Technogonies

Hesiod’s Theogony (pronounced with a hard “g” as in polygon) describes the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods. [1] By analogy, I’ll use the term technogonies for stories that describe the origins of technology. In traditional myths, technologies come from the gods, who are usually benefactors. In modern stories, tech comes from inside society, although the stories are complicated and sometimes contested.

Any sufficiently adopted technology loses its magic

Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (Wikipedia). There's a corollary: any sufficiently adopted technology loses its magic.

Enoch’s Egregores as Bringers of Tech

Rereading Mark Stavish’s Egregores prompted me to read the Book of Enoch (aka 1 Enoch) where the term Watcher (egregoros in Greek) is used to describe angels. I was struck that one of the terrible sins of the fallen angels described in Enoch was to teach humans technology. (The other was to have intercourse with women; angels are supposed to be spiritual beings and not be subject to lust.)

Heidegger's technicity is an agent

Heidegger’s essay “Die Frage nach der Technik” (usually translated as “The Question Concerning Technology”) posits Ge-Stell (variously translated at “enframing,” “pos-ure,” or “positionality”) as the essence of Technik (translated as “technology” or “technicity”; see endnote). Heidegger’s (or his translators’?) pervasive use the passive voice sidesteps the question of whether technicity has agency. I believe this text implies that he believes it does, and that he’s not just using figures of speech.

TED Talks: What would Socrates say?

My colleague Paul Diduch recently shared the video of a TED Talk by Imran Chaudhri and asked “What Would Socrates Say?”

Rusty promises

As the year comes to an end, it’s time to drop a list I’ve been noodling on for months: high tech dreams that didn’t come true—breathless tech promises that weren’t kept. 

Is crypto an orgregore?

Jill Dupré raised the question of crypto as an orgregore. Exploring the question helped me think about what an orgregore (aka ogregore or materialist's egregore) is. 

Ethics has downsides

I’m enjoying Justin Gregg’s new book, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity. In the fourth chapter he discusses some problems with human morality. It made me realize that we need to be just as skeptical that ethics is an unalloyed good as we are that technological progress will always have beneficial outcomes.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle as myth

Most people in business know about Gartner’s hype cycle, many of them believe it, and some act on it, for example through corporate investment decisions and buying Gartner’s services. It’s a story (more accurately, a trope) that meets my know/believe/act criterion for myth. 

Dionysus on Wall Street

The GameStop saga was a big story in February 2021. It’s often told as David against Goliath, but I think there’s a deeper pattern that reflects the role of technology.

Research Questions for the Tech & Mythology Project

 My February project snapshot listed some of the questions the Tech & Mythology project is asking. S. V., a researcher I met through the ATLAS Institute, challenged me to document my research questions. After peeling several layers off the onion, here’s what I came up with.

Tech & Mythology Project Snapshot – Feb 2021

 Here’s another update to the Tech & Mythology project outline. See previous snapshots from October and July 2020 for background.

Two 5G Stories

There are at least two 5G myths (that is, stories a community knows, most believe, and many act on): the industry hype, which I’ll call the 5G Vision, and the belief that 5G damages health, which I’ll call 5G EMF/Coronavirus. Technology is the protagonist in both – the hero in one, and the villain in the other. 

Tech/Myth Project Snapshot – October 2020

I gave a snapshot summary of the Tech/Myth project back in July. Here’s an update; it outlines the current assumptions and activities of the project, and provides some background to the current effort of analyzing tech in terms of character.

Techies & Myth Part 4: More Gods as Tech

In the fourth and final part of the series of posts about mythology and the tech industry, based on an email exchange with Petri Mähönen, I try to work some loose ends into the tapestry. Like the previous one, this post focuses on myths but with an eye to the tech implications.

Techies & Myth Part 3: Goddesses and Tech

In this third part of the series of posts about mythology and the tech industry, based on an email exchange with Petri Mähönen, I explore the relevance of several goddesses of ancient Greek mythology to digital technology. The first two posts focused on the techies; this one and the next will focus on the myths.

Techies & Myth Part 1: Apollo, Dionysus, and the Entrepreneurs

This post, and three more to come, aim to document a fascinating informal email discussion with Petri Mähönen in September 2020 about mythological ways of thinking about tech entrepreneurs and their companies. This was part of the on-going Tech & Myth project (see e.g. tech gods: Dec 2018, Jan 2019; project summaries: Jul 2020, Oct 2020). Massive thanks to Petri, and apologies for places where my paraphrases misunderstood or misrepresented him.

In the first post, I look at American digital entrepreneurs in the light of Nietzsche’s Apollo-Dionysus axis.

Tech/Myth Project Snapshot: July 2020

In common parlance, to call something a myth is to damn it as a pernicious false belief. A few dusty scholars might take myth to mean a traditional, transcendental story that made sense of the world to a specific group of people. I am interested in myth not because I care about debunking illusions, or studying cultural history, but because we live in a mythical world. This post outlines my current thinking about the Tech & Myth project. 

"Myth" in tech journalism

I think of myths as widely shared stories that societies use to make sense of the world, but for most people, most of the time, myth means a widely held but false belief (Oxford, sense 2). Over the week-end I made a quick inventory of what counts as tech myths on the internet, and the results helped me think about the semantics of the term.

Another Trickster Story

Here’s another technology-trickster story; the first one is here.

Trickster was very good at entertaining people. It was a great gig: he arranged for people to entertain each other, and they gave him credit for it.