It’s time to revisit the Tech & Mythology project outline since it keeps shifting as I learn more. There were previous snapshots in Jul 2020, Oct 2020, Feb 2021 and Nov 2021.
Thesis
Orgregores (supra-human systems with agency and perhaps sentience that emerge from the joint actions of groups of people; I also use the shorter term "ogregores") have a significant but hard-to-discern impact on our lives that making art and studying their behavior can help uncover.
Background
Digital technologies, industries and some Big Tech companies are powerful, pervasive, and mysterious—much like gods. However, our culture seems to lack the mythology and ritual that traditionally makes such greater-than-human entities comprehensible.
The behavior of such supra-human systems—I call them orgregores, the physicalist’s version of egregores—cannot be reduced to the actions of their human constituents even though the ogregore emerges from a human group. Orgregores are agents: they have perceptions (representations of the world) and goals (desired states of the world), and act to achieve their goals. Orgregores may have subjective experiences (that is, they may be conscious) but that is less important than their agency. (A rattlesnake’s ability to attack us is more important for our survival than whether it is conscious.)
Some digital technologies and tech companies are probably orgregores.
We seem to have a blind spot for orgregores. The dearth of mythic stories about high tech and our unease with corporate personhood suggests that we struggle to grasp (apprehend, make sense of, engage with, fathom) group agents like these. We may also be limited by our tendency to focus on human-like things. Our gaze automatically fixates on faces, and the gods of myth are humans—or human traits—writ large, rather than incomprehensible Others.
If we can’t perceive or grasp orgregores, we risk missing or misunderstanding their goals, intentions, and actions. (It’s important to know how to look out for rattlesnakes when walking in dry country.)
There are many ways to make orgregores more evident so that we can better grasp and respond to their impact, including philosophy and sociology. I’m partial to two others: making art like installations, visualizations, and stories; and studying orgregores as if they were animals.
- Making art is a way to make orgregores accessible to the senses and emotions. It may also be a way for orgregores to reveal themselves to us, in the way that deities traditionally reveal themselves through signs and prophets.
- The study of orgregores might use the techniques of ethology which studies the behavior of organisms in their natural environment. (The other main technique of behavioral biology, comparative psychology, isn’t an option since it is mainly done in lab settings. “First catch your orgregore.”)
The biography of orgregores falls in intersection of these two. Writing the life of a corporation, say, treats it as a character in a non-fiction but yet not scientific story.
Research questions
Here are some questions that follow from this agenda:
- Can taking a mythological view help us to understand and govern digital technology better? (For details, see my March 2021 blog post.)
- Why does mythology seem to be absent in our accounts of digital technology?
- How can one observe the actions of orgregores? How well do we currently do in perceiving them, and can we do better?
- What is the “natural history” of orgregores, such as their life cycle, habitat, ecology, and behavior? (See Khan Academy’s “Intro to Animal Behavior” for four questions that help one to understand animal behavior.)
- Which artists have succeeded in making orgregores sensable? Why and how did they succeed?
- What is the nature of the agency (or range of agencies) of orgregores?
- Would it matter if they were conscious? How would we know that they were?
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