[D66] Machine Psychology: A Disappearing Act

[R.O.]

https://325.nostate.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/325-12-net.pdf

Machine Psychology:
A Disappearing Act

Already in the 1960s, Theodor
Adorno found the computer to be
"the bankruptcy petition of conscious-
ness." 1 Now we are at the threshold
of cyborg existence, wherein the self
emerges as a shifting matrix of
animate and inanimate parts. This is
being accomplished insofar as we
have reduced ourselves to the
machine's level. "The very possibility
of subjectivity and the generation of
meaning for the future" is at stake,
2 As
as Gray Kochhar-Lindgren put it.2
the techno-culture advances in its
fast-forward course, what has
become undeveloped is the result.
"We are as highly developed in
psychopathology as in technology,"
3 Lightning
concluded Jules Henry.3
speed of connectivity––and increas-
ing disconnection among people.
Considerable regress in substantive
communication.
Consciousness, like perception
and cognition, is embodied. Except
when it's not. Direct, primary
experience is severely on the wane.
Life has moved to the screen, where
all is secondhand experience.
Cyberspace is not the realm of the
texture, depth and continuity of
anyone's life-world. Without the
immediacy of human experience we
live in a Dead Zone. And we need a
tremendous distraction industry or
apparatus because the content of
our own activity is thus diminished.
4 privileges
Our Age of Distraction4
external stimuli, especially data, over
interior reflection. From understand-
ing to knowledge to information to
data, the lowest level in the mental
food chain. Undigested information–
–data––is apt to become
disinformation, confusion, deception.
Discernment, attention span, etc. are
so many casualties of the erosion of
deeply felt experience.
Thought is not data-processing,
however much the metaphor of an
essentially machine-like process tends
to creep into our consciousness.
We "scan" this, "process" that, in
common usage. Faster and faster
speeds online "input," and we are
increasingly impatient with the slightest
delay. But deep experiences require
more than fractions of seconds. More
and more reliance on cyberspace
means we know less and less about the
world available to us directly.
Technological systems are config-
ured to be mind-deadening. The ultimate
danger is that people will become
addicted to technologies that in effect
ban their capacities to think, that take
away a basic sense of identity and
reality. For some time now, we've been
immersed in a universal culture of
redirection, diversion and infotainment,
a mass-based content level of cognitive
distraction. Unsurprisingly, boredom
and anxiety are hallmarks of this
restless ethos. Attention is at a
premium, sought and manipulated like
5 Interacting face-to-face becomes
data.5
rarer. A barren, synthetic reality
challenges us to be capable of thinking
for ourselves, because without reflec-
tion, hope for a different world dims.
Prominent among those who
embrace the technoverse is Donna
Haraway, who claims that machines do
not dominate or threaten us: the
machine is us. Too late to check the
invasiveness of technology anyway:
23"Prothesis becomes a fundamental
category for understanding our most
intimate selves." 6 Susan Griffin
counters this beautifully: "We know
ourselves to be made from this earth.
We know this earth is made from our
bodies. For we see ourselves. And we
are nature." 7 The tragedy is that only
machines thrive in the global
technoculture. Some people grow to be
like machines, à la Haraway.
All this is new and, in a sense, not
new. Kochhar-Lindgren proposes that
this is "when philosophy becomes what
it has always latently been: cybernet-
ics." 8 In other words, philosophy's
control and alienation aspects have
been lurking for a long time. Since its
origin in early civilization, writing has
been an independent object, abstracted
from reality. It virtualizes and delocal-
izes memory. The text stands over us in
a sense, like time. The decline from
speech to writing to the increasing
digitalization of human consciousness
exacts a price.
Society becomes an unhealthy
expression of the Internet. Michael
Heim calls this "a unifying network of
human presence." 9 Of course, we are
not present to each other online, and
there is no substitute for actual place.
Marc Andreessen had it right in 2011:
"Software is eating the world." 10
Phenomenologists speak of being-in-a-
world, meaning that it is from the world
that we come to understand not only it,
but ourselves. The technosphere is
immersive and invasive. It patterns or
structures our lives. Our sense of place,
presence, and self is being remade in
the image of the Machine.
Champions of cyborg existence
applaud the "seamless integration and
overall transformation" of human and
11 Smartphones are not
machine.11
zombifying agents of distraction, but
"mindware upgrades." 12 Much is
disappearing as the sentient and
tangible are de-realized. The sense of
community, for instance, shrinks in
proportion to the extension of global
online culture. An exception to disap-
pearance is social media; what is there
is eternal. Kate Eichorn's The End of
13 discusses how one is
Forgetting13
hard pressed to break away from the
past after those endless and perma-
nent self-surveillance posts to
Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Technology has become the
organizing principle of our lives. It is also
clear that it is civilization's cardinal
value, the chief reason that there is just
24
one, global civilization now. Thus it is
a huge challenge to be outside it, or
to even imagine such a change. And
yet individuals are far from happy
within the force-field of the ever-
present technoverse. Its promises
and claims are threadbare and false.
Everyone knows that, at least on a
visceral level. We know that the
totality is built on lies and is failing.
Consciousness may yet become
better armed, more able to take
advantage of Walter Benjamin's
dictum:
"The smallest cell of visualized reality
outweighs the rest of the world." 14

John Zerzan


Notes:
1. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics
(New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 206.
2. Gray Kochhar Lindgren,
TechnoLogics (Albany NY: State
University of New York Press, 2005),
p. 1.
3. Quoted in David Levin, Pathologies of
the Modern Self (New York: New York
University Press, 1987), p. 480.
4. Joseph R. Urgo, In the Age of
Distraction (Jackson MS: University
Press of Mississippi, 2000), e.g. p. 19.
5. See Adam Gazzaley and Larry D.
Rosen, The Distracted Mind (Cam-
bridge MA: The MIT Press, 2016) and
Steve Talbott, Devices of the Soul:
Battling for Our Selves in an Age of
Machines (Sebastopol CA: O'Reilly
Media, 2007).
6. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs
and Women (New York: Routledge,
1991), p. 249, n.7.
7. Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature:
The Roaring Inside Her (New York:
Harper & Row, 1978), p. 226.
8. Kochhar-Lindgren, op.cit., p. 5.
9. Michael Heim, "The Metaphysics of
Virtual Reality," in Sandra K. Kelsel and
Judith Paris Roth, editors, Virtual
Reality: Theory, Practice, and Promise
(Westport, CT: Meckler Publishing,
1991), p. 34.
10. Marc Andreessen, "Why Software
Is Eating the World" (Wall Street
Journal, August 20, 2011).
11. Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs
(New York: Oxford University Press,
2003), p. 34.
12. Ibid., p. 10.
13. Kate Eichorn, The End of Forget-
ting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2019).
14. Quoted in Adorno, op.cit., p. 303