Robert MacNeil Christie, Author

If you look at the world from an independent perspective, some things are obvious, others not so much. The Industrial Age has generated vast quantities of raw data and information (data structured to make sense). Ordinarily we are not aware of much of what our brains are doing, and that is probably a good thing or it would be incredibly overwhelming. Billions of little bits of data must be sorted through, most abandoned, and the rest structured into meaning.

That sorting and interpretation of data depends heavily on meanings we have already established from many past experiences. That gets complicated in a world of rapid change. In that context, it does not surprise me that given the multitude of sources and diversity of data, that sometimes we can get what might seem obvious to some others, very wrong.

Technology and Me

I think I have always been a technophile, even before I cut my index finger carving a spoon with my Boy Scout pocketknife in a carving contest, when the knife folded over onto the top of my finger—five small stiches. Nevertheless, I won second prize with my bloody basswood spoon. My earliest experiences with tools must have set my lifelong fascination with the implements with which humans interact with the world.

After all, until my parents moved and I started high school, my Boy Scout and Sea Scout adventures involved learning how to use many tools in addition to that bloody pocketknife. They included axes, tent stakes and rope, hammers/nails, saws, chisels, sharpening stones, canoes, .22 rifles, bow and arrows, rowboats, sailboats, bicycles, leather-work tools, etc. (It would take too long for this old brain to remember all the rest.) At the time, I enjoyed both the challenge and the satisfaction of mastering the skills required to deploy these tools well enough to earth all those merit badges, twenty-one of which earned me the rank of Eagle Scout. Looking back, I realized that every one of those tools was designed to allow me to control my relation to the world around me in some way or another.

Much later, despite being a full-time professor of sociology, as soon as the technology was available I began engaging in the creativity enabled by the personal computer. I wrote database applications for small businesses, built IBM “clone” personal computers and set up networks for small businesses when very few people had yet learned how to turn on a computer. It was all great fun, but I just did not have time for all that while fulfilling the duties of my ‘day job,’ so I began limiting the use of my computing skills to my own and my students’ needs. It is all about balance.

The Technosphere and Us

Dmitri Orlov defines “the technosphere” as that complex adaptive system that integrates technology with the global political economy to control ever-greater portions of the Earth System. (Well, that may be more my own interpretation of that definition than a precise rendering of his). The growth of the technosphere threatens the biosphere. Anyway, Orlov (2016) knew that we must “Shrinking the Technosphere,” the title of his 2016 book, the subtitle of which is “Getting a Grip on Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-Sufficiency and Freedom.” Things have gone a long ways since the early days of personal computers.

Orlov expresses the last stage of the self-contradictory rise and proliferation of ever more complex, powerful, and ultimately destructive digital information technologies for controlling the material world and humanity as well. Remember, the purpose of tools is to control something. Within the ‘progress’ of technology, the dominator culture engages in ‘shape-shifting.’ It creates new forms to control new targets with each shift. Now, we are the primary target.

Digital processing not only controls information and its communication, but also it controls entire design and manufacturing processes. Now, advocates of AI (so-called artificial intelligence) claim that it can replace many human intellectual processes. Its adoption by all sorts of businesses has been nothing short of contagion—a fad largely devoid of reflection on the potential dangers involved by those who deploy it for profit as well as to manipulate others. It is touted as an enhancement to just about every product or service that has an information-processing element involved.

Well, a lot of controversy swirls around this new development too, and not just about what the actual capabilities of the technology really are. Some of the “mistakes’ AI models have made are clues to what that technology really does. The AI developers call them “hallucinations,” and for good reason. Nonsensical or unreal output of large language models reflects the fact that these models have no real connection to human experience or feeling. Trained on large data sets, various unexpected social biases can infect them. Frankly, many otherwise sophisticated people do not really understand what intelligence is, in the rush to deploy this new profit center.

Perhaps the biggest potential dilemma surrounding AI, and the least discussed, is its potential impact on the culture of industrial civilization. We already have an out-of-control culture of separation from, and domination of Nature, including other humans, which has caused much of the converging crises of our time. The data from that same culture trains AI large language models. Reliance on AI models can give the dominator culture much more power, just when we need to bring it under much greater human control—that is, by shrinking the Technosphere. The global industrial-consumer political economy is destabilizing the entire Earth System and human systems (societies) as well. And most of us embrace its latest shape-shift if we rely on AI.

Shakti or Bust

Shakti is the Hindu term for the great cosmic force that energizes the entire universe, that’s all. The historic project of industrial civilization has found many ways to gain control of that energy in its particular form on planet Earth—for now, anyway. What has escaped the intellect and emotions of the world ‘leaders’ of finance, politics, military, and cultural systems, is that the trajectory of the Technosphere they have built over the past several hundreds of years, has significantly thrown the world out of balance.

Koyaanisqatsi means “Life Out of Balance” in the Hopi language. It is also the title of a haunting non-narrative documentary film directed and produced by Godfrey Reggio, with music by Philip Glass, and cinematography by Ron Fricke. Other translations include “crazy life,” “life in turmoil,” “life disintegrating,” and “a state of life that calls for another way of living.” Koyaanisqatsi is not where we should be. The film does not tell the story of an impending end of industrial civilization, it visually shows us the “life in turmoil” in the world of industrial modernism. In natural systems, one of the key characteristics is balance—modernist societies have lost their balance.

In complex adaptive living systems, balance is maintained by the process of self-organizing the flow of energy throughout the system in a variety of ways. Ecosystems everywhere display this balance and the processes that maintain it. The evolution of all life forms has required the balance of key system elements, even as complex living systems evolve. This is a fundamental principle of how Shakti energizes and sustains living systems. However, the rise of an internal imbalance, or the introduction of an external disruption of energy flows, if severe enough and if countervailing feedback loops are not strong enough, the system destabilizes even to the point of collapse.

Any attempt to ‘solve’ the dilemmas of climate, ecological, even economic destabilization today must be driven by the goal of bringing the various systems back into the balance that sustains effective harmonious flow of Shakti, supporting the continuation of life. It is high time to shift the shape of modern societies so that they may harmonize with the complex living system, the Earth System, which not nearly enough of us feel is our home.