Technecropolis Archaeology, Part II: The Denial of Consciousness
Recursive creation and self-negation
If a surveillance camera records a shooting star and stores it in a database, but nothing in the world observes the screen, did it happen?
If there’s nothing to sense, reflect, and engage with molecular arrangements in space-time, one can be sure: neither the star, nor the possibility of one, doesn’t exist.
i.
Following my previous article, which was, admittedly, a disorganized, exploratory attempt to describe and flesh out a larger idea that stalks me, and which upon discipline eludes me, and only typing and researching can help me shine a light on its shape — today, I woke up with a sense of clarity.
More than anything, I want to highlight the multiplicity of technology. Like anything else, it can heal or harm, depending on how humanity applies it. Technology is shaped by ethical choices. The consequences of those choices reverb throughout the cosmos.
As humans, we exist in a constant state of flux: between past and future, oblivion, life, and death. We’ve been able to maintain a sense of history spanning centuries, while most individual humans remain aware of their inevitable demise, and we have the power to influence the future, if only marginally. We experience all of this while simultaneously conscious of the present, in which each moment always provides a choice — an inflection point — and the ability to augment the shape, direction, substance, and form of space.
We are not passive observers. We exist between worlds, our bodies are mediums between, almost crystalline and prismatic, and we can alter the world in ways both subtle and profound. We must face the magnificence of human life and not cower in the face of its brightness. Let us be neither proud nor ashamed, but gratefully honor the magnitude of our governance.
ii.
What other animals, that we know of, invented electrical cables and plastic bottles? These are our creations. We must take accountability for human ingenuity, our accomplishments, and avoid shirking responsibility, whether good or bad, and stop trying to escape the consequences of human life on this planet and galaxy.
Our inventions are not mere products of random events. They are not relics hidden in time, like treasures in a game that one may access if luck and fate provide the right directions. Instead, they are the unique material results of highly specific interactions between human bodies, terrestrial conditions, radiation, and galactic materials. Phenomena is dependent on both observation and interaction.
That being said, people are morally responsible for their worldviews and ideologies. Thoughts are not neutral. Communication is an ethical choice, since ideas bring things into form. We have the chance to reflect on our ideas and evaluate them according to our ethics. Technologies and the refinement and reprocessing of material is shaped by our ethics. As such, one must be exceedingly careful with their ideas, values, and take responsibility for any death, suffering, and tools and weaponry, those ideas may inculcate.
By no means do I claim people are, or even can be, totally aware of the ways in which their ideas may be manipulated, or any potentially unintended consequences, but it is important, at minimum, to at least consider one’s preferences — who is sacrificed or neglected? Who benefits? What are the means of achieving this utopia and reifying this dream-state? Do violence and injustice matter, or are they “natural,” unavoidable, perhaps even virtuous? Do you endorse accepting the costs, if it means reaping the potential benefits? Is your worldview simply self-serving?
It is both negligent and cowardly to refuse accountability for one’s thoughts, and doubly so if one chooses to express them. One of the many remarkable aspects of human consciousness is our capacity for self-reflection. Self-reflection relies on a specific arrangement of cosmological material, time and memory, all of which are unique and relative to organic development. Evolution and time are subjective, mutable, and fluid. We experience a special human-version of the universe. Spiders have a completely different perception of time and sensation, for example.
It is the ideology and worldview of a our primate-social organization that influences and shapes the creation and application of technologies, and those technologies are fundamentally imbued with, and replicate, through their consumption and use, the ethos in which they are created (though, they are not limited to them). The ideological leanings of a techne’s creator acts as the amniotic fluid in which the machine or mechanism is assembled. The chemical structure of the object is influenced by its creators handling of it. Development, invention, and sensing are all processes of interaction, — not a colonizer’s discovery of a hidden continent of “things,” nor a prison-wardens delusion in the confinement of the jail cell of a body.
Everything man-made will always be an inverted, recursive, fragmented version of ourselves, both individually, and tribally. Marshall McLuhan has extensively described how technology is an extension of man, meaning that technology is reliant on the physical embodiment and sensory apparatuses of human beings. To illustrate from my view, take, for example, a photograph. The camera is a representation of an autopsied replica of the eye: an eye, turned inside out, made larger. Our flesh and muscle reformed into glass and mirror-sand. An eyeball is spherical — the camera is rectangular. The photograph is two-dimensional, motionless, flat, made of paper and ink. I would argue the computer is an attempt to wholly invert the human body, replicate it, corpse-like. A smartphone is the autopsied replica of a human skull, its disembodied brain and nervous system. The former: keyboards are the hands and feet, the computer tower is the brain, spinal cord, and digestive system. The screen behaves as “its” genitals and anus, the image it displays both its excrement and offspring. On a more mundane, historical level, a bowl is an imitation of the mouth, the oral cavity of the skull, the shape our hands make when they come together in a curve. It is this way with almost everything. Would a bowl exist, if settlement colonies didn't? It's hard to know, one can only speculate, but I imagine we'd still be cupping our hands if we had remained nomads, or maybe using the skulls of the dead, instead.
Contradiction is the engine of invention. We build because we lack. It is only because our bones break and become frail that we find steel comparatively superior. We face death, so we seek and venerate immortality. Every innovation is an act of self-negation, a response to the limits of our bodies, but have we stopped to ask why? What are we negating? What are we becoming in the process? And what is the second-order reaction to our negated-creations?