While reading Stefan Zweig's book The World of Yesterday recently, I came across the following quote:
It seems almost like Nature's fierce revenge on mankind that all the achievements of technology through which we have taken her mysterious forces into our own hands simultaneously destroy the soul. The greatest curse brought down on us by technology is that it prevents us from escaping the present even for a brief time. Previous generations could retreat into solitude and seclusion when disaster struck; it was our fate to be aware of everything catastrophic happening anywhere in the world at the hour and the second when it happened.
Mind you, Zweig was writing about the 1930s! A prophetic statement indeed.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is well known for declaring that "software is eating the world"; a corollary (since human beings are at the center of our world) is that software is eating our humanity. More and more, our interactions with each other, with our history, with ideas, with art, and even with physical reality are mediated by technology: to choose a few examples, by voice-response systems, website input forms, chatbots, in-car info screens, medical appointment scripts (wherein your doctor looks primarily at a screen, not you the patient), smartphones, social media apps, news and entertainment algorithms, and soon artificial intelligence and augmented reality.
Yet "mediated" is such an insipid word, isn't it? In truth, all too often it is our most human characteristics - our spontaneity, our creativity, our sociality, our empathy, our imagination, our individuality, or in old-fashioned language our soul - that our technologies constrain, ignore, suppress, and destroy.
At the same time, the human world is inherently a technological world because we have been tool-makers for millions of years. The question is always: do our tools serve us, or do we serve our tools? To me, increasingly it feels like the latter. (Yet it could be merely a matter of age: perhaps I'm comfortable with older technologies but not with newer ones.)
Naturally, finding a healthy balance between our technologies and our humanity is something that each of us must do on our own and within our families, friendships, organizations, and communities. For myself, I deliberately tilt toward more humanity, but it often feels like I'm swimming upstream...
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)