I am no expert on post-digital tech but qualify as an enthusiast of pre-digital technology. In the 1960s and 1970s as a graduate student at ID+IIT, an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute and the new campus of U of I at Chicago Circle, as well as in my side hustle in consumer research for new product development (the job that later brought me to Atlanta) I was immersed full-time in media studies, including the early published analyses of the effects of television, as an example, by Marshall McLuhan, who is considered a philosopher, but with a focus on recent developments and their relevance to our daily life.
R. Buckminster Fuller, primarily known as an engineer (and famous for his geodesic domes), was also a philosopher with a vast purview into the many dimensions of history and future-oriented thinking, or what he called “comprehensive, anticipatory design science,” became a primary mentor to myself and my generation of design professionals, also had a lot to say regarding the effects of technology on the culture in general and the lives of individuals in particular. Both had the genius of composing compelling catchphrases, such as “The medium is the message,” and “energy slaves.”
When I survey the arc of the evolution of technology that I have personally witnessed in my relatively brief lifetime, I am somewhat breathless at its scope and depth. As the great science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke is credited with coining, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. One of the major pedagogical premises of the Bauhaus approach to humanizing industrial design was to insist on back plotting the curriculum to earlier technologies, such as building a pinhole camera and setting lead type, before engaging the students in current advancements such as 35mm “miniature” cameras or phototype processes. Nowadays, with a camera in every pocket, such ideas seem charmingly naive.
Certainly, in the early days of television, if you were somehow able to change the channel from across the room, that would have been magical. The complexity of the early “remote controls,” as they were labeled in that generation of tech, was captured in jokes about the old folks having to ask their children to “program” them, much as we hear comments about getting Gen Xers to step in and solve online glitches today. The quaint notion of selecting one of three major “channels,” from the perspective of the functionally unlimited array of options on TV today, is itself a dead giveaway, culturally dated terminology that defined the early onslaught of what has come to be termed “social media.” In addition to the “big screen” movie theaters that preceded television, to the “small screens” of personal, portable fame – more power in your pocket than IBM’s original room-filling mainframe computers.
It is all sufficiently advanced to appear as magic. And the rate of change is accelerating.
In relation to Zen, I think it instructive to ask the question, “What would Dogen do?” as is more commonly asked of Jesus Christ. When we look at the technology at the disposal of the ancestors of Zen, beginning with Buddha in India, Bodhidharma in China, and on down to Dogen in 13th Century Japan, we probably err on the side of judging their grasp of reality as prohibitively primitive, compared to our own. Today’s average high school students would seem to have a more sophisticated grasp of the physics and biology of the causes and conditions of our existence than the most highly educated wise man of antiquity. When it comes to the world at large — the natural and universal spheres in which we find ourselves enmeshed — that might be true. But when it comes to the basics of existence on the personal plane, and in the social milieu, we may have something to learn from our predecessors. This is where the meditative arts come in.
When we reduce technology to its essential functions, we can see that most of the inventions and discoveries amount to extensions of the senses and sensibilities, the needs, and desires, of the human body and mind. The arc of evolution of media itself — from representative art in the form of portraiture and landscapes replaced by the first photographic technologies; from black-and-white imagery to color; from still images to kinescope; then cinemascope; from silent pictures to surround-sound; from cinema verité to special effects; from stereoscope to holograms; virtual reality goggles, and deep fakes — looks much like an attempt to capture, then to replicate, and eventually to replace, the real-world surround in which we live. All that is missing is the density knob (and they are working on that) and we will not be able to tell the difference. The Matrix writ large. (Interestingly, the Surangama Sutra mentions the “Matrix of Buddha.”)
Much of the labor and time invested in the creative endeavors of science, medicine, and even business, has been dedicated to the mission of enhancing life, safety and security, comfort, and pleasure; and avoiding or mitigating dangers and threats to life, liberty, and in modern times, the pursuit of justice. The hierarchy of fundamental needs, as outlined by Maslow, has not changed greatly over the past 2500 years since the advent of Siddharth Gotama’s discoveries and teachings, including the so-called “higher needs.”
The unbelievably advanced instrumentation that allows us to see into the macro-and micro-universe, to make visible the invisible and hidden, may be seen fundamentally as extensions of the instrument of the human body, with its Six Senses, including Thinking. Now, artificial intelligence threatens to eclipse even that most exalted characteristic of humanity that supposedly distinguishes us from the rest of the apes and so-called lower animals.
And yet we have not examined the very source from which this intelligence arises, as Buddha attempted to articulate in his model of the “Twelvefold Chain of Interdependent Co-Arising,” as discussed in my latest UnMind podcast. That we are endowed with consciousness and higher intelligence by a benevolent God is one persistent, understandably hopeful, explanation. But it ducks the fundamental problem, substituting a belief for a hypothesis. Buddha’s directive goes to the heart of the issue, exhorting us to confront the koan of existence head-on. Dogen admonishes us to “thoroughly examine in practice” this riddle of sentient being. The idea is that the most advanced technology we have at our disposal, the most precise and unerring instrument to focus on this most central concern, is our own body-mind. Which, counter-intuitively, must “drop off” (J. shinjin datsuraku), in order that we may see through it, to the heart of being, to borrow John Daido Loori’s construction.
Now that I have opened this can of worms, I am going to leave it to you to clean up the mess. But I intend to return to, and examine it more thoroughly, in upcoming Dharma Bytes and UnMind podcasts. “A hairsbreadth deviation and you are out of tune.” Stay tuned.
