our well-being: “For Schumacher it is a matter of simple inspection that technology is not only morally objectionable but leads to psychological stresses which threaten to tear the fabric of society” (145).

The author defines technology “as the characteristic way in which we today take up with the world” (35). He argues that this mindset originated in the Enlightenment. The promise of technology is firstly to relieve us from burdens, and to make us comfortable (41): “‘Relief became possible from the drudgery of threshing wheat, digging dirt, carrying water, breaking rocks, sawing wood, washing clothes, and, indoors, spinning and weaving and sewing; many of the laborious tasks of living were being made easier by the middle of the 19th century. Relief from toil does not necessarily mean a better higher life; nevertheless, any attempt to get at the meaning of American technology must give a prominent place to machines that have lifted burdens from the shoulders of millions of individual beings’” (Ferguson: 37). This is what Szerszynski would call the promise of infinitude. And of course it is a fallacy: : “One may be concerned whether technology can hope to be successful on its own terms, whether liberation in one place will not impose new burdens in another. This is Wiesner’s concern when he says: ‘In this enormously complex world, each large-scale technological advance has costs, side effects often unanticipated’” (38-9). Here we see Szerszynski’s dynameis. And furthermore, technology does not actually seem to make us happier: “It turns out that avowed happiness appears to decline as technological affluence rises” (124).

The promise of technology “guilds and veils the shaping of the modern world” (39) in this way: “The promise presents the character of the technological enterprise in broad and ambiguous outline, i.e., as the general procurement of liberty and prosperity in the principled and effective manner that is derived from modern science. Thus it keeps our aspirations present and out of focus at the same time” (39). In fact, our new aspirations become the values of technology: that the world be rendered unto us in a way that is “instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy” (41).

Borgmann makes a point about the necessity of technology to conceal its means, to present itself (falsely) as an unmediated experience (Ryan) to the user: Technology’s effect is insidious: “The concealment of the machinery and the disburdening character of the device go hand in hand. If the machinery were forcefully present, it would eo ipso make claims on our faculties. If claims are felt to be onerous and are therefore removed, then so is the machinery. A commodity is truly available when it can be enjoyed as a mere end, unencumbered by means” (44). This is why Stuart Walker’s work is so radical. When he makes a metronome, for example, by literally binding a battery to a rock so that it is exposed, he is asking us to question how we feel about the pollution of nature by technology; and if we don’t like what we see, not simply cover it up by concealing it in a battery case, but do something about it.

Much of what Borgmann writes about has to do with Marxist concepts like alienation and fetishization. He writes that, “Devices…dissolve the coherent and engaging character of the pretechnological world of things. In a device, the relatedness of the world is replaced by a machinery, but the machinery is concealed, and the commodities, which are made available by a device, are enjoyed without the encumbrance of or the engagement with a context” (47). And also, people are unwilling or unable to repair their technological devices, which leads to waste. And wastefulness is the necessary byproduct of making things carefree (47).

An important term for Borgmann is the ‘device paradigm’ (49). This can be seen when “Commodities and their consumption constitute the professed goal of the technological enterprise” (48). This breeds commodity fetishism, where people “‘search for satisfaction of their needs in the jungle of commodities’ (William Leiss)” (54).

The other really important idea in Borgmann’s work is that of reverse adaptation, defined by Winner as “the adjustment of human ends to match the character of the available means” (60); and as Borgmann writes, “Winner’s notion of reverse adaptation implies that in technology means sometimes determine ends and thus people become enslaved by their servant” (61). In this mode, Winner writes, “Abstract general ends – health, safety, comfort, nutrition, shelter, mobility, happiness, and so forth – become highly instrument-specific. The desire to move about becomes the desire to possess an automobile; the need to communicate becomes the necessity of having telephone service; the need to eat becomes a need for a refrigerator, stove, and convenient supermarket” (62).

And again, this comes back to Ellul’s ideas about the idolization of la technique: Borgmann writes, “Commodities allow no engagement and atrophy the fullness of our capacities…. In paraphrasing Ellul, Winner remarks: ‘The original ends have atrophied; society has accepted the power of technique in all areas of life; social decisions are now based upon the validity of instrumental modes of evaluation; the ends are restricted to suit the requirements of techniques of performance and of measurement’” (62).

In part three, Borgmann attempts to address how we can make changes. One necessary step is to insert humility into our technological development: to listen to nature and learn from it that we must “accept and to limit technology in a principled and sensible way” (195-6?). And another must is that we make a social commitment to changing the character of technology: “the more strongly we sense and the more clearly we understand the coherence and the character of technology, the more evident it becomes to us that technology must be countered by an equally patterned and social commitment, i.e., by a practice” (208). He explains further: “Countering technology through a practice is to take account of our susceptibility to technological distraction, and it is also to engage the peculiarly human strength of comprehension, i.e., the power to take in the world in its extent and significance and to respond through an enduring commitment. Practically a focal practice comes into being through resoluteness, either an explicit resolution where one vows regularly to engage in a focal activity from this day on or in a more implicit resolve that is nurtured by a focal thing in favorable circumstances and matures into a settled custom” (210).

For Borgmann, the antidote to our current technological fetishism is to turn away from producing commodities and begin creating “focal things”: “They are concrete, tangible, and deep, admitting of no functional equivalents; they have a tradition, structure, and rhythm of their own. They are unprocurable and finally beyond our control. They engage us in the fullness of our capacities. And they thrive in a technological setting. A focal practice, generally, is the resolute and regular dedication to a focal thing. It sponsors discipline and skill which are exercised in a unity of achievement and enjoyment, of mind, body, and the world, of myself and others, and in a social union” (219). And “one may hope that focal practices will lead to a deepening of charity and compassion. Focal practices provide a profounder commerce with reality and bring us closer to that intensity of experience where the world engages one painfully in hunger, disease, and confinement. A focal practice also discloses fellow human beings more fully and may make us more sensitive to the plight of those persons whose integrity is violated or suppressed. In short, a life of engagement may dispel the astounding callousness that insulates the citizens of the technological societies from the well-known misery in much of the world” (225).

Borgmann’s notions are bolstered by examples of people having spiritual engagements with technologies, such as Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

“…Pirsig suggests that peace of mind can be found in the midst of technology by carefully attending to a technological object such as a motorcycle. The suggestion is made explicit in the great promise of the book: ‘The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.’ What makes the pronouncement so attractive is its promise of reconciling nostalgia and technology. It tells us that we can find a world of peace and serenity and be at home not just in God’s pristine and vanishing creation but in the midst of our own creations which surround us daily” (160-1).

The lesson from this book, for Borgmann, is: “To attain harmony with technology…, we must take up the practice of maintaining and caring for the technological objects about is. This instruction responds in a positive way to the disengagement and disfranchisement that beset typical technological culture” (161). This is a matter of really engaging with technologies on a deeper level (“If we are to challenge the rule of technology, we can do so only through the practice of engagement’ (207)); caring for them (“A call for caring makes sense only within a reform proposal that recognizes and fruitfully counters the technological tendency to disburden and disengage us from the care of things” (161)).

Anyone who bemoans the current state of technological development risks being labeled a Luddite. Borgmann nips these criticisms in the bud with the following (long) explanation:

“The reform of technology that has been suggested so far would prune back the excesses of technology and restrict it to a supporting role. That suggestion does not stem from ill will toward technology but from the experience that there are forces that rightfully claim our engagement and truly grace our lives and from the concomitant experience that to procure these things technologically is to eviscerate them; finally, it springs from the experience that that joys that technology is able to furnish seem to have a parasitic and voracious character: they require as a contrast pretechnological limits and contours, and they seem to draw vitality from the firmness of pretechnological life by devouring and displacing it. But the focal things and practices that we have considered in Chapters 23 and 24 are not pretechnological, i.e., mere remnants of an earlier culture. Nor are they antitechnological, i.e., practices that defy or reject technology. Rather they unfold their significance in an affirmative and intelligent acceptance of technology. We may call them matatechnological things and practices. As such they provide an enduring counterposition to technology. They provide a contrast against which the experience of specifically technological liberty and prosperity remains alive and appreciated. Not only do focal concerns attain their proper splendor in the context of technology; the context of technology too is restored to the dignity of its original promise through the focal concerns at its center” (247-8).

So here, finally, we arrive at our target: “I want to insist that the destiny of the focal things, the one thing that matters should one emerge at length, is the fulcrum of change. We should measure the significance of the developments about us by the degree to which focal concerns are beginning to flourish openly or continue to live in hiding. All other changes will be variants of technological concerns” (248-9).

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:
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).

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 6 – Striving for Cosmic Diversity

The Dossier Journal writes of Kandinsky’s show at the Guggenheim: “The mature work stands on a deep faith in the inherent spiritual values of colors and shapes, telling us that, all along, the arrangement of these simple elements – not subjects – has produced the ‘vibration in the soul’ that is the great initial achievement of art. It is the artist’s task, Kandinsky believed, to ‘set art free,’ and the ultimate task the collective formation of a ‘spiritual pyramid’ that would ‘some day reach to heaven.’ Roll your eyes as you will at reaching heaven, the feeling of standing before these paintings is ineffable.”

Schultze says, “Gelernter rightly argues that the computer scientists who design our everyday technologies should study the liberal arts, so that the work of their hearts, minds, and hands might produce artifacts of higher beauty that fill our lives with more joy and delight and that inspire us to reach higher” (161).

The main message of this chapter is that we should be listening to people other than technology developers when it comes to developing technology, because it affects us so profoundly (in the words of Archbishop Chaput, “these things… shape the soul” (160)) that it requires a more collective consensus about the appropriateness of these technologies in our lives. We should be asking spiritual questions. We should be listening to the wisdom of ancient traditions. The danger is that we are developing one-track minds with regards to the wisdom of various technologies: “As we become information rich, we also tend to fall into a moral myopia that excludes noninstrumental mental values from shaping cyber-endeavors” (142). As Paul Duguid said, “Information technology has been wonderfully successful in many ways. But those successes have extended its ambition without necessarily broadening its outlook. Information is still the tool for all tasks” (158). Can we not think a bit more creatively?

What this also means, then, is that we need a “more diverse notion of ‘knowledge workers’ that includes essayists, poets, playwrights, public intellectuals, clergy, and laypersons – all people who can imagine a society that values not only technique but also joy and good judgment” (142). “As the Archbishop of Denver, Rev. Charles J. Chaput, puts it, the ‘information highway must not bypass humanity.’ We need responsible leaders who will ‘think deeply, not just about where we’re going, but why we’re going there’” (159). (As a sidenote: There is an undeniable prejudice in society to favor informational and technical ways of knowing over others (151). Intuition, for example, has no place in academic discourse; though if we paused to reflect, we would realize that it is only because of our intuition that we able to do any research.) Perhaps then we will begin to question whether the technological values of efficiency and control are really our values.

I think this quote is fairly revealing of a different problem (Schultze seems to be jumping around again), namely that technology is creating more and more soul-destroying jobs: “One Web worker says, ‘The sad reality is that for all the well-deserved excitement the web generates, working on the web can be one of the least exciting things in the world, like being a cook at the Normandy invasion’” (154). Why can’t we use technology to facilitate uplifting engagements? This is my quest for the next 3 years, anyway.