Hot & new consumer electronics are here – highway to the future or a technocultural dystopia unfolding?

Today is The Big Day for Nokia. In a few hours the the company is going to launch it’s latest Windows phone that is rumored to host the new Windows 8 OS. Later next week it’s the same with Apple and the new iPhone. The modern internet with it’s unimaginable power to transmit information boosts these two events to planetary proportions. Will Nokia finally be able to break (back) into the lead with the new phone or is the hype going to melt down with the – so far – superior Apple.

This must be what the singularity feels like but is this what it is supposed to be? I mean, virtually lining behind large companies in their attempt to dominate the market. The market? Do you mean the financial market? You know, the system behind the world scale economic disaster looming in the horizon?

I was a young man in the 90’s. Back then there were was a fast awakening to the ecological disaster facing the world. Researchers argued – and still do – that the economic boom of the 20th century is culminating in a fast depletion of natural resources. People around the world became aware of the fact that the lifestyle we enjoy does have a double edge. In the past two decades nothing much has happened to correct this “cycle of doom”.

Now we are in a situation where most of the planet is affected by how “people receive” their new mobile devices. Will the stock go up or down. It’s not long ago that Nokia and Apple both had to answer some odd questions about how, where and by whom their devices were manufactured. It turned out, that there were some mistakes made. And remember when Apple announced it would with draw from EPEAT? After a world wide protest they decided that it’s better not to.

At the start of the 21st century some of you may have noticed a modest rise of the “new consumer culture“. What this means is that people are not just buying stuff they want (like the theory of consumerism has been thus far) but people would be eager to invest in things that are ecologically and socially sustainable. This is a part of the “green revolution” and frankly, I am surprised that it still remains a very small part of the combined marketing economy that keeps our world going (faster, closer and more mobile).

I have absolutely nothing against such products like Lumia or the iPhone. Not at all. I could not imagine living with out one. Mobile devices along with other innovations of the 21st century makes my life better, easier and perhaps fuller.

And the very same things I slightly criticize here are the things I can use to look up stuff like sustainable economy or consumer movements such as “Buy Nothing Day“.

And it is after doing some thinking of my own, I have decided that the way we are “hyped about the future” may well be the thing that prevents us getting there. From a Transhuman standpoint it’s easy to see why. It’s not just the fastness of development or the availability of new products that push the world forward. Those things push the economy forward and all though that is needed to keep pushing towards a more techno-oriented society, culturally, it’s not enough.

The Transhumanist in me is seeking to find the right technologies to push forward. Deciding what is right goes deep into the basics of being human (and especially Transhuman). I’m not a big fan of “nature before everything” since I have a deeply antrophocentric world view. That said, I believe we need to look at the big picture here.

And the picture states the obvious. We can’t expect to enrich our lives with depleted meanings. Even that the technology offered here is state of the art, we should ask for more. Do we really need a new cell phone or an iPad every year? By asking more we are asking not only more sustainable technological progress but a deeper and richer content as well. You may or may not know that the bloody competition in the high end technology market puts the consumer “needs” before everything else. Where is the innovation in that? Why would any company – even super rich Apple – invest billions in research and development if what they really “need” to do is keep up with competition?

We should build less and slower. At the same time we should look at what the gadgets actually offer from a cultural and social perspective. This is totally against the ideology of the “free market” since it’s said that the free market is all we need to get the best products and practices. But is this true in a situation where best ideas are nothing but market projections for a certain market segment?

If we find our selves asking who to make the markets “smarter”, we may then wake up to the fact that there still are people on the planet who can’t read or write. Or who have trouble getting food and fresh water. The planetary infrastructure of social well being is undermined all the time, not to mention that the nature around us is dying and taking us with it. This must be something for Transhumanist’s to think about and in my understanding they are. This could also be a message what would make Transhumanism even a more interesting world view among the peoples of the world. It just needs good packaging.

No singularity worth the effort is going to happen unless we take care of the present first. We are loosing massive human resources due to poverty and we are loosing the battle to master nature – because we are continually at risk of being extinct because we are still very much dependent on the natural environment.

Despite this I’ll be rooting for Nokia this week. It’s still a Finnish company in name at least. I’ll also be dreaming about technological progress that would actually benefit humanity and pave the way for a better, happier and richer future.

Google glasses – the sociology of sight

One day I had a conversation with myself. Nothing crazy, just the usual pondering between different ideas and trying to go through things in a sort of a semi-dialogue way. If you have been following the blog, you may have noticed that lately I have began reading about cognitive psychology and cognitive science. I am going through several books at the same time just to get as much information in my head as I can.

The conversation between I and I took an unexpected turn when I suddenly remembered Google’s awesome Glass Project. My honest opinion as a tech enthusiast and an entrepreneur is that Google is going to hit gold if the final product will be even half than what was promised. Yes, the world is about to change with these goggles, no question about it. Just look at the Youtube commercial and you will never hold a pair of glasses the same way again.

But hold on, hold on… what exactly is being promised here and at what price? It was this question I and I began thinking, not arguing, about.

In the video we see the Glasses deliver emails, SMS-messages and social media updates as well as maps and other ‘augmented’ reality stuff to the wearer. So, you don’t have to reach in your pocket and look at your cell phone. What does that awkward though mean?

Well, since the beginning of human civilization we have had at least three ways of looking at things. The first is the animal stare of ‘fight, flight or copulate’. That is the essence of our animal side. The second is the mythical gaze when we look at the stars or follow a priest preforming whatever ritual before the tribe. And the third is the theatre view we have when we look at the social world in general.

All these ways of looking have different personal and social meanings. The animal stare helps us orientate to our surroundings and to perform tasks ‘at hand’. This animal stare is very much connected to the rest of our senses and our bodies in general. It is the way we humans touch to world.

The mythical gaze is connected to our mental abilities to imagine and find meanings in pictures and the world we live in. This gaze may be difficult to describe in words and it has a lot to do with how we feel about things.

The theatre view is the way we gather information about more complex social performances. This could actually be a theatre play or newspaper we read now and then. It gives us information on the world in general.

Now, these typifications are my own and they just sprang to mind so there is no science behind here.

If we take these three different ways of seeing and combine them to our very much visual culture, some thoughts come to mind.

We consume visual information. We no longer have things in our real hands and the ‘concrete’ stuff we need to process in order to get ‘real’ things done is very much visual and abstract. We not only need new technical skills but also new ways to understand information. If you – like most of us – feel that you are bombarded with emails, Facebook ‘likes’ and such, you probably have sometimes felt a bit sick because of the overflow of ‘information technology’.

Now, I and I were discussing this particular situation and thinking about the google glasses. I love the idea but I fear there is a certain level of pain coming along with them. By this I mean that we need to immerse ourselves even more with digital streams and abstract meanings with brains that are best apt to process information in the theree previously mentioned ways.

The brain is a physical device so it exists in space and time. The animal stare is for the very fast information concerning questions ilke where, how and when. The mythical stare is slow, perhaps closer to meditation and the theatre view is best understood as an ability to understand social roles and such (for instance, reading a newspaper article gives us a ‘story’ we understand).

The Google glasses – and similar products – destroy all this unless the designers are taking steps to offer the ‘augmented reality’ in an old fashion way.

The glasses is a major step because with them the ‘virtual’ is ever present. The younger generations will be able to grow new neuron links in order to have their brains wiring altered (yes, I believe that will happen) and they will have very different ways of processing information. That is already happening with our technology today.

Older brains are harder to rewire. Just look at how people who have never used a computer mouse has enormous difficulties in getting the simples click ‘click’. Now, imagine the mouse as a link to a virtual world where people who can perform this simple task have unique access to a whole new social world.

We are about to cross an interesting threshold. Once our brains begin to ‘evolve’ with new ways of perception, the following generations may go even further with the human-machine interface thing. I believe – and I have no scientific evidence in support of this – that the hacking of our brain and social relations has started a few decades back and the next decades will very much be about finding out our human restrictions and how to go beyond – and some of us will want to.

The Black Box of Technology

I’m working on a piece of theory I need for my first article. Last night I was laying in bed and going through some new articles on my iPhone. There were several and it will take weeks before I have read them all. And even then, I am not sure if the line of inquiry is a good one. Anyway, the problem is this: sometimes in STS literature technology is called “the black box”. This is to denote that technology is something we put things in and get other things out while we don’t exactly know how the ‘box’ works.

That sounds simple but in fact, the ‘black box’ offers a truly challenging problem in many forms. Obviously technology as a black box is extremely problematic for transhumanism that claims a certain essential knowledge about humans and technology. For me, this is very problematic because in order for me to link the subject and technology, there should not be a blind spot like this in the mix.

One approach I have been thinking about is inspired by Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey and Andrew Feenberg in their excellent book Modernity and Technology. Here they simply pose the question why so little is written about technology in the large corpus of modernity theory in the social sciences. I paused as I read about it and then realized that, yes, there is very little written about actual technology and the ‘modernity’ in much of these works.

Now, my mission is to link some form of a tourainean theory of the subject and action (a macro level analysis) to the concrete technological corporeal subject (micro level). Therefore the link between theory of the modern and actual technology is seminal in my work.

Back to the box. The first question to pop in my mind was not ‘how’ can I do this if technology is something I cant ‘see’ with my theoretical gaze. The first question was ‘why’ technology is not mentioned in the theory of modern.

In the coming days I’ll post my initial argument with which I hope to show that the ‘technology as a black box’ problem is in fact a problem of a meta narrative. Theories of modernity only grasp technology when they have a meta narrative about concrete phenomenon like technology. If one does not exist, technology is viewed like any other ‘system’ and therefore it gets hard to analyse it’s meaning and functioning. This is why, I argue vaguely, that is why you don’t often see technology in a ‘grand theory of the modern’. I can think of at least Bourdieu and Touraine as exceptions but I suppose there are others. But, the argument is coming later. And yes, there are big problems in it’s wake.

With meta narrative I mean a system of meaning that ‘reflects’ reality (weather or not such a thing exists). There fore a meta narrative can encapsulate a phenomenon like the black box of technology, give it a meaning and have it function inside the system of the meta narrative. But, there is no epistemic view on what this black box is an there is only an ontology of ‘meaning’ around the black box. I will argue, that the omission of meaning in the meta narrative is in fact the black box of technology it self.

If the box is opened, it becomes something that interacts with the theoretical construction of ‘reality’ around it. In the case of technological imperative -model of understanding technology, the black box marches an en deux macina from it bowls. In the constructivist view, the black box contains a process of knowledge genesis and in the ANT-model the black box becomes a piece of the world.

So, let’s have a theory of the ‘modern’ that actually holds some concrete ideas about what there is inside the black box. This is what I am working on right now and it shows a lot of promise and even more peril. (Dramatic. Someone should open the ‘theater of scientific writing’ and see what fools we make ourselves into.)

Now, it was this link between meta narratives, technology as a black box and the theory of modernity that got me excited about Steve Fullers 1995 Review Essay Is there life for sociological theory after the sociology of scientific knowledge? in sociology journal.

In the essay Fuller questions the status of scientific knowledge in social science research. The whole technology as a black box problem has a lot to do with the theory of knowledge in general. For instance, we know that a certain object is made of whatever materials, that it has some cultural meanings and that it can be used to affect how the (social) world operates. It has effects and we have knowledge ‘based’ on it. Now, to have knowledge about it, we need a theory that can explain why it exists.

And here we are, back in square one. However, I think I have something you could call a solution. Well, nothing that dramatic but at least I think I have an approach that can take me where all sociologists eventually end up: inside the blue box…. no, sorry, a fan u see… I meant the black box.

Against the static orientations to nature and institutions

Note. This text is meant to be provocative. It does not reflect the way my PhD is done nor are the points argued as my ‘true beliefs’. It is meant to provide a background of an ‘ideology’.

Today I’m hosting a workshop at Onnistamo 2012, the an event on Social Entrepreneurship at the Hub Helsinki. Due to some very unexpected challenges in my personal life, I have not had much time to prepare so I’m doing it now. The workshop is about a co-op company I’m trying to piece together but It has very little to do with my PhD so don’t think of this as a commercial thing. Why I’m writing about it here is because the underlying ‘philosophy’ me and some of my friends are developing is somewhat future and change oriented. It also involves some of the same questions transhumanism faces when political and societal issues concerning humanity is conceptualized.

I’m trying to argue that a) we are facing an uncertain future that will very likely bring about major threats to all life on earth, and b) we should focus on survival of humanity and c) to do this we need to get rid of the static thinking societal institutions and ‘harmony with nature’ entails.

The risks to our living are large. The first time I came to realize a concept of risk was in the writings of Ulrich Beck. He is the father of the idea of ‘risk society’. In short, a risk society is a world much like ours. The risks are no longer personal or limited but international and unlimited. This has very much to do with the development of technologies that destroy nature and perhaps even crush what is considered ‘human’. This pessimistic vision is something that has grown from the project of modernity and is seen as an ever increasing expansion of technological systems. In short, Beck famously puts it: “there is no way to test the safety of a nuclear plant, it’s too complex. We have to build one to see if in fact is safe to use”. This ‘risk consciousness’ is reflected as a feeling of uneasy about everyday living.

A prominent proponent of transhumanism, Nick Bostrom, has brought this discussion of ‘existential risks‘ in major focus. He is currently running the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford that focuses on the ‘foresight’ of different technological ‘extermination scenarios’. There are some quite utopian options out there as well as the more known, like the destruction of our living environment. Existential risks are risks that threaten the survival of our entire species and are hard to predict.

Now, we might be living in such a scenario when it comes to the destruction of our environment. There are also major species threatening risks that involve the use of biological weapons or nanotechnology. None of the possible futures can be predicted with certainty. The way I see it, is that taking in to serious consideration, there is a reasonable chance that this is right now happening in our world. This comes just short of being an ‘end times faith’, which I am against. We should not take the ‘precautionary principle’ too seriously. It is a technical way of addressing realistic risks and therefore the ‘strong program’ of it would cause us to stop everythinfg.

The biggest problem is when we become static. Too much emphasis on ‘danger’ makes only stand still while in reality nothing gets really stopped. The other sources of static behavior is the focusing on traditions or ‘institutions‘ or taking the stand that we should live in ‘harmony with nature’.

Institutions are static by nature. One way to define an institution is to claim that it is a social configuration that no one person can hope to change. Institutions do change over time, but very slowly. When I say that institutions are static by nature, it is important to note, that nature itself is in fact very much static. Evolution does occur but it takes millions or at least thousands of years to happen. Humans are only partly connected with nature. Yes, we are natural beings that are rooted in biology. But also, we are able to transgress these boundaries in our imagination – or ‘The Will‘ if you need a reference to philosophy of much of human history.

Nature through the idea of a ‘Gaian‘ system and institutions in form of culture are ways of not thinking in progressive terms. The other way to address the situation is to call the bluff. Nature is a constricting factor in human existence and culture is conservative by definition.

Some people say, that giving up on the belief in ‘bigger things’ life is devoid of meaning. This is sometimes referred as ‘postmodernism‘. I’m not going in to that here, since postmodern is a huge discussion in various sciences and it deserves a better handling than what I can give here.

Here is where my workshop begins. I claim, that we need a new breed of thinkers and activists, who can transgress the boundaries set to us by culture and nature. This does not lead to losing our values – completely the opposite is true. Once we focus on the human actor, we focus on the flesh and blood of existence. This is also where the influence of Alain Touraine becomes evident in my thinking. The transhuman concept of expanding the possibilities is, in my opinion, all about this.

Some of you readers might have realized that I am very much opposed to relativism. If we give up on tradition and stop believing in natural constrictions, do we then have to slide in to a relativistic way of thinking? No, because there is a universal human nature. This is also a big conversation that has certainly not started with transhumanism. It also deserves to be discussed in real detail and I will do that once my PhD gets there.

Here I’m just following on the lines set by an English philosopher Robert Scruton in his book Beauty. In the book there is much to debate about, but it also focuses in trying to find the experience of beauty. Beauty, according to Scruton, is objective and therefore a universal part of human nature. I would widen this definition and argue, that our sense of beauty is a way to sense things that are satisfactory and things that aren’t. There is a true risk of taking this argument to far, like the conservative thinker Leon Kass has shown in support of the ‘yack argument‘.

When we hear news about a famine in a far away country, we often struggle to care. It offends us in some sence, but the feeling does not manifest in a strong moral resentment. However, once we go there and get personally involved, we feel uneasy – we feel it is ugly.

The challenge for the new breed of thinkers and activists is to focus on creating beauty through their action.

And this is done by resisting the static forces in nature and in society. We need to start thinking about the ‘harmony with nature’ argument in another way. Nature is a restrictive force that subjucates us by our mental, psychical and existential borders. The reason to protect nature is not for it’s sake but for ours. I’m not against nature here, mind you that. I just see humans and nature forming a one system that is not our master but our partner.

We also need to resist conservative views when tackling questions of uncertain future. Here we would go against traditions, ethics, religions, political systems and economic ‘laws’. Again, nothing wrong with the mentioned, but we should not hold on to them if we are seeking new ways of thinking and acting.

In the light of the possibility of an extermination scenario of all life on earth, the stakes are high. Risks must be taken. The new thinkers I call Exeptional Challengers (written in an exceptional way in purpose) adhere to this ethics of exception.

The final point about ‘exeptionality’ is that it calls for sacrifice. Sacrifice of the old, our time and our resources – even our lives. This is difficult pitch to make in a world that has just had a few decades of economic growth well being (oh, this is actually not at all true if we look at the entire planet).

So, it comes down to this: we need to start considering what we should sacrifice for beauty in order to survive to the next millenia.