Martin Heidegger uttered those words in a 1966 interview, mourning the state of the world as he saw it. Our fallness, both existentially and spiritually, compounds our lostness. Human beings are thrust headfirst into a chaotic world not of their making. To fill what appears to be the crater-sized hole of emptiness, we build, invent, and harness the power of nature. One would think this would mean no one goes hungry, thirsty, or is without a place to lay their head at night. Sadly, we are far from any semblance of such a notion.
Nice post. I havn't read Heidegger and I hear he is extremely difficult to read, so I bought an idiot's guide to reading him which is on my bedside table, lol. But I just finished Jacques Ellul's "The Technological Society", which was also a complex and painful read, and he attributes the problem to the ascendancy of technique (which encompasses but is broader than technology) which seeks the most efficient means for any process without consideration of other factors such as religious, moral, pragmatic, cultural or environmental factors. As Ernst Junger said, "“Technique is the magical dance that the contemporary world dances. We can only participate in its vibrations and oscillations if we understand technique. Otherwise we are excluded from the game.” And Julian Assange agrees with this, that technique has transformed the world (sorry, long quote):
“I’m quite interested in the philosophy of technique. Technique means not just a piece of technology but it means, say, majority consensus on a board, or the structure of a parliament - it’s systematized interaction. For example, it seems to me that feudal systems came from the technique of mills. Once you had centralized mills, which required huge investments and which were easily subject to physical control, then it was quite natural that you would end up with feudal relations as a result. As time has gone by we seem to have developed increasingly sophisticated techniques. Some of these techniques can be democratized; they can be spread to everyone. But the majority of them - because of their complexity - are techniques that form as a result of strongly interconnected organizations like Intel Corporation. Perhaps the underlying tendency of technique is to go through these periods of discovering technique, centralizing technique, democratizing technique - when the knowledge about how to do it floods out in the next generation that is educated. But I think that the general tendency for technique is to centralize control in those people who control the physical resources of techniques.
Something like a semi-conductor manufacturer is, I think, the ultimate example of that, where you need such order that the air itself must be pure, where you need a construction plant that has thousands of people in it who have to wear hairnets to keep every little skin flake, every bit of hair away from the semi-conductor manufacturing process, which is a multi-step process that is extremely complicated. And there are literally millions of hours of research knowledge possessed by the semi-conductor manufacturing organization. If those things are popular, which they are, and they underpin the internet, then coded within internet liberation is semi-conductor manufacturing. And coded within semi-conductor manufacturing is the ability for whoever has physical control of the semi-conductor manufacturer to extract enormous concessions.
So underpinning the high-tech communications revolution - and the liberty that we have extracted from that - is the whole neoliberal, transnational, globalized modern market economy. It is in fact the peak of that. It is the height, in terms of technological achievement, that the modern globalized neoliberal economy can produce. The internet is underpinned by extremely complex trade interactions between optical fiber manufacturers, semi-conductor manufacturers, mining companies that dig all this stuff up, and all the financial lubricants to make the trade happen, courts to enforce private property laws and so on. So it really is the top of the pyramid of the whole neoliberal system.”
Nice post. I havn't read Heidegger and I hear he is extremely difficult to read, so I bought an idiot's guide to reading him which is on my bedside table, lol. But I just finished Jacques Ellul's "The Technological Society", which was also a complex and painful read, and he attributes the problem to the ascendancy of technique (which encompasses but is broader than technology) which seeks the most efficient means for any process without consideration of other factors such as religious, moral, pragmatic, cultural or environmental factors. As Ernst Junger said, "“Technique is the magical dance that the contemporary world dances. We can only participate in its vibrations and oscillations if we understand technique. Otherwise we are excluded from the game.” And Julian Assange agrees with this, that technique has transformed the world (sorry, long quote):
“I’m quite interested in the philosophy of technique. Technique means not just a piece of technology but it means, say, majority consensus on a board, or the structure of a parliament - it’s systematized interaction. For example, it seems to me that feudal systems came from the technique of mills. Once you had centralized mills, which required huge investments and which were easily subject to physical control, then it was quite natural that you would end up with feudal relations as a result. As time has gone by we seem to have developed increasingly sophisticated techniques. Some of these techniques can be democratized; they can be spread to everyone. But the majority of them - because of their complexity - are techniques that form as a result of strongly interconnected organizations like Intel Corporation. Perhaps the underlying tendency of technique is to go through these periods of discovering technique, centralizing technique, democratizing technique - when the knowledge about how to do it floods out in the next generation that is educated. But I think that the general tendency for technique is to centralize control in those people who control the physical resources of techniques.
Something like a semi-conductor manufacturer is, I think, the ultimate example of that, where you need such order that the air itself must be pure, where you need a construction plant that has thousands of people in it who have to wear hairnets to keep every little skin flake, every bit of hair away from the semi-conductor manufacturing process, which is a multi-step process that is extremely complicated. And there are literally millions of hours of research knowledge possessed by the semi-conductor manufacturing organization. If those things are popular, which they are, and they underpin the internet, then coded within internet liberation is semi-conductor manufacturing. And coded within semi-conductor manufacturing is the ability for whoever has physical control of the semi-conductor manufacturer to extract enormous concessions.
So underpinning the high-tech communications revolution - and the liberty that we have extracted from that - is the whole neoliberal, transnational, globalized modern market economy. It is in fact the peak of that. It is the height, in terms of technological achievement, that the modern globalized neoliberal economy can produce. The internet is underpinned by extremely complex trade interactions between optical fiber manufacturers, semi-conductor manufacturers, mining companies that dig all this stuff up, and all the financial lubricants to make the trade happen, courts to enforce private property laws and so on. So it really is the top of the pyramid of the whole neoliberal system.”