Kōan Fragments of a Distorted World #14 (with a nod to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s book "Pictures of the Gone World")

1)
In a recent article in which he described taking his son to watch a film through 3D glasses, Charles Eisenstein noted, “On-screen reality was so vivid, stimulating, and intense that it made the real world seem boring by comparison.”[1]

2)
laptops and lattes,
hooked up and trying to hook up
and the more “likes” you get
the more you like yourself,
or do you?

who cares
because screen is the new priest
absolving your social awkwardness
so you can get to the e-holy land and
have we reached the frenetic limit
of trying to keep up with the gadget-bytes?
always hungry, never sated

3)
“Excessive positivity also expresses itself as an excess of stimuli, information, and impulses. It radically changes the structure and economy of attention. Perception becomes fragmented and scattered.”
   - Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society[2]

4)
In my troubled teens and early twenties, I had a nervous habit of touching my chest with my fingers; it was my way of dealing with social anxiety; nervous tic as security blanket. A therapist once 'prescribed' that I do that four times a day for a minute; a clever formula so as to diminish the fixation. Maybe that sort of thing could be applied to gadget usage, limiting to various times of day, depending on one's work and other essential usage.

5)
“We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience. Whereas the Elizabethans were poised between medieval corporate experience and modern individualism, we reverse their pattern by confronting an electric technology which would seem to render individualism obsolete and the corporate interdependence mandatory.”
     - Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy[3]

6)
In his 1997 book The Religion Of Technology, David F. Noble gives example after example of how throughout history and more rapidly recently, inventions and technologies have been perceived – through a Judeo-Christian lens – as having a redemptive function, enabling mankind to redeem and transcend its expulsion from the paradisal garden and attain “Adamic dominion” over Nature.

And it continues to this day, as people look to technology as a savior, rather than a mere tool; look to technology as a convenience, which too-often encourages a mental and spiritual laziness: why remember things when the gadgets can store the info and why develop a psychic skill such as telepathy when you can speed-dial 24-7.

7)
“Every technology contrived and outered by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.”
   - Marshall McLuhan[4]

One thing all these examples have in common is a form of interiorization, where by excessive usage and loss of self, one becomes like the machine, in other words, the machine energy and behavior becomes internalized. Han, in The Burnout Society, cites neurological effects, along with depression, ADHD, and borderline personality disorders.

The Greek theater employed a technique known as “deus ex machina” or God out of a machine; by dictionary definition: “a god lowered by stage machinery to resolve a plot or extricate the protagonist from a difficult situation.”

Video-chatting with a friend you haven't seen in a while can feel like that or finding out how to do a home or car repair, yet the mass dependency is akin to the techno-savior fantasy. When we put all our marbles, all our faith into the god machine, we in effect remove the “deus” from within ourselves, we remove our innate spark and thus our respect for all the other sparks within human and non-human beings, and we remove our inner hook-up with the divine or mysterious source of energy, replacing it with machine-like behavior—we become automatons.

8)
How much is it worth losing our innate energies and abilities for a piece of the societal gadget pie? “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and to lose his soul?” You could ask the likes of Zuckerberg or Bezos, but more importantly, ask yourself.

NOTES:
[1] “Transhumanism and the Metaverse”
https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/transhumanism-and-the-metaverse

[2] translated by Erik Butler, stanford briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2015, p.12.

[3] University of Toronto Press, 1962; Signet Books, 1969, p.1.

[4] Ibid p.153.

Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) is an essayist and resident poet at Axis of Logic. Check out his newest book Moving Through The Empty Gate Forest: inside looking out.

In addition to his work as a writer and small press publisher, he travels a holistic mystic pathway staying in touch with Turtle Island. His website is here.

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