My personal failure: Know Thyself series

I have brought great dishonour to my family

The world if I had finished this essay series

My Great Shame

At the start of this year, I promised a new essay series on the topic of self-knowledge in the digital/AI age but failed to deliver to date.

With only two short weeks left of 2024, I thought I better explain myself…

Simply, I procrastinated writing this series because, as my research has continued, the task has simply been too daunting.

It's something I've realised the more you study human beings is that we are endlessly complex and that through us, we get to the complexity of the entire of reality.... and then when you throw in the planetary scale technological revolution of the digital world and post-apocalyptic sci-fi visions of artificial intelligence etc. You're pretty close to talking to shit to say you’ve got all that figured out..

We Need a New Kind of Literacy

But I am an optimist by nature and think that there is an opportunity for profound self-correction and, hence, transformation in the strange situation we have found ourselves in: building a giant mirror to look upon ourselves. That is, if we don't fall in love with our reflection first.

The so-called attention economy could be the perfect opponent for a planetary scale upgrading of self-awareness and understanding ourselves in a deeper way than ever before, motivated by necessity. Simply put, we have no other choice. The wolves are not only at the door; they're in your pocket, mediating your relationships and re-organising economics, politics and the social order globally. These are seriously upgraded wolves.

To deal with the absurd situation we have put ourselves in, we need our own upgrade in consciousness, which requires a new kind of literacy. What my friend Mitja Cernko called 'human literacy': part philosophy and mythology, part technology and computer science, part cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience.

Human literacy as a subject is a meta-subject, cutting a through-line between the sciences and humanities; it will need to account for many levels of analysis, develop common language and concepts, and adjudicate metaphysical, ethical and epistemological disputes. I'm too stupid to do it, but I think in many ways, in weird corners of the Internet, this field is forming anyway to address the pressing need.

The goal of the subject should be developing and teaching a model of humanity (a levelled account of the self), and of the digital world (the physics of digital platforms), and hence what the digital world is doing to us. As Caroline Busta wrote in the fantastic article “Holographic Media”:

“To gain agency in today’s media space, you need to overcome the physics of its software”Caroline Busta

The point of this project is to aid individuals and communities cultivation of morally grounded meta-cognition in the digital age, or as it’s also been known: Wisdom. The massive increase in complexity created by the digital transformation needs to be met with a corresponding increase in wisdom, which is the ability to handle complexity (I wrote more about wisdom development in this essay here). It is through wisdom that we could become truly amphibious, capable of operating in the digital and physical realms with minimal nastiness (this might also be the way to get web 2.0 companies to drop a lot of the nastiness by becoming a market of more sophisticated digital beings).

Why do we need a new literacy?

Here is the pitch for why we need a new human literacy. Jack Dorsey inadvertently got to the point last June when he said:

"This is going to sound a little bit crazy, but I think the free speech debate is a complete distraction right now. I think the real debate should be about free will...we can feel it right now, because we are being programmed...”

The ethical and philosophical problem is that when you put people in an environment, the environment starts to regulate their action selection. We outsource self-control to the context, which determines our habits over time, and our habits determine who we will become. The digital world has reshaped our psychology, like how the air gave wings to the birds, or water gave gills to the fish; but we are “devolving”, becoming reduced versions of ourselves, what White calls the character of a “Techno-wanton” or what Tristan Harris titled “human downgrading”.

We all recognise the current way the digital is shaping us isn't good, but what's the alternative? This is the real problem we are contending with philosophically, ethically, and theologically in the digital world - in a fully man-made environment, we have taken on the role of the arbiters of the final definition of humanity, and what should we be? We are now steering individual and cultural evolution based on pure math... and I don't see the tech heads grappling with that responsibility. The AI people seem to think we'll invent some super intelligence, and this will be the dictator at the top of the digital tyranny that can curate everything for us and tell us what is truly good - but either way, the question is the same: if we could wish to become anything, what should we be?

My vote is to be wise and discerning, but that’s hard to monetise (possibly even mathematise). But as we put people in computationally defined spaces and automate these spaces with AI, not to mention make these spaces essential for participation in economics, politics, the social world, then we are approaching the possibility of true digital tyranny (which might already be the case). Tyranny in the sense of a system of control that people have not consented to be a part of and which is shaping them in ways they do not want to be shaped or that is ultimately not in their best interest i.e human downgrading.

If my hypothesis is correct, the alternative is the divine model (to borrow a term from Plato), an account of human upgrading. To understand we are losing free will, we need an account of free will. To understand we are losing morality, we need an account of morality. To understand we are losing our humanity, we need an account of humanity. We have no meter stick for our personhood in the current intellectual paradigm, and so the attention-modifiers can continue their untrammelled human programming project unseen.

In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes - Judges 21:25

The New Advent of The Sacred

I’d like to end on a note of hope and dramatic irony.

In times of war, there is a stage when the entire economy becomes devoted to the maintenance of the war machine, called a total war economy. The digital attention economy is leading us towards a total addiction economy, whereby the aim of the companies competing in the economy is the addiction of the widest possible population. They can’t stop doing this because they will lose out to whoever does. Economically, their hands are tied. So, if addiction goes global - what comes next?

I read a great Twitter quote recently I think that sums up the answer,

“The worst part about drug addiction is ending up religious…”

In line with needing to re-discover the divine model as a meter-stick for the digital world, maybe what comes on the other side of the total addiction economy is John Vervaeke’s new advent of the sacred. It’s a needs-must type deal. We got everybody strung out on instant gratification, and automated our natural stupidity with artificial intelligence, and now we need a spiritual intervention to get us off our path of technological self-destruction. The result of the addiction economy may be a return to the Sacred, poor and humbled, like the prodigal son, and maybe that’s something worth celebrating.

So he got up and went back to his father. While he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him. His son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I no longer deserve to be called your son.’ But his father ordered his servants, ‘Quickly bring the finest robe and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Take the fattened calf and slaughter it. Then let us celebrate with a feast, because this son of mine was dead, and has come to life again; he was lost, and has been found.’ Then the celebration began. — Luke 15:20-24