Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 12: Breaking the Pod of I

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

Why the World Mourned Steve Jobs

When Steve Jobs died, and his profile appeared in apple bites around the world, I was taken aback. So many people genuinely mourned his death. It was as if he was John Lennon or Princess Diana. The world was in mourning and apparently it was a little emptier without him. As they moved from shock to fond farewells and I wondered who it was that they felt they lost.

This is as much as I can figure out: Jobs was like the Beatles. His coming to the world pop culture taught us a new way of being in the world and he made our lives seem richer and more exciting. This he did by making the interphase between human and computer easy—even sexy. Through those solid, white machines that looked so clean and elegant to the equally elegant pods on which we dock and which have become our constant companion, Steve Jobs made us all cyborgs. Jobs and company taught us how to enhance our humanity by being attached to our computers. They were able to do this because they created systems where anyone with a simple capacity to understand symbols, has a deep enough pocket, and has a rationality that can navigate the rudimentary operations of computers can instantly connect to a digital world where communicating with anyone and accessing any information is simple. Users didn’t have to know much except to point and click, and to know what to point at and why.

In the old days, before these computers became popular, one had to be a low level expert in computer languages to be able to make these machines do more than rudimentary computing and word processing. Because of the mouse and the simplified commands for making computers do things, most people can now engage the internet with its web of relations, use all forms of communication technologies that reduce great distances, and compile massive amounts of information from the most sublime to the most shallow. These world shifting innovations served us well indeed. They allowed us to be more informed, creative, productive, connected, and engaged. They allowed us to globalize production and tighten the global factory system. It also democratized the creation, distribution, and acquisition of knowledge. At least it democratized it among people who shared Western rationalities and incomes. (Of course, the down side of this is that it could have furthered the marginalization of the others of global civilization. But that’s another story.)

The ease of computer use served the Filipino spirit well. Filipinos have an intense need to keep in touch with each other. We need to know what all our relatives are up to, how much their children are earning, who married whom, who made it to America, and who is the most unfortunate. We need to know where are classmates are, if they’re earning more than us, if they made it to America or even Singapore, and whose kids are better than ours. The computer and information systems have intensified this need and magnified them to almost obsessive proportions. The public access computers in the Ateneo library are occupied with people checking their Facebooks walls or Twitter accounts. Almost every minute there is some comment on life, some gushing about food, some sharing of some poem, or some linked article read that we have to be updated with.

Pinoys need to reach out and touch others and be affirmed by those others. Because of our connectedness to our computers, this need has become extremely intensified. We constantly have our phones in our hands and forward badly constructed quotes or text inanities just to be able to say something and incite a response. Some obsess about keeping people updated about their present activities such as “enjoying my expresso in Starbucks” or “sad because I missed my class.” Almost constantly and without rest, we are asking for affirmation. Here is my cupcake that I ate the other day. See the picture! Here are a hundred pictures of me sitting with my friends in a restaurant. Here! Read my thoughts on cupcakes with friends in a restaurant. I heard this. I read that. I liked this. Like it too! Here I am! The computer and information technologies we now have made it easier for us to obsess with ourselves and present ourselves instantly to our cyber publics.

These examples of what computers have done for us shows how tools really expand our capacities and serve our needs. We have the need and capacity to communicate. Computers expanded these capacities beyond the face to face. They even modify space and time for us. Space and time are relative now to the speed of transmission and the capacity of the technology to accommodate users.

Technology Enframes

We thank Steve Jobs because his technological innovations made so many things possible: love at a distance, massive barkadas, and intercontinental collaborations—not  to mention our almost limitless self-promotion. These innovations seem to show how technology is responsive to our needs and that they exist to serve us. After all technology is only supposed to expand or extend our capabilities. However, we don’t realize that technologies also frame the way we realize those capabilities. For example, how we communicate and how we handle knowledge—the content of it and the meaning of it as much as the means of it—is computer framed. Today powerpoint determines how we lecture. It is linear, visual, and simple. Everything you have to say is all there and you do have to go too deep. The same is true with reflections, sharing information, and campaigning. These happen on webpages  on the internet. But to share this information you have to be picture-filled, not text-heavy, uncomplicated, and simplistic even.

Research and knowledge sharing have also been changed. For one, there is the democratization of knowledge. Anyone who can type and upload can share anything they want and make people think they are worth reading and quoting. We can also share our talents and make stars of ourselves without having the imprimatur of the controllers of music and entertainment. This certainly opens up the realms of art and culture, but it also floods our world with distractions that may not be worth spending much time on. And many people do spend time watching Youtube videos of babies bumping into walls or monkeys sticking their fingers in their anuses. For another, we have access to truly great things worth dwelling on such as the Apu Trilogy, early Greek music, the complete works of Kant, and scholarly commentary about all these things.

However, the nature of the technology does not encourage dwelling and deepening even of the most profound things we can acquire from it. For instance, because we can download the whole discography of Santana or every quartet of Beethoven, or the filmography of Fassbinder or Tarkovsky, in a matter of a day, we tend to acquire and acquire and flood our hard drives with so much stuff that we feel compelled to just to through everything. When we used to acquire one album at a time, and then it was difficult to acquire more than one at a time, we tended to dwell on those singular things we acquired. After all, one tends of savor the one thing one worked to get. But this cacophony of sound, this wealth of great art, tends to reduce the work to just another thing to consume on the level of the Youtube video of the monkeys dancing and that blog about cupcakes you just have to read.

In this way, we are enframed by the technologies we have. With the advent of these new systems of communicating, sharing, knowing; with our attachment to the computer and electronic systems; we are caught in a way of being that, if we are  not careful, can utterly transform the way we engage the real. How we think, how we know, how we process and deepen our knowledge, are profoundly being shaped by the new electronic media. Even our construction of self is being shaped by this. The fact that you have to posit yourself in Facebook, Twitter, or blog fashion determines how you project yourself. After all, there is a dominant rationality that controls these systems and formats the self-presentation that we are allowed to make. The limitations of space and style, shapes what we want to share and how we should share it. You are a different self in your diary than in your blog. Your posted self follows a format often already shaped by the Western users of that system. If we are not aware of any other way of presenting ourselves, we may just start believing what we project to be the very depths of our selves.

No Time To Think, No Time To Sleep

After the spread of communications technologies as we know them, we are left in a state of restlessness and sleeplessness because the rhythm of opening and retreating has been transformed to relentless exposing. We are called by our computer to always be online because there is always someone online doing something. We can’t really shut the computer anymore because we need to get the new thing, the latest scoop, the currently obsessed about thing. The movement of receiving and processing or reflecting has been disrupted by the bulk of things we have to process and the constant stream of shared information that floods our screens. There is no more time or inclination to be quiet and take things in. And the private spaces where the self can be formed and grow without being continuously bombarded with external noise is lost. We sit in front of computers constantly shifting our attention from task to task, clicking from page to page, processing, digesting, at the speed of digital transfers.

I was talking to a young person, a particularly smart and reflective writer, about the speed at which information was being transferred and accessed and how that robs many young people of the quiet time to reflect. And she said, And why is it so important to reflect? This is what Steve Jobs and the other computer revolutionaries have sold us. This is the new normal of human engagement and interaction, of coming to knowledge, and becoming ourselves. 

The new normal is good because it makes things easy. However, it is also makes us accept these ways uncritically. Without too many people realizing that it was happening, meetings were organized through cell phones, people stopped updating each other personally but through Facebook, protests were brought together through Twitter, and discussion groups were done through YM. Not too many people realized either that although you could gather people through Twitter, you could not educate them on the intricacies of issues through that. Sharing one’s life became less personal because one merely posted on a wall rather than communicating one’s feelings and thoughts to friends. Meetings and discussions over YM had to be superficial because the space constraints determined that we could not explore too deeply our thoughts in that space.  But that was the new normal and everyone accepted that.

image from http://southinkucannance.blogspot.com/2011/11/parking-garage-peep-show.html

However, things are happening too fast, and the new normal is being marketed too forcefully for the young to be able to critically reflect on the value and truth of these things. In fact, they no longer see any alternatives to this normal. Before most people realized it, we were bought into a way of being that we have not decided on nor have we reflected on its value. We just have to have a cell phone because otherwise our community will be limited. We have to have a Facebook account or we will be left out of the loop. We will have to have internet because we will be capability deprived on so many levels.

Today, because of these technologies, we are forced to express ourselves uniformly in ways constructed by others who have more access to us because of the internet. We feel we need to keep presenting ourselves and engaging our publics because otherwise we will be left out. We no longer have time or space to withdraw from the stream of images, information, and ideas. We are forced to be always with our machines and have almost forgotten what it means to be other than machine connected. We have become infolded. We have been pushed to present ourselves and obsess about what we are incessantly but as framed by the formats of the new media. We have also been led to frame the presencing of others such that we can only see them as they present themselves to us in the form of the enframing media.

A New Unfolding to a Generation Infolded

As life as we know it comes to an end, we are called by the play of the real to be more mindful of what comes to presence. The end of abundant food, the end of petroleum, the end of fertile soil, the end of free flowing water, and the end of consumer driven civilizations calls us to be open to the presencing of the end in order for us to articulate what is given to begin. In our time, the play of Being is  being given otherwise than how we have framed it. A new way of realizing human presencing is being challenged from us and we must rise to the call of it. But how do we respond to the call of presencing when we are already framed as the beings who are the masters of and mastered by enframing. We are already framed to let others presence as framed. We even frame our presencing as presentable as posts on a wall or tweets on a screen. We are self-absorbed totalities obsessed with presenting ourselves and consuming the self-presentation of others.

However, from the stasis of our self-absorption, we are being called to open to the advent of the play of eternity. How can we open to the eternal call of Being in play if all we can see is our selves and all we can accept is always already framed? We need to be able to realize an opening which demands a kind of thinking that is able to engage the play of what come to presence in the complexity of its play, in the complexity of its presentation. Only in this way can we be persons who are able to contemplate the play of being that gives presencing. If we are enframing and infolded, we cannot begin to open to what calls us forth to opening.

Unfortunately, the new technologies make us believe that being infolded is the only normal. We are i-pods. The pod of an I enclosed in itself, unable to open freely, to be given freely to what comes calling in presence. We are the plugged pod that cannot break open even when the time of ripening comes because we cannot even begin to sense the invitation to ripening in the air. But we cannot afford to be these petrified pods as we come to the end of life as we know it. Already, the earth is moving to eject us like destructive parasites in the fever of global warming. We will only survive this trying time if we can image new ways of being in the world that are genuinely responsive to the giving of the play of the earth’s presencing and make atonements. But how can we delicately respond if we are I pods—self contained, self-involved pods who interphase with each other in ways determined by enframing systems? We need to break the pods, and relearn opening.

We need to choose to cultivate the capacity to genuinely contemplate the play of presence. This means weaning ourselves from the obsessive distractedness with our machines. It means being able to withdraw from being plugged into the machineries of enframing and being able to contemplate, to reflect, to withdraw into our quiet. Only then will be begin to sense the stirring of rebirth at the end of life as we know it. Only then will the nourishment of renewal coax our pods into new birth.