On the various experiencial forms of freedom and technology:
What is our experience of freedom and what is our experience of freedom through technology? What is our experience of technology itself? Any experience of freedom is viewed as a positive. One can experience freedom in the natural world as well as experience freedom via technology. The majority of any experiences in today’s world more often than not are interwoven with technology. Nearly all actions and events in life take place in a way that is connected to and relying on technology that we have crafted from the warmth of our homes, the ease of transportation, and the availability of goods to consume.
We have been like a frog in water that has been so slowly getting hotter that we didn’t even notice until now that it’s boiling. Suddenly we find ourselves in hot water and we have nowhere to jump so we better figure out how to turn the heat down. This needs to begin with an opening of our eyes to this that the world is revealing to us. We need to see technology as the veil of experience that it is. This is not to dismiss the beauty of it, as veils are things that hold a sense of mystery and wonder, but nevertheless it is concealment, a filter. The information pouring into us through the viaduct of the internet is hitting us at an unnatural pace unlike any before and we drink it in, the good with the bad as it’s filter is not one of refinement.
We are almost completely enframed by technology; most of our experiences of freedom are through technology as opposed to our ancestors, whose experiences were in nature, who have always been striving to order the apparent disorderly natural world. Anymore the majority of us living in industrial nations have little interactions with nature directly in it’s natural state and the experiences of freedom it offers which is much more varied in range and more intricate in form. We must recognize the differance of these experiences that technology offers us, and the experiences of freedom that nature offers us. Our ability to summarize our experience of freedom in relationship to technology seems much more plausible as we are talking about an experience of something that is an extension of ourselves, not of the natural world.
We created the veil, and it serves us in many ways. However we must acknowledge each experience for what is, as different forms of experience. When we experience nature directly we are experiencing the “other”, yet we are a part of it. Technology is a part of ourselves, and when we experience the technology although going more complex every day, there is a safety and an assurance it offers us, while often the workings of are unknown to us as individuals we understand that it is under the control of humanity. The mysteries and complexities of the natural world that we are a product of are much more terrifying in their unknown, in their being outside our grasp.
We are searching for a truth of our experience both of the world and of ourselves as individuals, and desiring a proper relationship therewith. The enframing that has ensued upon us by the demands of modern world have left us with little time to appreciate the luxuries of either technology or nature. It is hard to see technology as luxury as new developments striking us at first with enthusiasm and awe quickly become necessities of survival within the enframent.
Forms of desires and freedom:
It makes sense that our first desire after survival would and should be the desire for freedom. We hunger for it, we fight for it and many prepared to die for it. For what are but prisoners if we are without freedom. Today we are not prisoners but we are not completely free. Many of us are fighting for survival and in a different way than our ancestors before us. We are fighting to survive within the system because there is nowhere to jump to out of it. The experience of freedom is becoming a scare commodity. The moments of our lives that we experience true freedom come quickly and leave us quickly. Our experience that was once a liberating relationship to technology has become a means to an end of survival. The majority of our personal energy is used in this quest. We are running out of energy keeping up with the demands of the hyper-industrial society as well as the standing-reserve of the earths resources are running out. We are in an unbalanced, unsustainable state.
I believe man and his essence have been mutually evolving over time as his experience has been changing, as his relationship to the natural world has been changing, yet there is something fixed about it’s structure. The form of our desires seem more fixed, certainly has had a longer lifespan that of the structure of the technology we have developed to fill these desires. These desires that have existed with us all along, before we stitched together the veil of technology a veil that was designed to protect us and aid our survival. The way humans have conceived of themselves has changed over time, and is changing over time, as is our essence and we should be steadfast be aware of this changing to ensure that it does not fall stagnant nor fall into an entropic pattern of our own devices.
These primary desires and our yearning of efficiency in these manners of survival, freedom and comfort will; surely not subside and seem to be in the line with the state of nature. Nature does the same thing, however in a manner that is much more elegant.
We have been blind, or is has been concealed until as of late, to the standing reserve of information and intelligence that nature uses to carry on with life for billions of years. A new mining is in order, one that will allow us to sustain a setting ourselves and within the algorithms of nature rather than a “setting-upon” in a way that is challenging to nature. For ours is a crude ordering compared to the sophisticated ordering of nature, who still strives in the same way to take the path of least resistance, but manages it even a much more sophisticated and efficient manner without disrupting the whole. This standing reserve of information is locked into the dynamics of nature and requires the much more agile tools, that of the mind, to unlock. This is a different task and a placing ourselves in a different relationship to technology, no longer that of drills and axes, eager to quickly consume any bit of readily available energy. Our demands for the luxuries that technology has to offer will not change of subside, and I don’t see that as where the problem lies, what we needs reconsidered is the means to the end and at what expense. We need to see past the enframent of our doing, and see the enframent that is of nature, that is a part of us, that which allows for and challenges our survival.
We are a part of nature yet the only part of nature that makes things so that we are destroying nature, by taking from nature and ordering these elements in a manner that is turning them out in a way that is both toxic and destructive to ourselves and the rest of the environment. The choosing to deny the truth of this revealed through environmental and scientific analysis is a choosing to be blind.
Man has turned man into a standing reserve. As Heidegger mentions the “supply for patients to a clinic” man has turned man and his health or rather illnesses into a standing reserve for profit. How disgusting is this? Drug companies hold a monopoly over information that is used to save our lives. I heard a figure the other day that between the distributors of these medications and the CEO’s of drug companies there is a 400% difference in their annual income. Who is free here and by what means? The question raised by Descartes, is man an expression or a utility? A further question would be is man only an expression of his utility?
The problem is both in the means of production driven by efficiency but also by profit, at the cost of the quality of human life and the condition of our environment. The ship has been taken over by pirates driven by greed alone. A new ordering, a new revealing is being made, nature and the state of the nation are revealing this to us, a state of emergency, that the old ways cannot sustain us much longer. Heidegger states, “Man ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving” this is a thought whose form needs inverting, as the reality is that man is an area of nature’s conceiving, and from this orientation we should proceed. We need to map a new mindset of technology.
The results of the current mode of manufacturing technology in our present world are something that we need to, as Heidegger phrases, “get spiritually in hand”. These results being both the impositions that this has made on the environment, the human condition and the functions of society. The environmental problems caused by the production of technology is undeniable, albeit or not one believes in global warming, we are polluting the environment and killing off entire species of plants and animals. We are disrupting nature through these industrial endeavors.
Heidegger is calling us to examine our relationship to technology. If the purposes of technology as listed above is to maximize efficiency pertaining to the needs to sustain our life then we are no different that any other thing in nature. This is the end that we most all desire; the problem or concern right now is the means to this end.
Heidegger states, “The cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it” For anything to have value it must be something that produces, it must yield something that we can use as a means to an end maximum yield at minimum expense. The expenses are beginning to reveal themselves, the bill is adding up. We must switch from a setting-in order upon nature to a setting-in-order upon our technology in a way that is informed by nature and our experiences. In this way will open up new freedoms within a new paradigm.
The field of biomimicry is opening up these new possibilities to us. See the world as a standing reserve of information, a decoder, rather than of just energy to consume. Through biomimicry we begin to see nature as an intelligent being, we see the technology of the natural world. And we need to see outside of ourselves, past the veil to be able to live in harmony with the natural world as well as new ways of seeing ourselves and or place in this world. Nature wants to use minimal material and with maximum amount to strength. For example, GM is creating skeletons for new cars based on the algorithms extracted from skeletal systems in nature, anti-bacterial surfaces are being engineered informed by the way that nature has solved this problem on a sharks skin, that allows no bacterial to grow. How are we so vain to think that the answer to our technological needs could be brought about by our own means, means that are so crude compared to the sophistication of nature. However too, we must recognize that the insights and tools of science of technology have brought about these new insights. Our current technology is revealing worlds to us previously unseen, so while our current ways cannot sustain us we can now see more clearly the workings of nature and that is a major insight that we must open our minds to, and invert the method of setting upon an order that challenges nature, we must now see that nature is challenging us through the revelation of sophisticated methods of solving problems. Nature will win, it has been around longer, and it doesn't care about us. We will lose if we don’t adjust our perception and means to satisfying our primal desires. It is hard to see what the implications would be for our experiences of freedom. I think it would be an invigorating one that would allow us the move forward in new holistic ways, in a way that is responsible to society, responsible to ourselves as individuals and responsible to our environment. I would find it truly liberating to know that my existence was not relying on the destruction of the environment, leading to wars over oil, etc.
We can begin by seeing our desires and the desires of the natural world to be succinct. We must then see the way much of our current technology has enframed us and see new paths from point A of our desired functions to point B of our security and well being that is paved by paths that are creating conditions that are conducive to the life and in synch with nature’s algorithms. The instrumentality of technology seems a fixed structure, and I don’t see that as what needs to change rather we need new instruments, new ways of building these instruments, and in the end we will have music that is more informed and sustainable.
The clear divide seems to be technology as something we experience and something that serves us as utility. We aren’t ready to nor should we be ready to give up technology and the ways it serves us but we should be actively ensure its evolvement and aware of it’s evolvement and it’s effect on our essence. Thinking of the internet, television, the deluge of information that we encounter via technology on a daily basis. I feel that Bourriaud’s statement on individuals in modernity, “like the laboratory rat doomed to an in exorable itinerary in it’s cage, littered with chunks of cheese”, is a fairly accurate statement with regards to our current situation. We are more and more removed from direct human relations, they are watched they are there in more forms than ever pouring into our living rooms every day, and we are left with the “society of the spectacle”-Guy Debord. We are free to judge from a safe distance, however it seems fair to wonder when the spectacle will lose it’s charm, its sparkle seems to be loosing it’s luster for many of us. As we move forward with technology and move with awareness and responsibility, we can do this with hope and in the spirit of discovery, that which is both of ourselves and of the natural world as, “Other technologies may allow the human spirit to recognize other types of world-forms”-Nicolas Bourriaud.
I think of the way that we interact with the material world, almost everything we touch, walk on and move though has be processed through technology. By stating this, is not to pass judgment of it but rather be aware of this. Our interactions with the material world are becoming more and more filtered and we have to recognize that we are becoming more and more removed from our experience with the raw material world. Which would one dare to argue is our more “authentic state” in relationship to our experience in the natural world, or in the technological world. We certainly cannot live without the material world of nature, yet we can question our survival within our current technological framework. Can we transform our technology into a more authentic extension of ourselves? The technology we have created is one set of information, and nature’s technology is a different set of information. We can rather figure out a way for those to work together or allow them to remain in opposition. The latter seems clear as an ignorant choice, that of disorder, when we what we need is innovation. May the clouded lens of our perception become clear.
Tit for Tat/Quid pro Quo:
That the pace of production has picked up is undeniable. It is harder and harder to commit to endeavors that take a serious investment of time. The space for individuals to invent new paths is shrinking. I have seen this happen in my lifetime. I had naively thought that by becoming an artist I could escape technology. I didn’t want to end up sitting on a computer all day. I wanted to have a hands on experience with the world. The rise of technology in just the past fifteen years is noteworthy. My first year of college, no one had cell phone, within three years everyone did. This changed things. Now I too have a small computer, an iPhone that I carry with me everywhere. A recent study I heard about was the study of brain waves when individuals would look at their iphones, and the same patterns emerged looking at their iphones as looking at loved ones. What does this say of our experience to technology? As an instructor of drawing I have had students that are art majors in my class that had never drawn with pencils, only through a digital pad on the computer! I am not sure the fair reaching implication of this; I am just noticing the shift. Artists spend less as less time developing a single work of art; this could easily be said of architecture and on down to items for consumption. These pressures that don’t show a sign of ceasing, are transforming the way we create in the world. Technology is a force to be reckoned within any creative endeavor today. It is requiring us to be innovative if we are to evolve and maintain quality in life and in the objects we create.
