By Paul Schwartzentruber
Published in June 2014
People always ask the fishes, ‘What does the water feel like to you?’ and the fishes are always happy to oblige. Like feathers are to other feathers, they say. Like powder touching ash. We smile and nod. When the fishes tell us these things, we begin to understand. We begin to think we know what the water feels like to the fishes…. They are curious things, fish are, and thus they ask, ‘Why? Why do you want to know what the water feels like to the fishes?’ And we are never quite sure. The fishes press further. ‘Do you breathe air?’ they ask. The answer is yes. Well then, they say, ‘What does the air feel like to you?’ And we do not know.
– Dave Eggers, Hidden in Plain Sight: Problems in Questioning Technologies
There are many feelings we have about the technologies that surround us, those with which — and through which – we now interact daily and multifariously with the world and others: frustration, consolation, anxiety, excitement, exhaustion, relief, release, puzzlement, fear and hope. The feelings cut across the whole range of human experience and they are part of a long and still cascading history moving at great speed in many directions toward unknown futures. All of these feelings may help us intuit and partially describe the presence of this technology in our lives, but they do not give us a perspective on it, an ability to see it clearly and to raise questions about it.
It is true that at several points in the recent past, quantum leaps in technologies have seemed to bring something about them into a momentary focus, if mostly for the attentive historian; a story could be told and momentous changes in the world traced in outline up to our own time. For example, we could say that the invention of the book (11th century) and later the printing press (15th century) revolutionized the store of language and knowledge in a way unimagined since the invention of the alphabet (See Illich, Abrams). It also allowed the formulation of the modern concept of the (individual) self (Gillespie). In addition, we could recognize, shortly thereafter (in the 16th century) that the humble mechanism of the watch heralded an age of mechanics and that it, along with the new optics of the microscope and telescope (17th century) created a radically new view of the universe and the human place in it (Gillespie on Descartes).
Why these patterns of violent and rapacious behaviour?
Then again, we could say with some certainty that industrialism and mass production in the new nation states reshaped earthly and human landscapes definitively. These technologies, re-fueled by newer petroleum-based ones, then spawned a global colonialism that fed off the subjection of the colonized (at home and abroad) and created patterns of violent, rapacious behaviour toward others and the earth itself. This continues and continues to escalate through our own era of globalization. Finally, we ourselves are just past the cusp of another such quantum leap mediated by digital technologies. Within the last twenty years, these technologies have accomplished a most thorough integration of human consciousness itself into a new virtual space which is traced and charted by algorithms of interest and desire. Already it is clear that the most intimately human forms of self-expression (art, work, sexuality, health, education and memory etc.,) have themselves become thoroughly digitized and therefore placed within a technologized consciousness. Time and space have been redefined and refashioned, or at least apparently so.
Yet all of these statements can only vaguely hint at the reality we have experienced. In large part this is because what is brought into brief focus in each of these historical instances, through the very novelty of the new technology, is just as quickly absorbed into normative human action and social practice. When it is integrated into that practice, it is humanized, as it were. In this way, it becomes harder and harder to imagine or recall a human ‘before’ to any of these technological leaps; after the leaps, we seem to ourselves to be ‘simply’ human again. The result of this ever-accelerating adaptability of human beings is that the time or space for a question to be raised about each new leap closes almost before it opens. The novelty itself quickly becomes ‘water’ and ‘air’, integrated seamlessly into everyday life, one more action hidden among many others and consciousness, accepting it as part of the human self, ceases to marvel or even reflect on it.
Humans are deeply charmed by the ingenuity of their technology
To be sure there have always been negative reactions at these new historical points of ‘integration’–millennialism, religious wars, the anti-machine fervor of the Luddites and others promoting a recovery of ‘craft’ and of the ‘natural’, yet these moments and movements rarely yielded profound or consequential questioning about what had been accomplished by the integration of the new technology. Their desire to hold on to the old ways, the human ‘before’, was quickly overwhelmed by the eagerness with which the new became the common environment of the human. Human beings seem to be deeply charmed and then seduced by the ingenuity of their own technologies. In this sense, resistance to technological transformation seems futile. We are so unquestioningly open to these transformations, so enticed by the possibilities of yet another transformation of our reality that we assimilate it readily and allow it to become almost immediately native to our (new) reality and self-consciousness. Once the novelty of the technology passes through the veil of this human intimacy, it ceases to be ‘other’ in any significant way. In this sense, the norm of human self-development seems to be established: ‘what can be done, will be done–and has already been done’; any idea of self-limitation becomes moot.
Notable exceptions to uncritical acceptance
Within this history of the co-evolution between the human and the technological, there have been a very few notable exceptions to the process of uncritical integration. (We will leave aside the earlier notables–Socrates, Jesus, the Buddha–and focus on those in modern times). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, one group of thinkers created a space for such critical reflection at the height of industrialism and colonialism: Blake, Thoreau, Ruskin, Tolstoy and, above all, Gandhi. Still later, we could identify Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil and Ivan Illich as people who created another open space, another possibility of reflection on technologies and their impact on being human. Each one of these engaged thinkers began to raise fundamental questions about the relation between the technological and the human. Indeed, they began to try to evaluate that relationship. Yet this was possible only because each of them had first undertaken to stand willfully outside the social consensus and practice created by the technological and to abstain from participating in many of the forms of its current integration within human society. These experiments with self-limitation were brief but very fruitful. Primarily because by their abstention, they made visible a seam where the connection between the two realities – the human and the technological – could be seen and questioned. As a result, fundamental and troubling questions were raised and sometimes heard. These questions had an oddness about them and were very difficult to answer: ‘what does water feel like to the fishes?; what does air feel like to the humans?’
We shape our tools
This position of the self-limiting outsider, the abstainer, (and thus the radical) is important in many senses, of course, but it is important in this context because it suggests a point of leverage. That is to say, it opens a possibility of thinking critically about technology by identifying its ‘seam’ with the human.
We have been trying to identify the unique difficulty of reflecting on the technological in modern times: it is never simply something that stands over against the human being, objectified and separate. Rather, it has always already been conceived by and integrated into the human being who would reflect upon it.
Thus it has always already shaped and become part of the consciousness that wishes to reflect upon it. In this sense, it is as invisible as water to the fish or air to people, that is to say it is ‘hidden in plain sight’. “We shape our tools”, said Marshall McLuhan, “and then our tools shape us.” In this process, human beings show themselves to be continuously and profoundly adaptive to the new forms of being, doing and thinking that emerge through their connection with these tools/technologies. Indeed we might say, more properly, that we are self-adaptive: for we transform ourselves as we integrate these new forms and make them forms of our being-in-the-world. Yet it is the second part of this process that is quickly hidden by the new ‘normal’ of a transformed human practice.
Then our tools shape us
Another way of picturing this is to say that the technological as such creates an essential blind-spot in consciousness, and erases itself from view for that consciousness. This is one of the primary reasons for the longstanding illusion that technologies are merely instrumental, merely ‘tools’ outside of us. This illusion – which is really the lie that consciousness repeats about itself to itself – is persistent and continues to shape and distort thinking about technologies. It is a denial of the fact that the technological, in its visible outward forms, is also anchored firmly within consciousness, shaping its view of it and therefore obscuring its effects upon us. This denial is as fundamental perhaps as the denial of mortality is to everyday human consciousness (see Varki and Brower).
When we try to loosen the effects of this denial (and of technology as mere instruments), then the technological may begin to come into view not only or simply as a human creation or product – a tool – but rather as act of self-creation, or at least, a self-creating extension/expression of the human being. As such, and working in a true synergy with the human (so that both human and technological exceed their original forms and scope) the technological becomes essential to the human and essentially humanized (thus, an axiom of human consciousness). In this sense, too, it is always rooted within us long before we try to objectify and question it. Here again, then, the problem of questioning technology reappears, now not only as a cognitive problem but as a problem of the will. How can one question that on which one depends, that through which one engages with the world? How can one question the air with which one breathes?
The path after choices made
This second (volitional) element of the problem will always be intertwined with the first (cognitive) problem, in the sense that only an act of will (an act of self-limitation) can hope to make the technological ‘visible’ again as a question for consciousness. Yet if technology is understood as a self-creation, as humanized and in essential synergy with the human, what kind of questioning about it might be valid and from what point of view or horizon in the human might it arise in the first place? If we view technologies as humanized expressions, as extensions of the human being in synergy with them, then the questions about technology could only be fundamental questions, questions about human destiny and its unfolding through and together with and through its technologies. We can no longer pretend to raise questions as if the human choices about technology are still to be made. The choices have already been made. We can only ask truthfully about the destiny of that choice and of the human beings who have made it and are borne along by it.
