Technocracy cont’d
This won’t brighten your day, but it is important…
Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s when I was teaching undergraduate biology and environmental studies, I used to contrast two visions of humanity using various texts. It might be Marvin Minsky’s essay Will Robots Inherit the Earth? versus passages from Goatwalking by Jim Corbett. Or it might be Doyne Farmer’s Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution paired with one of Wendell Berry’s essays. I tried to get the attention of the young women who were my students by picking really radically different visions of the world and our place in it. The subsequent decades have not disappointed those looking forward to a post-human future. And of course I’ve been dragged into the tech world in spite of misgivings—I love my iPad, I’m delighted not to have to use a typewriter and carbon paper, and I feel blessed by having 24/7 instant access to my children (they may feel differently, though we are careful not to abuse it). I’m not surprised by much that has happened, especially since I grew up reading almost nothing but fantasy and science fiction in the 60’s. But—I was so naïve politically on so many fronts. I had read both Huxley and Orwell and these notions were in my vocabulary, but being a white, male, middle class American in a largely apolitical family raised in the 50s and 60s I had no real idea of how badly things can go wrong. I didn’t pay close enough attention to Philip K. Dick…
Here’s an essential essay by Émile Torres (you should definitely jump down the rabbit hole opened by his biography!) that comes to us via Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich:
The Endgame of Edgelord Eschatology
Powerful figures in Silicon Valley advocate a new-age religion that sees humanity as a transitional species — one whose time is almost up.
This is Minsky and Farmer on steroids… and students of Henry Corbin should check out the Wikipedia page on the phrase “Immanentize the Eschcaton” for a view of Gnosticism that is pretty much the exact opposite of Corbin’s use of the the term “gnostic.” I’ll have more to say about this in class…