@lukeburgis @jamespoulos end/ What, then, of the Paradise Gardener’s insight, of the co-evolving bond between planet and person, natural and man-made realms, soil and soul? What, indeed, of the bond between Garden and Cyberspace, of the dirt under the fingernails of these, my transmitting fingers?
Image description
Original X alt text
In one of his apocalyptic theoretical tracts, Jean Baudrillard called this mediated rapture "the ecstasy of communication." He argues that the "harsh and inexorable light of information and communication" has now mastered all spheres of existence, producing an omnipresent system of media flows that has colo-nized the interior of the self. Passion, intimacy, and psychologi-cal depth evaporate, and we wind up "only a pure screen, a switching center of all the networks of influence." No longer subjects of our own experience, we abandon ourselves to a cold and schizophrenic fascination with an infoglut he likens to a °microscopic pornography of the universe." Though one sus-pects that Monsieur Baudrillard might do well to cancel his pre-mium cable se e, his dour prophecy certainly resonates. Many of us have indeed enclosed our nervous systems within a vibrating artificial matrix of cell phones, pagers, voice mail sys-tems, networked laptops, and ever-present terminal screens...
Image description
Original X alt text
Many of us have indeed enclosed our nervous systems within a vibrating artificial matrix of cell phones, pagers, voice mail systems, networked laptops, and ever-present terminal screens, which monitor us as much as we monitor them. As we attempt 330 TECHGNOSIS to micromanage this onslaught of sound bites, emails, temporal disjunction, and data dumps, we lose the slower rhythms and gnawing silences of the inner world. We lose the capacity to speak and act from within, and communication is reduced to a reactive, almost technical operation. And so we drown, believing that to drown is to surf.
@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?”
Image description
Original X alt text
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?