People have never been better, here in the Year of Our Simulation 2024, at hating the very forces underlying that simulation; in other words, in hating digital technology itself. And good for them. These technological critics active everywhere do not rely only on lazy, nostalgic and technophobic people to take positions on trends. feelings not anymore. Now they have research papers to back them up. They have bestsellers of the likes of Harari and haid. They have—imagine their presumption—statistics. The children, I don’t know if you’ve heard, are all killing each other.
None of this bothers me. Well, teen suicide obviously is, it’s horrible, but it’s not hard to debunk arguments that blame technology. What is difficult to discredit, and what bothers me, is the only exception, in my opinion, to this rule: the anti-technology argument offered by the modern philosopher.
By philosopher, I don’t mean some writer who spews out statistics about glorified self-help. I’m talking about a ridiculously learned, deeper-level overanalyzer, someone who breaks problems down into their relevant parts so that when those parts are put back together, nothing looks the same. Descartes did not simply say “I think, therefore I am” spontaneously. had to go so far in his head as he humanly could, stripping away everything else, before he could get to his classic phrase. (Besides God. People always seem to forget that Descartes, inventor of the so-called rational mind, couldn’t take God away.)
So for someone trying to mount a case against technology, a Descartes-style line of attack might go something like this: when we dig into the technology as much as we can, eliminating everything else and breaking the problem down into its constituent parts. Where do we end up? Exactly there, of course: in the literal bits, the 1s and 0s of digital computing. And what do the bits tell us about the world? I’m simplifying here, but practically: everything. Cat or dog. Harris or Trump. White or black. Nowadays everyone thinks in binary terms. Because that is what the dominant machinery imposes and reinforces.
Or so says, in short, the most elegant argument against digital technology: “I binarize,” computers teach us, “therefore I exist.” Certain technoliterates have been venturing versions of this Theory of Everything for some time now; Earlier this year, an English professor at Dartmouth, Aden Evens, published what is, as far as I know, his first properly philosophical codification. Digital and its discontents. I’ve had a little chat with Evens. Good boy. He’s not a technophobe, he claims, but still: it’s clear that he is historically distressed by digital life, and he roots that distress in the foundations of technology.
I might have agreed, once. Now, like I say: I’m upset. I am dissatisfied. The more I think about Evens et al.’s technophilosophy, the less I want to accept it. I think there are two reasons for my dissatisfaction. One: Since when do base units of anything dictate the entirety of your top level expression? Genes, the basic units of life, only represent a submajority percentage of how we develop and behave. Quantum-mechanical phenomena, the basic units of physics, do not influence my physical actions. (Otherwise, you’d be walking through walls, when you weren’t, half the time, dead.) So why should binary digits define, forever, the limits of computing and our experience of it? ? When complex systems interact, there is always a way for new behaviors to mysteriously emerge. Nowhere in every bird can the flock algorithm be found! Turing himself said that you can’t look at computer code and know, completelywhat will happen
And two: blaming the 1s and 0s for technology’s discontent treats the digital as an endpoint, as a kind of logical conclusion to the history of human thought, as if humanity, as Evens suggests, had finally achieved the dreams of an enlightened rationality. There is no reason to believe such a thing. Computing was, for most of its history, No digital. And, if predictions of an analog comeback are correct, it won’t remain purely digital for much longer. I’m not here to say whether or not computer scientists should develop chips in an analog way, just to say that, if it happenedIt would be foolish to claim that all the binaries of modern existence, so deeply instilled in us by our digitized machinery, would suddenly collapse into nuance and glorious analog complexity. We invented the technology. Technology does not invent us.