hegemony rules

There's an excellent article in today's PopMatters about the connection of virtuality, "overclocking" the brain a la Mind Performance Hacks, and consumerism. Rob Horning, one of the site's editors and the article's author, argues that much of the discourse today regarding technology and our "speeded up" life is entrenched in a battle between "the spiritual community of religious believers, and the eager community of technologized subjects, epitomized by the commercial and participatory promise of the Internet." He continues,

...On the flip side of the fear of mechanistic science is a kind of technophilia, in which humans are so impressed with the efficiency of machines that they voluntarily seek to emulate them. Consider, for example, Mind Performance Hacks, a book recently touted at BoingBoing.net that promises “tips and tools for overclocking your brain” and “new ‘software subroutines’ that you can run to optimize various mental processes.” The brain is hardware, and consciousness the output of resident programs. Computer metaphors are attractive in that they allow us to conceptualize enduring human problems—the ones that require utopian thinking—in a readymade way that makes them seem easily and inevitably solvable by the march of technological process. We see our own minds as programmable, controllable, able to be applied to discrete focused tasks, and different ones simultaneously in heroic feats of multitasking. We talk about plugging ourselves into networks and leveraging the knowledge distributed among us. We imagine social life as a massive operating system in which everything has a deliberate function, so that it can seem comprehensible and manageable. We talk of unfortunate ideas as computer viruses, taking a biological metaphor that’s been technologized and repatriating it for humans.

The human-computer fantasy typically views the brain as fundamentally passive—think of The Matrix‘s depiction of Keanu Reeves downloading immediately functional information directly into his brain, as though it ran on third-party programs that just needed occasional patching. One is configured as an end-user of one’s own brain, a mere consumer of the experiences it can be programmed to spit out. Consciousness is a step removed from the brain, which provides the data that consciousness enjoys, as though it were a film.

But Mind Performance Hacks inverts this, promising to make the brain work more like a machine under the user’s conscious direction, which suggests that the user’s consciousness itself aspires to be more machinelike, more relentlessly productive. Rather than receiving data the brain spits out, consciousness merges with “subroutines” it can perform to think more mechanically and more efficiently. No doubt these things work—these kinds of ideas for human perfectibility and increased mental acuity have kicked around before as mnemonics or chisenbop or EST or hypnotherapy, bioengineering, methadrine, etc.—but what seems new is the insistence on the computer metaphor, as if to be a computer would be to live the dream.

By imagining ourselves more like computers, we are to take the value system technology generates—the idea almost hegemonic in business culture that greater productive efficiency automatically generates an expansion of happiness—and apply it to our own behavior. Our economy’s emphasis on technology as a means to produce perpetual growth makes us think that by becoming more machinelike, we become more human in the sense of fulfilling our maximum potential. The more raw data we can process, the richer our lives become, as if processing information was valuable for its own sake. Information, now an unconquerable ocean, tempts us to master it through heroic feats of navigation, exploratory expeditions made purely for glory. Human potential, human experience, may come to seem entirely a matter of information processing; and the faster your brain processes information, the more life one is cramming into our allotted time on earth. Efforts to absorb all this information can become a kind of flow experience, a way of entering the “zone” associated with athletic accomplishment, and at that point one may seem to merge with the information itself, to become inseparable from its continual transmission. That might be the aspiration anyway, to become the best data you can be, so you still figure in a world awash in nothing but data.

This is fascinating stuff, and I agree with much of Horning's assessment, especially in his Marxist critique of the desire (which is probably as much market- as it is people-driven) to process raw data as a means in-and-of-itself. While I'm no Luddite (as evidenced by my annoyance at being offline for a few weeks), I'm also not a cheerleader for unrestrained technological development. Our "needs" are increasingly becoming commodified and consumerized - so I find it especially ironic that much of the technological-utopian discourse is being spouted by folks who consider themselves progressive anti-capitalist champions.