In the year of our simulation 2024, people have never been better off, hating this simulated force, in other words, for hating digital technology itself. And good for them. These ubiquitous tech critics don’t just rely on the vague, nostalgic, technophobic to take their on-trend position. feelings Plus they now have research papers to back them up. They have bestsellers by the likes of Harari and Haidt. They have – their badass imageData. Kids, I don’t know if you’ve heard, are beating themselves out of the classroom.
None of this bothers me. Well, teen suicide is obviously scary, but arguments blaming technology aren’t hard to debunk. What’s hard to pin down, and what bothers me, is the one exception, I guess, to this rule: the anti-tech argument offered by the modern-day philosopher.
By philosopher, I don’t mean some writer of glorified self-help statistics. I mean a deep-level, ridiculously learned overanalyzer, someone who breaks problems down into their relevant bits so that, when those bits are put back together, nothing looks the same. . Descartes didn’t just say “I think, therefore I am” off the top of his head. As far as he had to go. i His head as he humanly could, snapping everything else, before he could get to his classic one-liner. (Plus God. People always forget that Descartes, the inventor of the so-called rational mind, could not take away God.)
For someone trying to make a case against technology, a Descartes-style attack might go something like this: When we go as far as we can in technology, we strip away everything else and break the problem down into its component parts. . Where do we end up? Right there, of course: on literal bits, the 1s and 0s of digital computation. And what do bits tell us about the world? I’m simplifying here, but pretty much: everything. A cat or a dog. Harris or Trump? Black or white? Everyone thinks in binary terms these days. Because it is what is enforced and strengthened by the dominant machinery.
Or, in short, the biggest argument against digital technology: “I binarize,” computers teach us, “therefore I am.” Some technologists have been developing versions of this Theory of Everything for some time. Earlier this year, an English professor at Dartmouth, Aidan Evans, published what was, as far as I can tell, the first proper philosophical treatise, Digital and its discontents. I have had a little chat with Evans. He is a good man. He claims not to be a technophobe, but still: it’s clear that he’s worried about the world’s historical discomfort with digital life, and he roots that discomfort in the foundations of technology.
I might have agreed once. Now, as I say: I’m worried. I am dissatisfied. In Evens et al. The more I think about K’s techno philosophy, the less I want to embrace it. I think there are two reasons for my dissatisfaction. A: Since when do base units. anything Command the full range of its advanced expression? Genes, the basic units of life, account for only a sub-percentage of our development and behavior. Quantum mechanical phenomena, the basic units of physics, have no bearing on my physical actions. (Otherwise I’d be walking through walls – when I wasn’t, half the time, dead.) So why should binary digits define, forever, the limits of computation, and our experience of it? There is always a way of new behavior, when complex systems mysteriously emerge from each other. Nowhere in the individual bird can you find a flocking algorithm! Turing himself said that you can’t tell by looking at computer code, Completelywhat will happen.
And two: Blaming the discontents of technology on the 1s and 0s treats the digital as an endpoint, as some logical conclusion to the history of human thought—as if humanity, as Evans suggests, At last the dreams of enlightenment have been achieved. There is no reason to believe such a thing. Computing, for most of its history, No Digital and, if predictions about the return of analog are correct, it won’t be entirely digital for long. I’m not here to say whether or not computer scientists should design chips uniformly, just to say, Was it meant to be?It would be foolish to claim that all the binarisms of modern existence, so thoroughly embedded in us by our digitized machinery, will suddenly collapse into fragility and glorious analog complexity. We invent technology. Technology does not invent us.
