Only a Game

Return to the Green Room

The epic two year adventure that was A Hundred Cyborgs is now concluded, with just the final block of revisits concluding last week. What a great time to return to the Green Room and have a chat about our adventures together!

It's been over a decade since we last ended up in the Green Room, at the end of the Ethics Campaign that would lead more than five years later to Chaos Ethics. By long standing tradition, I talk about Only a Game as a 'non-fiction role-playing game', and so when we pursue a long-term project it's a 'campaign' (the name given to a continuous string of adventures in a tabletop RPG). #100Cyborgs feels very different from the original two campaigns (Metaphysics and Ethics), not least of all because blogs no longer maintain the regular conversations they used to. Yet on Twitter, if not here, there has been a lot of discussion around various pieces, although certainly less than half of them. Also, the 500 word structure is rather unique, and led to a very different pacing... I learned a lot from working in this form; you can fit much more into 500 words than it first seems!

I would be very grateful, if you enjoyed or were challenged by even one of these one hundred pieces, if you would leave a comment here 'in the Green Room' to let me know. I write because I have to, but it is being read that makes writing worthwhile.

The game begins anew soon.

100Cyborgs: 91-100

What are the behavioural effects of technological networks? What happens if we stop thinking about technology as shiny machines and start looking at other, subtler tools? Can we design technology to have better effects upon humans? These and other questions are what this blog project, A Hundred Cyborgs, are all about. Here are the final ten posts from 91 to 100:

    91. GoogleApple
    92. Deplatforming
    93. Drugs
    94. Make-up
    95. The Digital Downstairs (Routers)
    96. Disney Tax
    97. Lockdown
    98. Citizens
    99. Libraries
    100. Philosophy Books

It was not easy to choose a final ten cyborgs... all through the serial I maintained a list of ideas for what I could talk about, and at the end there were still some forty or so that I hadn't discussed. I had avoided dealing with smartphones directly until this final block, but #91 GoogleApple puts a fair perspective on the matter, and #95 The Digital Downstairs provides a different viewpoint on our relationship with our robots, one that is worth bearing in mind. There were several pieces that I wasn't sure how controversial they'd be - #93 Drugs sank without notice, while #92 Deplatforming provoked an absolute storm of vehement objections, although nothing that swayed me from my position. #97 Lockdown and #98 Citizens go together as twin diagnoses to our current crises - the one we inflicted upon ourselves out of fear, and the one we urgently need to fix before hatred destroys us. The pacing of this final block allowed for a dramatic pause after that pairing, leading to the final two. I always wanted to end on a positive note, and I could find no better example of cybervirtue than #99 Libraries, which led perfectly into #100 Philosophy Books, allowing me to end the serial by connecting it to its reason for existence - The Virtuous Cyborg.

I am always interested in discussion, so feel free to raise comments either here (ideal for longer debates) or on Twitter (perfect for quick questions). And if you’ve enjoyed any of these pieces, please buy a copy of The Virtuous Cyborg and support my research into cybervirtue!

Enjoyed any of the pieces in #100Cyborgs? Join me in the Green Room and let me know.

Philosophy Books

Why read a book like The Virtuous Cyborg? One answer is that reading philosophy books is a way of encouraging your own virtues; your curiosity, your flexibility, your moral judgement, and your reasoning - all can be sharpened by forming a cyborg with a book that will expand your capacities - just as your smartphone expands your capacities as a cyborg, albeit by signing over part of your autonomy to GoogleApple.

Not every book written by a philosopher is a ‘philosophy book’ in the sense I mean, and some books written by journalists, scientists, and theologians are also philosophy books in the relevant sense. Many novels are too. They are so if they put your mind and the world it lives within into contact with another mind and world in a way that opens you up to new ways of thinking. That capacity - to think anew - is what makes philosophy such a unique set of practices. Alas, the vogue for an academia of specialisms is anathema to philosophy books, since in such a system there are only problems to solve and no people to meet.

Through my cyborg encounters with philosophy books I have talked with Descartes, Aristotle, and Chuang Tzu, but not alas with Hypatia, whose books have not survived. I have encountered people like Mary Midgley who I went on to correspond with, and Immanuel Kant or Mary Wollstonecraft, who I could not. And each encounter has expanded the range of ways I can think about myself and my world, and clarified the connectivity between our thinking today and two millennia of written works, many of which have bequeathed to us our tools for thinking, held so unconsciously we might almost mistake them as the only possible way of thinking.

Yet philosophy books are endangered. Professional philosophers aren’t expected to learn how to share minds as a human-book cyborg, as universities are expunged of the practices of philology and so-called ‘continental’ philosophy, both of which make this cyborg possible. Books too are endangered, although ebooks provide a surrogate if you do not mind your reading habits being fed to advertising robots. The smartphone-human cyborg encourages bite-sized thinking, watching over reading, monotone over monographs. The book is an anchor to an older way of thinking - indeed, to every older way of thinking that survives in books. That’s why libraries are so vital - they are a kind of time machine that is not purely imaginary!

Why read a philosophy book? To experiment in thinking with somebody else, to share in the experience of human thought in ways that are new to you. It is not something that everyone can do with ease - but if you can, you owe it to yourself to provoke your own thought. Philosophy books can do that. But you have to be prepared to commit to something more than utility; to find value in discourse and disagreement. Are you up to that challenge?

A Hundred Cyborgs, #100

Libraries

Throughout A Hundred Cyborgs, I’ve tried to find at least a few examples of technology that encourages virtue - and I can find no greater exemplar than libraries. These astonishing cybernetic networks consist of one or more humans curating dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of books and other publications, arranged within some system to aid recovering specific texts. Not a single aspect of the technology involved is remarkable - there is nothing of the chrome-tinted goggles at work inside any library building - it is solely that the cyborg we form with a library is encouraged to develop their virtues in so many different ways, and those who facilitate this near-miraculous arrangement also cultivate the distinctive excellences of the librarian in the process.

Through the agreement to remain silent, the library cyborg learns respect for others and an awareness of personal space; through the signage upon shelves, the breadth and depth of human knowledge and experience is foreshadowed, and curiosity fostered; the time limit upon lending teaches both responsibility and time-keeping. And all this is without beginning to delve into the cybervirtue of the books themselves, which can teach concentration, imagination, empathy, patience, commitment and so much more besides.

Yet none of this matters in the eyes of most humans, since the internet is far more convenient and endlessly entertaining. Have a question? The internet robots will get you an answer instantly, while obfuscating your ability to know how that answer was constructed, or what commercial forces distorted your enquiry. Want to while away some time? An infinite river of shallow amusements awaits at scores of websites, offering chewing gum fun in a variety of vacuous flavours. Who would want to learn from books when a video will show you exactly how to do something, and with none of the time-consuming reading or thinking to get in the way? We call it the World Wide Web, and aptly so, for it is indeed a subtle, sticky trap that once you enter you can never leave. Convenience is a value that conditions us to impatience - why discover and master your own excellences when the robots of the digital downstairs are standing by to service your every whim...?

As long as we judge solely by the shallow ethical calculus of the twentieth century, libraries seem inferior to the internet. That’s because utility is a disastrous value to build civilisation upon - it fools us into thinking we ought to make everything, because technology is ‘neutral’, so we should stockpile as much of it as possible. But technology is never neutral. It ranges from the calamitous to the beneficent - and the library is a sterling example of cybernetic networks that not only foster human flourishing, they have been able to incorporate computers into their practices without jeopardising their own distinctive excellences. An advanced civilisation is not the one with the most toys, but the one that cultivates civility. Understood in the way, libraries are the apex of human civilisation.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #99

100Cyborgs: 81-90

What are the behavioural effects of technological networks? What happens if we stop thinking about technology as shiny machines and start looking at other, subtler tools? Can we design technology to have better effects upon humans? These and other questions are what this blog project, A Hundred Cyborgs, are all about. Here are the ten posts from 81 to 90, including six submitted as part of 'All Comers April' by guest writers:

    81. Mathematics by Joel Goodwin
    82. Defendants by Samuel Thomson
    83. Meditation Apps by Victor Navarro Remesal
    84. Glasses by Chris Billows
    85. Drones by Jed Pressgrove
    86. Notes by Matt Mower
    87. Vaccines
    88. Schools
    89. Supermarkets
    90. Roads

I had been quite nervous about opening up for 'All Comers April', but in the end I was thrilled with the six pieces submitted - all thoughtful reflections upon our relationship with technology, and all radically different. I love the way they dance across the landscape of technology, ranging from the oft-unnoticed (#41 Mathematics and #44 Glasses), the impact of software (#43 Meditation apps and #46 Notes), a symbol of the double-edge of contemporary technology (#45 Drones), and reflections upon how technology might affect our legal concepts (#42 Defendants).

To round out the block, I posted four pieces reflecting upon the lockdown in radically different ways. Alas, #47 Vaccines did not provoke the discussion I had hoped for, but #48 Schools went down well in the UK and #49 Supermarkets struck a chord with readers in the US. I no longer expect people to engage with the tremendous threat to human life that automobiles represent, so #50 Roads lack of response was something I anticipated. Nonetheless, if the claim to care for human life that has so frequently been invoked in the context of COVID-19 were entirely honest, we would act on the designs of our cars and save far more lives every year than any of this year's lockdowns saved once. We do not. So we are either in a state of complete denial about transportation (highly likely) or our fear of disease unbalances our ability to accurately assess risks (also likely).

I am always interested in discussion, so feel free to raise comments either here (ideal for longer debates) or on Twitter (perfect for quick questions). And if you’ve enjoyed any of these pieces, please buy a copy of The Virtuous Cyborg and support my research into cybervirtue!

The final ten cyborgs resume next week.

Citizens

The technology of citizenship was one of the most revolutionary transformations in human history. It offered, for the first time, the chance for people to participate in a political body as equals - a concept invented in ancient Greece, expanded in the Roman Republic, and then lost for millennia as the relationship of sovereign to subject became the dominant political regime once more.

We inherited the revival of this citizenship technology, bequeathed to us by the great thinkers of the Enlightenment such as Immanuel Kant and Mary Wollstonecraft. This shiny new model was founded upon the dignity of our free will as rational beings. Kant ‘hacked’ citizenship into monarchies without losing the role of the monarch (a necessary compromise for this change to have been permitted!), while Wollstonecraft thought through its consequences leading inexorably to a citizenship that was available for the first time to women as well as men. Eventually, without any further hacking required, the concept of citizenship extended to all humans belonging to a nation, regardless of their personal circumstances.

Yet now we have hit a crisis in our concept of citizenship, a technological breakdown caused in large but unnoticed part by our wilfully forgetting where we came from. Thus while the fundamental laws concerning citizenship haven’t significantly shifted (except to expressly include those who, philosophically speaking, should always have been included) most of us seem to have rejected the option to be a citizen at all.

We reject leaders whom others elected, and will not follow them.

We reject other people whose political views offend us, and try to rob them of their right to free speech.

And we reject the sovereignty of other countries, and use force of arms to alter their political course even though we are not (and do not desire to be) citizens of those nations.

In short, we reject our opportunity to be citizens at all, and offer in its place nothing but excuses for why our values, our judgements, and our chosen leaders are the only ones that matter.

A person who truly practices citizenship, rather than abusing their entitlements and excluding voices from political consideration, forms a cyborg network with all other citizens within the same nation. I would love to say something trenchant about the moral and behavioural effects of citizenship, but first I would have to find some citizens to observe, and apparently there are none left. We continue to try to reap the benefits of this social technology even while we fatally undermine the radical equality it depends upon. Liberals are just as guilty of this corruption of the technology of citizenship as conservatives, since few liberals care about their nation as such, seeking instead to assert their power everywhere while undermining both free speech and the concepts of nationality that citizenship depends upon.

For the first time in my life, I find myself interested in learning how to be a citizen... but alas, there is nobody left for me to be a citizen with.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #98

Lockdown

The lockdowns triggered in response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus are the most extensive attempt to manually reconfigure our cybernetic networks since World War II. In both cases, changes were justified in order to ‘save lives’ (an emotive but oft misleading slogan), and in the case of the lockdowns, it now seems that everyone treats the regularly reported fatalities attributable to the virus either as proof of the emergency or evidence of government negligence. The sole thing held up as a counterweight are economic numbers, as if only numbers could oppose other numbers, as if deaths and money were directly comparable measures.

The catalogue of damage caused by lockdowns, meanwhile, are inadmissible because they are unquantifiable. Thus while it is forbidden (rather than, say, grossly insensitive) to observe that most of the casualties in this pandemic have been vulnerable elderly folk who had survived several consecutive mild flu seasons, the harm caused by withdrawal of medical services, the severe mental health impact, suicides, or the myriad other negative consequences of lockdown disruptions can be simply ignored and dismissed, just as we routinely ignore and dismiss the million annual automobile deaths that are entirely preventable yet not worth discussing. The one thing we can say with confidence about these lockdowns are that their full impact upon human flourishing is entirely unknown and cannot possibly be calculated, such that every blowhard mouthing off one way or the other about what everyone else got wrong reveals themselves as, well, simply human and not in fact possessed of any great insight upon this partially self-inflicted calamity. Beyond all the other examples of shallow-sightedness I’ve discussed, the lockdowns seem truly beyond our capacity to fully comprehend.

What of the moral and behavioural effects of lockdowns? Here is a strange case where positive and negative aspects flow into and around each other. Some families have been brought closer together, yet some couples have been torn apart. Neighbours in the UK have forged solidarity through ritual clapping, whilst also making pariahs out of those who are “letting the street down” by not participating. Likewise, mask-wearing (despite unresolved disputes among epidemiologists that it is verboten to acknowledge), has on the one hand demonstrated the universal love some profess for all others - and then utterly undermined that through the vehement scorn directed at all those who question masks, regardless of their reasons.

It is said that the spirit of the Blitz brought out the best of Londoners. Lockdown has seemingly brought out both the best and the worst in everyone. It has also disconfirmed Alan Moore’s hypothesis in Watchmen that humanity could be united by a common threat. COVID-19, like the fake alien attack on New York in that comic, is a monster provoking stage-managed fearfulness - stay at home or suffer the consequences! Yet we are not united, except in our blundering compliance to these lockdowns, within which we continue to squabble like we are not brothers and sisters, but rather our own worst enemies.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #97