Technology and Changing Power

In Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution writer, Simon Schama asserts that the first hot air balloon may have initiated the French Revolution. In 1783 at Annonay, France the Montgolfier brothers sent up the first balloon, and later the Aeorstat Revellion at Versailles with crew of sheep, duck, and rooster, and later a manned flight. It captured the public imagination.

Schama believes it allowed French subjects to imagine themselves as Montgolfier, lofted above the earth and freed in some way from worldly bounds.

Every revolution is precipitated by some new invention.

The Renaissance brought perspective in painting and then the printing press. Marshall McLuhan said this:

Print technology transformed the medieval zero into the Renaissance infinity, not only by convergence - perspective and vanishing point - but by bringing into play for the first time in human history the factor of exact repeatability. Print gave to men the concept of indefinite repetition so necessary to the mathematical concept of infinity. 1


The uniformity and repeatability of print permeated the Renaissance with the idea of time and space as continuous measurable quantities. The immediate effect of this idea was to desacralize the world of nature and the world of power alike. The new technique of control of physical processes by segmentation and fragmentation separated God and Nature as much as Man and Nature, or man and man. 2


The discovery of the New World later in the Renaissance opened up new physical territory and exploded the myth of a flat world. A cognate was found in Renaissance perspective which removed the mystical, godlike space in art the church fed the masses. Renaissance people now wanted rational art and narratives. that ended the unified, all-encompassing space of Medievalism and ushered in the measurable, logical world of Man, in which Man was the center of this world, and God was confined to Heaven.

Turning points in history come in with changes in the political and social sphere, but they are founded on new technological inventions, devices that change the way people look at the world. The old ways of command and control can't work any more, and the power structures in place are shaken to their core.

Take the photograph. Daguerre created the first silver negative in 1839. Photography's reliable reproduction of reality made citizens no longer dependent on accounts of reality fed to them by the press and its government in the way With a new reliance on themselves to observe naturalistic reality in all its starkness, Europeans created the revolutions of the 1840s.

With the end of the 1848 climax of the revolution the Second Industrial Revolution began, in which mass consumption, made possible with advanced industry, was in bloom. People were not only free to revolt but to consume. McLuhan mentions the transience of the photograph.3 An analogy to it is the limited-use commodity, such as the raft of souvenirs created in the mid-19th century. The early Renaissance, prior to printing press and perspective nevertheless brought in a degree of human nature into the art of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, and others. From this "invention" came the workshops and guilds, which created a mass market for art for wealthy patrons.

Now we have the very mass media of the Internet and social networking. They have their down sides, as they isolate some of us into an unreal world. And Facebook friends are not your real friends. They do, in fairness though, remove the unilateral nature of earlier mass media. We are not dependent on what NBC has to tell us. We can search the Net for hundreds of news sources. And without social networking we would have no 2009 Iranian uprising, no Arab Spring. The Internet and social networking do not have a command structure as the networks do. Every point (person, that is) is equivalent to every other. As others have said, the dissemination of knowledge is limitless, like Renaissance infinity and the printing press, but much more so. With it power of the elites is weakening into more democratic expression.

The last technology for this essay is the conversion of analog to digital.


NYU Professor, James Carse, once told his class that he opened up his country house and found a leak in the well. So he put his hand over it. But the water shot out at another hole, so he put his hand over that to plug it up. But water came out of two new holes. He said he couldn't figure out the source of the leak until he realized the water was coming from everywhere. And that's the case here. The information revolution is unleashing a wellspring of knowledge in a democratic way. It can't be stopped. It's what we do with information that's the test.

A more abstract development in technology is the conversion of transmissions from analog to digital. Analog technology is structural in its processes. It depends on a hierarchy of steps A - B - C on variable waves. It's frequencies have a theoretically endless number of values. It's cognate would be social organization of the past with kings at the top, then bishops, ministers, knights, merchants, commoners; or president, prime minister, cabinet, and down to voters. Analog depends on a chain of command along a linear path. Its, well, analog in the social and political field is hierarchical power. That is until now.

With digital technology, everything is reduced to binary code...ones and zeros. It is dependent on sampling. Marcos Novak says:

In a world of fields, the distinction between what is and what is not is one
of degree. There can be as many sampling points where something is not as
there are where something is. Sampling involves an intermediate sense of
reality, something between real and integer numbers, a fractal notion of
qualified truth, truth-to-a-point. An object's boundary is simply the
reconstructed contour of an arbitrarily chosen value.4.

While binary leaves itself open to an either/or outlook and can be used to continue a bipolar world view, inviting class conflict, racism, social Darwinism, sampling takes the ones and zeros of binary along a bandwidth of qualified truth, as Novak says. It is not structured the way analog is.

Humanity is becoming more networked, more egalitarian like this digital bandwidth. We are evolving more into one community, certainly not in the short term, but as an impetus for centuries to come.

Stuart Kurtz
November 12, 2011

1. McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, (M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1964, 1994, Ninth edition 2001)pg. 116.
2. Ibid, pg. 176.

3. Ibid, pg. 196.

4. Novak, Marcos, Transmitting Architecture: The Transphysical City, Edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker,ctheory.net/text_file?pick=76 (published 11/29/1996)

Revealing the Truth about Revealing the Truth

In 1949 Martin Heiddeger delivered four lectures to the Bremen Club that eventually became the essay, "The Question Concerning Technology." He relates how technology is to him not about technical and scientific methods of production nor inventions based on those principles. It is a way of revealing beings. Poiesis, bringing-forth, is what the craftsman does when he produces an object.



Revealing in the sense of technology has the inherent danger that the revealing will not reveal truth. Heiddeger reveals the essense of technology as a setting-upon of man and nature to turn the earth into a standing-reserve, that is, a storehouse of resources which Man masters. Man extracts from nature everything he needs. The Rhine River is for the purpose of creating hydroelectric power.



Ge-Stell, enframing, is that challenging claim which allows man to reveal nature as standing-reserve. That is a dangerous way to look at the world:

Yet when destining reigns in the mode of enframing, it is the supreme danger.
This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is unconcealed
no longer concerns man even as object, but exclusively as standing-reserve,
and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the
standing-reserve, then he comes to the brink of a precipitous fall, that is,
he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-
reserve. Meanwhile, man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself
to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the illusion comes to
prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his
construct. This illusion gives him in turn one final delusion: it seems as
though man everywhere and always encounters only himself...In truth,
however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself,
i.e., his essence.

While enframing endangers the truth by keeping up the standing reserve, man can be the agent by which the truth will be revealed.

I have to give ghost credit to a web page I read about a two years ago that said the way we use information now is like Heidegger's standing-reserve. Please let me know, readers, whether you can find this page. Think about this. Don't we just mine Google and other search engines when we need information? Are we doing deductive reasoning now? With a vast reservoir of info at our disposal, we have become mesmerized by information. Knowledge could be an arsenal of intellectual weaponry to use to fight subjugation. We could use the database to fight the official narrative and then come up with our own dialectics, each person his own inventor of new ideas. This poesis, bringing-forth, could help us redefine our world and our place in it.

I believe the powers that be want to keep us dependent on the standing-reserve of knowledge so that we do not shake up the power structure. The powers are pulling a Svengali's trick on us by having us dependent on factoids and mesmerized by the Internet. Few people use the expansive standing reserve to generate new configurations

Just as the railroad coralled people off the farms and into the factories in 1820's and 1830's England, the Internet, when it is used as standing reserve, restricts thought. As Heidegger warned, with ubiquitous information at our fingertips, we encounter only ourselves. We are part of the standing reserve. Our consciousnesses are becoming part of the system. That system is Capitalism.

You may have noticed that any time at all you invoke a term on the search bar, you get ads. Knowledge is now associated with consumption. This is a dangerous development, as knowledge is tainted with powerful forces more than ever. It always has been, but now it is ever-present that it is second nature to us that we are in buying mode when we go to the storehouse of knowledge.

Consider the ways that computers alienate us from eachother. People talk less to others. Email precludes personal interactions -phones, while distancing, allow give and take and emotional connection. Answering machines do not. How many minutes at the outer limits would you stay on hold? The IRS kept me on hold for one hour and thirty seven of them. And answering machines confine your choices. How many times have you had a question which couldn't be found on the directory?

Our identities themselves are getting alloyed with Information Age technology. The pervasiveness of Facebook and MySpace underscores this. A friend of mine didn't contact me in over two months while abroad. When she did, it was in the form of a brief email saying, "Hey, check out my Facebook profile!" So much for asking how I was or having a human interaction. We become virtual selves, and the danger is great that we are losing touch with real, physical and mental, suffering in the real world. I am sure forces are aware of this, and that this is not coincidental.

Heidegger relates the meaning of technikon, part of techne (technology) as more than the work of the craftsman bringing forth objects. It is also about art. And poiesis, bringing-forth, is poetic.

Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the
beautiful was called techne. The poiesis of the fine arets was
also called techne.

Heidegger tells us how in Ancient Greece art was not an aesthetic enterprise. It was a revealing that aimed at the safekeeping of truth. Its job was to reveal truth. That is possibly what John Keats meant when he wrote, "Truth is beauty, beauty truth." So, it was the supreme danger that the enframing and challenging Heidegger wrote of would reveal only himself, but not his essence. That is the false revealing through the techne. Art is the technikon which can reveal the truth of man's existence.

If we allow our minds and identities to rely on all information as something we extract, and we do not deduce our own thoughts, we will become victims of our own exploitation of resources. Deduction is artistic in that we take information from other sources and then creatively reconfigure ideas.

The act of making art is a search for truth. We should make sure our mastery of the earth and information does not confuse what we know from what we could know.