Cybernetic vs the Ecological Vision of Life
Discussion
Nathan Gardels:
"For Dan Zimmer, the “up” constituency consists of the libertarian boomers of Silicon Valley and their deregulatory allies who want to barge ahead toward the singularity of a transhumanist future with no holds barred, even dreaming of “extending the light of consciousness to the stars.” The “down” constituency is composed of environmentalist doomers and regulators who harbor an instinctive hostility toward technology as a hubristic attempt to substitute for the natural wisdom of restraint and self-limitation.
“The enemy of this rising technological faction is less the traditional left or right than environmentalists and the regulations that they have been crafting to restrain technology since the 1970s,” writes Zimmer. “This tension between technologists and environmentalists cuts across traditional political boundaries, splitting the MAGA movement into “tech” and “green” factions and increasingly dividing the left into its own techno-solutionist and ecological camps. While the traditional left and right focus on human welfare, contemporary politics is being reshaped by people who claim to champion the cause of nothing less than Life itself.”
What Zimmer means by “Life with a capital L” is “the sum total of all living things reconceived as a single process.” But there is a deep dissonance between technological and ecological camps over what Life itself is.
Zimmer traces the common root of these contending visions to the rise of cybernetics in the 1970s, which came to understand that all living things are “complex information processing systems.
...
Following from this, Zimmer argues that today’s tech accelerationist camp “views Life primarily as an information process to expand and enhance, while the other conceives of Life chiefly as a complex system to maintain and balance. These contrasting perspectives inspire rival political visions: one gazing upward toward Life’s cosmic conquests and the other downward toward Life’s planetary entanglements.”
He continues: “They demand a new political language and orientation — neither left nor right — that I propose can best be captured by the contrast between a technological ‘Up’ and an ecological ‘Down.’”
By my reading, this could also be cast as the tension between inorganic, or disembodied, intelligence — such as AI — and grounded, or embodied, intelligence.
Zimmer rightly grasps that “the extreme positions of Far Up and Deep Down are not only incompatible, but they are also mutually hostile. If the Far Up is correct in viewing human beings as the vehicle for freeing Life from its biological shackles, then the Down-wing’s drive to relinquish technical mastery needlessly condemns Life to perish on Earth. …One group promises that everything can be improved, while the other warns of the ease with which everything can be destroyed.”
(https://www.noemamag.com/the-clash-between-technology-ecology/)