I
just finished reading an essay by New York Times
columnist Tom Friedman [Warning! Everything is Going Deep,” January
29] that aligns fully with the core thesis of Digital Dharma.
“Technology moves up
in steps,” he
writes, and each step is “biased toward a new set of capabilities.”
And right now, our
society is experiencing the change
from the technology metaphors
of “connectivity” driven by the Internet and social media, to
those associated with “deep knowledge.” According to Friedman,
we’re all being driven by the explosion in complex
systems-learning, AI, and huge database analysis, “to
the deep end of the pool” where
the forces of surveillance capitalism swim like sharks, and the
regulatory lifeguard
(government, social institutions, business and religious leaders)
“doesn’t
know how to swim!”
Readers of my 2007
book Digital Dharma (and this “teleconsciousness” blog),
are already familiar with the idea that communications technology
impacts all aspects of social, spiritual and cultural life,
and that most importantly, this impact is a two-way street: our
technology is both a product of the evolution of consciousness, and
a mirror of this evolution; and it also
reveals the light and shadow facing us at each stage of that
evolutionary process.i
Our shift from the
issues of “connectivity”
to those associated with
“deep pattern processing”
is indeed momentous, as the technologies of social media, smart
devices, predictive algorithms, virtual reality and the
all-encompassing Cloud, envelope, seduce and enrapture us,
impacting
our social, political and spiritual lives.
In
this short essay I will expand on Friedman’s thesis of
technology-driven metaphors. Using the 2012 election as an anchor, I
will start a bit earlier: looking at the shift
from a world dominated by television to that of the Internet. I will
also go deeper into exploring the impacts of these shifts on our
political and social life,
and most importantly, look at how each shift brought forth a new set
of spiritual challenges
reflecting both our highest aspirations and lowest fears. Finally,
I will look ahead, suggesting
that Friedman’s “deep processing” metaphor can be split into
two memes: our current “crisis of truth” reflected in the work
deep seeing, and the
emerging challenge of deep mind,
brought about by AI, smart devices and the cloud.
2012:
From Television to Twitter to Trump
Back
in the late 1950’s, media scholar Marshall McLuhan watched as
television swept across Canada, ending the dominance of radio and
print media, but more
importantly, changing family
life, social norms, and even
political beliefs. He coined the phrase, “the medium is the
message,” to get us to look at the impacts of a communications
technology form that had nothing to do with the programming delivered
on it. Hundreds of books and thousands of articles have analyzed
television through McLuhan’s lens, looking at the deep changes
wrought by this flickering “electronic hearth.” In Digital
Dharma, I proposed that
television was an extension of our emotional
Heart:
a medium of expression and
feelings,
stimulating both sympathy for
those different than us, and an addictive hunger to suppress those
new feelings by stuffing ourselves with food, material objects and
distractions.ii
Television’s
gift to the “boomer” generation was its face-to-face close-up
view of the world’s diverse community. Despite its menu of cowboys
and Indians, crime-fighters and often violent cartoons, TV also
introduced us to the humanity of outsiders
of different colors, tribe and nation. It connected us, along with
the Space Program, for the first time to our entire planet as one
Spaceship Earth. It
was the medium of human and animal rights, the environment and
holistic thinking. Balancing its diet of “hard news” and
glorified sports violence, it was also a medium of the feminine: of
the intimate family narrative and soap operas of personal disclosure,
bringing the carnage of the Vietnam War into every living room. And,
at the same time TV was bringing the world to the developed west, it
was exporting these values, and the images of consumer wealth, to the
rest of the world, destabilizing the old regimes, and stimulating
migratory dreams.
In
its reflection
of the “shadow” aspect of the heart,
television gave
us addictive
emotionalism: the glorification of desire, and its fulfillment at
bargain-basement prices. Instead of true compassion, it offered a
chance to feel pity or disdain for the parade of the world’s
“losers” brought to our screens (or faux corporate boardrooms), a
half-response that only deepened a sense of spiritual depression and
disconnection. As consciousness evolved, television’s world-view of
naive optimism, self-pity and addictive consumerism, became easier
and easier to mock. Donald Trump’s
network producers
understood this, and brazenly used television itself to belittle its
soft
emotional (feminine)
side, offering in opposition, a parody television
masculinity:
a loud-mouthed,
unfeeling,
so-called self-made
millionaire, beauty-pageant and wrestling promoter.
At
the same time The
Donald
was being introduced to the
nation’s viewers,
the
Internet was moving from a carrier of email and a place to “surf
the web,” to the home of Facebook, blogging, podcasts and all forms
“social media.” If television was an extension of the heart, then
the all-connected, all-present online world, was an extension of our
skin.iii
Over-connection,
not
over-emotion, would become the new challenge.
While
television offered
an opportunity to look
at
the multicultural world, the Internet brought
us the gift and the challenge of actually connecting
with it.
As
Friedman writes, “Suddenly connectivity became so fast, cheap, easy
for you and ubiquitous that it felt like you could touch someone whom
you could never touch before and that you could be touched by someone
who could never touch you before.” In this world, the
“other” is not just a face on a screen out
there,
but someone, invited or not, inside
our personal space.
This is the multi-cultural, globally-cosmopolitan, knowledge-based,
world of today. It
is
a place where
we can
no longer ignore
the
multiple overlapping voices
of minority peoples and
cultures;
a
place where
everyone
is
speaking all at once,
and everything about
us is
revealed. At
its best, a
place for organizing
decentralized online communities, and the creativity that comes from
rubbing against new peoples and new ideas. Its
metaphor of “we’re all connected,” offers an opportunity to
embrace “holistic awareness,”
an
understanding of
the true interconnection of all life, and the possibility of new
tools to better integrate humanity into the biosphere.
Yet
at the same time, the deep anxiety that comes from this realization
leaves
on feeling
“data
naked,” unprotected and overwhelmed by incoming signals. From
the
pandemics
of AIDS, SARS and Ebola, to the waves of global migrants at the door
of the developed world, to the data thefts, and cyber-attacks on the
technological pillars of the information economy, the
Internet has made us vulnerable to the darker side of being part of
one web-linked world.
This
was the world that Barack Obama symbolized. His
campaign was based on data-driven Internet organizing, and his
Presidency was based on the “cool management” of a less
self-inflated
nation in a multi-polar world. It is no surprise that this move into
network-style governance would generate unease and push-back from
those hurt
by all this “connectivity.” All those left
out of the capital
flows of the information
economy, those
whose jobs were outsourced to internet-linked factories overseas,
those
frightened by the real or imagined appearance of the “the other”
at the door, and those who felt that their (formally unquestioned and
dominant) voices were now being drowned
out
by those
they couldn’t shut down due to the new codes of
“political correctness.”
In
the 2016 campaign, at a time of deep social division and growing
distrust of the new networked global financial corporations and
financial institutions, the Democrats offered a candidate steeped in
television’s
aspirational memes (fairness and multicultural “rights”), coupled
with an unpleasant air of boomer
entitlement (“its my turn”). Donald Trump, who rose to fame
manipulating television’s shadow as the exemplar of me-first
materialism, crass cynicism and melodrama, easily embraced the role
of anti-Internet
metaphor
avatar.
Like
many of the “strong man nationalists” coming to power today, he
ran as the anti-connectionist
(anti-diversity,
anti-politically-correct speech, anti-feminist, anti-immigration)
candidate. Trump
effectively channeled
his attacks against the metaphors
of
the multi-polar,
all-connected internet
(“America
First,” “Build the Wall”), using
not just his television persona, but even more radically, by
mastering
a regressive
communications
medium
whose
operative metaphor (“Here I Am”) is most
aligned with the older
values of security,
survival, and fight or flight: the
command and control, one-way
280-character
mini-telegram
solar-plexus
broadcasts
of
the Twitter feed.iv
In
its declarative pronouncements, free of nuance (without even the
perfunctory hellos and goodbyes, let alone the empathetic responses
of telephone talk), Twitter communication is a throwback
to the Victorian Internet, a rejection
of holism
and
its complexities – the
perfect medium of competitive
narcissism.
Trump’s
attacks on the “deep state” tap
the very unease that Friedman calls
“swimming in the deep end” – the
sense that our interconnected databases and complex
pattern-recognition software, while “abstracting complexity at a
speed, scope and scale we’d never experienced before,” are
leaving us
“on
the outside,” blind to what’s
happening inside the algorithms that have
begun to
control our lives,
while
at the same time the surveillance state and the corporations of
surveillance capitalism could see everything about us, including our
decision-making processes that we hardly knew existed. Is
it any wonder that one response to this sense of “not
seeing” is
the creation of a social
media
world
of
curated
presentation
– where everything is
artifice
and falsehood, where nothing can
be
believed, a place full
of bots,
scammers, poseurs
and grifters, where
everything is
“fake news.”
How
to manage the ethical challenge
of deep
seeing
is our
present dilemma
and
opportunity.
Faced
with the dark shadow of our smart technologies, and a President who
is leading the charge away from even
discussing its implications, Friedman
sees great peril. He calls
for trusted
seers and
navigators
that can “offer the public deep truths, deep privacy protections,
and deep trust.” Perhaps
these attributes will be the focus of our next presidential race, as
a number of candidates have embraced a return to complex policy
analysis and are touting their “inner nerd.” We can hope that the
rejection of science won’t continue in the face of global
ecological catastrophe.
From
an integral
perspective, the
spiritual
“third eye” metaphor
of deep-seeing
offers a way out of the
deep waters of
false alarms, false friends and false truths. Recognizing that every
sound and image we perceive might be manipulated, that every “solid
physical truth” is really only a set of quantum probabilities, can
lead us to a deeply cynical disconnected stance: to immersion in
virtual reality escapism, or the passions of tribal regression. But
it can also lead us to a more
holistic understanding of our place in this complex universe.v
Many
spiritual traditions urge to recognize the bigger picture of
creation: to see ourselves as part of an evolving whole, where no one
is separate, and the face of the Other is a reflection of our
shared divinity. Could it be that the metaphor of deep-seeing is an
invitation to mindfully “watch the codes” of our own thought
processes?
The
second set of “deep processes” identified by Friedman are those
associated with thought itself – artificial intelligence, big data,
cloud computing, and predictive algorithms. In a future blog post I
will look at these technologies as reflections of consciousness
itself: are we separate thinking beings or part of one larger global
brain?vi
Are we stand-alone processors, or nodes on a giant network? Is our
work to protect our ego-selves, or Tikun
Olum – to
repair the grid of Creation? To
dance and sing together in community rituals and share in small
face-to-face healing circles? Or
to embrace the libertarian
fantasy
of preserving
one’s separate self by
fleeing to a bunker in New Zealand, a colony on Mars, or worst case,
into a liquid-nitrogen-cooled brain-storage unit!
i Of
course, I didn’t invent this idea! It is drawn from the field of
media ecology pioneered by Marshal McLuhan, the integral philosophy
of Ken Wilber, and the consciousness evolution model of Spiral
Dynamics.
ii Philosopher
Ken Wilber has called this response “boomeritis” – utopian
dreaming and multicultural sympathies bordering on collective guilt
for all the world’s victims, mixed with unacknowledged attachment
to material luxuries and high drama.
iii In
Digital Dharma (DD), I linked it to the Fifth Chakra: the Throat
Center, the place of our voice and all communications.
iv In
Chapter One of DD,
I called texting
“the
telegraph of Aliveness,” and suggested that this medium was the
perfect voice of adolescence: the time when kids start to push away
and declare their individuality, announcing and reinforcing their
‘Beingness’ to their peers, calling attention to their
cleverness. Adults usually grow out of this narcissism. When they
don’t, in Maureen Dowd’s words, “its as if your id had a
typewriter.” Twitter
combines this First Chakra hunger to announce oneself with the
broadcast power of radio, the Third Chakra medium.
v I
looked at the impact of digital audio and video compression on our
sense that “not everything we see is real,” and the resulting
response of the “curated-self” in DD Chapter Five.
vi This
is the work of the Crown Center, discussed in DD Chapter Seven.
