The question concerning technology does not merely concern human artefacts, but it is also a question of ethos, of reverence, of gratitude. We forget to hold our phones as miraculous shrines that incapsulate sound from one side of the globe and transfer it to the other; to fly across countries realising we are merely mimicking the flight and composition of birds; to turn the lights on reminiscing the struggles of fumbling in the heart of the night, whilst the aid of sunlight is brought to life on command. Thanks to human brilliance, life is made easy by artifice. It is made easy, but not simple. Through technology, we have accommodated our needs and dangerously transformed them into necessity. The attitude of humanity remains stolid in the face of the wonders it has created. In the words of Hannah Arendt, ‘’the more highly developed a civilisation […], the more it will resent everything it has not produced’’ (1951). Everything that humankind has not produced or created, but merely received as an element of its environment has increasingly become stigmatised within the contemporary construction of our reality, where technic has come to prevail as an absolute language. By distancing ourselves from our given environments, we have come to despise those things that are outwith human control, irreducible to technical solutions. This moment in time can be seen as a crisis of reality, where the lack of imaginative and creative power leads us to a view of our world that is sterile, disintegrating, unchangeable. We should never forget, on the other hand, that it is always in our power to reimagine and thus recreate alternative reality systems: renewing our cosmologies can radically give birth to new ways of conceiving of our individual existences, as well as organising our socio-political lives.
It is true that throughout our existence, we take place: we cross sites, navigate geographies, belong to expansions by ‘’taking place’’. Thus, by contributing, changing, affecting our environments. Every action, no matter how small, has an impact that never truly transcends its space: even a prayer for instance, remains rooted in the territory of its utterance or contemplation, which in turn becomes a sacred space. We make place, as we take it. The dangers of technology are that it gives us the illusion of transcendence, where space becomes meaningless as we create a global network of scientific, political, technological, administrative that are thought to address the environmental catastrophe we have created, as well as aid our survival in the world. However, we have yet to learn that a dynamic ‘system’ such as nature cannot be managed as if it were a machinery system: by translating all we know to the language of science and technology, we overlook the very needs of our biosphere. We must remember that nature, society and machines require different languages. From here, the distinction between ‘complexity’ and ‘complication’. In the words of Kvaløy Setreng (2000), ‘complexity’ is the ‘’dynamic, irreversible, non-centrally steered, goal-directed, conflict-fertilised manifoldness of nature and the human mind/body entity’’. On the contrary, ‘complication’ is the ‘’static, reversible, externally and unicentrally steered, standardised structure-intricacy of the machine’’. Whilst complexity is merely a property of the natural world, where ecosystems are intertwined and co-dependent, different species and languages survive amongst each other, complication is the man-made construction of a reality where the standardisation of scientific and technological language is applied to all things. We expect to treat the brain as though it were a computer. We wish to solve homelessness by applying spikes to park benches. We cure depression with chemicals, rather than looking to the greater environment of reasons and causes within which this happens. If we limit ourselves to the complications we create, rather than recognising and accepting the potentially enriching complexity of our world, then we will constantly live in a world of edges and obduracy where technological-fixes become the only way of solving our problems, yet creating more on the long run. Although we are systematically taught to accept the age of technologisation and computerisation as something intrinsically positive, we must not forget to balance its scientific and developmental advantages to its social, political, ecological risks. The way we ease a complicated world can shine light on the way we overlook the possibilities of the reality that surrounds us, helping us consider the political and social consequences of such devices and ‘augment’ our reality without resorting to digital means. To be easy is not to be simple: sometimes the small rituals of cutting wood or lighting a fire to keep warm and cook food can help us feel awe at the magic of a mobile phone that can reach the opposite side of the globe. Our brains are not machines, and as such it remains in their deepest power to break through the language of our times and touch the flesh of another world.
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