New Realities (2) - Quareness Series 137th "Lecture".
Are we now witnessing some sort of substitution of the unreal for the real with the covid event interventions stimulating a tipping into an awaiting technologically manipulated reality? With the new landscape emerging will the human mind find itself increasingly out-of-place in a territory hazardous for our emotional, mental and physical states? Are we looking at the human condition under intense modification?
We are already witnessing new rising forms of power embedded in the structures of health security, social life, living and working spaces, and our movements (both digital and physical). Up to quite recent times social control mainly operated below the waterline where a largely intangible world existed beyond imposed/mandated governance or accountability. But now the "beast of behaviour modification" is unashamedly spreading its tentacles throughout our cultural landscape...in the name of "health security" aka "social management". And this modification is quite likely going to further anaesthetise, desensitise and dehumanise us all with the collective human mind being groomed for a new consensus reality of "normalised dissonance"?
Taking a more panoramic view of this emerging landscape we may notice the merging of physical world pandemics (current and future) with those viral digital epidemics that increasingly infect the human psyche wherein the social body is targeted by strategies that cause anxiety, confusion, exhaustion, fear, fragmentation and polarisation. We can see this digital impact malaise currently reflected in the real world through "lockdowns", loss of economic independence, social distancing, social ostracisation and more. It looks like our human condition is being subjected to a new rhythm of the modern power-machine that tends to break down social alliances.
The long established conditions that have maintained our sense of social reality may be in danger of being replaced with a totalitarian managing of the masses through forms of separation and quantification. These processes/techniques (seen as necessary to form a technologised humanity) can now reasonably be regarded as seeking to reduce our human life and its environment to something measurable and predictable...ordained by algorithms. And such imposed changes must inevitably create disequilibrium in the human psyche with a fragmentation of the human self and a breaking down of trusted social relations. Within such attempting to create a world of sleepwalkers plied with pills for anxiety, updated with vaccines, programmed with a lot of nonsense and dismissive of alternative thinking, we might detect something insidious creeping into the global collective. We are being prepared to mimic the automation of the machine within a new form of "social collective" producing normalised/
standardised behaviour in a socially manageable populace? The apparent "lure" here is the promise of security and human well-being but the unavoidable "downside" may be increase in depressing social dependency.
Luciano Floridi (Professor of Philosophy and Information Ethics at Oxford University) talks about human civilisation shifting into a phase of “hyperhistory” where society dependent upon integrative technologies could also become human-independent i.e. not needing us. If life on Planet Earth is to be incorporated into an infrastructure that favours machine intelligence and artificial organisms (and our urban environments could soon be more conducive to artificial than biological life), we're looking at stripping the human experience from much of its natural territory. And we could also be moving towards eroding the possibility of human transcendence in a world where a "flesh robot" eventually dominates the reality consensus?
Currently we are seeing an unprecedented migration of humanity from the physical space to an embedded digital environment of surveillance and technocratic social management. Upcoming generations may not recognise any fundamental difference between the digital-sphere and the physical world. For them the integrated digital-physical-sphere may be their only reality if they have been born without the offline-online distinction. The world that many of us still recognise today as being human may never be the same again as we migrate from "childhood" to being "users" who inhabit whole new machine-driven "realities". Connectivity is set to be increasingly part of this new power structure with rights of access quite probably a matter of consensus "health security". And such alignment would likely require us to opt in to the sanctioned and on-surveillance connections (the new cartography of "human reality"), making any opting out almost an impossible alternative for those wishing to live off-line.
The quarantine lockdowns have served somewhat as living laboratories for a potential "no-touch" future. One sentiment abroad identifies a growing inclination towards contactless technology on the grounds that humans are biohazards and machines are not. There has also been an increasing trend of collaboration between governments and the large private tech companies with a view to creating more "seamless integration" between the service operations of education, health and policing...all integral parts of the "frontline pandemic response". Furthermore the individual home now seems targeted to become an enclosed "smart" hub facilitating on-line learning and shopping, home office, telehealth, etc., all as part of an emerging investment environment seeking to convert existing physical-digital infrastructures to "cloud-based" ones running on saturation-level microwave networks. The "cloak and dagger" lure here is that of providing citizens with a securitised "virus-free" landscape. Of course in order to effectively modify and "correct" our behaviour, machine intelligence would need to gather ever greater datasets about each of us. Hence the inevitable increased surveillance inherent in such "smart and secure spaces".
And so the sceptre of Surveillance Capitalism raises its antennae. The rapid rise of data collection for commercial gain sees our lives pervasively rendered as information molded into mere input for the creation of the real product which is the data. People are reduced to "prediction products" designed to anticipate our thoughts and actions for selling on. Frankly what we have here is a parasite feeding on every aspect of every human's experience. And using this free raw material for translation into behavioural data, organisations can intervene in our lives to shape and modify our behaviour to their own commercial benefit. Basically we are being reduced to "batteries" producing datasets for algorithms and machine learning, and most of us are unknowingly funding our own manipulation.
The underlying goal more and more seems to be to manufacture a new standardisation of the human body and mind through such technocratic normalisation and the deliberate breaking up of social groupings. With the encroachment of socially managed interventions, people are being made vulnerable to increased destabilising of the human self. In short order the human sense of self and identity is becoming a fragile thing as it is both increasingly scrutinised and analysed and criticised through social media, and modified through surveillance capitalism. And as these rather predictable post-pandemic landscapes roll out further into our social environments, we are likely to see an ever-greater fragmentation of the human self.
In today's environment we are being inundated with such contradictory information as to leave many of us finding it increasingly difficult to see the underlying patterns and connect the dots. Many are also experiencing forms of cognitive dissonance involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. As a result we have some feeling of mental discomfort which may lead on to an altered outlook in an attempt to reduce the discomfort and restore some balance. However, as our minds desperately seek to do so we may become more prone to accept a coherent picture or closure provided by a structure of orthodox "authority", to the detriment of a healthier seeking of such from within ourselves (through our own resources). An increasing breakdown of social relations within a massively changing human environment could see people's consciousness being further fragmented so that events are largely seen as random rather than interrelated. And if/when virtual distraction in a "safe and secure" home base is on offer to compensate for such lack of meaningfulness, our capacity for critical thinking, perspective observation and intuitive knowing could/will be facing an ongoing onslaught of nullifying behaviour modification.
Already we see public space issues of self-identity becoming a target of division, creating much anxiety, doubt and social polarisation with people psychologically being pushed to submit and accept measures implemented in the "new normal". And the more we acquiesce in these matters, the more likely we are to become vulnerable to further submission and disempowerment. Bureaucratic regimes and administrative structures are set to encroach deeper into our living environment when any new forms of social discipline and collective obedience foster artificial and engineered states of perception. It's looking more like we're now facing into such a time of intense "enforced socialisation" and the only practical response for many to this overwhelming "architecture of oppression" (as Edward Snowden described it) might well be to find and stay within their comfort zones - potentially quite a dead end in terms of personal development.
Unprecedented times for humanity would seem to require an unprecedented response from us. It appears we are now being called upon to accept our individual responsibility to become fully human and not to allow our behaviour to be modified or our self-identities to be splintered. The choices we make at this stage of our history may also be unprecedented in determining our future as a human species. Future generations will depend on us here today to push back against the power machine seeking distanced and disempowered individuals. Could the last chapter of our human story be coming into view? - only time will tell.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
March, 2021.