Imagine to Remember

In my last post I explored the connection between technology and oppression. New technologies may offer us more ease, entertainment and convenience but they do so at a cost. We have long been told that technologies are neutral and are subject to the intentions of the user. This is a half truth. The real truth lies in plain sight. In any other context would you embrace artificiality? You would reject it, you would insist on the real thing. AI is only the appearance of intelligence, it is not the real thing. This is the defining feature of modern life, the replacement of real for the represented, through the use of images, which Guy Debord called the “spectacle”. And spectacle is everywhere. We have gone, as Debord puts it from “being into having, and having into merely appearing”. 

If the technologies we know and use today reinforce and perpetuate oppression then it follows that new tech will create completely novel forms of oppression, stifling our creativity and emotions in the most intimate ways . AI proselytizers first promised us a utopia and now even they are scared of the monster they created. We cannot trust them and they cannot trust themselves. They readily admit that machines are accelerating in ways they could not predict. 

But there are ways in which the external oppressive force becomes almost unnecessary. We become not only complicit, but ourselves become the agents of our own oppression. And this internal oppressor is insidious, slippery and shapeshifting. In ways small and large, we betray and sabotage ourselves. It may look like engaging in self-destructive behaviors, playing small, procrastinating, resentment or it may be the slow surrender of our sovereignty to forces outside ourselves, trusting the machine above and beyond the truths of our hearts, just because it is convenient. This force has always been in us but it has never had so many vices, so many distractions. We had a connection, community, faith and the natural world to keep us rooted. 

The Sufi tradition talks about Pharaoh within, the ego, who is undoubtedly a fiercer enemy than any external oppressor. Wily and sneaky, the Pharaoh within like the Pharaoh in his palace, uses all the tricks at his disposal to enchant and enslave. The Pharaoh believes he knows best, taking himself as his own god. And so we fight a battle on two fronts. In the time of Moses the Pharaoh used magic to bewitch the eyes of the people. To make them perceive that which was not real. And the Pharaohs of today have their magic as well; new tools that deceive our eyes and ears, confusing the mind. The only antidote will be to rely not on the physical senses but on the inner seeing and inner hearing. Audre Lorde wrote that the “master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house”. Fire cannot be fought with fire. Outwitting, the machine may not even be possible, but we can try and disentangle ourselves from its grip. The most any of us may be able to do is to strengthen our own defenses because the age of confusion and chaos is already upon us. 

Artist: Nikolai Lutohin