The Condition of Weightlessness | QMM #5
On the False Promises of Development, Technology, and the Future
Quixote’s Media Meditations #5
Assignment: With things like Neuralink coming and AI generation, consider that sentence, “‘The condition of weightlessness’ that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace,” or maybe something else? What?
With each new, successive wave of commercial, technological advancement, we meet the great promise of salvation proceeding alongside the apocalyptic anxiety of what might come. The naysaying and the yeasaying. While I imagine that neither is inherently or wholly justified, each reaction is reflected insofar as we understand the next evolution to be a culmination of what came before it: either a break from our current technology’s predecessors or an extension of it. A child, either conjured or cut from the same cloth. The cycle encircles, repeats and shrinks with each new iteration, most often without any consideration as to why the last one just wasn’t good enough.
After all, we can ask and perhaps properly should: if the “next generation” of technocratic salvation is (one way or another) based on the previous generation(‘s successes or failures), then what great promise does it confer? That, based on the failure of the previous promises, we’re suddenly in the clear? Or based on our supposed incremental success we need to promise more, despite the track record? It should be noted here that a promise is always an act hurled towards the future. It is never bound or obliged to the present. It always proposes something we will do, not something that we are doing. Something that will happen, not that is happening. A promise, among other things, is hope, patronized and personalized.
If each new wave of promise is marketed as the be-all and end-all, why do we need another one? What were the conditions by which we could suddenly conclude that the current iteration isn’t working or isn’t good enough? How would we properly know without stretching our usage and the limits of that particular tool to its ends? What is the goal of modern technology? Is there a goal? Or are we just playing trial-and-error with culture and life?
In the 20th century, Henri Bergson developed a hypothesis in which he claimed that consciousness is not housed in the brain, but instead, that consciousness permeates all things, seen and unseen. The brain, among humans at least, acts as a filter for consciousness, ensuring that we don’t get too much of it all at once and that we can continue to act in a relatively stable, perpetual survival mode without the constant or consistent mind-blowing experiences that are often attributed to drugs, dreams, and trauma.
The brain-as-filter or the “reducing valve” of culture, as others have called it, has come to been seen as another frontier to mine and conquer, to overcome and exploit through human ingenuity, curiosity, and in the words of the mainstream, “development.” In the 1960s, the newly-created computer and its technological potential were seen among some as a way of immersing humans in a space of “universal understanding and unity,” through which weightlessness and speechlessness would bring about all of the things that our biological filter, has refused: immortality, telepathy, unlimited control over the body, infinitude. In other words, the opposite of what the human frame is or has become.
The post-World War II era saw the birth of the development program. While sold as a way to lift “undeveloped” or “underdeveloped” nation-states out of poverty and to create a degree of socioeconomic equality in the global village, the programs and policies employed ensured that the “third world” would forever exist in a stasis of debt peonage to the “first world.” Through public relations (later marketing), psychology and capitalist realism (Thatcher and Reagan’s TINA or “There Is No Alternative”), the individual required development, as well. Commercial technology was promoted as a path toward this developmental “evolution.” McLuhan noted that promise in his seminal 1964 text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man:
“Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language.”
Of course, this has come to pass in the form of the countless AI-powered language translation tools.
“The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity.”
The Pentecost is, according to the Encylopedia Britannica, “the festival in the Christian church marking the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples and the beginning of the church's global mission.” It is a way of bringing, and as its gone in the last half-century, imposing the good news of an efficient, secular, and machine-based modernity onto the lives of people who either didn’t ask for it or didn’t know what they were inviting in. Where the Church failed, the computer (or at least the internet) succeeded.
More than half a century later, we can admit that the computer has failed in becoming a conduit for collective peace, harmony or transcedence. Today, we can recognize that ever-thinning path in the ways that we require our technological tools to perform almost any social task (i.e. work, travel, and communicate). We are still countless light years away from socioeconomic equality, that is, unless we understand our paradigms and systems as forcing us toward a more equally indentured servitude on the slave ship of state-sanctioned pax. Next, virtual reality and human-AI, neurobiological cyborg technologies are on deck, being primed with all the promises of their predecessors. Future-oriented. The same old solution. But maybe the problem isn’t the solution. Maybe our concern properly lies in how we perceive the problem. Maybe it’s that we perceive a problem that is part of the problem.
Speechlessness is a kind of mind meld. A reduction of complexity and agency.
“Electricity points the way to an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on a world scale, and without any verbalization whatever.”
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
As long as we have serviceable cell phones, we don’t need to speak to anyone. It is a promise that dreams of the possibility of telepathy for people whose ears are being every so subtly shunned from the mother tongues they’ve been entrusted with.
Weightlessness infers, among other things, a degree of uprootedness. It is an alienation from the gravitational pressures of life, removed from the capacity to live in alignment with the land. Of space, but not place.
“The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson.” - Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
While this might sound attractive and awe-inspiring, this dream has become the nightmare of a screened-in worldview, a World Bank-style globalization and the hypermobility of escape (via migration and tourism). A weightlessness pushed and prized by the winds of exile.
Perhaps, off in the woods somewhere between the fields of promise and canyons of paranoia, we can begin to quietly court and seed a question without any expectation of an answer: how did it come to be this way? Why do we continue to mortgage the present for a future that never arrives? Why do we refuse limit as a birthright, as our marching orders? If immortality and telepathy are pipe dreams, if any semblance of those things arrives as the commodified or mandated negation of this precious human frame, of what some might call “our nature,” then what is development, what is “a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace” if not the promise of misanthropy?
The previous edition of Quixote’s Media Meditations was entitled, False Flags. You check out the full list here.
These reflections on technology, language, media ecology & literacy are provoked by Andrew McLuhan’s mandatory, must-take Understanding Media Intensive. You can find out more about McLuhan Studies straight from McLuhan’s mouth by reading his Substack, here.