Recovering Our Technological Unconscious

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With thanks to the Restate Foundation, which invited me to speak on Technology and Consciousness at the Web3 Summit in Brussels, on May 24, 2023.

Text

Michel Bauwens, Brussels, May 24:

Recovering our technological unconscious


To a very large degree, the development of human technology is the expression of our unconscious desires and ideals, which we put out in the world, where it becomes a uncontrollable cybernetic machine ..

Let me elaborate on this idea.

First of all, technology is a unconscious expression of the individual human body. This idea comes from Marshall McLuhan. Technology starts as an expression of our extremities, hands and feet, in the forms of bows and spears, arrows and stones for cutting. Then we externalize our limbs, arms and legs, through human or animal powered mechanistic technologies, such as the plough. Industrialism externalizes our digestive system, through transforming raw material into useful products and waste. Finally, networked computers, now AI-driven, represent our brains and nervous system. In our current ‘transhuman’ stage, what we have invented comes back at us, ready to be internalized as physical or intellectual protheses. This is not just a good thing: for example, the introduction of computers and smartphones has been not just a catastrophe for education, but has led to an explosion of mental illness and isolation. We have virtualized and mediatized our relationship to our bodies and nature to unsustainable levels, and we need to re-integrate what we’ve lost, through a process that psycho-analysts used to call: regression in service of the ego. We need to re-acquaint ourselves and our children with our dependence on foods and material production. The meta-medium that is the internet actually regresses us to reactive forms of consciousness and is harmful to the scribal depth-consciousness which was the achievement of literate civilization.

Second, technology is an expression of the forgetfulness of the collective, planetary body, the living body of the earth. In the 16th century, western humanity moved away from the organismic, wholistic ‘cosmo-biological’ understanding of the cosmos as an animated and living being, and replaced it with mechanism. Earth and the human and non-human beings on it became a ‘resource’, to be understood, that may be considered an advance, but most of all, to be ‘used’, for much baser motives of personal and collective greed, and for the competitive power of market and state institutions. The result is planetary overshoot. Our planet once had a immature biosphere, which could not durably sustain life. But after the great oxygenation event, many organisms started cooperating to create the mature biosphere, that was durably able to sustain life. Out of this came the most cooperative species ever, but unfortunately so far, we have created a ‘immature’ Technosphere, which durable endangers our planet and the life on it. Our task is obvious, and to enhance cooperation to the level of a mature Technosphere. This is really what the new eco-systemic technologies such as Web3, crypto, open source and the like are about: to move from a narcissistic vision of isolated entities, unaware of their impact, to cooperative and ecologically aware (thermodynamically aware) ecosystems.

But thirdly, let us not forget that the current form of technological development is socially unconscious. We largely ignore the ‘social body’ of the planet, of both human and non-human communities. A very large part of current crypto is motivated by the ‘exodus of the elites’, the creation of Elysium, believing that some will be able to escape the likely social and ecological catastrophes that seem to align themselves into a meta-crisis. As a result, we have a developing global civil conflict between the virtuals and the physicals, the nowhere and the somewhere. In this context, I advocate for the cosmo-local option, i.e. the subsidiarity of material production, but the supersidiarity of immaterial cooperation. Everything that is heavy is local, everything that is light is global and shared. Distributed manufacturing coupled with globally cooperating ‘protocol cooperatives’, which have been prefigured by the open source and crypto-ecosystems. We need ‘everywhere’s, the organic ‘intellectuals’ of the network, able to link the local to the cosmic. We need an optimal alignment of the three coordination systems that humanity has developed so far: that of planning and state-centricity, that of pricing and market-centricity, and that of ‘stigmergy’ (mutual signalling in ‘holoptical’ open systems) and commons-centricity. The evolution of civilization can be seen as a pulsation of the commons, with the extractive institutions of markets and states in charge of ascending periods, and a popular striving to re-invent the only regenerative and protective institution that is the commons. We must address the global commons gap, and create Magisteria of the Commons that can balance the international state-system and the transnational financial system. Technology can and should be at the service of the full spectrum of life. And this is of course where ‘pro-social’ technology and AI comes in, the tool that will give us the necessary thermo-dynamic context to be aware of natural limits, and that can mobilize collective intelligence at the service of life. It is time to marry the insights of Elinor Ostrom and Amartya Sen and to think of a global ‘commons of capabilities’ where technology enhances human cooperation, instead of atomizing us.

So naturally, we arrive at technology as spiritual unconsciousness! When we abandoned the cosmo-biological vision and chose mechanism, when we turned away from the orientation towards the highest possibilities of the human spirit, we buried our transcendent drives in the unconscious. From the ancient orientation towards inner spiritual development, we devoted ourselves to the material advance. In the words of Eric Voegelin, we ‘immanentized the eschaton’. But what if spiritual transcendence is an actual physical need for the human species, what if the cosmos is indeed constituted, not of matter, but of meaning? If that is the case, and there is evidence for it, then the only thing that happens is that our spiritual drives become unconscious. But my argument here would be that unconscious religious and spiritual drives are much more dangerous than conscious ones. If that is true, then we should read certain current movements, not as motivated by purely instrumental motives but as unconscious expressions of religious drives. Being unaware of them, they turn against us, and become a program not for extending humanism to a recognition of interdependence with other beings on a finite planet, but of dreams of abandoning the human, to become post or transhuman, and escape from life and the body, creating a mechanistic machine-based superorganism. A monstrous cybernetic system which we no longer control. Many will think we are already there. My answer is, it is never too late to put consciousness and spirit at the centre stage, to use technology for life, and not against it.


Discussion

Please read Mark Whitaker on the Forms of Technological Consciousness