Technology is maybe the most prominent act of collective self-expression realized by Homo Sapiens. We’ll be breaking down its historical development and the implications it has on our relationship with the environment, to gain a deeper understanding and a more mature usage of it.
What’s behind it
Technology is the actualization of abstraction, a distinctive feature Nature gave our species. Several other species showed evidence of abstract thinking through problem-solving acts, like the use of tools, the development of complex inter-individual structures and communication methods, and even self-awareness.
We’ve just come across our core concept: problem-solving. The story of earthy life is one of adaptation to different sets of problems pushing species to their limits to cope with them. The harder the problem, the tougher the survivors - Natural Selection is definitely politically incorrect. You can see how the development and refinement of abstract thinking and creativity is inherently, deeply problem-bound. It’s unlikely that advanced (according to our anthropocentric point of view) species deliberately tried to exercise their ability to make tools or assign sounds to designate things. What triggered this process was necessity. We as a species don’t have instructions to survive written in our DNA. Selective Pressure shaped us more and more, making us more and more reliant on practical solutions discovered by individuals and shared among progressively bigger and bigger groups. That’s what we call culture: it is a set of survival and adaptation skills shared by a group.
On this aspect, human abstraction differs from Primates, Dolphins, Elephants, Birds, and Cephalopods on a quantitative level. Our process is the same, but the extent of human one is vastly greater.
We took one step further, qualitatively, when we discovered the pleasure of speculation, when we untied creativity from problem-solving. That’s maybe the strongest, most specific trait of mankind. Nature forced us to develop the capacity to pick up data from our perception of the world and elaborate it into theoretical models. At some point, we managed to reverse the process and start shaping exterior reality the way we think it should be. We started speculating. We started enjoying the usage of sounds, symbols and tools for the pleasure of merely using them, or for the pleasure we could get from their effect. That’s how entertainment, a fundamental need not only for our species, was born. Cave paintings, decorative artifacts, and early games substantiated an ontologically new way of conceiving technology. Rather than needing it to survive, we were now using it to add a superfluous dimension of pleasure of living. We could technically take it or leave it, but it does add a significant aspect to human life experience.
The invention of Meaning
As said, the effort of sweetening existence with fun activities is not a human prerogative - dogs love playing fetch and cats could spend hours playing a fight. Humanity is apparent in its entirety when unnecessary (meaning ‘not related to primary needs to stay alive’) things and activities transcend the mere flow and are enriched with meaning, when they aim to elevate our condition to a state that’s superior to common life experience. This process was delegated to four branches of activities in early civilizations: the Arts, Philosophy, Religion and Science.
So, the main stages of our relationship with technology, and, in a broader sense, with bringing our thoughts into reality, were: the need to survive by developing strategies and tools, the pleasure brought by activities and tools without the presence of a pressing need, the yearning for meaning to be achieved, again, with our activities and tools. Think about it: the struggle for meaning is still the main driving force of mankind. Love, friendship, professional success, are all sublimations of physiological needs for mating, companionship and survival. They enrich those needs with meaning, which is deeper, almost normative and definitely universal and transcultural.
Technology and Culture
The reason for this historical excursus was to reflect on the way we should perceive and use technology. Our needs are and will ever be the same, our ways to fulfill needs change over time, although pivoting on the four branches we seen. Science, of which technology is a spin-off, is living its heyday. Religion is hidden in many liturgies of our secularized world, including atheism (and the writer is an atheist) and showing its anti-fragile temperament. The Arts are living their final agony. Philosophy is clinically dead. We seem to be out of balance.
Our faith in progress and self-determination indeed led us to the stars, in terms of quality of life. We often forget how lucky we are to be born WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) and in the present-day world. The problem is not in believing in progress, secularization, individualism and other attributes of modernity: they’re what gave present-day life quality levels that were unthinkable a century ago. Degeneration happens when we refuse everything that does not fit into this group. Not that we shouldn’t be selective: evolution is about scrapping what doesn’t work. Reiterating Natural Selection on and on tightens the mesh of what will survive. This gives the illusion of a positive addition of fit characteristics while it’s actually a negative eradication of unfit ones. But we seem to have scrapped some good characteristics in the process though, forcing other ones to play the same role. Think about religion: although it has been the greatest vector for meaning ever, it has led to hate, war, intolerance, racism and obscurantism. We needed to overcome it. But we cannot overcome our craving for meaning, and ‘progress’ just doesn’t work for finding it. We substituted the belief in supernatural deities and their tyrannical regulation of our lives with the faith in a religious rejection of deities, and of spirituality as a whole, in politically correct utopias, in disregarding whatever can be labeled as ‘old’. Again: it’s only natural that spirituality must be reshaped in the contemporary world, that some of the instances underlining politically correct excesses are indeed commendable, that it is silly to preserve old models as a whole. Yet, we’re acting religiously, in an exquisitely digital fashion: we only know 0 and 1. Yes or No, first past the post.
Technology and us
Let’s not do this with technology. It serves us in improving our material conditions, it’s a tool. It doesn’t bring meaning, it helps us create it. What is happening now echoes the inverted process we discussed: rather than using tools to enhance our lives, we are more and more adapting our lives to the tool's needs. We’re getting imprisoned in our abstraction of reality to the point of needing to change reality itself to fit within it. Think about social media: they were, and are, by all means the most significant invention in the current world. They allowed us to seamlessly communicate with old and new friends whenever we want, wherever we are. Lack of communication was a problem, now it’s a memory. But we soon realized how this tool allowed us to project an image, our image - which, of course, solves the problem of properly identifying a user. And we realized how free we were to adapt this image not to the way we are, but to the way we think we should be. At the same time, our society was becoming more and more shaped around social media; they’re now an integral part of most people’s identity. So what happened is that we entered a perverted game in which we all sell our idealized projection of us selves to each other, and then stress out to live up to that. There’s nothing new to the process itself, but it has been magnified by social media in a way that’s now qualitatively altering the process. That’s what we have to run away from: having technology create problems we have to cope with. That’s not what we need it for. That’s not what we invented it for. It’s not a deity, it’s a human creation: as such, we have, and must keep, full control over it.
How should we act
We have to proceed negatively, by remembering we are designed to work perfectly without it. This does not at all imply a refusal: it’s great to catch up with friends on WhatsApp, to find old friends on Facebook, to enjoy both educational and entertainment content on streaming platforms, to get news, and even to conduct political activism, on X. But these are only facilitators. We need to rediscover our bare humanity, to seek the aid of technology only when it is necessary. And, in that case, we have to use it without any remora.
Meaning is not in the tool, it is inside us and in the outside world. We need to seek meaning, not its image.
Worshipping a telescope won’t take us to space - it may prevent us from reaching it, if we overdo it.