The Alchemist

Years ago, in an introductory study of religion class our teacher had presented an image to the class.

The image above was painted by the 19th century artist Caspar David Friedrich and was entitled Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.

While the image is often associated with German Romanticism there was a different interpretation of the image: the societal shock after the Second World War with the interpretation itself being akin to this:

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We thought that scientific and technological progress alone would bring about a utopia, but instead the pinnacle of our achievements led to continent-scale warfare, genocide orders of magnitude greater in scope and totality than any previous age and the specter of nuclear war. In the painting the hiker has scaled a mountain... but there's nothing there. And now civilization has scaled incredible peaks in scientific understanding and technological ability but have found its reality falling far short of its promise.

So... now what?
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Of note: the interpretation above can be only very slightly re-worded and describe the current state of civilization as well.

We've wired up the world, connected everyone to everyone, have both made and are making great strides in the fields of computers, biological sciences (both pure and applied) and global connectivity. We thought (some still think) that science and technology alone can save us from all of our problems. But the promised utopia of a smarter, better educated and less militaristic humanity never arrived. We forgot the human element when chasing fantasies of a perfect future and now we find ourselves facing a resurgence of militant nationalism, ignorance, distrust and hatred.

So... now what?

I belive this passage from Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson might hold part of an answer:

"Very good Nirgal. Your sight has such insight. In archetypal terminologies we might call green and white the Mystic and the Scientist. Both extremely powerful figures, as you see. But what we need, if you ask me, is a combination of the two, which we call the Alchemist."

While I'm not sure mysticism is what should be aimed for, there is another ideal we could embrace, and indeed I have already alluded to it in this post: the human element.

I'm not trying to make an appeal to nature but instead the understanding that the human element is just as important in factoring into the trajectory of our collective future than technology on its own.

Why not see the good in humanity, cherish the goodness and nurture it wherever we go? Should we not all strive to be the Alchemist?

A shot in the dark

The digital age has bloomed, and it's a nightmare.

Okay that's probably too melodramatic, but you have to admit that the digital revolution that promised a bright and closely connected future for all of humanity has fallen far short of said promise.

I'm not going to go over the whole bots, cyberwarfare and swatting stuff, many people speak about it better than I ever could. No, what I'm going to talk about is free speech and the new circumstances the digital age has wrought upon it.

Before I continue, I want to bring to your attention to an article written by Zeynep Tufekci at Wired. It's an interesting article detailing how censorship is no longer the sole purview of governments or large corporations and what that implies for the digital age.

If you are unable to read the whole story then at least take this quote to heart:

"The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all."

Thus the new age of censorship, but what of free speech itself?

At the risk of being U.S.-centric (I don't think I have the liberty to talk about other nations), let's go back to the late 18th century U.S. As the Constitution was formed one of the major ideas codified by it was the idea of the freedom of peaceful expression. You could argue against or in favor of an idea or event and -provided you did so peacefully- you wouldn't be arrested or silenced by the U.S. government.

We all know the world was different back then. But let's think for a moment about how different it really was and what those differences meant for the very concept of freedom of expression (including the freedom of speech).

This was an age in which news only traveled as fast as a horse could gallop, a world where electricity -much less communications based on it- was yet to be harnessed, an age where the scope of globalization was limited by sail, carriage and foot.

What did all of this imply for the idea of free expression? It meant nobody, not even the greatest thinkers of the time, could imagine near-instantaneous communication to audiences of millions across a continent, much less the entire world. Nobody could have imagined that wealthy reactionaries could buy up large portions of the fourth-estate known as the press and control it from halfway around the planet. And certainly nobody could have conceived of sockpuppet accounts, weaponized personality profiling or web-bots that a small group of people in Macedonia could use to warp the zeitgeist of an entire country across the Atlantic.

But all of that is possible today thanks to the power of the World Wide Web, and as a result it's changed the context of free expression. Before, it was believed that one person could contribute one voice to the chorus of human rhetoric and only one voice. But with sockpuppets and web-bots it's now possible for a single person to amplify their voice to shout over all objections and concerns.

In other words: free expression today means all expression is free, but some freedom is freer than others -especially if dishonest means are used. And all of this is having a deleterious effect on civilization.

Of course pointing out a problem is easy but it's much harder to come up with solutions for it. It would require action via massive cross-disciplinary research and implementation.

Unfortunately I am just one person in a sea of 7 billion and counting.

The inaugural Post

So, the first post of this blog. What to say?

Well, one thing to get out of the way first: this blog will be political from time to time. Not only in the sense that I hate anglo-libertarianism (the term "Libertarian" originally referred to non-authoritarian socialists) or "capital-fundieism" I sometimes like to say. But it'll also be political in the sense that Nikola Danylov eloquently stated:

...technology, as a bringer of change, is about politics. Because, as my undegraduate textbook defined it, politics is about “who gets what, from whom, under what conditions, and for what purpose.”

So ultimately a blog like this will inevitably be political, such blogs are political by their very nature.

With that out of the way, I also consider myself a bright green environmentalist and somewhat of an appreciator of nature. Also a budding coder (currently learning Ruby, maybe others in the future) at the time of this writing, in addition to being a full-time Linux user.

You'll see posts about those topics and more on this blog. I hope you enjoy them!