Technology descends from the technology of the past. There is always a precursor, a prototype, a new context, a change. Deep in humanity’s history, we slowly guided the direction of our own evolution through the manipulation of our world. Over thousands of years of cooking fires and the progressive domestication of animals, our digestive systems changed, our teeth morphed. Our bodies responded to shelters and clothing created through the refinement of our technological skills like building and weaving.
Yet with the increasing speed of innovation, our bodies remain relatively the same as technologies quickly change. While our biology moves at the speed of life like it always has, we seem to have taken matters into our own hands, evolving through extensions of ourselves instead. Without understanding what we are doing, we create ourselves, embodying our will through social structures and the design of our living spaces and technologies. Computing technologies, slaves to Moore’s Law, double in sophistication every 18 months. We now create an expansive web, alive with a new global consciousness. The spider, mankind, sits in the center. But our biology doesn’t keep up. Our society moves at a pace which divorces us from ourselves. We’re not designed to process this reality we’ve made. We are in conflict with what we think we should be, what we want to be, and what we are.
Embedded into the systems of our planet, we are constantly impacted and impacting. Constantly in relationship. Yet the mind fractured through dualistic thinking disassociates us from the intimacy of interconnection which defines us. “The worldview of modern physics is holistic and ecological. It emphasizes the fundamental interrelatedness and interdependence of all phenomena, and also the intrinsically dynamic nature of physical reality.” [1] Taught that we are somehow separate, that we interact with a rigid machine world run by levers and cogs, we’re inhibited in navigating our relationships and actions in a way which takes into consideration these inescapable causal feedback loops. We seem to forget our individual and collective power, constructing the world in a mechanical and fixed way, rather than observing the natural system – an ever-evolving and shifting system of life and emergence. We are numb to ourselves.
Our spiritual and cultural ecology is profoundly fractured, a disconnect deeply situated in our psyche – at an individual, relational, and social level – approaching a global level. It is amplified through the design and use of modern technologies, reflecting the fractal nature of being. What we are, we create. What we create, we become. Our digital technologies engage our mind, the control center of our thinking, feeling, acting, and living experience. As we connect through technology, we extend our existential selves. We experience a disembodiment and fall into lopsided imbalance, leaving the stable core of our self to find connection which falls short of our most primal need to deeply relate. The traumas we share are not only felt in our bodies, living in our nervous systems and tissues, but amplified through the structures of the networks we build and maintain. Largescale disruption, violence, and toxicity is experienced in a shared public moment. Events and cultural currents are memorialized by the digital quality of being outside of time and place, suddenly occurring upon user access.
The grief of the world is carried by everyone. Instead of creating a cohesive system of social connection, we see tribalism and conflict erupting online. A well-connected system is resilient, healthy, regenerative. As these dysfunctional attributes are demonstrated, what does it imply about the structures we are using – and what does it imply about ourselves, the architects and users of the system? How can our systems be more well-designed, rooted in the way healthy relationships are formed and flow? If this is connection, what qualities does it have? What link in the genetic code is missing? If living systems theory is correct, which it appears to be, and chaos is a precursor for divergent parts to self-organize, what does this turbulent culture indicate is coming forth? Will it be a death, or will it be a resilient life? How do we engage with the creation of our future?
[1] Fritjof Capra
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