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Title: A Specious Species Author: C. E. Hayes Date: 2008 Language: en Topics: Green Anarchy, Green Anarchy #25, primitivist, subjectivity, technology Notes: from Green Anarchy #25, Spring-Summer 2008
The experience of technological narcissism produces a smothering
obsession with ways to reflect the superficial self. There is an
inability of self-expression without recount to a superficial
identification within a technological process, product or field of
influence. The process of self-expression becomes an obsession to
declare individuality, uniqueness, specialncss that is founded on
superficiality. Each superficiality exhibits itself as a change in angle
from, or newly cast reflection of, the technologically constructed
subject. Self-expression has become a variation on a common theme — the
celebration of the narcissistic superficial self through purely
technological means.
Our culture tempts us with speciousness backed by a rubric of thought
that enforces its repetition ad infinitum. There is unlimited access to
the same experience wherein the experience of the individual is
amplified via small manufactured superficial changes. The promise of
technology has always been to make life easier and better. What it has
done is provide standardization and unlimited access. Precisely what has
happened is individuality, uniqueness, and the creative act, have nearly
been erased from experience. We now follow standard procedure to meet
stated goals. Technological narcissism pushes forward with making the
experience of society, our culture, more and more general — a worldwide
monoculture. While pursuing its self-fulfilling prophecies of personal
freedom, liberty and unlimited variations for unique self expression
(individuality) it has done nothing but construct a worldwide
monoculture that is destroying the possibility of the existence for any
real experience and replaces it with a “standing reserve” of
experiential processes with superficially constructed deviations on the
process to simulate individuality — the marketing term is
personalization. What we have today, and what we have to look forward to
is a technological culture, civilization, that is in love with itself
and the multiple reflections it makes in its own image for us to
celebrate, or obsess over.
Fast and furiously we are led into the frenzied self adulation of our
technological society, its products and the reflection of them in
ourselves. Our technology has never really been a reflection of
ourselves directly. We were simply the vehicle for its deliverance, or
its own being. For technology and its partner in disgrace, science, do
not exist beyond the being we give them and as such, they exist outside
of our direct human experience (the reality of our “being here”). They
are virtual activities and we have elevated these virtual activities to
their current level of control over our real lives and experiences.
Technology and science are pressed into use to model and manipulate
those beings in the world that do not perform the same manipulation.
Upon this world, the “progress” of science/technology was not earned out
by any other living creature besides humanity. Without us as the
vehicle, technology stops. Science does not exist. The “knowledge” it
begets is once again unknown and the products associated with such
knowledge deteriorate and become useless. Technology and scientific
thought should be properly understood as a type of possession of the
mind. The mind is possessed with a will to dominate, manipulate and
serve that which gives it structure — technological society itself. Our
use of technology is definitely not a benign creative diversion that is
employed in the natural act of preserving and protecting our place in
the natural world. It exists solely to separate us from our natural
being and environment. What we have in the mirror of our existence is
not ourselves, but rather the system generated by our technology.
No longer can we see ourselves in much of the society we encounter. What
we see are reflections of the technological system with manufactured
deviations on superficial levels. The desire to “be human” has been
supplanted with a desire to be “different” within the system and most of
all, to be acknowledged for being different. The consequence of these
desires to be different, and the seeking of acknowledgement for being
different, is that life becomes subservient to the system that
communicates the expressions. The system now provides the means to
create deviations on expression, and what follows is technology becoming
not just the messenger of human expression, but what humanity expresses.
Human desires are now sublimated, if not eliminated, based on the
technological methods available for expression.
The raw experience of being human is repressed and redirected to serve
the refinement of technological control over our direct experience of
the world. That which can be modeled, manipulated and quantified in a
virtual manner becomes the basis of what we do to our physical reality.
The refinement of technology (specialization) reveals smaller and
smaller deviations on physical reality until the reality is lost. What
is left is the superficiality of the technologically derived model. This
now becomes the desire, our desire: The technical perfection of a
technologically derived model of ourselves. We are bred by the system to
desire a life free of pain, suffering, distress, death, loss, and
uncertainty among other things that are harmful to the functioning of
the system. What remains is an impossible human life essentially, but
the models have supplanted our concept of reality to the point where the
virtual world, the technologically perfect world, is the actual
foundation of reality. Self-expression is sublimated to the virtual
world. Self-expression becomes not an expression of the self, but an
expression of a particular superficiality within the model constructed
by the prevailing technology of the moment. We pretend to be what we are
not in order to justify the existence of what we create and express.
We fall in love with the perfection of the model. The closest we can get
to a raw human experience is this love, but it is a mutated and deformed
version of love that is not naturally derived from our experience with
direct reality. It is a technologically derived form of narcissism. It
is not ourselves, nor anyone, we are in love with, but rather a
reflection of ourselves cast by a mirror of science and technology. We
desire to become what we are not, nor will ever be, but push ourselves
to become the reflection. We want the perfection promised by the
technological reflection. Self-expression is therefore not from the
self, but rather an expression dictated by the reflection.
This “techno-expression” has manifested itself in many ways. Blogging,
as a means of publishing a single person’s multimedia diary (a
personalized electronic press kit of sorts) accessible to all, is
perhaps a fitting example. Being accessible to all necessarily means
that all can understand, that all can identify with, and this type of
experience can only be produced if all have similar cultural data.
Because the technology exists and because the technology is widespread,
the experience of it (being technological) becomes a common fixture
(utility) of daily existence to the beings that use it. It is to this
end that the use of technology becomes the basis of the human
experience. In order to express what it is to be human we must resort to
expressing what it means to experience the technology we use. Blogging,
while at superficial level, may appear to cover a wide spectrum of
subjects, discourses and styles, actually restricts any sort of unique
personal perspective from coming into existence. In order to be
understood, one must speak the language of technology. In doing so. the
speaker channels the language of the system and its desires through
themselves. One needs gadgets to blog the knowledge of the gadgets that
enable the processing of reality, and lastly the time to create the blog
in isolation from reality in order to distill real-life into something
that is able to be represented as something intelligible through a
personal computer by others. In order for blogging to be effective at
conveying information, human experience must be regulated and
standardized — made easily digestible and transmittable by technology.
What instructs the content of the blog is that which the blogger can
distill through the current technology.
No longer are we limited to literate technology (writing) capturing
data, but we now have ubiquitous technology to record images and sound —
hence the rise of MySpace and YouTube (nothing narcissistic about the
names of those sites at all!). Not only this, but there are even virtual
worlds for us to inhabit such as SecondLife, which completely do away
with the real world entirely. Perhaps the virtual world/virtual life is
the greatest achievement of technological processing of life to date. It
does away with the translation of reality and replaces it outright. In
order to be “heard” within these virtual communities, you must be able
to relate to common cultural data (monoculture) and have the ability to
express it in familiar terms.
The focus becomes how can “I” stand out from all the sameness that
technology fosters, but the ability to stand out only manifests on
purely superficial, or stylistic, terms. How many genre names can we
give to the explosion of sameness that has occurred in the Digital Age?
Only the smallest of superficial deviations produce the desire to be
recognized as different or claim individuality. Sometimes the
“difference” is only in the application of certain technology to the
same exact data — from black and white to color, from analog to digital,
from orchestra to synthesizer, etc.
The stimulus to all this activity is the same — the ubiquity of
technology creates common cultural data and enables its expression in
common terms. The reaction to the stimulus is narcissistic behavior. The
overpowering desire to be “acknowledged” by others for ones own
individuality fuels the engine of the current technologically dependent
culture. Since the experience of life is so schematized by the
technology we manipulate, consume and depend upon, the will to express
ourselves has now turned to our own bodies as the last refuge from the
invasion of technology. With horrific irony, or absurd incongruity, the
only means we have at our disposal to express what our body experiences
“out there” in the real world is reliant on the prevailing technological
framing of what we are supposed to be experiencing. The real world we
encounter is largely the schema of technology imposed on our lives to
make them “better”, i.e. more efficient, less strenuous, more
comfortable, happier, and so forth. To strip the world of technology
would return us to a brutal encounter with nature that we cannot bear to
sustain, or so those who uphold the current technocratic civilization
propose. It is here, in the experience of a non-technologically mediated
existence, that one may find access to unfettered self-expression,
though.
The specious species that we have become desires the perfections of
experience that are promised by the technological representations of
what it means to be human. An infallible “yes” or “no” to life as it has
been constructed is what one desires in the schematized cultural
experience. To experience an in between state cannot be accurately
expressed by such methods and as such, is intolerable. When the strict
logic of scientific rigor is interrupted by the contradiction of
emotions and reality itself, the experience is broken down into smaller
technically manufactured states, quantified, analyzed and processed. The
technical term for this may be conflict resolution. The technological
narcissist desires clarity and confirmation of their self.
Self-expression is derived by establishing a superficial identification
within a technological process, product or field of influence in order
to confirm and clarify ones internal feelings. Without the technology to
parse the experience of being in the world, then self-expression becomes
impossible and the experiential data self-expression draws upon for
inspiration becomes meaningless. As it stands, any technologically
derived expression of reality is better than none, therefore
self-expression has been reduced to spurious and superficial layers of
technological narcissism.