ecce, post-sapien
(After Ecce, Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1908)
Why do things seem so crazy in the world today? Many feel that nothing seems to make sense anymore. Economic, political and social structures feel out of control. What was once scandalous, unacceptable or sometimes even criminal is now just another day.
What has changed? How did this come to be?
The reason that we can no longer understand our world is because the systems and processes we have previously used to define and organize our society fail us now. Truth is now subjective. Division and difference define identity. Our tools and ways no longer serve the purpose. We struggle as we are without a functioning compass.
Some consider this to be the end of the American empire or the inevitable outcome of a capitalist system.
But I believe it to be something else.
Peter Theil surmised in his book, Zero To One, that we still live in a physical reality defined by the 19th century. The 1800s were an unparalleled era of technological innovation that built much of the world we live in today. Steel. Electricity. The internal combustion engine. Indoor plumbing. Our cities have remained largely unchanged over the past several decades. Yes, the cars are better, and some taller and shinier buildings, but our cities are essentially the same. The roads they drive on are the same. We live much like we did from 1950 onwards - except we all have smartphones now.
The 20th century’s greatest advancements are largely in communications technology. And as Marshall McLuhan correctly posited, the global village has left us exactly as promised - ever connected, yet deeply divided.
One of McLuhan’s final and critically important explorations was the Tetrad of Media Effects, which defines media and its impact on us:
What does the medium enhance?
What does the medium make obsolete?
What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes?
Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad of Media Effects (image courtesy Wikipedia)
I feel we are stuck in McLuhan’s upper-left quadrant - REVERSES. The media and systems that we use today now produce the reverse - or opposite effect of their intention. The media of our time no longer serves us, but in fact, leaves us feeling challenged, confused and increasingly divided - it is clear that our media have indeed reversed as they are pushed to extremes.
What does this mean, exactly? Here are some examples:
Social media gave us the promise of community and connection, but it is rife with division, propaganda, lies, manipulation, surveillance and predatory behaviors.
Deep fakes destroy truth and manipulate reality.
AI has advanced to a point in which it can efficiently replace many human functions, much like how the first machines of the first industrial revolution replaced the human hand or the beast of burden.
Since the development of the integrated circuit (or microchip) in 1958, our lives have increasingly become digital, further enabled by the development of the public internet in the 1990s to the global, digital accelerator of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, in which the developed world experienced a decade’s worth of growth in less than a year.
Not only has the paradigm changed, but we find ourselves caught in between epochs. It is only through the lens of history that we can accurately locate the ushering in of a new industrial revolution; however, I posit that this is not the case for us. Rather, we are at the end of industrial evolution altogether. Our previous world is still close, just out of reach and increasingly so as we try to stretch out our fingers to grasp it, while moving ever farther away from what we once recognized. And what we are moving into, with great speed, is undefined and unknown. Our new rules and ways have not been defined, and we tread water as the current of perceived inevitable advancement pulls us along. Our next evolution is post-sapien. Our next evolution is designed and not at the whim of natural selection and environmental adaptation.
We are different now. What comes next is uncertain. But we are clearly different.
