At the age of 66, I find myself having stayed current with digital technology, giving me the ability to work at a university. In turn, working at the university has led to self-study, broadening my view of technology. I have come to the conclusion that I use digital technology mainly as a consumer and creator. I would like to expand my understanding of it further, as it applies to terraforming, philosophy, social structures, geopolitics, computation and many other pressing planetary concerns.
This was an accident?
Mainly because of how I clicked, I have routinely been fed the works of Benjamin Bratton, Kevin Kelly (coined the term “Technium”), K Allado MacDowell and others. Now, my feeds and their algorithms have led me to Dr. Giota Alevizou and King's College, where I have applied for a Digital Futures MA. It may have been my choice to consume these academic works, which I regularly and eagerly do, but the fact that I have been exposed to them at all is due to the digital technology that surrounds me. In these ways, digital technology is shaping who I am becoming, an extraordinary realization for me at this point in my life. And after being exposed to the concept of digital technology as irreducible, self-forming and fundamental, I now more deeply understand the fears or hopes of a future, the latter which will require a radical shift in how we orient ourselves to it in a post-dualistic framing of the world.
Don’t Taze Me Bro
My current pedagogical practice regarding technology is emancipatory as opposed to protectionist. Like media ecologist Marshall McLuhan, I frame technology as an extension of our physical being and pulling on that idea into our present experience, "smart phones" function as both proxies and informants for our cognitive and neurological selves. Why would we refuse them to our children in their learning environments? We should just as soon ban eyeglasses and hearing aids. Our technology is outpacing our intentions for it, so it's even more critical to view us as a part of it, rather than it an artifact of us.
A Neural Interstate
Just as I am finding a mediated identity and agency, so will our epistemological, ecological, geopolitical and geoeconomic systems at a planetary level moving forward. It is then therefore critical to see digital technology in a far different way. Just as the gasoline engine vastly terraformed landscapes and cities, just as the telescope universally de-centered our egos and just as the microscope reveals maths in cellular computations or the teleporting status of quantum particles, our technology will continue to inform its next iteration by pulling the rug out from the original intention behind it.
The Built Environment for Dummies
Technology no longer fits in the box that we have constructed for it and it continually shatters the underpinnings of its own genesis, leading to existential questions rather than empirical answers. In my view, digital technology is affording us a neo-Socratic renaissance of sorts, where our "memory" is now ready to hand, enabling us to spend time and energy conceptualizing speculative inquiries and constructing new semiotics for what is only now ineffable, instead of temporal and organic storage and retrieval of data. Our machines can do this. But technology needs our guidance as much as we need technology to steer us toward an ontologically driven view of the future. The rudder needs to be identified and grasped in order to chart a course. The vessel can also be artificial, although preferrably in the same way that the hive is the built environment of the bee. This future can and should be both conceived and built upon a protopian framework and much of the language needed for constructing it doesn't even exist yet.
Why Stop Now?
Even as I write this, I feel that my knowledge is extremely tacit. I would like to experience this new language as it comes into being. I would like to be a participant for a sentient earth in a more deliberate and present way. My goal is to have a more comprehensive, operational knowledge that will lead to teaching courses that are of higher academic quality and more impactful on students. We live in a very interesting world right now, even with all its troubles and confusion. Still, it’s just too interesting of a time to miss all of this.