Life is a constantly self-producing thing. It emerges in seeming chaos, in patterns and structures we don’t immediately understand through our conscious awareness but know in some unseen and unsaid place inside us. We each possess the potential for wholeness and connection. Our growth is a constant reaction to information, based in feedback loops. Yet the unique way we respond to experiences and information is determined by both our natural disposition and the culture which has formed our values and worldview.
The way our communities are built, how marketing and phone apps are designed, the meaning we take away from messages all influence our development throughout life. Our responses are a combination of the design of these things and the pre-existing circumstances within us. Conversely, the ways in which our world is designed originate from how we understand it and ourselves, the intentions we have in generating the outcomes we aim to produce, and, deep down, the beliefs and systems which form our state of being. Technology extends from the character of ourselves.
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us,” Marshall McLuhan prophetically observed. During the height of his career in the 1960s and 1970s, many new technological events occurred, including the television broadcast of John F. Kennedy’s funeral where virtually everyone across the nation experienced a shared public moment for the first time – whether they were there or not. He foresaw how our ability to replay and analyze our actions would change our relationship with our self-image; how different media would intimately engage with us, impacting how we understand our world and the information we access; how our relationship with time and events would shift through broadcasting, the experience of the user accessing a recorded moment as if it just happened, removing the boundaries of place and context.
Technology impacts our behaviors and how we perceive and experience the world. We’ve given ourselves abilities beyond the scope of anything imaginable just four generations ago. We now traverse time and space, instantly retrieve hordes of information, create worlds we can never touch (though our mind may believe them…). We can even mine valuable code and create currency from this vast, digitally constructed system. [1] Magic! And alchemy! Yet, we’ve not created the skill or culture to keep up with these experiences in sustainable ways. “[O]ur access to the global scale of suffering has become immediate through technology, but we have not developed the capacity to be with that increased awareness of suffering.” [2] However, awareness of suffering is not the only weight we bear. We are simply moving at an information pace that is not matched with our own growth or ability to digest and integrate. We are overwhelmed and molded by a story which separates the individual from our intimate selfhood, deep relational experience, and interconnection to our planet. As our tool, we are shaped by technology. Because a tool represents the values, skill, intentions, and other attributes of the person or people creating it, who and what those people are is embedded into the functionality and impact of the tool’s use (whether anticipated or not).
Fractal structures permeate our universe. They are small shapes or structures which multiply into the self-same structure across scale. We find them in the shell of the nautilus, the compound center of the sunflower, the stunning web of the orb spider, and the spiral of our galaxy. Veins blue under skin and spreading through leaves grow in fractal patterns like estuaries, branches, mycelium, and forked electrical currents. Snowflakes bloom in perfect fractals, each one unique. The story of our self grows into our identity, creating a storyline which combines into the social story we share. Technology is an embodiment of our metanarrative, the large overarching story which defines culture, describing how we ought to behave, how the world works, the natural order of things, the roles we all play. This is a fractal aspect of how technology emerges, and how human ways of being expand into larger entities and systems. A mutual shaping, essentially seeded by human patterning, occurs. In this way, we are the germ for the idea from which technology grows.
In 2019, I joined a group of cultural innovators and future-forward entrepreneurs at the inaugural Imagine Convergence on Orcas Island. In a hall looking out over driftwood beaches toward the island relatives of the first peoples, the sculptor, Joseph Rastovich, asked Maurizio Benazzo of the Science and Nonduality Conference in California how to know if you’re making a positive impact in community work which spreads. A master of analogy, Maurizio told us about his experience inoculating mycelium into a log. The instructions cautioned him to be very clean, to be mindful and take precautionary measures so that the spores were healthy, and bacteria wouldn’t grow in place of a thriving fungus colony. He said to us, “Be a clean spore.”
We are each a drop in Indra’s Net, reflecting one another, replicating what we are throughout the entire interconnected web we exist in. We are the germ of our technology. Technology extends or enhances our natural ability. We are the spider in the center, the glial cells which build and maintain the structure of the networks and ecosystems we conceive. If we are whole, and healthy, the systems which grow through our creative manufacture will stem from that holistic and complete state. Yet, in this moment, we develop technologies and systems which embody the fractures radiating from our psyche, separating us from our embedded nature in the world. We are part of a mechanical broken system – a system which denies the emergence and interdependence of life. Technology extends from the character of ourselves.
Still, life wants to emerge, always. It is constantly self-producing. As I understand the dysfunction I am in reciprocal relationship with, I focus my sight and creative energy on the form of the thriving system of healing and growth that is waiting to come forth. We are self-organizing and interconnected. We organize ourselves just like the cells and atoms and chemical codes in our bodies organize themselves. We are simply a system of inevitable structures. We exist in relationship and in relationship we heal. As we play, we learn to connect and strike a dynamic balance. In the spaces we feel free, we make meaning and discover true character, the wholeness and connection held in the DNA of our potential. The nature of modern technology requires that we each develop a firm sense of self which includes the cultivation and protection of our existential identity. A sense of security in place, found through connection with one another, a degree of control in our home and interaction with the land we live in, is vital to our wellbeing. Being safe enables us to participate in calculated risk and seek growth opportunity. Without safety, we are unable to become vulnerable enough to begin the complex processes of integrated healing. We can each exist in a constant state of growth and arrival, constantly fresh. This is a choice we make and an action which follows.
As we are seeing now, rigid systems that hold too tightly to their calcified structures crumble and die. Connection creates many paths of process, response, and resilience. We will heal in the containers we create within ourselves, in the places we are in community, and in the digital spaces we meet in. Life is lived in each of these levels, interconnected and always growing forth. Let us each be a clean spore. Technology extends from the character of ourselves.
[1] See: Cryptocurrency [2] From Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown. Quote attributed to Angel Kyodo Williams.
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