Technology in service of life - but what, in the modern context, does this look like? My imagination conjures images from Dune and cyberpunk, for some reason. The former - what is the body capable of? Well they had to find out, because they eliminated computers. The latter - the humanization of technology by incorporation into the body, but also, and more importantly, the turning of technology to criminal, outlaw ends, out of a desire for intensity of experience.
Is there any world in which phones, for example, can be rehabilitated as life and mind extending tekhne? I don't think I've ever loved and hated any technology so much as the phone. It is so useful, and precisely because of that so addictive. I'm on my phone now as I type this. I read your essay while lounging on my couch, thanks to my phone. Yet I find many hours a day get sucked into the screen, and that is not what life is for ... to stare and paw at a black mirror.
We need, I feel as a matter of great urgency, a better interface.
There are days when I wish a solar flare would simply solve the problem for us. Technology in service of Thanatos seems intractable, it would be so nice if it just went away. That's the luddism speaking, of course.
But then, I think, in many ways, the solution to the problem of technology is not technology, but human ... how we relate to it. And that we can change only by starting with our own spirits. If we hold fast to that, it becomes a vector - the technology will change, over time, to accommodate this changed perspective. For all that it is difficult to foresee exactly what that might look like, this seems to me the only starting place.
Technology in service of life - but what, in the modern context, does this look like? My imagination conjures images from Dune and cyberpunk, for some reason. The former - what is the body capable of? Well they had to find out, because they eliminated computers. The latter - the humanization of technology by incorporation into the body, but also, and more importantly, the turning of technology to criminal, outlaw ends, out of a desire for intensity of experience.
Is there any world in which phones, for example, can be rehabilitated as life and mind extending tekhne? I don't think I've ever loved and hated any technology so much as the phone. It is so useful, and precisely because of that so addictive. I'm on my phone now as I type this. I read your essay while lounging on my couch, thanks to my phone. Yet I find many hours a day get sucked into the screen, and that is not what life is for ... to stare and paw at a black mirror.
We need, I feel as a matter of great urgency, a better interface.
There are days when I wish a solar flare would simply solve the problem for us. Technology in service of Thanatos seems intractable, it would be so nice if it just went away. That's the luddism speaking, of course.
But then, I think, in many ways, the solution to the problem of technology is not technology, but human ... how we relate to it. And that we can change only by starting with our own spirits. If we hold fast to that, it becomes a vector - the technology will change, over time, to accommodate this changed perspective. For all that it is difficult to foresee exactly what that might look like, this seems to me the only starting place.