What if you are living someone else’s life, someone else’s story? Someone else’s WAR. Only you just didn’t realise it? And what has all this got to do with the connection between singer Elvis Costello and English Civil war figure, Oliver Cromwell? I answer these questions in my latest video on YouTube.
This routine ensures that the thoughts running through my head are typically the ones I placed there, not the ones some politician, media or social media actor shoved into my skull. And it means the algorithms can’t get me till at least 1.00pm. My days and my life, therefore, have not become an instrument of Big Tech’s toxic profit models, nor have I become a useful idiot who can be herded like some bone-headed bovine into online advertising spaces, to chew on their noxious cud. I therefore remain focused upon the things that are of most value to me, not those that are of value to the CEO of some trillion dollar tech company. I use the tech. But it will not use me. I will no longer let it.
The psyche weaves its way across life, perhaps not unlike the way a river makes its way from the mountains to the sea. And we never quite know when the river waters might rise, even as we make our way to the other side.
It’s this historical and civilizational impasse that led me to write my latest book, Power and Presence, and I am delighted to announce that it is now available on Kindle and in hard copy format on Amazon. The book’s subtitle hints at my preferred approach to the sensemaking crisis: Reclaiming Your Authentic Self in a Digitized World. I believe that it is in developing a more conscious relationship with ourselves (including the body and mind), the world and technology itself that we can establish a genuine foundation for moving forward. Simply regulating everything and punishing people isn’t going to work, at least not by itself. We have to look deeper than that, right into the soul of humanity, and ask ourselves, “What does it mean to be human in the digital age?” So, as much as anything, this is a meaning crisis, one that long precedes the digital age, and which has been developing for centuries.
So, here we are at the beginning of what I call the A.I. Explosion. We are at a moment in history where change is happening at a rate that may never have previously occurred. I can’t say that definitively, because it is difficult to fully quantify the extent and impact of what’s occurring. But I…
Digital Wisdom as I define it comprises three parts. The first is“know thyself;” the second “know the humans;” and the third is “know the machines.” Individuals, organisations and societies can work at developing these three domains to cultivate Digital Wisdom personally and collectively
Research indicates that when we employ our peripheral vision, our sense of presence, awe and wonder increases. We relax, gain a deeper perspective of our place in time and space and our capacity for spatial memory improves. We become more positive about the future and the jigsaw of life begins to piece itself together. Thus, as our gaze habitually collapses outward while peripherally constricting, we lose touch with the human spirit.
A bird sitting in a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because her trust is not on the branch, but on its own wings.” Denzel Washington. It is not possible to create perfect systems. We can simply aim for better. And given that our systems and institutions will inevitably fail us sometimes, it…
Our time spent online is increasingly being eaten by forces that care naught for our authentic selves. The web is mostly a world of projection and drama, where hyperbole, fear and catastrophic narratives are pumped into us, such that our consciousness can be fed into their machines. Much of the internet is the imaginal gone wrong. The more we bury ourselves in that, the more lost, angry and alienated we become; because we have unwittingly betrayed our authentic selves. Because we have betrayed our own spirit.
Learning to listen to the heart may take a lifetime. Even longer. Or just a moment.
In Ginsberg’s rendering of the Machine, our intrinsic joy or “Heaven” has been consumed by the ravenous Moloch, along with our innate spirituality and embodied presence. We have become “loveless,” chasing “unobtainable dollars” like dumb mules stumbling towards carrots on a stick, not seeing what lies beyond the desirous thing dangling immediately before us.