@johnrobb Many sides: one disease. J. Poulos: “Who has the fullness of soul in them, and the authority this vitality confers, to triumph over the computed and computing world in its worldliness, to redeem it and turn it back toward service to the given life of the world and we the living?”
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Copies of three tweets: As in cyberspace, so below. As in meatspace, so above. On all sides, the murderous dismissal of the Other, experienced and promoted as coherent and socially beneficial, powerfully defines the anthropology of modernity. A hall of mirrors. The war of all against all. 1/ Near enough: – 1/ Nothing new under the sun, as they say. Not 'moral' or 'empathetic' as much as powerfully demonstrating the 'mimetic, unconscious, automatic and universal' mechanism sustaining "the essential complicity between violence and human culture." (Girard) end/ So, an algorithmically-supercharged vortex of mimetic contagion and, all told, a momentum the prophets universally anticipated would inevitably deliver us to the very threshold of suicidal, planetary cataclysm. Hobbes' 'war of all against all', plus nukes. What next, then?
@pauljpastor 1/ So true. That said, I wonder, if however, the decisive role of information technology shaping the direction, form and character of mimesis at the planetary level can ultimately be understood, in Adorno's terms, "only in the light shed on the world by redemption.” For one...
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Copy of tweet here: If climate chaos loses its terror and becomes a liberating hope only once its interpretation is fully Christianized, perhaps technology trends can also only be fully understood apocalyptically, that is, from a point of view revealing a meaning different from their literal sense? end/ Needs be said, reality's inclusivity is boundlessly vaster than 'the West' and 'Christendom' as Kingsnorth has it. Then again, illumination framed in an essentially occidental, Christian vernacular has its merits. For one, if "everything is religious", This Machine is, too. Quote tweet: I farm. Yes, the Technium cult, largely blind, anthropocentric, diabolically absurd; and Kingsnorth, hands-down, one of our wisest. But he misses a critical, positive, Christological dimension, namely, IT as central to transcendent political intervention at the planetary level.