This episode of "Shots of Awe" is brought to you by Norton.
So I'm very passionate about technology.
And most people think of technology
as a set of tools that expand our creative capacity somewhat.
A set of tools that provide useful services in the world.
But I believe that there's a hidden dimension at play here.
I believe that there's this hidden dimension to technology
that's actually metaphysical, that was explored brilliantly
in the work of Erik Davis in the book "Techgnosis."
Consider the example of Amber Case, cyborg anthropologist.
She says every time you make a telephone call,
a Skype call, you're essentially collapsing geography,
you're essentially transcending the limits of space, of time,
of distance.
Your thoughts electrified, traveling at quasi
the speed of light, connecting you
with another mind in real time in a kind of technologically
mediated telepathy, to use the term by David Porush.
And so these telephone calls, these techno social wormholes,
reveal themselves to be a kind of design engineering.
We become the alchemical gods.
Andy Clark, in his book "Natural Born Cyborg"
says that the mind, the modern human mind,
actually emerges in the feedback loops between brains--
these tools that we create and the environment in which we
create them.
We're thinking through our iPhones and Samsung phones.
We're thinking on the internet.
We're thinking on the page.
We build the tool, and the tool builds us.
We are designed by that which we have designed.
And because we are coupled to these tools,
and because these tools promise to be conduits to transcending
our biological limitations, perhaps we
should be sympathetic to the reason
that we run in droves to buy the new smartphone when
it comes out.
We're literally getting a mind upgrade.
A wet-ware upgrade.
These are not trivial things, these
are not fashion accessories.
These are mind-ware upgrades.