Psycho-technologies of the Future

Instead of replacing humans with robots, we can return to ancient traditions

My interview with Thomas Roberts is now up on Youtube. Watch it here.

Last week, I interviewed Thomas Roberts, author of The Psychedelic Future of the Mind, and Mark Stahlman, Director of The Center for the Study of Digital Life (interview here). I am still reflecting on ideas from these fascinating thinkers.

Stahlman is a devotee of media theorist Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan looked at the way the dominant media paradigm creates the basic “grammar” of human society. When children are young — in grammar school — they don’t just learn sentence structure. Their entire relation to the world around them is shaped by the dominant media paradigm.

An oral society operates differently from one that has writing, which exteriorizes memory. The alphabet produced linear, sequential, abstract thinking. The printing press transformed society, causing the shift to the modern nation-state with an informed public given a limited form of democratic participation. Electric media — radio and television — induced another transformation, into the modern mass society. McLuhan famously theorized that electronic media transformed the world into a “global village” where people lived mythically and in depth, once again.

Stahlman proposes we have entered a different world with the transition from the electric media age of television and film to the digital age of computers over the last decades. All of the institutions shaped for the electric media age no longer work in this media environment. They have become, in some strange sense, obsolete, even if we have nothing, as of yet, with which to replace them. This is obviously true of representative government. Our education system is out of date, moribund: Schools educate young people for an industrial civilization that no longer exists. Perhaps it is even true of corporations.

The television image is produced in the brain. If a you isolate a frame on a TV screen, you see only a blur of dots. Our brains do the work to assemble the image into a picture. Television, Stahlman says, imprisons us in an illusory world of imagination. Computers, instead, require perfect memory. Computers must continually execute code that has to be flawless, uncorrupted, for the program to work.

We now seem to be in a situation where there is, on the one hand, a destructive persistence of memory and, on the other hand, a kind of obliteration of narrative and sense. Let’s say someone makes a mistake and does something that offends some group’s sensitivities. If this is recorded online, it will continue to shadow that person over the course of their life. It can always be brought up again to castigate them, even many years or decades later. Consciously or not, people live in fear of the digital Panopticon — particularly younger people who grow up with the native grammar of the digital society. It is almost like we have created our own, self-policed Reign of Terror or “groupthink” control apparatus.

Stahlman believes that the focus on “information” is part of the problem. Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han makes similar points:

Everything that binds and connects is disappearing. There are hardly any shared values or symbols, no common narratives that unite people.

Truth, the provider of meaning and orientation, is also a narrative. We are very well informed, yet somehow we cannot orient ourselves. The informatization of reality leads to its atomization — separated spheres of what is thought to be true.

But truth, unlike information, has a centripetal force that holds society together. Information, on the other hand, is centrifugal, with very destructive effects on social cohesion. If we want to comprehend what kind of society we are living, we need to understand the nature of information.

Bits of information provide neither meaning nor orientation. They do not congeal into a narrative. They are purely additive. From a certain point onward, they no longer inform — they deform. They can even darken the world. This puts them in opposition to truth. Truth illuminates the world, while information lives off the attraction of surprise, pulling us into a permanent frenzy of fleeting moments.

… Another reason for the crisis of community, which is a crisis of democracy, is digitalization. Digital communication redirects the flow of communication. Information is spread without forming a public sphere. It is produced in private spaces and distributed to private spaces. The web does not create a public.

This has highly deleterious consequences for the democratic process. Social media intensify this kind of communication without community. You cannot forge a public sphere out of influencers and followers. Digital communities have the form of commodities; ultimately, they are commodities.

Modern civilization is, unfortunately, an ongoing war fought for power and control. Not everyone wishes to fight such a war. In fact, most people (the vast preponderance) would prefer a society based on shared power, or “power with,” instead of domination, or “power over.” But this civilization has domination, “power over,” woven into its genetic code. Increasingly, ever-more efficiently, domination and control is attained via remote technologies, through the “soft touch” of digital systems and surveillance networks that coerce compliance seamlessly, seductively.

I find it tantalizing to consider that the divergent ways the old electric and the new digital media construct a visual image may have far-reaching effects on our individual and collective consciousness. Society in the television age was coordinated through a kind of blurry, frustrating, yet vaguely tolerated hegemony. This vague blurriness also allowed for a certain degree of individual freedom and a somewhat lax amorality. In a world where any negative personal interaction may lead to a permanent public “Scarlet letter,” it is not surprising that young people, generally, are not only having less sex, but even failing to form friendships.

Han notes the shift from what Michel Foucault called a disciplinary society to a new regime, which he calls achievement society, marked by the entrepreneurial self on a quest for “perpetual self-optimization.” In the achievement society, “Prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation.” The individual introjects the control paradigm at the bio-psychic level, now able to (implicitly commanded to) measure his or her ongoing heart rate, brainwaves, respiratory habits, diet, and so on.

McLuhan thought that the psychological effects of the last, obsolete media paradigm continue to haunt subsequent generations. For Stahlman, the impact of electronic media was to stimulate the imagination to an extreme degree — the “grammar” of electric media / television reinforces our tendency to build illusory inner worlds. It remains easy for us to imagine the darkest dystopian possibilities and most malevolent conspiracies, or to get lost in vague fantasies of “the new consciousness” that will magically transform the world for the better. QANON, for instance, has the murky ambience of a dystopian B movie or television series.