The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet

ISBN 9788897233008
274 Pages – Format: 6″ x 9″ – $17.90 (discounted on Amazon)

It is nearly half a century since Marshall McLuhan pointed out that the medium is the message. In the interim, digital technologies have found an irresistible hook on our minds. With the soul’s quest for the infinite usurped by the ego’s desire for unlimited power, the Internet and social media have stepped in to fill our deepest needs for communication, knowledge and creativity – even intimacy and sexuality. Without being grounded in those human qualities which are established through experience and inner exploration, we are vulnerable to being seduced into outsourcing our minds and our fragile identities.

Intersecting media studies, psychology and spirituality, The Digitally Divided Self exposes the nature of the malleable mind and explores the religious and philosophical influences which leave it obsessed with the incessant flow of information.

I am deeply touched and extremely grateful to the people who took the time to read, support and endorse The Digitally Divided Self. Being my first English book, and basically self-published, I didn’t expect to receive many reviews, much less from such leading thinkers and writers – nor such positive responses.

It was also a surprise to find common interests around eastern spirituality with so many people into technology and media. This makes me hopeful for an evolution of the information society – from chasing external stimulation to inner explorations and silence.

Detailed table of contents, introduction and chapter 1.

Order on Amazon.

Praise for Digitally Divided Self

 “Quartiroli’s The Digitally Divided Self is a must read for anyone seeking to understand the ever-increasing hegemony of the digital world in the individual psyche. Drawing on diverse fields and traditions, the author analyzes numerous mechanisms by which IT separates us from ourselves. Readers stand to benefit from such an understanding that is a prerequisite for mounting a defense of one’s individuality.” —Len Bracken, author of several novels and the biography Guy Debord—Revolutionary

 ­“With great insight, Ivo Quartiroli captures the subtle as well as the gross impact that media use has on our individual and collective psyches. The challenge before all of us is how to adapt to the new technology in a healthy way that allows us to retain our essential humanity. He offers us a solution born of his experience and confirmed by neuroscience. This is a must read.” —Hilarie Cash, PhD, co-founder of reSTART: Internet Addiction Recovery Program

 “It is difficult to offer a spiritually based critique of today’s network culture without sounding like a nostalgic Luddite crank. Immersed in the tech, but also in various meditative traditions, Ivo Quartiroli is the perfect person to offer integral wisdom-tech with clarity and bite.” —Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis and Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica.

  “Aware of the profound and rapid psychological and social metamorphosis we are going through as we ‘go digital’ without paying attention, Ivo Quartiroli is telling us very precisely what we are gaining and what we are losing of the qualities and privileges that, glued as we are to one screen or another, we take for granted in our emotional, cognitive and spiritual life. This book is a wake-up call. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates should read it.” —Derrick de Kerckhove, Professor, Facoltà di sociologia, Università Federico II, Naples, former Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology.

 “The Digitally Divided Self alerts us about the insidious dangers of our growing dependence on Information Technology. Ivo Quartiroli warns us that Internet can easily develop into an addiction that undercuts our connections with nature, with other people, and with our deeper inner reality. The spiritual nourishment coming from genuine relationships is then replaced by the empty calories of fake relationships, with the resulting deterioration of our personal and social lives. Using an incisive style, Ivo Quartiroli can be provocative, iconoclastic, at times exaggerated, but never boring. Behind each observation there are pearls of wisdom that are guaranteed to make you think.” —Federico Faggin, designer of the microprocessor.

 “Global culture is not only the latest step in the human evolutionary journey. It is also, as Ivo Quartiroli shows in The Digitally Divided Self, a critical opportunity to apply non-Western techniques of awareness to ensure healthy survival in the 21st century.” —Michael Heim, author of The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, Virtual Realism, and Electric Language.

 “Question the merits of technology in the past and you’d be called a Luddite. But now technologists are leading the way toward a new, more balanced view of our gadget-driven lives. Drawing from his fascinating expertise in computer science and spirituality, Ivo Quartiroli presents a compelling critique of the corrosive impact of the Net on our humanity. It’s a warning we must heed.” —Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.

“A profoundly premonitory vision of the future of the 21st century, The Digitally Divided Self unlocks the great codes of technological society, namely that the very same digital forces that effectively control the shape and direction of the human destiny are also the founding powers of a new revolution of the human spirit.” —Arthur Kroker, author of The Will to Technology and Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory.

 “People today, especially young people, live more on the Internet than in the real world. This has subtle and not-so-subtle effects on their thinking and personality. It is high time to review these effects, to see whether they are a smooth highway to a bright interconnected future, or possibly a deviation that could endanger health and wellbeing for the individual as well as for society. Ivo Quartiroli undertakes to produce this review and does so with deep understanding and dedicated humanism. His book should be read by everyone, whether he or she is addicted to the Internet or has second thoughts about it.” —Ervin Laszlo, President, the Club of Budapest, and Chancellor, the Giordano Bruno Globalshift University.

 “The Mind-Body Split is a pervasive condition/affliction in the developed world, wholly un-recognized; yet fundamental to the great worldwide problems of health, environment, and economic inequity. Ivo Quartiroli’s Digitally Divided Self masterfully examines the effects of the insulated digital experience on the mind and the body self: exacerbating illusions and the Mind-Body Split; and contrasts it to the processes of self-discovery, growth, and healing: true inter-connectedness with nature, each other, and our selves. If the digital age is to solve our real problems, rather than create them, it will be with the knowledge contained in The Digitally Divided Self. Well done!” —Frederic Lowen, son of Alexander Lowen, Executive Director, The Alexander Lowen Foundation

 “Ivo Quartiroli here addresses one of the most pressing questions forced upon us by our latest technologies. In disturbing the deepest relations between the user’s faculties and the surrounding world, our electric media, all of them without exception, create profound disorientation and subsequent discord, personal and cultural. Few subjects today demand greater scrutiny.” — Dr. Eric McLuhan, Author and Lecturer

 “The internet is an extension of our central nervous system. When you operate a computer, you are extending yourself, through its interface, potentially all over the world, instantaneously. Extending yourself in such a disembodied, discarnate fashion only further entrenches your separateness, your ego self. In contrast, the introspective freeing from the physical through meditation also has the effect of creating a discarnate, disembodied state. That state is one that is progressively less identified with the ego self. This is the dichotomy that Ivo Quartiroli explores in The Digitally Divided Self. This book is well worth investigating.” —Michael McLuhan

 “We should all be asking the questions Ivo Quartiroli asks in this bold and provocative book. Whatever you think right now about technology, The Digitally Divided Self will challenge you to think again.” —William Powers, author of the New York Times bestseller Hamlet’s BlackBerry

 “It isn’t easy to find an informed and critical look at the impact of digital media practices on human lives and minds. Ivo Quartiroli offers an informed critique based in both an understanding of technology and of human consciousness.” —Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs.

 “Ivo Quartiroli is mining the rich liminal territory between humans and their networks. With the integrity of a scientist and the passion of artist, he forces us to reconsider where we end and technology begins. Or when.” —Douglas Rushkoff, Media Theorist and author of Cyberia, Media Virus, Life, Inc. and Program or Be Programmed.

 “You might find what he writes to be challenging, irritating, even blasphemous and sacrilegious. If so, he has proven his point. The Internet, Ivo suggests, might just be the new opium of the masses. Agree with him or not, no other book to date brings together the multitude of issues related to how the seductions of technology impinge upon and affect the development of the self and soul.” —Michael Wesch, Associate Professor of Digital Ethnography, Kansas State University

  “The Digitally Divided Self is a refreshing look at technology that goes beyond the standard, well-worn critiques. Ivo Quartiroli charts new territory with a series of profound reflections on the intersections of computer science, psychology and spirituality.” —Micah White, Senior Editor at Adbusters magazine.

Detailed table of contents, introduction and chapter 1.

Order on Amazon.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: From Awareness of technology to technologies of Awareness .. 1
Chapter 2:“It’s only a tool” .. 17
Chapter 3: The Roots of It .. 39
Chapter 4: The Digitization of Reality .. 53
Chapter 5: Intimacy and Sexuality.. 73
Chapter 6: Commoditizing and Monetizing.. 89
Chapter 7: Politics, Participation and Control .. 97
Chapter 8: Come together: the Rise of Social networks.. 115
Chapter 9: Digital Kids ..125
Chapter 10: Literacy and the Analytical Mind.. 133
Chapter 11: Lost in the Current .. 143
Chapter 12: The Digitally Divided Self.. 165
Chapter 13: The Process of Knowledge .. 189
Chapter 14: Upgrading to Heaven .. 205
Chapter 15: Biting the Snake.. 223
Appendix: The People of Contemporary It and what Drives them.. 233

Introduction

Like many people nowadays, much of my personal and professional life is related to technology: I use the Internet for keeping the connection with my work projects and friends wherever I am in the world. I published the first book in Italy about the Internet. I run a blog and a Web magazine, do my investments online, shop on the Net, do interviews by email and Skype, and have even indulged in cybersex. Right now I’m in Asia developing this book – which is full of references to Web articles, blogs and material found only on the Internet – with online support: an editor and writing coach in California, copy editor in India, book designer in Italy, and a printing and distribution service with multiple locations in USA. My life is immersed in the digital loop.

I have been involved in IT since I was a student. As I learned meditation and explored spiritual paths, I developed an inner observer and discovered states beyond the mind. Thus, I found myself going back and forth between processing consciousness and information. Slowly my focus has shifted from what we can do with technology to what technology does to us. As a first-hand explorer, I’ve observed the subtle changes of our massive use of the Net.

Just as a spiritual researcher can go beyond the mind only after having observed and mastered it, it is necessary to enter the digital world to step beyond it. We can’t become aware of its effects without being engaged in it. Since digital technology is unavoidable now, we need to master it without becoming lost in it, using its tools with our full awareness.

In this time, the intensification of mental inputs is a phenomenon that must be kept in balance. Our contemporary culture does not acknowledge anything beyond the mind, but in other traditions the mental world is just one of the aspects of our wholeness. In the West a sort of Cartesian “pure thinking” has been given priority. Although the mind is the best-known organ of thought, it is not the only cognitive modality. Nervous systems have been discovered both in the heart and in the belly, and the global awareness that can be accessed by spiritual practitioners is pervasive and non-localized. Yet these modalities cannot be represented digitally, so they are relegated to the sidelines.

Our technological society militates against uninterrupted conscious attention. Several authors have documented the effects of IT on attention, literacy and intellectual skills. It also intrudes on the silent time needed to be aware of inner transformations. We don’t realize we have become servomechanisms of IT – precisely because IT has weakened the inner skills of self-understanding. Shrinking of the rich range of human qualities to privilege only those which can be represented and operated digitally arises from the nature of the ego-mind and our particular Western history which has engendered – then valued – mental representations of reality. My focus here is to understand why the mind can be lured by the magic of the tools, while forgetting the person who is using them.

We believe we are empowered individually and politically as we post articles on our blogs and participate in social networks. In actuality, we feed the machine with our “user-generated content” which becomes candy for advertisers who then design ads based on what we say on Twitter, Facebook, and even our emails.

Jumping from information to self-understanding is necessary if we are to regain real freedom, a freedom from conditioning of our mind and the manipulation by information – whether self-created or from external sources. We mistake the transmission of gigabytes of data for freedom.

In our advanced technological society there is a reticence to acknowledge the inner, spiritual or metaphysical dimensions of life. What cannot be calculated – which is, thereby, “not objective” – is considered unworthy of investigation. Even more strongly denied is the relationship between technology and the impact on our psyche. Technophiles declare that it’s only a tool, as if our psyche could remain untouched by continuous interaction with digital media, and as if we could control its impact on us. We can indeed be in control of digital media – but only after we become fluent in those cognitive modalities which can’t be reached by such media.

To be unaffected by digital media, we need a Buddha-like awareness with sustained attention, mindfulness and introspection. Yet these very qualities which are needed to break out of the automated mind are especially difficult to access when we are drowning in information – information that is predominantly ephemeral and transient, and which lacks a broader narrative. Awareness is what gives meaning and depth to information, but for awareness to expand we need to empty our mind. A story will illustrate this. A university professor approached a master to learn about Zen. Tea was served, but when the cup was full, the master did not stop pouring. The cup, like the professor’s mind with its concepts and positions, was full. It must first be emptied to understand Zen. So, too, for the digital world.

The world over, people using the Internet click on the same icons, use the same shortcuts in email and chats, connect with people through the same Facebook modalities. This is the globalization of minds. In the process of the digitization of reality, regardless of content, we use predominantly the same limited mental channels and interact with the same tools. We bring the same attitudes, gestures and procedures to working, dating, shopping, communicating with friends, sexual arousal, and scientific research. And most of these activities are impoverished by this phenomenon. Everything is seen as an information system, from the digitization of territory (like Google Earth and augmented realities software) to our biology.

Judeo-Christian culture places nature and the world of matter at man’s disposal. Acting on them is a way to garner good deeds and regain the lost perfection of Eden. In this culture that has considered miracles as proof of the existence of God, we have developed technologies that resemble the miraculous and the divine. We are compelled to welcome the advent of new technological tools with the rhetoric of peace, progress, prosperity and mutual understanding.

The telegraph, telephone, radio, TV and other media have been regarded as tools for democracy, world peace, understanding and freedom of expression. The Internet is just the latest in a succession of promising messiahs. Yet we don’t have more democracy in the world. In fact, big media and big powers are even stronger, while freedom of expression has ceded to control by corporations and governmental agencies. The Internet, like TV, will be entertaining, dumbing people in their own separate homes where they will be unable to question the system. The Internet might already be the new soma for a society experiencing economic and environmental degradation. But with the huge economic interests connected to it, criticizing its effect is akin to cursing God.

Many technological developments appeal to people because they answer psychological and even spiritual needs – like the quests for understanding and connection with others. Already digital technology has taken charge of truth and love – the drives which are distinctly human. Those primordial needs have been addressed, on the mental level, with information. Reflected only at that level, our soul is left empty with craving for the real qualities, and our mind is left restless, craving more information and chasing after satisfaction in vain.

The need to extend our possibilities through technology derives from the need to recover parts of ourself that were lost during the development of our soul – the states of sharp perception, fulfillment, and peace. Information technology (IT) also satisfies our ancient drives for power and control, even giving us several options with a simple click or touch of a finger.

The endless multiplication of information can keep the ego-mind busy – and thus at the center of the show. IT is the most powerful mental “pusher” ever created, feeding the duality of the ego-mind (which is symbolically mirrored by binary technology). More than TV whose attractions are framed between the beginning and ending time of a show, the Internet, video games, and smartphones have no structural pauses or endings. Hooked on a “real-time” stream of information, they take us farther away from both the real and the appropriate time frames.

The computer charms us by reflecting our mind on the Net. Like Narcissus, we mistake the reflected image and enter a closed loop, charmed by our reflection. The Internet, since the beginning, has been considered a technology which could crumble central governments and organizations. Perhaps that forecast was an external projection of what can happen inside us: disturbance of the integration of our psyches.

Meditation helps us recognize that we construct reality and that the mind leads us astray. Meditation is a path back to reality, to truth, to knowing and mastering our minds – instead of mastering the computer as a way to outsource our mind’s skills. It is a way to expand our awareness and join the other global “Net” – of awareness that permeates everything.

Though I am Italian, I am publishing this book for the English market because it is a post-digital book which can be better appreciated in countries where digital culture has spread throughout society. In Italy, one politically powerful tycoon owns most of the media, and uses it to demonize the Net. In that setting, being critical of the Net invokes the accusation of aligning with power to castrate freedom of expression, which is the polar opposite of my intention.

I welcome every medium which expands our chances of expressing ourselves, but I am aware that true self-expression can happen only when there’s a true self, which can hardly be shaped by screen media.

I am grateful to my spiritual teachers who opened new dimensions for my soul in my journey toward awareness, especially the intensity of Osho and the brilliant clarity of A. H. Almaas. I thank my copy editor Dhiren Bahl (www.WordsWay-Copyediting.com) for his painstaking corrections of my English text and my editor David Carr (www.MovingWords.us) for his clarifications and stylistic improvements. I’m grateful to my friends, too many to list here, for the numerous talks bringing together heart and mind in sharing our passion for truth.

Detailed table of contents, introduction and chapter 1.

Order on Amazon.

Order on Amazon.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: From Awareness of technology to technologies of Awareness .. 1
The Limits of Technology.. 3
What’s Not Computable Isn’t Real .. 4
The Promises of the Early Internet .. 5
From Information Processing to Consciousness Processing.. 6
All in the Digital Mincer .. 7
Technology Can’t be Challenged.. 8
Technology Uses Us .. 10
Feeding the Soul with Bytes .. 11
The Immortal Mind .. 12
Inner Prostheses and Amputations through Technology .. 13
Beyond the Mind.. 14
The Fragility of Beliefs and Information Technology.. 15

Chapter 2:“It’s only a tool” .. 17
Technology is not Questionable .. 18
Knowing through the Body .. 18
Technology “Does” Us .. 19
Technology is a Matter of Life and Death.. 21
Binary and Inner Duality.. 21
Knowing through the Heart.. 22
Our Identity With Tools – from Chimps to Chips .. 25
Reconnecting with the Inner Flow.. 26
From Spectator to Witness .. 28
Inner Holes and Techno-Fills .. 28
Pure Thinking Without the Body.. 30
Tools for Inner Growth.. 31
The Mind Itself is a Medium.. 34
IT Weakens Our Presence .. 36
Constrained to Produce .. 39

Chapter 3: The Roots of It .. 39
Constrained to Produce .. 39
IT was Started by the Bible .. 40
Technology as Returning to the Lost Perfection .. 41
Contradictory Messages Short Circuit the Psyche .. 43
Children of a Lesser God .. 44
Psychological Defenses .. 44
Technology as the Ultimate Savior .. 45
The Nature of the Mind.. 46
Conceptual Debris and Technology as a Holding Agent for the Psyche 47
The Quest for Immortality .. 48
Copying, Improving and Creating Minds.. 50

Chapter 4: The Digitization of Reality .. 53
Data is King .. 55
The Digitization of Territory .. 56
Augmenting Reality .. 57
The Mind as the First Virtual Reality Tool .. 58
The Digitization of Biology .. 59
Analogical Models of Reality .. 64
Our Digital Nervous Systems .. 66
Programming .. 67
Thinking like Software .. 69
Digitizing All Life Events .. 71

Chapter 5: Intimacy and Sexuality.. 73
Eros and the Sexualization of Society .. 74
Cybersex.. 75
The Transformation of Seduction and of Relationship .. 77
Masturbation and Sex Toys.. 78
Orgasm 2.0.. 80
Cybervirgins .. 82
Gender Issues and the Vanishing Male.. 84
Earlier Exposure to Porn.. 85
Desires .. 87
Cybersex as a Tantric Path .. 87

Chapter 6: Commoditizing and Monetizing.. 89
Replacing the Real .. 90
Playing with Feelings .. 90
iMarket .. 92
Brave New World.. 94
Deconstructing Sense and Ethics.. 94
Toward the Denial of Truth .. 95

Chapter 7: Politics, Participation and Control .. 97
The Rulers of Our Psyches .. 98
Governments.. 99
Advertising and Our Attention.. 100
Google .. 101
Wikileaks .. 104
Into Our Digital Persona .. 104
You Can Tell What Somebody is Like by the Company They Keep.. 105
Is the Internet Empowering Us? .. 106
Illusory Participation.. 107
Slacktivism .. 110
The Yogic Geek.. 112
Renouncing the World .. 115

Chapter 8: Come together: the Rise of Social networks.. 115
Renoucing the World .. 115
The Inner Need of Connection and Facebook.. 116
Experiencing for Others to See .. 118
Empathy.. 119
Illusory Contact.. 121
Body/Mind Development in Childhood .. 125

Chapter 9: Digital Kids ..125
Body/Mind Development in Childhood .. 125
Denied Childhood .. 126
Computers in Education .. 127
Lack of Mentors .. 128
Technology as an Answer to Social Fear .. 129
Wired Children.. 130
Sleepless Children .. 132

Chapter 10: Literacy and the Analytical Mind.. 133
Analytical and Critical Skills .. 136
A New Literacy Through eBooks? .. 138
The Reading “Technology” .. 139
Digital Writing .. 140
Communication and the Transformation of Consciousness.. 141
Attend to This! .. 143

Chapter 11: Lost in the Current .. 143
Attend to This! .. 143
Attend to it Now and Forever! .. 145
New is Cool .. 145
Instant Gratification.. 145
Neurological Changes Related to Instant Gratification .. 146
Accepting Emptiness and the Eureka Effect.. 147
Faster and Faster, but just Apparently .. 149
Into the Loop .. 151
Technological Updates and the Right to Silence .. 152
Cogitus Interruptus through Multitasking .. 153
No History, No Narrative, No Past .. 156
Digital and Human Memory.. 157
Addiction.. 158
Awareness of Feelings and Addiction.. 162
Attention .. 165

Chapter 12: The Digitally Divided Self.. 165
Attention .. 165
The Construction of the Self .. 166
Technological Development as a Metaphor of the Psychological One .. 170
Millions of MP3s and the Missing “My Personality” .. 173
Attachment to the Machine .. 173
The Need for Mirroring .. 174
Maternal Feeding and Paternal Limit Setting .. 175
The Sand Castle Crumbles: Toward a Schizoid State.. 176
The Other as Image .. 178
Detaching from the Body .. 179
The Schizoid State is an Ontological Condition .. 181
The Eye, the Ear, and a Global Tribalism.. 181
The Mind as a Medium.. 183
No Identity.. 185
The Reign of Objectivity .. 189

Chapter 13: The Process of Knowledge .. 189
The Reign of Objectivity .. 189
Joining Inner and Outer Knowledge .. 192
Not Knowing.. 195
Words are Second-Best After Silence.. 198
Do We Know with our Brains? .. 200
Externalizing Thinking .. 202

Chapter 14: Upgrading to Heaven .. 205
Creating Consciousness.. 206
Technology as an Ego Maintainer .. 209
IT Beyond Me: Unlinking Ourselves through Technology .. 211
Here and Now.. 213
Devotionally Disappearing into Technology.. 214
The Immortal Mind.. 215
Spiritual Powers through Technology .. 217
Are we Machines? .. 218
The Will to Create Mental Worlds .. 220

Chapter 15: Biting the Snake.. 223
Out of the Loop.. 224
Screen Media vs. Meditation .. 225
Meditation .. 228
IT is basically Counter-Meditative.. 230
Another Maya Layer through Technology .. 231
Charles Babbage.. 233

Appendix: The People of Contemporary It and what Drives them.. 233
Charles Babbage.. 233
Ada Lovelace .. 234
John von Neumann.. 234
Norbert Wiener .. 235
Alan Turing .. 235
Al Gore.. 236
Steward Brand .. 237
Kevin Kelly .. 238
Bill Gates.. 239
Steve Jobs .. 239
Withdrawing into the Mind .. 240
Bibliography .. 241
Index .. 249

Order on Amazon.

Introduction

Like many people nowadays, much of my personal and professional life is related to technology: I use the Internet for keeping the connection with my work projects and friends wherever I am in the world. I published the first book in Italy about the Internet. I run a blog and a Web magazine, do my investments online, shop on the Net, do interviews by email and Skype, and have even indulged in cybersex. Right now I’m in Asia developing this book – which is full of references to Web articles, blogs and material found only on the Internet – with online support: an editor and writing coach in California, copy editor in India, book designer in Italy, and a printing and distribution service with multiple locations in USA. My life is immersed in the digital loop.

I have been involved in IT since I was a student. As I learned meditation and explored spiritual paths, I developed an inner observer and discovered states beyond the mind. Thus, I found myself going back and forth between processing consciousness and information. Slowly my focus has shifted from what we can do with technology to what technology does to us. As a first-hand explorer, I’ve observed the subtle changes of our massive use of the Net.

Just as a spiritual researcher can go beyond the mind only after having observed and mastered it, it is necessary to enter the digital world to step beyond it. We can’t become aware of its effects without being engaged in it. Since digital technology is unavoidable now, we need to master it without becoming lost in it, using its tools with our full awareness.

In this time, the intensification of mental inputs is a phenomenon that must be kept in balance. Our contemporary culture does not acknowledge anything beyond the mind, but in other traditions the mental world is just one of the aspects of our wholeness. In the West a sort of Cartesian “pure thinking” has been given priority. Although the mind is the best-known organ of thought, it is not the only cognitive modality. Nervous systems have been discovered both in the heart and in the belly, and the global awareness that can be accessed by spiritual practitioners is pervasive and non-localized. Yet these modalities cannot be represented digitally, so they are relegated to the sidelines.

Our technological society militates against uninterrupted conscious attention. Several authors have documented the effects of IT on attention, literacy and intellectual skills. It also intrudes on the silent time needed to be aware of inner transformations. We don’t realize we have become servomechanisms of IT – precisely because IT has weakened the inner skills of self-understanding. Shrinking of the rich range of human qualities to privilege only those which can be represented and operated digitally arises from the nature of the ego-mind and our particular Western history which has engendered – then valued – mental representations of reality. My focus here is to understand why the mind can be lured by the magic of the tools, while forgetting the person who is using them.

We believe we are empowered individually and politically as we post articles on our blogs and participate in social networks. In actuality, we feed the machine with our “user-generated content” which becomes candy for advertisers who then design ads based on what we say on Twitter, Facebook, and even our emails.

Jumping from information to self-understanding is necessary if we are to regain real freedom, a freedom from conditioning of our mind and the manipulation by information – whether self-created or from external sources. We mistake the transmission of gigabytes of data for freedom.

In our advanced technological society there is a reticence to acknowledge the inner, spiritual or metaphysical dimensions of life. What cannot be calculated – which is, thereby, “not objective” – is considered unworthy of investigation. Even more strongly denied is the relationship between technology and the impact on our psyche. Technophiles declare that it’s only a tool, as if our psyche could remain untouched by continuous interaction with digital media, and as if we could control its impact on us. We can indeed be in control of digital media – but only after we become fluent in those cognitive modalities which can’t be reached by such media.

To be unaffected by digital media, we need a Buddha-like awareness with sustained attention, mindfulness and introspection. Yet these very qualities which are needed to break out of the automated mind are especially difficult to access when we are drowning in information – information that is predominantly ephemeral and transient, and which lacks a broader narrative. Awareness is what gives meaning and depth to information, but for awareness to expand we need to empty our mind. A story will illustrate this. A university professor approached a master to learn about Zen. Tea was served, but when the cup was full, the master did not stop pouring. The cup, like the professor’s mind with its concepts and positions, was full. It must first be emptied to understand Zen. So, too, for the digital world.

The world over, people using the Internet click on the same icons, use the same shortcuts in email and chats, connect with people through the same Facebook modalities. This is the globalization of minds. In the process of the digitization of reality, regardless of content, we use predominantly the same limited mental channels and interact with the same tools. We bring the same attitudes, gestures and procedures to working, dating, shopping, communicating with friends, sexual arousal, and scientific research. And most of these activities are impoverished by this phenomenon. Everything is seen as an information system, from the digitization of territory (like Google Earth and augmented realities software) to our biology.

Judeo-Christian culture places nature and the world of matter at man’s disposal. Acting on them is a way to garner good deeds and regain the lost perfection of Eden. In this culture that has considered miracles as proof of the existence of God, we have developed technologies that resemble the miraculous and the divine. We are compelled to welcome the advent of new technological tools with the rhetoric of peace, progress, prosperity and mutual understanding.

The telegraph, telephone, radio, TV and other media have been regarded as tools for democracy, world peace, understanding and freedom of expression. The Internet is just the latest in a succession of promising messiahs. Yet we don’t have more democracy in the world. In fact, big media and big powers are even stronger, while freedom of expression has ceded to control by corporations and governmental agencies. The Internet, like TV, will be entertaining, dumbing people in their own separate homes where they will be unable to question the system. The Internet might already be the new soma for a society experiencing economic and environmental degradation. But with the huge economic interests connected to it, criticizing its effect is akin to cursing God.

Many technological developments appeal to people because they answer psychological and even spiritual needs – like the quests for understanding and connection with others. Already digital technology has taken charge of truth and love – the drives which are distinctly human. Those primordial needs have been addressed, on the mental level, with information. Reflected only at that level, our soul is left empty with craving for the real qualities, and our mind is left restless, craving more information and chasing after satisfaction in vain.

The need to extend our possibilities through technology derives from the need to recover parts of ourself that were lost during the development of our soul – the states of sharp perception, fulfillment, and peace. Information technology (IT) also satisfies our ancient drives for power and control, even giving us several options with a simple click or touch of a finger.

The endless multiplication of information can keep the ego-mind busy – and thus at the center of the show. IT is the most powerful mental “pusher” ever created, feeding the duality of the ego-mind (which is symbolically mirrored by binary technology). More than TV whose attractions are framed between the beginning and ending time of a show, the Internet, video games, and smartphones have no structural pauses or endings. Hooked on a “real-time” stream of information, they take us farther away from both the real and the appropriate time frames.

The computer charms us by reflecting our mind on the Net. Like Narcissus, we mistake the reflected image and enter a closed loop, charmed by our reflection. The Internet, since the beginning, has been considered a technology which could crumble central governments and organizations. Perhaps that forecast was an external projection of what can happen inside us: disturbance of the integration of our psyches.

Meditation helps us recognize that we construct reality and that the mind leads us astray. Meditation is a path back to reality, to truth, to knowing and mastering our minds – instead of mastering the computer as a way to outsource our mind’s skills. It is a way to expand our awareness and join the other global “Net” – of awareness that permeates everything.

Though I am Italian, I am publishing this book for the English market because it is a post-digital book which can be better appreciated in countries where digital culture has spread throughout society. In Italy, one politically powerful tycoon owns most of the media, and uses it to demonize the Net. In that setting, being critical of the Net invokes the accusation of aligning with power to castrate freedom of expression, which is the polar opposite of my intention.

I welcome every medium which expands our chances of expressing ourselves, but I am aware that true self-expression can happen only when there’s a true self, which can hardly be shaped by screen media.

I am grateful to my spiritual teachers who opened new dimensions for my soul in my journey toward awareness, especially the intensity of Osho and the brilliant clarity of A. H. Almaas. I thank my copy editor Dhiren Bahl (www.WordsWay-Copyediting.com) for his painstaking corrections of my English text and my editor David Carr (www.MovingWords.us) for his clarifications and stylistic improvements. I’m grateful to my friends, too many to list here, for the numerous talks bringing together heart and mind in sharing our passion for truth.

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Chapter 1: From Awareness of Technology to Technologies of Awareness

Ever since I was a child the mysteries of numbers fascinated me. When I learned about prime numbers at school, I was captivated by those unique, solitary, unpredictable, indivisible odd numbers.

At 12, I desired nothing less than finding their law. A few years later I discovered long series of numbers which were possibly connected to prime numbers. I found the formulas of the first series, but the more complicated ones had many components in individual numbers reaching fifteen digits. Such numbers were beyond the capacity of pocket calculators, so I proceeded manually.

The slow pace of manual calculation allowed me to “feel” numbers, contemplating each one, sensing its relationship to other numbers in the series. At 15, I entered the Philips Contest for Young Researchers and Inventors. There were just a couple of months to prepare my presentation – impossible for me to progress through all the calculations. Yet under the puzzled gaze of my schoolmates, this wild boy turned into a would-be mathematician.

The computational effort took me to the university’s computer center to ask for help. Grounded in comic books, I thought I could “feed” the computer with the numbers in the series and have the formulas delivered. At that time, computer laboratories in Italy looked like any other academic laboratories, with high-level technicians dressed formally. I tried to explain my problem to a few students, who mostly ignored me. A kind employee told me simply that computers couldn’t find the formulas of my series – they could not even add or subtract such big numbers unless they were programmed to. “Oh really? Are computers that dumb?” I wondered.

I understood from her that what I needed was a piece of “software” suited to the problem. “Fine,” I said, “can you make it for me?” She couldn’t, since it had to be designed for the specific problem – and anyway, computer time was very limited, even for students. I returned to manual calculations.

In 1976 computers were as big and unapproachable as the people who worked with them. In time, computers became more user-friendly and much faster – but not less dumb. Concurrently, computer technicians changed from uniforms to casual or messy clothes, though their detached attitude did not noticeably change.

For my research on those series, I was a finalist in the Italian contest – which led to a personal conversation with the president of the Italian CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, National Research Council). He discouraged me from searching for the law of prime numbers as “a waste of time, something which centuries of mathematicians had already tried to find, but nobody could.” I might instead concentrate my energies on developing useful applications in the scientific arena. He introduced me to the reality that research was most welcomed by society when it could be translated into products and money.

What about the fun and enthusiasm I had doing that research? What about the almost mystical states I reached in diving into the mysteries of prime numbers? What about the development of my perseverance in pursuing such a task, even though (or maybe because) it was an impossible one? What about my capacity to tolerate frustration when my long calculations had been faulty from the beginning of the series?

I recognize now that some important inner qualities had been shaped as I chased those prime numbers. I had learned that the path is itself the goal.

Latin putare means “to prune,” “to cut,” “to clean.” In the etymology of “computer” lies its implicit goal: something to accomplish, to complete, a clear-cut result to reach.

Computing, that increasingly-present activity in our lives, has created what I call the “digitization of reality.” Computing wants answers – well-defined results cleansed of “noise” – and it wants them fast.

Descartes, in his Discourse on the Method which shaped Western science, sought a state of pure thinking, free from the body and from feelings – for in his opinion they would distort the scientific quest. He would be proud of contemporary technical developments which allow both scientists and ordinary people to interact with a machine through pure thinking. But if he could peek into this century, I feel he would miss the philosophical and spiritual attitude he had even as a scientist – which is left out of the technological race.

In our rush, everything which can possibly be automated and speeded up becomes digital. Everything which can be represented by bits and bytes is sucked into the digitizing mentality.

I too believed this, when it was time for university, so I went into computer science – partly to fulfill my need to write a program to find the law of my series. In time I stopped chasing prime numbers, but by then I was a programming enthusiast.

What did not change was my propensity for impossible tasks. Since I enjoyed playing the guitar, I wrote a program for creating chords and harmonies. Then, wanting to grab the secrets of guitarists like Jimi Hendrix or Carlos Santana, I translated their improvisations into digital form. After all, I figured, musical scales have a mathematical structure, so if I could decode and deconstruct their creations, then my software could produce amazing new melodies which I could then reproduce on my guitar.

There was still no affordable way to generate good quality sound from a computer, so as output (programming in C language for the UNIX operating system), I had a list of notes, their pitch, duration, and their attributes like sliding or bending – a sort of score I could perform on my guitar. Far from masterpieces, they were funny, like the caricature of a living person.

Meanwhile, I was working for the computer labs of the new computer science faculty in Milan, preferring to learn through practice rather than study for exams. There was a pioneering atmosphere in the very early 1980s – and many of the students later becoming entrepreneurs of the dotcom revolution in Italy.

The peak of impossibility lay in my plan to create an artificial intelligence system, written in the Prolog programming language, to explore people’s psychological patterns in depth – according to various models, both psychological and spiritual. It never went beyond a very initial idea.

The Limits of Technology

In searching for the law of prime numbers, for the secrets of great guitarists’ solos, or for the understanding of the human soul, 25 years ago, I reached what was – and still remains – the limits of computability.

Finding those limits is perhaps the unconscious secret goal of our drive toward technology. Whatever can be made digital is merely a model created by the mind, which the mind itself can reshape or destroy at any moment.

The mind is by nature dualistic, operating within the same binary logic as computers. The dualistic-binary attitude of looking at the world gives both people and computers a powerful discriminating tool – a tool to produce huge amount of data and to act on matter in powerful ways. Through this dualistic mind we can fulfill our highest “mission” – to be masters of nature, as assigned by the scriptures. But matters that are more than mental – artistic creativity, brilliant intuition, feelings of compassion, love, joy, peace, as well as experiencing spiritual states like a no-mind state of deep meditation – cannot be represented in digital form. Though information technology can point to or inform us about those states, more often than not it keeps us stuck looping at the informational level, actually distancing us from them.

As we reach the limits of technology, either it can stimulate our search for something further – jumping from information to consciousness-processing as Peter Russell (1995) defined it – or we can become hypnotized by the infinite forms information can be shaped into. Like a fascinating psychedelic vision, the digital realm can amaze us forever, but basically it goes no further than the mental level which originally created the technology.

My impossible tasks, seen in retrospect, were my self-inflicted koans. A koan is a question with no apparent answer given by a Zen master to a student. The very effort to find an answer is what transforms consciousness and eventually stops the mind. Staying in the unknown is not comfortable for the mind, but it is the best way to link the subject of the quest with our inner void. From this, greater awareness can arise. By contrast, much of the Web industry is designed to cut through, to deliver answers quickly – not in itself a bad thing, but which can and does weaken the drive of our inner quest.

Since the impossible tasks didn’t pay, I worked on more practical software and wrote about computer science. In 1982, with the UNIX internal architecture still a well-kept secret and without much documentation for the end user, two other students and I wrote a book about UNIX. We printed it with a low-quality dot matrix printer, and I felt like a technical Che Guevara fighting for the liberation of computer knowledge.

What’s Not Computable Isn’t Real

Writing for computer science magazines in the mid ’80s, I alternated technical articles with interviews of philosophers and psychologists about the inner and social implications of the computer revolution, including a column called “Loops” for Informatica Oggi magazine, the leading computer Italian science magazine at the time. My heretical column was scrapped by the publisher after only a few months because some readers complained that those subjects had nothing to do with computer science, and that they’d rather read “real” and “useful” information.

Turning the view 180 degrees toward the inner side, from what we can do with technology to what technology does to us wasn’t a very popular move. Anything that smells of the philosophical, the inner, or the metaphysical is still seen with suspicion by people into technology, who categorize those perspectives as “things which could even be interesting, but vague and non-scientific.” For the most part, challenging technology has become almost taboo in our culture. As Neil Postman (1993) contended: “‘The computer shows…’ or ‘The computer has determined…’ is Technopoly’s equivalent of the sentence, ‘It is God’s will’ and the effect is roughly the same.”

Technology seems “inevitable.” It is rarely considered that people who are sensitive to what technology does to us might embrace and use technology – though they do it from 360 degrees instead of looking just at the bright front side.

In advanced technological societies there is a reticence to acknowledge the inner, the spiritual, or the metaphysical dimensions of life. The inner is seen pertinent only to religion, reinforcing the historical division of powers which gave science dominion over matter and religion dominion over the soul. What is non-calculable or non-objective is mostly ignored, as are the implications of technology for our psyche.

Sensitivity to the inner is easily branded new-ageism, fundamentalism, or plain weirdness. Meditation is misunderstood as thinking. The body-mind connection is something to decode by DNA sequences. Going beyond the mind is misunderstood as going below the functionality of mind, dulled rather than perceiving more deeply. Understanding is something which we infer only intellectually. The inner void is something we become aware of only when the computer hangs and we are left to stare blankly at the screen. Mind is seen mainly in terms of cognitive capacities and performance, a set of neurotransmitters which can eventually be “fixed” or “enhanced” by pharmacological molecules.

The Promises of the Early Internet

After publishing my own books, I became a publisher of computer science books. Around 1994, when the Internet was becoming popular in Italy, I welcomed the Net in enthusiastic terms. Like many early enthusiasts, I saw the Net as a way to produce and share information in a more democratic way that could threaten big powers and even nation-states, and having the potential of shaping global consciousness.

Through Apogeo, my former publishing house, I published the first books in Italy about the Internet, convincing the traditional media that the Net wasn’t just about terrorists, pedophiles and dangerous hackers. For many years there was an opposition between the Internet on one side, and TV and print media on the other. Hostility toward the Internet was about competing interests, as well as simple ignorance. Their distorted, inaccurate and false vision of the Internet continues to this day.

At the same time, it was difficult to find a balanced, critical view of the role of the Net in society and in people’s minds. Anybody who criticized the Net risked being branded a close-minded conservative, a Luddite, an “old media” supporter wanting to limit the freedom of expression which the Net seemed to expand.

The fact is, though, that after twenty years of the Internet in our lives, most of the promises have not been fulfilled. We don’t have more democracy in the world, big media and big powers are even stronger, no global consciousness has arisen – and even though everybody can upload anything onto the Web simply and cheaply, we know less about what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan than what we knew about the Vietnam war which was heavily broadcast. Yes, there are sites through which information can leak, but the leakage is a drop in the ocean of information daily available – and on sites read by a small percentage of web users.

Even when alternative information is presented, it is likely to be found on less popular websites that are far down in Google’s ranking. This merely deludes us into believing we have a tool for spreading information to the world – when in most cases it is more like a neighborly backyard chat. A chat, in fact, that can be traced and controlled. The big media have not disappeared – and their presence on the Net could make them even bigger.

Furthermore, privacy and control issues by governments and companies like Google and Facebook are, to say the least, worrying. What was once a place with no commercial interests is now full of advertisements, with some free services likely to become fee-based.

As soon as my company could afford it, I published a series on media studies, spirituality and Eastern culture, which reflected my personal life-path as a researcher of the truth. I switched from “updating” myself on the latest technical trends to attending workshops in different spiritual traditions and techniques. I went to ashrams in India and studied in psycho-spiritual schools in the US.

From Information Processing to Consciousness Processing

I moved back and forth between information processing and consciousness processing – from the awareness of technology to technologies of awareness. Information and my mind fed each other in a vicious cycle, making it difficult to stop and turn my gaze back toward inner silence. The mechanism of information incites us to stay within the feedback loop.

My subjective inner exploration was important not only for knowing my inner self, but also for clarity and a broader understanding of the outer world. Freeing my mind from conditioning and acquired beliefs proved effective both in my daily life and for a deeper understanding of reality. (Despite common misconceptions, spiritual paths are paths toward reality and clarity.) Beyond the conditioned mind we can see reality in a sharper way.

As every meditator quickly learns, many of our choices only seem to be “ours.” They are, in most cases, the result of early-life messages – either explicit or unconscious –which structured our minds. Those knots can never be untied if we don’t work on them with our attention and full presence.

Uninterrupted conscious attention along with silent time to look into our inner world are exactly what is rendered arduous by the technological society which, to use a term dear to Mauro Magatti (2009), sequesters our attention. The modality of the Internet, regardless of the actual content we are giving attention to, tends to split our attention – among websites, instant messaging, email, social networks, pictures, videos, software tools and more. With the growing speed of computers and the Net, everyone can keep several windows and websites open at once, jumping rapidly from one to the other.

Links themselves – the cement of the Internet – useful as they are, can be distracting. We approach even the best, most interesting and in-depth information with the same divided inner modality. Marshall McLuhan’s awakening phrase “the medium is the message” is true also for the Net. Being more than just another medium, the Net can be considered the summation of all media, and its impact on our inner and outer lives is accordingly stronger than any preceding media.

But we can always be masters of our attention, right? True, but the efforts to direct our attention and maintain it becomes harder with the growing presence of the Internet in our lives.

All in the Digital Mincer

The digitization of reality started with number crunching, a process close to computer language. Computers were initially used for scientific and engineering calculations, later extending to reading, writing, studying, working, entertainment, travel planning, connecting with friends and family, dating, sexual arousal, shopping and banking. And these activities are happening only online for a growing number of people. The “Internet of things” promises to go even further, radio tagging any object on earth with an Internet address, sucking all matter into the Net like a vacuum cleaner. The Net’s voracity doesn’t stop anywhere – including Body Area Networks that will be monitoring people’s physiological parameters.

The Net continually adds to the list of human activities which can be represented digitally – charming us with amazing applications, digitizing traditional needs and desires, and stimulating new ones. The transformation of desires into needs is one of the main activities of technological society, which in this regard shares the attitude with capitalistic society.

But we can just go offline, right? Again, true – but the Internet tends, like a gas, to expand in time and space. It follows us anywhere, through wireless connections and smartphones. With the immediacy of communication through the Net, there is a reciprocal pressure for answers to be fast. If we stay away from the Net for only a couple of days, we could miss an important job message, our friends’ updates, a notification from our airline, a juicy invitation from a person we’re attracted to, a nasty comment on our blog or social network page which we need to remove, a credit card transaction, the choices in door handles from our architect, library and credit card late notices, or a message from the insurance company.

With most of our colleagues, friends and family online, being offline will feel like living in a remote corner of the planet. Therefore, we are more than willing to transfer our lives to the Net, display them on social networks like Facebook, preserve our private documents in the “cloud,” and embrace technologies which promise to amaze and empower us. We can happily disembody into the cloud like a “pure” angel.

Technology Can’t be Challenged

When I started, computers were in transition from mainframes to PCs –a milestone in the empowerment of the individual, who could finally manage his own data, in his own time and place, and on his own computer. Floppy disks may have had very limited capacity, but we welcomed this freedom. Today PCs are more powerful than those mainframes, but we willingly give our data and computations back to Web services in the cloud.

Since the advent of computers, there has been concern about how they affect our minds. As computers spread, Sherry Turkle pointed out how they influence construction of the personal self, and Joseph Weizenbaum explored the attitudes of people working with computers. In reality, however, there are not as many people interested in those subjects as there are people chasing after the latest technological gadgets.

There are on the Net itself articles critical of the information society. Some correctly emphasize the loss of concentration through multiple mental stimuli. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr (2008) created a wave of debates. Other commentators have written about the prominence which the Net gives to the latest news, and how small chunks of information force historical context and broader implications into the shadows.

Some people express concern about Internet addiction to online auctions like eBay, to porn and cybersex, and online gaming and chats. Parents and teachers are legitimately concerned about protecting minors from information inappropriate for their age, from cyberpredators to cyberbullying.

Even though critical voices are present, it is not easy to criticize technology. In 2009, neuroscientist Susan Greenfield spoke before the House of Lords about the risk of changes in children’s brains from overuse of social networks. Bloggers and websites counterattacked with the allegation that she had no scientific proof for her “conjecture and opinions.”

This looks like a reverse inquisition. As the Church would condemn anything which wasn’t compatible with Holy Scripture, now it looks like nothing has value if it is not backed by hard scientific proof and plenty of data. With that premise, there can be no value in any inner, philosophical, or ethical quest. What’s not calculable, statistically coherent or scientifically demonstrable is categorized as mere “opinion” and far from truth. Welcome to Technopoly, as Neil Postman defined it.

Saying that “it is not scientific” or “we don’t have enough data” are typical defenses that technologically-oriented people use to counteract criticism or expressions of concern. They also take the position that the answer to any problem arising from technology lies in technology itself: more options, more speed, improved functionalities, a newer version.

We know the common slogans. “Technology and tools in themselves are neutral – it’s about how you choose to use them.” Any tool, however, has wider reverberations in both the social and inner worlds, aside from the way we use it. The mere presence of cars, for instance, reshaped the landscape and changed our connection with it, relocated people, changed the air we breathe, made people more sedentary, revised geopolitical relationships, and built a huge economy based on the powering, production and maintenance of cars and roads. Being without a car is possible but hard to manage, especially in places where public transportation is not in much demand. Yes we have choices in how we use cars: we can kill people with them or transport food to a poor community, but we cannot avoid their effect on our lives. They extend the possibilities of our legs, which grow weak through disuse. And without use, we tend to detach our attention from them. Likewise, TV extends our vision of the world beyond our neighborhood – but the very act of watching isolates us from neighbors and family.

Computers and the Internet are influencing our lives in more and more powerful ways. If cars reshaped the landscape, computers are making it useless. We can do almost anything in front of our screen without going anywhere. And then when we’re outdoors, we can experience the landscape filtered by the “augmented reality” tools of our smartphones. Computers and the Internet have also created a huge economy built on the growing desire for both gadgets and information. They influence our bodies, minds, and inner lives even more pervasively than cars.

Whether we are using the Internet for spreading racial hatred or for organizing support groups for people in trouble, we employ software tools within a certain body-mind setting in front of a screen, and we are communicating with people who share similar settings and tools. Inadvertently, we are feeding the huge Internet economy of software, telecommunication data lines, and hardware – equipment that is mostly produced in countries where labor is cheap and the environmental impact of their production is not debated. Countries that we will likely never visit.

Technology Uses Us

The process of digitization of reality translates our needs into the digital-mental arena, and creates new ones. The fairy tale that we are free to choose how we use technology hides the fact that using technology allows technology to use us. McLuhan said that, “by continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms.” We obliterate the awareness of being servomechanisms by believing that technology widens our choices, our freedom, and empowers us. Like car ads that emphasize freedom and power, showing shiny SUVs in mountains or desert – when in reality we spend hours trapped inside them, stuck in traffic.

Always busy clicking here and there, we pay no attention to how our outer and inner states are changed by technology and information. We are numbed to the loss of certain mental capacities and inner qualities which have been walled off by technology that emphasizes only the Now and the Latest, till we no longer remember how we were. This is hardly the here and now inner state described by spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle, though that state is being simulated by instant gratification and release from the burden of the past and the future by following the endless stream of new information.

Technologically-oriented people themselves express legitimate concerns. On the social and political levels, many are sensitive to the implications of the digital divide, as well as privacy and the openness of software architectures – yet most of them ignore the deeper implications

Feeding the Soul with Bytes

Traveling from information- to consciousness-processing through meditation and psycho-spiritual understanding, I became aware that many technological developments are appealing because they share deep psychological and even spiritual needs with fake ones. As those primordial needs are translated onto the mental level of information, the emptied soul craves the real qualities, even as the restless mind seeks more information which can never fulfill the authentic needs of the soul. This very restlessness doesn’t allow the subtle inner qualities to penetrate our awareness.

On the psychological level, one of the appeals of the Net is that it fulfills the human need to be seen, listened to, and recognized as we are. Far from being narcissistic, recognition is essential to the development of our personality – and should be acknowledged in childhood by parents, teachers, and other role models. We can only recognize and value our innate qualities initially through the eyes of others.

When parents don’t give enough time and attention to their children (perhaps because of hard work or because they are caught in the technological loop) or when they lack the inner qualities themselves, their children’s need for mirroring is unaddressed. Technology, then, offers a second opportunity to show ourself and relate to others through social networks. What we receive, however, reflects us only on the mental level, which cannot feed our soul with the essential human qualities we need to recognize in ourself and embody.

The spiritual teacher A. H. Almaas (1986) has discriminated many essential human qualities such as Love, Compassion, Joy, Strength, Passion, Steadfastness, Perseverance, Intuition, Curiosity, and Inner Peace. Being seen by Facebook friends is not the same as assimilating the real qualities through connection with a real human being who embodies them. Since we feel an inner lack which can be filled from the outside only in a very temporary and illusory way, we become stuck in needing to be continually recognized. And the mind will try forever.

The use of technology can have direct impact on our neurophysiology as well. Research points to a stunting of the frontal lobe in teenagers who are heavily into computers and video games (Small, 2008). The frontal lobes are fundamental for developing reasoning and judging abilities, and for long-term planning. The instant gratification of computer use can weaken our capacities for broader vision and planning. Poorly-developed frontal lobes are also typical of schizophrenia.

The Immortal Mind

Through technology and the Net we crave divine as well as ordinary powers. So people like Raymond Kurzweil (2005) appeal to us with a future where technological advances will bring us nothing less than immortality – through downloading our mind to the computer. In the history of Western science, he is not the first to apply messianic and religious terms to technology. After all, humanity has already been saved by the technology of Noah’s Ark, so there will surely be a “hack” even for mortality.

What Kurzweil and others are suggesting to drive our evolution through computers and biotechnology is a reflection, confined to the biological and mental levels, of the spiritual quest to elevate awareness beyond our mind. But since the quest is activated through mind-created technology, we can only remain on the same plane as the mind, however expanded and sophisticated it becomes through external supports and enhancements.

Kurzweil claims that “eventually, we leap beyond the boundaries of our planet, and every bit of matter in the entire universe becomes intelligent. . . . This,” he concludes, “is the destiny of the universe.” Sure, but this is already what the universe is, with no need for any contribution of technology. Enlightened spiritual teachers know that the universe is permeated by a brilliant Consciousness which cannot be grasped by ordinary mind, but which can be experienced through advanced states of consciousness as a result of spiritual inquiry.

Since our culture associates human beings mainly with their minds’ contents, then immortality means preserving that information. But if we jump to another level of identification, then the project of preserving our mind is seen as nothing more special than keeping our kidneys functioning by machines in a laboratory. Awareness and the essential human qualities are not a Cartesian matter of a purely mental state. They are a part of the soul which we perceive through our capacity of inner observation. I use the term soul to designate the overall entity of the body-mind, the psyche, and spiritual states. As Almaas says about those essential qualities:

Each of the different ways that Essence appears has recognizable properties and characteristics that differentiate it experientially from the other aspects. Because Essence is not a physical substance, we do not actually perceive its presence with our physical senses, but it can be clearly perceived and recognized through the functioning of subtle inner capacities that correspond to physical senses (2002, p. 250).

Those subtle inner capacities require our awareness of our whole body-mind. We can’t transfer essential qualities to the Net and bring them with us on the techno-immortal journey.

Inner Prostheses and Amputations through Technology

Many technical advances are being made without asking the basic questions about what drives us into technology and what technology really does to us. The time spent talking about technology is concerned with how it works, not with its ends. The implicit belief is that any technological development which seems to expand our options is going to have a positive impact.

McLuhan wrote that “any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.” We tend to look only at the extended parts, not at the shifting equilibriums they trigger. We prefer to look at our extensions rather than the amputations, because our mind has developed to be more comfortable looking outside than within.

We project externally on technologies, which in turn mirror our self-images. But the amputations hinder recognition. The more we transfer our own qualities to technology, the less we are aware of what’s missing, having weakened the inner tools of self-awareness. We are, like drunks, in denial of our condition.

Translating reality into information is very attractive to the ego-mind. The ego can thus consider the world as a huge information system to be understood, catalogued, and controlled through software – itself an extension of the mind. The mind becomes then a supreme king.

Minds and digital technologies have much in common. Both can simulate almost anything, and both try to incorporate everything into their domains. The mind and the thinking process are the most cherished entities in our culture. But that is not the whole story.

Beyond the Mind

There are states beyond the mind which can be reached through awareness. There exists a condition of “spiritual enlightenment” which can elevate human beings to the divine and to global Consciousness. Spiritual teachers of every age have pointed to such a state, however difficult it is to communicate through words what is beyond mind.

Words, dual in themselves, are the tools at hand to describe the non-dual state of union with the whole, called spiritual enlightenment, satchitananda (the merging of existence, consciousness and bliss), being a Buddha, God Realization, and Ultimate Understanding.” I have a faint echo of this from the glimpses of higher states my own journey has offered.

But the words of spiritual teachers are the map, not the territory – and my experiences could be no more than delusions. Actually, some teachers say that any experience is not yet that, so a Zen master would probably hit my head with a stick. The truth is that neither I nor anyone has a way to prove the existence of such a state, since every “proof” would stay on the level of the mind itself. All in all, it’s a matter of faith. And even science has its own axioms or postulates, truths which are taken for granted.

The word faith has been associated with the monotheistic religions, with fundamentalism and in opposition to an open quest for the truth. Much blood has been spilled in the name of faith. Faith has been used, as well, to mean not acknowledging scientific truths. I am not talking about that faith.

Where my faith comes from is a mystery. Maybe I was touched by reading, maybe I felt an echo of something larger than the mind or I recognized higher states of being in my spiritual teachers.

If I would add anything more than plain faith to the existence of spiritual enlightenment, then trouble would ensue. For instance, when instead of saying “God exists,” we say “God is goodness,” we are already in a dualistic perspective that can easily slip into “Who doesn’t believe in God is evil.” Also, if the postulate that spiritual enlightenment exists were extended into “I know the only way toward enlightenment,” then we would fall into fundamentalism. The mind wants to pull into its purview even what can never be known by it.

Words are products of the conceptual/dual mind, and nobody can avoid the risk of building structures and dogmas when talking about no-mind. But what’s important is to keep an open-ended attitude at the root of any inquiry, whether scientific or self-inquiry.

The Fragility of Beliefs and Information Technology

Science cannot conceive anything beyond the ego and the mind – not even in human sciences such as psychology (with the exception of transpersonal psychology). Thus, abandoning our mind’s contents seems like total defeat. In the West, nihilism is often knocking at the door, since what the mind creates – by its ephemeral nature – the mind itself can destroy. Without acknowledging a spiritual dimension, one is tempted to say that there’s nothing solid – and ultimately that there’s no sense in anything.

A culture which has been developed on the foundation of “I think, therefore I am” will cling to thinking and will produce tools to keep the mind busy all the time. But for the spiritually-oriented person there’s a plan B. The abandonment of the ego-mind is equivalent to the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly.

The ephemeral nature of the mind becomes clear when, in meditation, we try with titanic effort to observe our thoughts and sensations, instead of clinging to them as they carry our mind away. We can see then how weak our skills are to concentrate on a single object, how short-lived our thoughts are, and how little control we have over them. The mind has been compared by spiritual teachers to a drunken monkey. Yet we cherish our thinking process as the highest expression of being human.

Technology and information are also quite ephemeral. The chances of preserving their digital contents are dim compared to other media. Papyrus lasted thousands of years, books hundreds of years, CDs (the very best quality) dozens of years, and hard drives only a few years.

The software I wrote when I was at university was backed up on magnetic data tape. I don’t know if there’s any compatible tape reader still tucked away in some laboratory. Even if there were, most probably the tape would have been demagnetized by now. But even if not, the software will have been rewritten to work with current operating systems.

In recovering data which is just a few years old, there are both hardware and software format problems. Converting our data to ever-changing computer formats is a huge job – which most probably will never be done either by individuals or institutions. Even if it were, who could make sense of that huge amount of data?

Technology is fragile in other aspects too. As shown by Low-Tech Magazine, the energy consumption of hi-tech devices is skyrocketing, especially the energy required to manufacture them. “The embodied energy of the memory chip of a computer alone already exceeds the energy consumption of the laptop during its life expectancy of 3 years” (deDecker, 2009). Digital technology then, like many other developments since we started to drill for oil, is a product of cheap energy. With the growing cost of energy and a lurking peak in oil production, we won’t see as many hi-tech devices around as we are used to. Also, many hi-tech products depend on rare earth metals, more than 95 percent of which are found in China – which plans to limit exports.

Hi-tech products are also very sensitive to the electromagnetic radiation of solar wind. The current 11-year solar cycle, which started in 2007 and will peak around 2013, should be significantly stronger than the previous one. Solar flares shoot energetic photons toward Earth, upsetting the geomagnetic field and potentially affecting power grids, communications, satellites, GPS signals and even electronic chips.

A strong solar storm in 1859 shorted telegraph wires, causing fires in North America and Europe. If such an electromagnetic storm occurred today, it would take four to ten years to recover electric power lines, according to a report of the National Academy of Science. Given the strong interdependence of every system, the effects could be devastating for the whole of society.

As with meditation techniques, in which we learn to observe and let go of arising thoughts, maybe we should begin to practice letting go of our attachments to the information loop.

Order on Amazon.

“All that once was directly lived has become representation. . . . The real consumer has become a consumer of illusions” (Guy Debord, 1967).

The Situationists, an international revolutionary group of the ’50s critical of capitalist culture, spoke of “The Society of the Spectacle” – which alienated people through a mediated and commoditized social envinroment.

Media and products, in the Situationists’ view, dull the audience and control desire. Half a century later,  we have newly created media with greatly expanded scope –which reinforce the Situationists’ principles. In the new digital millennium it seems that desires are not controlled, yet are accepted as long as there is a market product associated with it, channeled through and stimulated by the media.

Situationists perceived that in capitalism, emotions become transmuted into market products – and we have to pay up to redeem our emotions. The market, as they saw it, first takes away our real needs for connection and authenticity, then offers a pale reflection of the real – making us always thirsty for a real which will never come.

The need for connection today is expressed through social networks which appear free and democratic. Yes, many Internet services are free of charge, but if we calculate hardware, software, the Internet connection – plus our time and attention – the cost must be reconsidered.

Moreover, the Situationists observed that people in our society are programmed to live a life that is merely a representation of a real life. Through technology needs have been created in order to sell solutions. And the hi-tech market doesn’t even require much in the way of commodities any more, since it is represented digitally – making Debord’s words about becoming consumers of illusions blatant.

“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left” (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964).

Minsky believes that we can separate the ability to juggle from the internal transformations that take place while learning to juggle. Knowledge, in the Cartesian style, is seen as something “pure,” removed from subjective participation and the involvement of our body/mind.

Scientists who claim to be at the forefront of human progress are still entangled in paradigms hundreds of years old.  Given Minsky’s vision, even inner knowledge can be represented digitally and downloaded to our neurophysiology, just as we do with a computer application. Kurzweil and others forecast such a future.

Here is Aldous Huxley’s view:

Some artists have practised the kind of self-naughting which is the indispensable pre-condition of the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground. Fra Angelico, for example, prepared himself for his work by means of prayer and meditation; and from the foreground extract from Chuang Tzu we see how essentially religious (and not merely professional) was the Taoist craftman’s approach to his art. Here we may remark in passing that mechanization is incompatible with inspiration. The artisan could do and often did do a thoroughly bad job. But if, like Ch’ing, the chief carpenter, he cared for his art and were ready to do what was necessary to make himself docile to inspiration, he could and sometimes did do a job so good that is seemed “as though as supernatural execution.” Among the many and enormous advantages of efficient automatic machinery is this: it is completely fool-proof. But every gain has to be paid for. The automatic machine is fool-proof; but just because it is fool-proof it is also grace-proof. The man who tends such a machine is impervious to every form of aesthetic inspiration, whether of human or of genuinely spiritual origin. “Industry without art is brutality.” But actually Ruskin maligns the brutes. The industrious bird or insect is inspired, when it works, by the infallible animal grace of instinct – by Tao as it manifests itself on the level immediately above the physiological.” ²

When we don’t feel “presence” in our actions or value our activities as media for our growth, we move toward automating everything that can be automated, including activities which expand our soul’s capacities. In Zen monasteries, even the most repetitive tasks—like cleaning the rice—are used as a path for awareness. But the contemporary ego wants goals – and wants to reach them fast.

¹Chandler, D.L. “Rethinking artificial intelligence”.  MITnews.  http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/ai-overview-1207.html

²Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, New York: Harper & Row, 1945, p. 171.

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple with Steve Wozniak, was born in 1955 while his mother was a single college graduate. Unable to support her baby, she put him up for adoption. It mattered to her that his adopting parents were college graduates. However, when the couple she had arranged with learned the baby was a boy, they reneged.

The next couple willing to adopt him did not have degrees. So she continued to nurture him for a few months until the adopting parents committed to seeing him graduate–though, ultimately, he dropped out anyway. As with Ada Lovelace, regarded as the first programmer, someone rejected at birth, grew into an icon in IT.

In line with the counterculture of the 70s, he explored LSD and went to India for a spiritual retreat. (He now identifies himself as a Buddhist.) In 1978, repeating his own history, he fathered a girl who was raised on welfare while he denied paternity on the grounds of being sterile.

Continuing to move with the times, he became one of the most innovative and often controversial entrepreneurs in IT. Apple gave new meaning to personal computing, introducing visual cues and user-friendly interfaces.

In 1998, the Dalai Lama gave permission for Apple to use his image with the words, “Think different.” China at the time was not an attractive market for Apple products. But business is business even for Buddhist ex-hippies. Under Jobs, Apple blocked a number of applications related to the Dalai Lama from the Chinese iPhones. Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller responded, “We continue to comply with local laws…not all apps are available in every country.” And recently Apple admitted that child labor was used in factories in China that produce their hardware.

However, his life with Apple was not a straight road. In 1985, he was fired by the board of directors. He then founded NeXT computers, later bought by The Graphics Group which turned it into Pixar, the most prolific computer graphics company producing Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille. In 1996, Apple bought NeXT, bringing Jobs back to his original company as CEO.

In 2004, he was diagnosed with a rare, operable form of pancreatic cancer. Five years later a liver transplant allowed him to continue his creative mission.

In many parts of the world, adopted children are considered as “nobody’s children.” Perhaps a scanty identity drove him to India in search of his soul, but then he chose to construct a more acceptable one. Through prestige and money he built a well-defined “I”—iPod, iMac, iPhone, iPad. Through many anecdotes about his management style, we know Jobs as one of biggest egos in the IT world.

A pattern that emerges from the overview of his life is a repeated dropping out and redefining himself. Rejected by mother, potential parents, the very company he started; rejecting his education and his daughter; to nearly being rejected by life through major health problems.

Even making a home has been hard. Legal and bureaucratic problems surrounded a historical mansion he purchased in 1984 in Woodside, California. After living in its almost unfurnished state for years, he planned to demolish it to build a new house, but a local preservation group stopped him. He spent years renovating an apartment on the top floors of a New York City building, but never moved in. He seems in perpetual search for both inner and outer home, bouncing back from every difficulty with new tools and renewed energy to lay before the world.

Withdrawing into the Mind

Steve Job’s story is typical of the Type Five personality in the Enneagram (even thought elements of Type Seven are present too), a pattern shared by many people in the IT world. This psychospiritual system discriminates nine styles of personality. Probably of Sufi origin, it was brought to the West by George Gurdjieff around 1900, then spread in the 1970s as Oscar Ichazo and psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo elaborated the core qualities of the nine types. It was later popularized by Don Riso and Russ Hudson, as well as by Helen Palmer. A.H. Almaas elaborated the spiritual dimension in the 1990s.

Early ontological insecurity about survival can shape a schizoid personality, to which Enneatype Five is the closest. Rationality and orderliness are valuable defense mechanisms against the threat of being separated from life, assembling everything in its own place.

Type Fives escape into their mental world for safe haven. They want to be accepted for their capabilities, often disappearing from the scene to stay with their own minds and develop skills. These give them confidence to re-enter as talented (thus, accepted) persons with innovative ideas to display.

They are most successful by creating a niche which no one else occupies, giving them an acknowledged place in the world. Apple’s technology is proprietary, guaranteeing Jobs his unique place and highlighting the greedy aspect of Five personalities to horde—whether it is keeping their emotions and possessions to themselves or proprietary information.

The schizoid Type Five personality seems more widespread than others in the modern, technology-dependent world. The possible reasons for this are worth contemplating.

Among the ones who grabbed my attention was Anthony Aguirre’s (Associate Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz) answer “The Enemy of Insight?” which reverberates with my reflections on knowledge and the inner mechanisms which insights are based on.

A passages from Anthony Aguirre’s answer:

I, like most of my colleagues, spend a lot of time connected to the Internet. It is a central tool in my research life. Yet when I think of what I do that is most valuable — to me at least — it is the occasional generation of genuine creative insights into the world. And looking at some of those insights, I realized that essentially none of them have happened in connection with the Internet…
I’ve come think that it is important to cultivate a ‘don’t know’ mind: one that perceives a real and interesting enigma, and is willing to dwell in that perplexity and confusion. A sense of playful delight in that confusion, and a willingness to make mistakes — many mistakes — while floundering about, is a key part of what makes insight possible for me. And the Internet? The Internet does not like this sort of mind. The Internet wants us to know, and it wants us to know RIGHT NOW: its essential structure is to produce knowing on demand. I don’t just worry that the Internet goads us to trade understanding for information (it surely does), but that it makes us too accustomed to to instant informational gratification. Its bright light deprives us of spending any time in the fertile mystery of the dark.

The attitude of not-knowing is been shared by good science and by spiritual researchers as well, two worlds who usually tend te be considered far apart. Descartes itself is his Discourse on the Method started his philosophical investigation with a not-knowing attitude which made him find his first principle of the philosophy “I think, therefore I am”.

Let’s see what the spiritual teachers say about not-knowing. Sri Aurobindo said, regarding the enlightened mind: “One is in an unutterable state of truth without understanding anything about it – simply, it is.” (Satprem. Sri Aurobindo, or the Adventure of Consciousness. Harper & Row. New York. 1974.)

Nisargadatta Maharaj:

When consciousness mixes with itself, that is samadhi. When one doesn’t know anything – and doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know anything – that is samadhi. (Nisargadatta Maharaj. Prior to Consciousness. Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. Acorn Press. Durham. 1985. p. 6)

Then Osho:

This is the the ultimate paradox of mysticism: with not-knowing you can reach knowing and through knowing yiu lose it. Not-knowing is superior to any knowledge. Universities make you learned but when you enter the Buddhafield of a spiritual Master you enter in an anti-university. In the university you harvest more and more knowledge, information and you accumulate. In the anti-university of a Master you unlearn more and more… until the moment you don’t know anything anymore. (Osho. Theologia Mystica. Rebel Publishing House. 1983)

And Almaas:

Why am I here? Where am I going? We need to see how honest we can be with ourselves when trying to answer these questions. These two questions are related; that is, most people think they are here because there is a goal, they want to go somewhere. Where do you want to go? You probably think you know; do you? Do you think I know where you should go? If you think I know, can I tell you? And if I tell you, will you follow? Can you follow? These are questions that you cannot answer with your mind. These are questions that should remain questions. Do not try to simply answer them mentally. These questions are like a flame. If you answer them with your mind, you will put out the flame, because the mind doesn’t, the mind can’t know the answers to these questions. When you answer them with your mind and you think you know, the question is gone. When you believe you have answered such questions, the flame is gone and there is no more enquiry. (A.H. Almaas. Being and the Meaning of Life (Diamond Heart Book Three). Diamond Books. Berkeley. 1990. p. 1)

Even neurophysiologically a stage of not-knowing is needed for getting the “Eureka effect”. Being in the unknown is uncomfortable for the mind, our ego identifies mostly with what we know. Knowing reassures us too.

So whenever we have an itch to know anything we can search for it on google and quench our thirsts. However, this way, as Almaas say, “the flame is gone” and good meals sometimes require a slow long cooking, better if on flames rather than electricity.

But Google works hard for avoiding any darkness and delays in his answers, wanting to “help” computers understand language.

I wrote in Google, Privacy and the Need to be Seen that we are apt at showing ourselves online in trying to fulfill the natural human need for mirroring, to be seen and understood, which probably hasn’t been actualized in the proper way at the proper time in our lives. Also, our skills for self-recognition and inner mirroring is becoming weaker and weaker because of the growing pressure from external inputs, mostly by the Net. No time for reflection and no empty space.

Social network analysis can infer much more about us than our sexual preferences. The ordinary mind in itself, as most spiritual teachers say, is quite mechanical in its behavior. Joining this mechanistic nature of the mind with the amount of available data which most people spontaneously show on the Net is such that a well-written software could guess many of our ideas, opinions, tastes and, most important for marketers, which products we’ll be willing to buy.

Psychoanalysis, neuro-linguistic programming and any other science of the inner being knows well that our beliefs and ideas are for the most part created by the conditioning acquired during our lives, especially in childhood.

Marketers have a special aptitude for cataloging people on the basis of their personalities, attitudes, lifestyles and preferences. But they aren’t interested in understanding the roots of those attitudes or in going beyond them. More than anything else, marketers are interested in the conditionings which have been created through a compensation for an undeveloped inner quality.

For instance, we might “need” some sort of external appearance (goods, clothes, gadgets, make-up, muscles or a slim figure) to compensate for a weak sense of self-worth, or we could need to connect frequently with people online because we aren’t able to keep in touch with our inner self and for the lack of authentic real-life relationships, thus needing computers, connections, smartphones and such gizmos.

Marketers, as well as psychoanalysts or spiritual teachers, are interested in knowing us and our conditionings, but the former are interested in making them stronger, reinforcing our “needs” instead of liberating us from them.

The understanding of marketers of the human soul is quite superficial since they don’t really need to go into the depths of people’s souls to exploit their weaknesses commercially, as much as a pusher doesn’t need to know the reasons why his client needs drugs.

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

I also think that Facebook users have real-life connections as well, but since Facebook has spread massively, my feeling is that the pre-existing real-life relationships are being sucked into Facebook too.

In the beginning, TV used to show and describe reality, and people would talk about what happened on TV. Starting around 20 years ago, I noticed that TV talked more and more about what happened on TV itself in a self-referencing way. I saw that mostly through other peoples’ TV sets since I don’t own a set myself. Seeing TV only rarely makes me more aware of the macro-changes. At a certain point, TV didn’t just show and talk about reality any more, but made reality itself, which was then commented upon by TV itself and by other media.

The Net followed a similar but slightly different path. A few years ago, the Net was limited to a small percentage of the population and it was immediately self-referential, encouraged by the easy mechanism of the link system.

Then, as social networks spread, people populated Facebook and similar sites. Recently, I noticed that real-life conversations got more into “what happened on Facebook” and this in itself fuelled the growth of the social network itself. People didn’t want to feel “left out” so they flocked to Facebook. Suddenly, people would feel left out if they weren’t present on the Net and in its happenings, more than if they weren’t present in face-to-face meetings.

The Net got priority. Without it, many real meetings can’t happen anymore as they are organized as Facebook events. Since we spend more and more time online, without the Net, we could even become short of arguments in our real-life conversations.

Many people into technology welcome the interaction between the Net and real life, seeing that as something which balances both and which takes the Net out of a cage. The problem is that the process of digitalization of reality is quite greedy and tends to incorporate every aspect of reality, absorbing the wholeness of reality starting from the mental level, representing it digitally as if everything could be translated into bytes. So in the end, reality becomes sucked into the Net, which has to be lifestreamed or lifelogged in order to become realized. Reality can be considered real only when can become digitalized.

Prof. Mauro Magatti: The idea is to give a complete picture of the last 30 years which began with the coming of so-called neo-liberalism in the Anglo-Saxon countries. My book traces and develops the hypothesis of authoritative colleagues, especially the works of Boltanski in France, Bauman in England and Beck in Germany.

The idea is that those 30 years represent something as unitarian, which is detached from the previous stages (which I call “societal capitalism”), and is based not only on the nation state, but on the social and economic effects which the nation state is not able to load and which are usually referred to as “the welfare society.” The fundamental peculiarity of techno-nihilistic capitalism is a kind of new vision of the world, a new weltenshaung, which makes nihilism, traditionally a philosophy which expresses itself in stages of decadence when the established values had to be destroyed, a useful vision for accelerating both economic and technological growth on a planetary scale.

There’s a capitalism which tries to free itself from the cultural background which the national state established. This capitalism defines itself in an alliance between a technique which is supposed to be intangible, in a very thin cultural setting, or even when it is absent and, on the other side, a full availability, a full manipulability of every cultural meaning, which has to be continuously redefined, transformed, and overcome.

Quartiroli: You affirm that technology gives an imaginary freedom, yet many people, based on this very interview, could well say the opposite. I came to know about your book on the Net, sent you an email and you graciously agreed to be interviewed by me. We use Skype for the interview and then I will publish it in my blogs. This gives us a broad freedom. We don’t have any editorial limitation regarding space or length and we don’t have a director to approve our conversation. Online, we don’t even need to publish it before a certain date. And even better, we can reach hundreds or maybe thousands of readers in every corner of the world directly.

Kevin Kelly, one of the most passionate supporters of technology, in his recent article “Expansion of Free Will” says that, “Technology wants choices. The internet, to a greater degree than any technology before it, offers choices and options.” And more, “the technium continues to expand free will as it unrolls into the future. What technology wants is more freedom, expanded free will.” The idea of freedom and expansion of our possibilities is chased by every technological gadget and by every software which interacts with us. All seems very pleasurable, free and fulfilling, so what’s wrong in this expansion of our options?

Magatti: Kelly’s quote is excellent and gets to the point. Techno-nihilistic capitalism, passing the previous stage of societal capitalism, legitimates itself through this increasing of possibilities, which then is connected to the expansion of choices.

Nobody can deny that, in general terms, to go from a condition where we have less opportunities and choices to one where, instead we have the possibility of expanding our doings, in a way expands our freedom. For instance, when we can move easily and quickly from one part of the planet to the other, we get more chances to “do.”

The point is, what happens in a world where the freedom of choices, where this increase of opportunities is being produced with the speed we experience in our personal and collective lives? We should ask ourselves whether this increase has any effect on the very freedom we want to achieve.

A tangible example to make the point: freedom is somehow like the eye. The eye opens to what is in front, is a sense organ somehow indeterminate since it is connected to what is being seen. The fast-increasing choices in the individual experience give us an excess of things we can see, as fundamental changes in our way of seeing, and we are even subject to the powerful systems which are there to put things in front of our eyes.

This brings the risk of becoming people who are driven from the outside: something is being presented as a choice, which is pleasurable and which increases our power and our fulfillment, but with the risk that freedom implodes on itself and that will deliver us completely to something which is external of ourselves.

To this first problem there’s a second one: all of those opportunities presented to us aren’t as real for most people as they are supposed to be. Therefore, the opportunities in front of us are kept only in an illusory and fantasized state and we withdraw them in. To give a banal example, miraculous or even magical solutions, as would be winning 130 million euro on the Lotto which would allow us to do anything we wanted to, at least in our fantasy.

Because of those two reasons, that world with expanded possibilities which is theoretically associated with an increased freedom, then carries the risk of encaging freedom again. In the book I don’t envision a world where we go back in limiting our opportunities, but to ask ourselves about our freedom and understanding if we are as free as we think we are.

Quartiroli: On page 126 of Imaginary Freedom, you write:

…the changeover which happened between the seventies and the eighties went consistently in the direction of the shift of what “need” – still connected to an objective and material idea, in itself saturable, to “desire”, the place of subjectivity and immateriality, as such, non-saturable.

Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, compares Orwell’s 1984 with Huxley’s Brave New World.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”…In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

The shift from need to desire and vice versa, transforming as need the object of infinite desire, is no doubt a practical mechanism for expanding corporate sales, but in what you define as “surplus enjoyment,” which is encouraged by contemporary capitalism, there is the superego aspect too (the set of rules and prohibitions given by the state, by morals, family and by religion), which have been loosened in what you define as techno-nihilistic capitalism.

The liberation from the superego and the quest for pleasure have a positive effect in the release of new life energies and in exploring ourselves and the surrounding world. However, in my opinion, if this, though welcome loosening of rules doesn’t match the development of the essential human qualities (compassion, perseverance, search for truth), we end up living only at our instinctual levels, combined with the mental area, which is overstimulated by technology, without a mediation of the heart. Intelligent beasts. A dangerous combination both for the human relationship and for the environment (many of the desires are fulfilled by goods and products which somehow contribute to environmental disaster).

On the other side, I don’t foresee nor welcome a return to the rules of the “old” capitalism which gave structure, rules and rigid roles. We would hardly give up desires, even though those will be like mirages. The genie is already out of the bottle. What’s your opinion about it?

Magatti: The question is very challenging. First, a one-liner about the fact that Lacan was right regarding Marx. It is not capitalism which creates desires, but capitalism, as a system, is even able to supplant religion, understands the importance of desire in the human experience and give fuel and substance to it. In particular, with the development of the consumer society first and with the communication society later, and finally in what I call techno-nihilistic capitalism, desire is being made pleasure.

The point is not to put the genie back in the bottle, which is impossible; the point is to get desire back not only on an individual level, but on the collective one as well. In the twentieth century, as well as a reaction to the repressive approach of industrial needs, of bureaucracies and of religions seen as a rule system, desires have been rediscovered even in relationships with the body and, this is something which has to be valued and not discarded.

The problem is that techno-nihilistic capitalism again seized desire and constrained it, in the sense that my experience, my sensation is like living in a big cathedral, almost a medieval monastery where you cannot turn your head without being continuously solicited, first on the sensorial level, in reducing our desire to what is being sold by the market or by TV. Desire in this way is being dramatically flattened in a materialistic experience which produces selfish relationships and, on the environmental level, has devastating effects on the environmental balance since, in order to satisfy this desire with no limits, it produces the effects we are experiencing.

Capitalism understood that this desire can be reproduced at will, so it got into it with great ease. I think that, if there is a solution – and this is, of course, very difficult and complex to find – it is in coming back to ask ourselves about desires, which is a mystery for everybody. Of desire, we can on one side be aware of the physical and sensorial aspects and of the deep aspects of our Self in psychoanalytical terms and, on the other side we can consider the metaphysical dimensions too, connected to the sense of mystery, of the infinite, to the meanings which can direct our lives.

We could also try to find a new synthesis between the pulsional element of desire, the deep element which goes back to the development of our personality and, as well, with the intellective element. In the twentieth century, we created this opposition between reason and desire, as if the two would exclude each other. I think instead, that the two can talk to each other, a communication between the pulsional element and reason. Both are important to feed desire, even with different forms and modalities.

Quartiroli: This reminds me of a Buddhist image, where in their tradition there’s the “hungry ghost” realm, greedy ghosts who can never satisfy their hunger, having a huge stomach and a tiny mouth, representing the impossibility of satisfying every desire. In this tradition, the way out from this hellish circle is about loving the truth, substituting compulsion with the desire for truth. In this regard, the metaphysical and spiritual aspects, which take different forms in different traditions, could show us the exit from this dead end, since we cannot go back denying desires but can’t go forward on the road of desires either, because desire, even before being fully satisfied, will devastate the planet and maybe even our psyches.

Magatti: Assuming that the East and the West follow very different paths, though in some aspects are complementary, so both journeys are interesting if they are part of the question. I resume from the last words, “love of truth.” Well, one of the dramatic things which are present on the historical stage we are populating, is the crisis of truth the West has experienced, the crisis of truth in the way it has been built in the previous centuries, up to the point of rejecting the issue of truth itself.

One thing is pretending to know truth and impose it on people; another is the desire for truth and accepting that, even though it is something which is larger than us, is something which we all long for. Wanting to separate any connection between freedom and truth is for sure one of the basic reasons which then progressively leads to what I call techno-nihilistic capitalism. On this basis, I agree fully that those hungry populations which run after their desires are really amazing.

Desire, if we don’t compress it immediately in the material dimension but leave it open on the spiritual dimension, gets a perspective such as this Western destructive effect, which at least can be reduced. Being able to again open this space in Western culture is really quite a big job because the obsessive presence of those ghosts which are conjured by the media system continuously saturate our horizons, and frame our horizons. Then the reopening to the sense of mystery, to the search of the truth seems literally inhibited.

Quartiroli: Since desire is what keeps the entire production machine running, it has to be continuously stimulated. The naked women on magazines’ covers are certainly functional to the selling of the magazines themselves, but are probably even more useful to predisposing the reader toward a desiring attitude which will then be transferred to the advertised products. Depression, perhaps as well as a result of the frustration of unfulfilled desires by most people, is the most widespread contemporary mental health discomfort.

The use of antidepressive and stimulant drugs, legal and illegal, has been increasing over the years. Depression, the real enemy of the market which needs ever-desiring people, has thus found its market in the treatment of depression itself, up to making pathological even those behaviors which are part of the normal human experience, as sadness or simple introversion. Any moment of emptiness has to be filled, if not otherwise, by a drug which operates on our nervous systems. Recently, I was reading that some psychiatrists are suggesting the use of antidepressives for babies 3 years old and less. As you wrote on page 187:

In front of the complexity of reality and on its incessant change, the self has to give up its unity, because that’s nothing else than the infinite series of stimuli which it is exposed to. This pressure is infinitely more powerful than any inwardness.

So, when those stimuli stop, an inner void opens showing a frightening abyss which is avoided as much as possible but which could be the door itself toward reconstructing an identity based on the deep inner perception instead of the external messages. When the techno-nihilist machine stops, who are we, Prof. Magatti?

Magatti: The dramatic condition of the contemporary Self, of the subjectivity, is to find itself scarily empty. The disproportion between the surrounding world and our psyches is so wide that we are always forced to conform to the external instead of investing in our inner lives, instead of loving and preferring what could allow us to grow something inside from our experience and to mark our paths in life. Our paths can be unique only if we accept the limits, as when the painter has the whole color palette in front of him. If he doesn’t decide to choose some and to stay inside the limits of the frame, then there will just be a mess.

One of the contemporary syndromes is the inability of many people, as psychotherapists say, of being able to narratively recount ones own experience, which is made up of individual and separate moments, experiences and situations which we cannot explain why they came out and why we found ourselves in them.

Depression comes when stimuli stop, for instance, with retired or unemployed people, or as also happens because of exhaustion: the physical and psychological effort needed to chase every opportunity is huge. There’s a time in life when we can’t take it any more or we feel inadequate compared to this very demanding model. Depression occurs from lack of sense as well, which produces not only the inability to understand ourselves and others, but on arriving at a point where there’s a growing difficulty in feeling anything in those opportunities and experiences which are more or less amazing if we throw ourselves into them.

So we have a being who manifests as powerful and skilled but actually hides an incredible incapacity to trace his peculiar history and his particular vision of the world. This brings us to the massification of behaviors we dramatically read in statistics where we all behave the same way.

One of the basic points of the book is that what Nietzsche introduced at the end of the nineteenth century is central to understand what’s going on. Our will to power is continuously called up as a fundamental energy to push the individual to match the surrounding environment. However, this will to power is reduced only toward the external and becomes useless toward the deep desire and instinct which we all have about becoming and letting others become.

One of the shocking things about the contemporary reality is that we have many options in many life situations, but we lose the basic, that is how to be and let others be. For a time which boasts of being a model regarding freedom, this is a dramatic outcome.

Quartiroli: A young woman, one of the so-called digital natives, part of the generation which grew with the Net and high technologies, recently wrote to me, referring to the precariousness of everything (work, relationships), that “in this confusion, the Net, paradoxically, offers an anchor.”

The Internet, and especially social networks like Facebook, represent a continuity, as they are a primary object relationship, a very early one. As the dean of the Faculty of Sociology at the Università Cattolica of Milan, you are in a favored observatory about the digital natives. How are relationships redefined and, in particular the Self relationship and the issue of identity?

Magatti: First, I think that being young nowadays – and this has been happening for a number of years – is an experience opposite to the one which the 1968 generation had. Then, there was a world of adults and of institutions which claimed to be coherent, cohesive and to express meanings and values. One could agree and integrate, or one could challenge that world and take a contradictory stand.

Today, the experience is the converse: the world of adults is a confused one, is contradictory, institutions are basically voiceless, and the level of legitimation is very low. The fundamental concern of young people is not to oppose somebody: when a problem is encountered, when a contraposition is met, they turn around and move in a different direction in order to avoid conflicts.

The main problem of today’s youth is to eventually understand whether they subsist as personal entities, even though changeable and contradictory, that is, whether there’s still any passion about searching for a lasting center of gravity around which they can base their lives. This explains why young people often appear lost and dazed regarding the surrounding world. Of course, they are thirsty and they enter life with the enthusiasm and creativity of their age to find supports and places which could possibly help them to realize this circular and complex process of circumnavigating their experience without immediately feeling closed or identified in a specific position.

In this regard, the Net is definitely a tempting tool and, in many aspects it is on the extent that the Net will be able to let experiences, questions and context be born which will have the sensitivity to avoid the ephemeral which characterizes our times. Obviously, the big limitation of the Net is the lack of direct relationships, of face-to-face connections, of the complexities of contextual relationships and its aim of building a network of connections which by definition remain ever-susceptible to being dissolved by the participating subjects. The potentialities which can be found in this setting are immense and have to be balanced with the limits, whereas the interacting person can always participate in the process, keeping a part out of it.

This has always happened even in face-to-face relationships; we do that every day at any time, showing one face and keeping other faces hidden or uninvolved. But perhaps in direct relationships this is more difficult, while on the Net’s relationships this is easier and is an aspect which shouldn’t be underestimated.

Quartiroli: These days I am especially struck by the indifference of the collective answer regarding the tragedy of the immigrants who died in the sea trying to reach our coasts and, in general on themes of sorrow. On compassion, on page 265, you wrote: “Demobilizing values – seen as unnecessary obstacles – and riding the will to power, the techno-nihilistic capitalism erodes the very bases of compassion and the human capacity of taking care.”

I find your assertion true and ask myself about the roots of the lack of compassion. There’s a sentence of Mark Slouka from War of the Worlds (Basic Books, 1995), one of the first generation’s books critical about technology of the Internet era.

The world provides context, and without context, ethical behavior is impossible. It is the physical facts of birth and pain and pleasure and death that force us (enable us) to make value judgments: this is better than that. Nourishment is better than hunger. Compassion is better than torture. Virtual systems, by offering us a reality divorced from the world, from the limits and responsibilities of presence, offer us as well a glimpse into an utterly amoral universe.

The technological setting is basically disembodied, where the body has a marginal role, when not seen as an impediment; likewise, Descartes regarded it as such in his scientific method. This negation of the body has more ancient roots then Descartes’ philosophy which characterized the scientific development of the last centuries. The roots have to be found in the Judeo-Christian tradition which relegated the body to a role far from the divine, when not an instrument of sin. You end the book writing of a coming back to bare faith as an antidote to the loss of sense and you wish for an open and non-dogmatic faith.

Do you think that the body, in this faith, could be brought back to a new worthiness and healthy vitality, instead of letting the body being managed by the society of surplus enjoyment? Christianity, in denying the body, in my opinion also negated the very bases of compassion, which become active in an integrated process of body, empathy, feelings, mind and divine values present in any human being, which we can approach through our body.

Magatti: One of the cultural traces of the twentieth century is this ambiguous rediscovery of the body, against its negation in the previous cultural structures. The problem is that technical development produces a new compression of the corporeality, mainly because techniques need abstraction. In its constituent language and in the kind of conditions created, this has to be over-contextualized and based on the creation of distance.

This created a new reduction of the corporeal element, which seems to weaken especially over face-to-face connections and caring connections and compassion. I think that our era pays a big penalty to an anthropological idea of the human being, the will to power which Nietzsche referred to. This is a very complex power, of course, known only negatively, even though it can be managed with difficulty, but which forgets other anthropological dimensions which are equally fundamental.

In particular, it forgets the experience we make of others through what, according to Levinas, the other’s face conveys to us or, according to Ricoeur, through what he calls the ordinary kindness, that is the human attitude to understanding each other, to find acknowledgment in each other and to depend on each other regarding our needs.

All of those dimensions are based as well on direct physical experience, on face-to-face dimensions which are dramatically negated and seized in social life. This not only damages the individual at the psychological level but also creates a series of problems in interpersonal connections and in the social world we live in. It’s impressive to see that in techno-nihilistic capitalism it seems almost annoying referring to and talking about questions which have to do with justice, poverty, about people who live in worse conditions, about the mutual sensitivity human beings have for each other.

I really think it is a lack of anthropological definition which when translated in an institutional organization and in lifestyles then makes this caring attitude even weaker. I think that they might instead (even on the institutional level) open channels, creating spaces and stimuli where this attitude can grow and compensate and balance the destructive aspects which the will to power can provoke if left to itself.

Quartiroli: Nihilism states the lack of meaning and of value of many aspects of life. From time to time nihilism emerged in the Western world in different forms. You say that contemporary capitalism, even with the important support of technology, tends to fragment, dismantle and melt any meaning and value, leaving only the society of surplus enjoyment.

I ask myself what the roots of nihilism in the Western world are and why we don’t have an existential perspective – we could say metaphysical or spiritual – beyond ideologies and the world of matter.
While some religious traditions, especially the Eastern ones, contemplate that human beings can reach divine spiritual states in this very life and in this very body, in the Christian tradition it is not possible to become like Christ, who is the only son of God and as such at most can be imitated through our virtuous actions, but not reachable as a state of being, at least in the earthly life.

So I’m not surprised that, given the impossibility of reaching the transcendental, and in the face of the intrinsic weakness of ideologies in the given sense to humanity, nihilism can slip in, which cancels everything and one can refer only to the certainties of consumerism and materiality.

Aurobindo said: “Every finite struggle to express an infinite which feels is his very truth.” Lacking the authentic transcendental infinite, the ego craves for it on the mental plane, which is being chased at the technological level, of information, of production, which gives the hope of obtaining divine powers (being in every place at the same time through the Net, extending life with bioengineering, life and death managed by medicine, omniscience with Google and so on). What’s your opinion about it?

Magatti: The point you raised is of crucial importance. It is based on events that are centuries old and mark different civilizations in depth. I won’t, in this instance, take a stand on what I was formed as and where I find myself, which is Christian and Western. However, I find an important convergence about the point where a human being is the intermediary between the finite and infinite and the way which this intermediation is played decides many things in our real lives and in social settings.

In the Christian tradition, transcendence is the ultimate source of desire, the deep drive of human beings. As Severino writes, the whole history of modernity is marked by the pretension of reducing transcendence to immanence through the systematic application of the will to power to the expansion of the freedom of goals.

As far as it is a carrier of material well-being, such movement is designed to create many problems, as history tells us. Here comes the Christian solution which asks to never close this frontier but to always keep the look open on the infinite.

Techno-nihilistic capitalism is a system which wants to be based on an immanence-immanent, subjugated to the systems of power which give a continuous mutation. Even if it introduces itself with no claims, techno-nihilistic capitalism is a view of the world and of history. Somehow, it is a religious system.

Unmasking this pretension is the first step to reopen the discourse about freedom and happiness.

Mauro Magatti. Libertà immaginaria. Le illusioni del capitalismo tecno-nichilista (Feltrinelli, Milano, 2009)