The Techno-Expansivist Manifesto
The best technology-related manifesto you'll read this month!
Quick note: I’m probably going to return to more discussion on kulchur, taste, sociology, aesthetics, and that sort of thing next week. But I needed to write this amid a flash of inspiration, so consider it a rough draft, a work in progress. This is probably the closest thing to a full-blown “Credo” concerning technology that I’ll ever write. My version of an “In This House, We Believe…” sign.
-Kerwin
I. The Fundamental Problem Concerning Mankind’s Progress
The tragic essence of mankind is not found in his limited capacity for knowledge, nor in his creative exhaustibility. Instead, it is found in his unremitting appetite for knowledge and the bottomlessness of his ambitions.
These traits wouldn’t be tragic if they belonged only to some men, but mankind and men are not the same two things, and the former is not merely the sum of the latter’s parts. Men are flesh and blood people. Real guys. “Mankind,” on the other hand, is an abstraction. A spook. And his progress forces adjustments in flesh-and-blood men who would not necessarily want them.
If one segment of mankind, some community of real guys let’s say, decides that they’ve sated all their appetites for the transcendent, established a living routine for themselves, and acquired all the knowledge they ever needed, then that would be wonderful for them. But only for a while, as the story wouldn’t end there. They would have new needs shortly enough, and those needs would sadly have been imposed from without. They might have even achieved some perfect stasis within their environment, as hunting-gathering bands or small horticultural tribes, but their environment will not remain stable. And it won’t remain stable because of all the other segments within mankind who, due to their boundless ambitions, will inevitably encroach upon their way of life. The fellaheen peoples that Kerouac so idolized aren’t allowed to exist in perpetuity. Mankind’s desires and needs, no matter how irrational, will compel these formerly satisfied men to change theirs by way of adjustment. This won’t necessarily be mankind’s intention, but ecology is fragile and resources are scarce.
And it is also this way for the modern man, who may not ever need to adjust much in his life, yet will be compelled to as soon as what seems a greater alternative is presented. He isn’t always forced to adjust to new material conditions, but it’s easy to trigger some untapped yearning inside of him to make him do so. Watch him: every month or two he learns about things that he once never considered possible yet somehow now, as if by magic, cannot live without. He would likely be just fine if the modern world didn’t keep tempting him. But the temptations can’t stop. Even when he feels satisfied, he simply can’t bear the threat of ostracism as the social world keeps changing around him. If he has some perspicacity, he may learn a thing or two about himself as the cycle of desire and satiety progresses. But this knowledge won’t bring him back to where he previously was. No, it will only make him all the more aware of his weaknesses. He worships at the toenails of the inferior god of pleasure, and now he knows it – a feeling that surely fills him with disgust.
Primitives fall in line with mankind because of circumstances imposed from without, while modern man falls in line because mankind exhumes desires shut within him.
Some men don’t want to take their small steps while mankind takes its giant leaps; certainly they’d deny it if you asked them. They just want to stand there athwart history, not even yelling at it to stop. But they can’t, either due to coercion or mere personal weakness.
Other men, however, hold their heads above the rest of mankind. If they prove worthy and find themselves in the right circumstances, then a small number of these men who are attuned to their own creative inexhaustibility and bottomless ambitions can become visionaries. Everyone likes visionaries; even weaklings who tirelessly spend their days convincing themselves they don’t. But the world’s visionaries, despite their own aims, ultimately create the conditions through which the hitherto satisfied men of the world once again become swept up into more untapped desires and needs.
Desires, for visionaries, are satisfied through struggle. Once the visionary has changed the world’s conditions and new desires/needs have been imposed upon the rest of mankind, the new ones must now be attained through systems the visionary has left in his wake: administrations, technical apparatuses, organizations, and bureaucracies. The more mankind yearns and strives for what it has convinced itself it needs, and the more visionaries come along to answer those needs while creating new ones, the more of those systems mankind will have. The visionary brings the telluric cataclysm, and the rest of mankind dutifully goes to work, bringing the erosion and smoothing out the edges.
Example: an ancient man becomes incredibly big and strong. He doesn’t do it because of some technique that was conjured up in the mind of a philosopher. In fact, there is no guidance of received wisdom at all. He does it because a daemon whispered in his ear, “Go pick up that giant rock over there, and then put it down. Yes, yes, and then pick it up again. Ohhh, yes. And then put it down. Do it over and over, twenty times. And you see that little newborn calf over there? You know what to do. Go pick him up and walk around with him. Do it every day, no matter how big he gets.” Then, because these inclinations proved successful at achieving something, whatever our big man was attempting to do (if anything at all), someone will soon harness them. Some poindexter comes along, recognizes what happened, and calls it “progressive overload,” “sets and repetitions,” “time under tension,” and so on. And thousands of years later, it becomes common for every little town to have a building with 50 young men all doing the same thing as our first big man, only with no daemonic energy to guide them, only formulas, techniques, rules, regulations, instructions, and some speakers blaring out a psy-trance remix of an old Eminem song from 2003.
What’s true of bodybuilding is just as true of business. The great captains of their industries – Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Disney, Trump, and McMahon – are stained by the bureaucracies they’ve left in their wake. It isn’t their fault! It’s just the way we pick up and organize the scraps they’ve left. And while so many people, including some famous economists, want to blame “bureaucracy” for stagnation, bureaucracy is an inextricable part of modern life. No one has been able to disprove Max Weber’s observation that it’s the best way our imperfect species can achieve efficiency. It merely doesn’t feel efficient because of the example set by the great men toward whom other men look in awe.
It is God’s great mockery of our species that when we offer our insolent challenges to the stars and propel ourselves upward to satisfy our vaunted ambitions, striating the sky, gliding towards the infinite, our grand successes only sow the seeds of mediocrity and standardization, which fall gently from us like fairy dust to coat the earth.
This morbidly amusing state of affairs is why our greatest prayers are realized in exuberant laughter: we meet our deranged God head on with a sublime madness of our own.
II. The Nature Of Man
So because mankind is never satisfied, even while individual men quite often are, we have a problem. It’s mankind that jostles an actual, flesh-and-blood man about and tells him what he needs to desire and crave, and thus every man walks blindly in the shadow of mankind’s collective ambitions, knowing that he would be blinded far worse by the piercing light from which mankind’s shadow also shields him. He can’t wander alone in the desert, so he is compelled to walk with the herd, whether he wants to or not.
I’m describing the basic effects of technology on individuals.
While most technological alarmists argue that new technologies threaten to destroy our humanity, we techno-expansivists couldn’t disagree more. It would be lovely if technology could do such a thing, because then there wouldn’t be any problem. But our human instincts have proven frustratingly obstinate and will continue to do so. Man is stuck being man. But what is man?
Man is a technological species by his very nature and has always been. There were two great turning points in his development: the first was when homo habilis invented cooking, the manipulation of fire. This technology allowed him to spend less time foraging, chewing, and digesting, and his now-smaller digestive tract allowed his body’s newfound energy to facilitate the growth of the brain. This technology brought homo habilis to homo erectus. The second turning point occurred during the time of homo erectus with the invention of language. Language allowed him to organize more efficient hunting/scavenging raids and organize traveling expeditions that covered greater amounts of terrain than ever, placing him in different environments, forcing him to adapt to them, furthering his evolution. The technology of language brought homo erectus up to homo sapiens. Both of these innovations, importantly, were not imposed upon them by a sovereign environment against which all species are helplessly plastic. They were borne on the wings of cosmogonic eroticism – the elemental erotic attraction that binds the stars to the firmament and the heavens to the earth, and which dwells within the hearts of men more firmly than any other species. Some have called it creative evolution. Others, evolutionary love.
III. Ideologies Surrounding Technology
Mankind’s propensity toward technological innovation thus does not need cheerleading. He simply discovers new things, turns them into techniques, and then formalizes, proceduralizes, and bureaucratizes them. It could not be otherwise. No set of beliefs concerning technology can affect this basic state of affairs one way or another, whether “techno-optimist” or “techno-pessimist.” In fact, many of today’s great computer technology innovators are themselves techno-pessimists. They sit around, saying to themselves, “Oh, dear, we’re creating the technology that will destroy mankind. It will create horrifying disasters, the likes of which even our most horrifying science fiction fantasies could never have imagined. How awful.” These are the thoughts they have during their lunch break! And then, it’s back to work, creating The Machine that may or may not wreak the havoc they’re predicting.
I suspect technologists love apocalyptic fantasizing so much because they want to convince themselves of their own great importance in the scheme of things. The hostile AI who wipes out the human race is a projection of the nerd’s feelings about his own latent, hidden power – power that the rest of the world cannot see as he stumbles and bumbles about through life, hemming and hawing his way through awkward conversations, alienating women everywhere. But regardless of the place from which their bloodyminded yarns are spun, these geeks will continue to program and code until the cows come home and the eschaton is reached, regardless of their own nagging feelings, only because they know no other way.
Ideologies that encourage the development of technology resemble a man who cannot control his untrained dog, then decides that whatever his dog happens to do is what he wanted all along. Accelerationists are particularly bad offenders in this regard.
Ideologies that draw attention to the downsides of technology are similarly useless, though they at least can give us a sense of what we have lost amid the mania surrounding the excited speculations about the future, not to mention the latest new gadgets the marketplace dangles before us.
There are three major problems with their critical stance, however. The first is in their limited understanding of what technology actually entails. Not all are guilty of this, but enough for it to be an annoyance. For instance, one might bemoan the decline of rituals, or mantras, or theurgy, and then cite “technology” as the culprit for their demise, without realizing that all three of those things – rituals, mantras, and theurgy – are themselves technologies that work perfectly well, if one correctly assesses their value and meaning.
(The attitude of techno-expansivists is that rituals, mantras, and theurgy are all on the table and never left. We’ll get to that eventually.)
The second problem is that they offer no pathway forward. Though his thinking was among the clumsiest, the Unabomber at least tried to come up with ideas for destroying the entire industrial technological apparatus. He also claimed, correctly, that most techno-critical writings function as a kind of therapy session for distraught men with a nostalgic streak. One reads the book, thinks, “Ah, yes, it’s so true. The conditions we are in have become unlivable. Why, we don’t even feel anymore. Remember when we used to feel?” and he then finds himself newly blessed with the patience to go back to work and push buttons on his keyboard for another eight hours.
The third problem with ideologies that pooh-pooh the progress of technology is that they only view the subject from the standpoint of mankind, which as we’ve established doesn’t really exist as a corporeal entity. In fact, the idea that technology “progresses” at all can only come from mankind’s point of view. It can’t possibly come from yours, or mine, or Jim’s, or Susan’s, or Mortimer’s, or Cordelia’s, because we’ve all found ourselves thrown into a world whose extant technologies float about on the periphery of our experiential horizons, available for our potential use, waiting for us to seize upon them. Whether or not one is “recent” should have no bearing on any individual, because prior to his existence, there was nothing as far as he was concerned. All the available technologies reveal themselves as the individual discovers them, and if he cannot understand the technique behind the various technological products he uses, those techniques that engendered them may as well be pure magic. He is not engaging with that technology; rather, the technology is engaging with him.
IV. What Is Techno-Expansivism?
Pardon the italics back there – the conceit of the last sentence is so well-known that it has almost become cliché. But it needs to be understood properly. From any individual’s honest, non-abstract perspective, technological progress cannot exist outside of him. Disagree all you like, but if you can’t approach this subject with just a bit of well-placed tactical solipsism, you will take far more for granted than you realize. A cellular phone may be a byproduct of technology, but it sure isn’t “technological progress.” If all you can do is pick it up and play around with its user-friendly app interface, then you are not being particularly technical. You certainly didn’t build or program it, and in failing to engage with it actively and technically, you neglect your God-given gifts as a man, a chiefly technological being. Such passivity means that you are being played like an instrument. And who is doing the playing? The machines? Artificial Intelligence? Those damn data-miners? The CIA? No. You’re being played by mankind, the demanding yet necessary shadow of progress whom you must follow or die.
(By the way, the enemy of flesh-and-blood men in every “evil robot” sci-fi movie is, in fact, mankind. The techno-gnostic dystopia is mankind’s invention. The AI is an extension of his intelligence. Informative media are an extension of his senses. And mankind’s technology can therefore exploit flesh-and-blood men by rendering them inert and passive. Remember: mankind is a spook, and all spooks are inherently parasitic to a greater or lesser degree. Technology, too, is a spook.)
Now, continuing from this perspective, if you figure out, say, how to plant and grow a garden, then that is a genuinely new technology, because it’s new to you. It’s a technology you are engaging with at the tactile level, and in the process of your engagement, you come to understand it. Your cellular phone isn’t “new technology,” because it isn’t really new, and it might as well not even be technology. You push buttons on it with less technical sophistication than that of a savage sharpening a stick to hunt some wild game. But as you continue to tend to this garden, you develop and refine your technique in maintaining it, and only when you feel yourself going on “autopilot” do you cease to be engaging with the activity technically — a well-earned kind of passivity.1
Techno-expansivism is a way of thinking designed to keep flesh-and-blood men grounded on this earth, mindful of who they are and what they’re doing, and attuned to their own technological mode of being, not mankind’s. With a techno-expansivist sensibility, man can extract techniques from himself as a carnal entity and orient himself properly to all the potentially parasitic tools and products that are so lazily described as “technology” but which might as well be sorcery. With this proposed way of thinking, man can remain conscious of their artifice and use them purposefully rather than be used by them.
In this way, techno-expansivism can be understood as a kind of meta-technology. It’s a technology that allows flesh-and-blood man to negotiate his status in relation to mankind. Mankind has produced a wide array of technological artifacts, but if flesh-and-blood man hasn’t devised an approach to extract the greatest yield from them, they may turn into little more than parasitic trinkets and baubles that corrode his inner essence.
Techno-expansivism is not a heroic way of thinking, though it could lead to heroism. It doesn’t care for the fate of mankind and has almost no collectivist inclinations. It does encourage the creation of teams, groups, clubs, parties, and so on, but only insofar as those things help the individual flesh-and-blood man. It is rather a resuscitative way of thinking, something that overlaps with one of Democritus’s great philosophical aims, namely, care of the soul. Above all else, it is a preventative against self-deception, since man needs to satisfy his desires through experimentation and discovery. Simply bearing in mind that the use of a technological artifact itself has nothing to do with technology goes a long way.
V. Various Principles (Incomplete List)
Here are some guiding principles behind techno-expansivism, in list form, since I’m sensing this essay is starting to wear out its welcome:
1. Techno-expansivism holds that the human body is the measure of all things, and what’s corporeal must be taken at the corporeal level. Technical engagement with the world around you is a primarily tactile phenomenon. When man answers his calling as a technological being, the hand is his primary organ of experience, not the eyes or ears.
(For this reason, incidentally, techno-expansivists hold the metric system in contempt and praise the imperial system. Americans and the Myanmarese have been given a head start in reorienting themselves to their surroundings on techno-expansivist lines. Meters, liters, and grams belong to mankind, not man. They attempt to standardize us into a way of seeing the world that has nothing to do with our own native faculties and surroundings. Millimeters, centimeters, meters, and kilometers do not correspond to anything physical. In the imperial system, by contrast, a foot is about the length of a human foot. A yard is about the girth of a man’s waist. A barleycorn is about the length of, well, a barleycorn. A furlong is the distance a team of oxen can plough before they get tired. And so on. These aren’t precise correspondences, and one such system couldn’t line up perfectly with another. But no matter. They’re correspondences rooted in the physical world. Mankind must be precise and standardized. Man just needs to make things work.)
2. Techno-expansivists agree with Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that media form extensions of mankind’s five senses. We also agree with McLuhan’s expansive understanding of what the word “media” entails, including not just the newspaper and internet, but also light bulbs, motor vehicles, and drugs. However, techno-expansivists posit a rough center to man’s experiences that media exposure can obstruct and obscure without proper orientation, causing him to fall out of alignment and lose his sense of self. When constantly encountering distal phenomena via some medium, a man can spread himself too thin. Techno-expansivism is thus anti-deconstruction, since deconstruction posits that all communication is a supplement to a supplement to a supplement, etc., and there is thus no conceivable center of meaningful experience/communication.
3. Given numbers 1 and 2, it will come as no surprise that techno-expansivists contend that three-dimensional space is the primary plane of flesh-and-blood man’s experience, while the internet is increasingly becoming the space in which mankind dwells. There’s a book called The King’s Two Bodies. It’s about how the medieval church held that each king had two bodies: a physical body, and a “body politic,” the one being carnal, the other abstract. As the king of your own world, three-dimensional space is the carnal one you inhabit, while digital space is the abstract one. The inventions of the lens and screen have allowed us as flesh-and-blood men to see further than we ever thought possible, especially with the advent of electricity, but they also turn each of us into a cyclops, robbing us of depth perception. There are many self-styled techno-optimists who seem to think that mankind can one day program a computer game so amazing that the digital experience will altogether supplant the carnal one, answering to human needs that were hitherto considered only answerable in carnal space.2 Well...! Who knew it could be so easy to morph into Homo Bugmanicus! Suffice to say, we are not holding our breath.
4. Techno-expansivism praises the concept of docta ignorantia, or “learned ignorance.” When Nicholas of Cusa first coined the term, he was describing the ignorance one must acquire to properly appreciate the way both God and the physical universe are themselves immeasurable, with a center everywhere, and a circumference nowhere.3 We aren’t as lofty in our use of the concept. The landscape of electronic media is non-linear and immeasurable in a more instantly recognizable way than the carnal world, with its own center everywhere and margins nowhere. For that reason, the techno-expansivist strives to acquire a certain conscious ignorance when engaging with any phenomenon encountered in this landscape. He reminds himself of the disjunction between himself in three-dimensional space and what he’s encountering in virtual space. Further, he sees it as wiser still to know when a phenomenon should be altogether ignored. The techno-expansivist works just as hard to decide upon what he should ignore as he does to learn what he deems necessary to know.
5. The techno-expansivist has no problem engaging in purposeless tinkering and experimentation in the physical world as a way of initiating a process of understanding. Randomness and chance are considered aids to technical knowledge. In the beginning of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, the wandering samurai throws up a stick into the air, deciding that wherever it points, he’ll go in that direction. This is a techno-expansivist approach.
6. A cardinal sort of technology for the techno-expansivist is collective mnemotechnics, the practice through which groups of men stay mindful of who they are and what their purpose is. As I said in some previous writing,
The digital landscape is an abstract one in which ideas of all forms endlessly present themselves to an individual and then fizzle out as fast as they had arrived — not necessarily because they are no longer available, but rather because the individual has become distracted by something else and has moved on. The internet is loaded with nearly all the information from our known universe, but its widespread availability is not conducive to any kind of collective memory. Memory must be limited by the contours of time and distinct experience, and thus it will always stand opposed to the universalism that the “world wide web” entails.
Collective mnemotechnics involves methods of preserving important narratives and ideas concerning a group, and these methods almost always involve some interaction with the real world. Dietary regulations, dress regulations, tokens placed on the body (rings, tattoos), ritualized prayer, and literary canons all fall under this category.
7. Techno-expansivism takes seriously the potential value of hermeticism, magic, theurgy, astrology, and other assorted fringe/kook sciences rooted in tradition, as well as entheogenic drug use, because even if these things fail to achieve their intended purpose, one might still extract from them some valuable insights into his orientation toward the carnal world (provided, of course, he doesn’t permanently wreck his own mind, which is quite possible). Iamblichus’s ideas on ritualized cosmogony are relevant here. So are the meditative practices recommended in the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, like the one where the student goes outside, spins himself in a circle a bunch of times, and then falls down on the grass – the delirium opening him up to receive the wisdom of Shiva.
8. The techno-expansivist works to keep himself open to daemonic influence. He tries to acquire a sense of smell for such things.
9. Despite being centered on the care of the individual and his soul, techno-expansivism acknowledges the need for camaraderie and fellowship. There is no greater symbol than man’s inextricable need for connection to other beings than the umbilical cord; no one is ever born alone. Despite revisionist assertions to the contrary, the early British liberals understood this well, as did the enlightenment intellectuals who gathered in coffee shops to discuss their ideas. Techno-expansivists, in this sense, share their temperament. They recognize that social organization is a technology, and furthermore one that cannot be discarded. Socializing moreover requires rituals and procedures if it is to be effective, and these are all technological. Unlike the political left, who regularly invoke the importance of organization as a means of enacting social change, techno-expansivism believes in experimenting with human organization just for the hell of it. Organize people for no reason other than to have fun! Or do it for a specific reason. It don’t matter.
10. Techno-expansivism has no concerns at all about “enframing” in Heidegger’s sense of the term. Go ahead and enframe things. Enframe them before you even know what you’re enframing them for. Use your hands to molest and fondle nature, she won’t mind. A great man once said, “Where man is not, nature is barren.” Was he right? It doesn’t matter. From one’s own limited perspective, he might as well be.
Alright, that’s it. The manifesto is done. This is no conclusion; only a commencement.
Go forth.
I made fun of bodybuilding back in Part I, but given its status as a technology of the body, going and doing that, even though you’re just applying pre-written programs and methods, is a far better realization of your calling as a technological being than engaging with “the latest technology.”
They are, it must be noted, far more aligned with deconstruction than they realize.
So when man considers an object within the universe, he must take into consideration his own inability to apprehend its infinitesimal details and broader place within the cosmos, in the same way that he cannot apprehend God’s characteristics. Thus he can reconcile in his mind how the carnal universe is a contracted image of God, who is the limitless Maximum of all things.