Understanding, episode 7: Directing
In a network, technology carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions.
What Means, To What Ends?
How are we going to use technology, language and networks, for the next two decades?
What plateaus, places and evolutionary trajectories are we considering, what digital means and what coordination of effort for our knowledge navigation?
We made it? What happened? We happened
Technology carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the awakened, aware people it carries towards developing inclusive economics, eudaimonics and ecosystemics; the narcissist, sociopathic it carries into solipsist surveillance.
Mind you, though this may seem to justify the 21C Age of Cynicism in its contention that technology is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth.
What Attachment To What Narratives Do We Need To Divest From?
How are we to combine the powers of humans and machines to divest, design, develop, cultivate and build ecology and society?
What narratives do we need to divest from?
“Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty.
Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
What narratives do we need to rediscover?
“That indigenous peoples can have gathered, hunted, fished, and settled these lands for such a tremendous span of time without severely degrading the continent’s wild integrity readily confounds the notion that humans are innately bound to ravage their earthly surroundings.”
— David Abram
Once we understand what, then how?
“This is an open plea to researchers and to those who ultimately motivate, finance, or direct them, to turn serious attention toward the possibility of evolving a dynamic discipline that can treat the problem of improving intellectual effectiveness in a total sense.
This discipline should aim at producing a continuous cycle of improvements — increased understanding of the problem, improved means for developing new augmentation systems, and improved augmentation systems that can serve the world’s problem solvers in general and this discipline’s workers in particular.”
— Douglas Engelbart
