Sometimes its "better late than never". Sometimes its "too little too late". The next few years will reveal the true nature of the "digital revolution"
Digital tech is unlike any tech before. It is general purpose, malleable, reprogrammable, with active IO and feedback loops with the human realm. It does have some "genes" and biases in the form of chip design and specialization, but this pales compared to the phenotype diversity of everything that can "run" on it.
The worldwide surface of silicon chips creates thus a blank slate that captures and reflects like a mirror an ever increasing slice of our condition. If the digital image is going dark its because our societies are currently regressing.
The accelerating dehumanising journey of digital tech is a direct reflection of long lived, pre-existing latent beliefs that deny people of essential human dimensions: agency, social bonds, inner spaces and spirituality, harmonious coexistence with nature.
Reclaiming this digital exo-brain (that is cabable for the worst and the best) by the forces of the broader humanistic movement is the prime objective.
Humanity's journey towards ubuntu is long and tortured. Ripping hearts of captives to please imaginary gods in public spectacles was yesterday.
The debilitating thought is that we are past redemption. That the emergent behavior from shapping the mirror of social media platforms and surveillance devices has pulled us into a twilight zone with no escape.
My gut feeling is that it is not yet so dire. It may get there in the mid-term future. What we need to do is make humanism viral. It exists not because of some idealists but because its inate and congruent with what people want. It needs to get reflected in the digital mirror. It already does at the edges. As open source software. As collaboration platforms like wikipedia and openstreetmaps. As the fediverse.
Lets hope and work towards moving it to the center.
Digital tech is unlike any tech before. It is general purpose, malleable, reprogrammable, with active IO and feedback loops with the human realm. It does have some "genes" and biases in the form of chip design and specialization, but this pales compared to the phenotype diversity of everything that can "run" on it.
The worldwide surface of silicon chips creates thus a blank slate that captures and reflects like a mirror an ever increasing slice of our condition. If the digital image is going dark its because our societies are currently regressing.
The accelerating dehumanising journey of digital tech is a direct reflection of long lived, pre-existing latent beliefs that deny people of essential human dimensions: agency, social bonds, inner spaces and spirituality, harmonious coexistence with nature.
Reclaiming this digital exo-brain (that is cabable for the worst and the best) by the forces of the broader humanistic movement is the prime objective.
Humanity's journey towards ubuntu is long and tortured. Ripping hearts of captives to please imaginary gods in public spectacles was yesterday.
The debilitating thought is that we are past redemption. That the emergent behavior from shapping the mirror of social media platforms and surveillance devices has pulled us into a twilight zone with no escape.
My gut feeling is that it is not yet so dire. It may get there in the mid-term future. What we need to do is make humanism viral. It exists not because of some idealists but because its inate and congruent with what people want. It needs to get reflected in the digital mirror. It already does at the edges. As open source software. As collaboration platforms like wikipedia and openstreetmaps. As the fediverse.
Lets hope and work towards moving it to the center.