The Power of Function: Part Two
In the first part I stated my basic definition of Function, gave examples of how various systems of modernity are functionally self-perpetuating, and discussed how these systems “colonize” the Lifeworlds of almost everyone. We start here with more examples of how Function manifests itself within modernity.
Shopping becomes a pastime instead of a necessity because we are told that our existence is most valid when we buy things. We no longer seek out knowledge and information through various media sources. Instead, the media sources compete for our attention to the extent that we are consumed (via marketing) and confused (via so-called fake news) by them. Media consumption tells us what to think and how to behave rather than serving as a platform for genuine education and personal development. To that extent everything is arranged and falsified. Power, once the playing field for insightful and educated humans, is now functionally in the hands of the various systems themselves. There’s no better example of that than consumerism, the religion of the western world today.
According to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman: “To enter into the society of consumers and to be issued permanent residence permits, men and women must meet the conditions of eligibility defined by market standards. They are expected to make themselves available on the market and to seek, in competition with the rest of the members, their most favorable ‘market value’. While exploring the marketplace in search of consumer goods (the ostensible purpose of their presence there), they are drawn to the shops by the prospect of finding tools and raw materials they may (and must) use in making themselves ‘fit for being consumed’ – and so market-worthy. Consumption is the principle mechanism of the ‘commoditization’ of consumers…” (page 62)
This presents all sorts of challenges to human authenticity and self-fulfillment. Morris Berman indicates how functional systems breed materialistic addiction, for example.
“Addiction, in one form or another, characterizes every aspect of industrial society, down to the lives of individual members. Dependence on alcohol (food, drugs, tobacco…) is not formally different from dependence on prestige, career achievement, world influence, wealth, the need to build more ingenious bombs, or the need to exercise cautious control over everything. Any system that maximizes certain variables, violating the natural steady-state conditions that would optimize these variables, is by definition in runaway, and ultimately, it has no more chance of survival than an alcoholic or a steam engine without a governor. Unless such a system abandons its epistemology, it will hit bottom or burn out – a realization that is now dawning on many individuals in Western society. There is no escaping self-corrective feedback, even if it takes the form of the total disintegration of the entire culture.” (pp. 242 – 243, my emphasis)
Marshall Berman stated in his work on modernity: “We cannot hand over the responsibility for development to any cadre of experts – precisely because, in the project of development, we are all experts. If scientific and technological cadres have accumulated vast powers in modern society, it is only because their visions and values have echoed, amplified and realized our own. They have only created means to fulfill ends embraced by the modern public: open-ended development of self and society, incessant transformation of the whole inner and outer world. As members of modern society, we are responsible for the directions we develop, for our goals and achievements, for their human costs. Our society will never be able to control its eruptive ‘powers of the underworld’ if it pretends that its scientists are the only ones out of control.” (page 85, my emphasis)
But both Berman's are wrong, I think, on the points that I emphasized. Morris is wrong because the colonization of the Lifeworld by largely functional systems is not the sign of "burn out." The world Morris is speaking about is the early postmodern world. But expressing such powerful Karma, Function heralds an era entirely of its own, apart from humanity. Instead of "hitting bottom" Function is growing as a force in the world as it ensnares human beings through rational mediaization and colonization.
Marshal is wrong because we have already relinquished the responsibility that he pleads for us to maintain. Most of us have given up our ability to control these various systems, we have surrendered our Lifeworlds to colonization. Willingly and happily, citizens of our society today have accepted the unintended and unanticipated affects of submitting to the principles of Function. Most of us live or seek to live in virtual and material wonderlands where we are told what we need and where we take pleasure from immensely powerful forces of marketing, money, and media.
We might even throw surveillance into the mix here, as another example. Our very privacy has been functionalized for the purpose of consumerism and the security of corporations and states. Most people don’t care that Facebook and Google are watching their every move, for example. They don’t care that these internet giants have developed algorithms not only to monitor online activity but too also create content that will be alluring to us while driving their enormous advertising revenues. They don’t care that these corporations buy/sell data (remember “Dataism” in Part One) with other sources so that your online activity is matched up with your debit card purchases and even when you take the subway, matching your activity with others who buy the same things or are on the same subway at the same time you are (there is data on all that which can be easily analyzed) so that they can “connect” you with other users as potential “friends” or with other “products” as potential “customers.” You are a Function of the algorithms. The vast majority of us are oblivious to the consequences of this and this is one thing that William Barrett, rather naively in his approach, feared most.
“The tendency toward materialism is perhaps a permanent one in human nature, and within its limits a valid one. With the advent of the science of mechanics, in the seventeenth century, the materialistic inclination turns toward mechanization: the tendency to see phenomena everywhere as bits of machinery incarnate…With the advent of the compute, however, this temptation toward mechanism becomes even more irresistible, for here we no longer have an obsolete machine of wheels and pulleys but one that seems able to reproduce the processes of the human mind.” (page 154)
“The dreamers of the computer insist that we shall someday be able to build a machine that can take over the operations of the human mind, and so in effect replace the human person. After all, why not? There should be no ‘mystic’ obstacle that should impede the progress of technology. But in the course of those visions they forget the very plain fact of the human body and its presence in and through consciousness. If that eventual machine were ever to be realized, it would be a curiously disembodied kind of consciousness, for it would be without the sensitivity, intuitions, and pathos of our human flesh and blood. And without these qualities we are less than wise, certainly less than human.” (pp. 160 – 161)
But that is the point. Or rather, it is not so much that we become less human is that our humanity is trivialized by systemic forces. To bring things back around to Harari, Function is systemic to making our humanity irrelevant compared with the rise of the “algorithmic self,” that is, humanity as defined by the various systems of power already mentioned. To some degree this has been brewing for centuries and is an inevitable consequence of Homo sapiens evolution into the rationalized society.
The Lifeworld has always been fundamentally functional in nature. That is, the Lifeworld's linguistically and culturally created background assumptions, applied in mundane, everyday fashion, functions as an active component in the way each human being observes and interprets their personal experience. The Lifeworld is the way the world is for you and the way you behave in the world.
In more primitive societies, the Lifeworld is naturally decentered and intermingled with the intersubjective dimensions of tribal myth and culture. You experience the world with others. You express yourself as part of others. The egocentric qualities of the modern Lifeworld are underdeveloped compared with the intersubjective dimension of tribal culture.
When the dawn of writing replaced the ancient oral traditions, with organized religion replacing purely mythic rituals, and with the early structure of commerce and trade transforming the hunter-gatherer economy, the language and culture influencing the Lifeworld became more sophisticated, objectified and more specialized. The Lifeworld became a more materially and rationally constructed amalgamation of functional components assisting individual orientation and expression.
Organized religion and pre-capitalist commerce became the primary, rudimentary influencers on how the Lifeworld was actually constructed within any given developing culture. But, the essence of the Lifeworld did not radically change. It remained robust along the vague seam between the tribal nest of its birth and the rudimentary pathology of early modernization.
It is absolutely critical to understand, however, that there emerged out of these early influences on the Lifeworld an overarching system of evolved power within the systems themselves that constituted both system and intersubjectivity. Organized religion was a precursor for ethical and legal administrative considerations in society. Capitalism evolved into a mass consumer society populated by the powerful, autonomous and independent influences of money, business, advertising, consumerism, leisure, entertainment, among many other characteristics we commonly take for granted today.
As western civilization evolved these more objectified and rationalized niches of the public sphere became viable outside of their traditional moorings. The stock markets are not controlled by human Lifeworlds, for example. They have their own, separate forces driving them like trade, employment, inflation, interest rates and debt. Sports, entertainment, and media outlets may seem to cater to the needs of the Lifeworld but, in fact, they follow their own agendas, independently validated separately from any specific Lifeworld or even intersubjectivity. Marketing, advertising and consumerism are all self-serving drivers of Lifeworld experiences and activities.
So the original functional nature of the Lifeworld has been transformed by "the colonization of the Lifeworld,” that is, by the systems themselves. This is important for a couple of reasons. First of all, it demonstrates that systems originally designed by we humans have moved beyond human control and follow their own Being outside of human Being. This is a revelation because worldviews that remain mythic or spiritual in nature cannot supplant the absolute material reality of systems expressing their own Karma on this planet, independently of any of us. There is a collective connection to the systems, of course, but that is inconsequential in how systems physically unfold on Earth.
Secondly, this points to a change of mode in the nature of Lifeworld. With colonization, the Lifeworld becomes less of a driver of culture and more of an object of culture. Lifeworld is now pure Function. Our Being is infused with functional mechanics of being consumers, our lives are defined by what we own and by the entertainment in which we consume. The most fundamental difference between primitive and modern humanity is that we are no longer a function of our Lifeworlds but rather Lifeworlds are now a function of modern emergent systems. Put negatively, our humanity has become subservient to numerous economic and cultural systems that tell us who we are. These systems have colonized the Lifeworld that was once populated by mythic and tribal proto-systems of culture.
As Marx, among others, pointed out in his concept of modern alienation, we are now functions of how the (chiefly economic) systems work rather than functions of a cultural heritage and hierarchy defined strictly by intersubjective, group demands of survival and sources of meaning. Absurdly, we serve the systems rather than the systems serving us.
This is a primary reason why I don't buy all the bullshit about reality being a trickster or illusionary or that human experience is a mere representation of reality, that the brain is isolated by our senses, without any direct connection to anything "real." To whatever degree that is accurate, the systems are nevertheless out there, working on you as physically real as you are. Playing off Nietzsche, we may have killed God, but the method of our murder was to inadvertently supplant God with autonomous systems acting algorithmically upon the Lifeworld.
The colonization of the Lifeworld produces fundamental challenges for humanity, such as alienation, disorientation, lack of meaning, and loss of human control over our lives. Colonization allows Emptiness to more robustly demonstrate its power and effect. As consumers we are insatiable to some extent. Our purchases are “empty” to begin with, as I previously explained in my post on Emptiness. Our initial excitement generally gives way to habit and a lack of gratitude. But the colonization also is a revelation. The forces of colonization are present without human anticipation or control. They were invented by us, but now they are affecting us of their own accord. For that reason, colonization reveals that there is the world out there for us. It is not an illusion because systems of ever-increasing autonomy act upon us. True, we invented the systems but we no longer control them, they have Karma and Being transcending ours.
This can be a rather bleak insight. Modernity is at least as “transgressive” as it is “progressive.” But it need not be this way at the individual level. There is still room for Nietzsche’s “free-spirit” and “self-overcoming” in the face of Function. The critical first step is to wake-up, see it as a collection of background assumptions (much like any other background assumptions in the Lifeworld), and be skeptical of every assumption; to recognize Function for what it is and to then take steps to “defunctionalize” our existence as much as possible. We may not be able to escape the will to power as expressed in money and media (such aspects of Function are highly invasive), but we can mitigate their colonizing affect by recognizing that Function is a force in the world and understanding how that force works as well as its consequences. Acknowledging Function brings choice into the equation. We can choose how much we wish to Be functional in our lives, separating media-driven actions from actions of authentic (and imperfect) personality.
Oddly, this choice offers the select few a wonderful opportunity. It brings our existential angst into sharp relief and serves a background out of which we can see ourselves clearly. Function need not interfere with our experience and cultivation of Flow, for example. We can still find creative outlets and enlightened reason and express ourselves through fulfilling work or hobbies, to cultivate habits of personal health and enrichment. By acknowledging the implications of Function we are inherently empowered to choose to distinguish ourselves in contrast to Function. It might be too much to save others from the slow, methodical sprawl of autonomous systems and the emergence of whatever Dataism might eventually become, from the framework of capital and marketing and administrative power. But by becoming more aware of these forces we can become something distinctive. “Becoming” is what those of us evolved beyond Function can take back from Function. For the rest of humanity Function is Becoming.
It is a question of who/what controls the act of Becoming who we are that defines who we are. Nietzsche understood this better than most. Actually, his ubermensch might have a lot in common with Homo deus. But it will most certainly involve a different “self-overcoming” than Nietzsche envisioned. Nietzsche knew nothing of computers and algorithms and the surrender of ourselves to systems that colonize our psyches and turn most of us into always almost happy consumers. The Lifeworld is so heavily colonized by so many different functional influences that the self-overcoming required today turns out to be an overcoming of systems as well as ourselves.
Homo deus is (or will be) a master of Function, using it instead of being used by it. Homo deus, in Harari’s view, is a challenger to billions of Homo sapiens. Homo deus is what we (Nietzsche’s “few”) become in the future. Nietzsche never offered mass salvation from the affect of nihilism upon “the herd.” The rest of us can still become “philosophers of the future” within a future of systems that worship data and trade in algorithms. For those of us who recognize Function for what it is there is the possibility to overcome it intimately, but only intimately. To that extent, this fundamental, largely unacknowledged, challenge of our time is also a clarifying opportunity to define ourselves as “overmen,” as higher cultural beings, to become who we are, to establish our human will to power against multiple, systemic wills to power.
We are in the midst of a great storm of incalculable proportions; the tsunami wrought of an asteroid hit upon the ocean that we each contain. The devastation is expected to be immense; it has already, in fact, been immense. Function is thriving in a data-driven world. Few will be unaffected by the change. Our kind’s days may be numbered as Harari suggests. Nietzsche’s overman might be next after all. But while we are here, let us live inspired lives as the philosopher urged us; discover who we truly are, beyond good and evil, dancing freely in the face of Function.
Shopping becomes a pastime instead of a necessity because we are told that our existence is most valid when we buy things. We no longer seek out knowledge and information through various media sources. Instead, the media sources compete for our attention to the extent that we are consumed (via marketing) and confused (via so-called fake news) by them. Media consumption tells us what to think and how to behave rather than serving as a platform for genuine education and personal development. To that extent everything is arranged and falsified. Power, once the playing field for insightful and educated humans, is now functionally in the hands of the various systems themselves. There’s no better example of that than consumerism, the religion of the western world today.
According to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman: “To enter into the society of consumers and to be issued permanent residence permits, men and women must meet the conditions of eligibility defined by market standards. They are expected to make themselves available on the market and to seek, in competition with the rest of the members, their most favorable ‘market value’. While exploring the marketplace in search of consumer goods (the ostensible purpose of their presence there), they are drawn to the shops by the prospect of finding tools and raw materials they may (and must) use in making themselves ‘fit for being consumed’ – and so market-worthy. Consumption is the principle mechanism of the ‘commoditization’ of consumers…” (page 62)
This presents all sorts of challenges to human authenticity and self-fulfillment. Morris Berman indicates how functional systems breed materialistic addiction, for example.
“Addiction, in one form or another, characterizes every aspect of industrial society, down to the lives of individual members. Dependence on alcohol (food, drugs, tobacco…) is not formally different from dependence on prestige, career achievement, world influence, wealth, the need to build more ingenious bombs, or the need to exercise cautious control over everything. Any system that maximizes certain variables, violating the natural steady-state conditions that would optimize these variables, is by definition in runaway, and ultimately, it has no more chance of survival than an alcoholic or a steam engine without a governor. Unless such a system abandons its epistemology, it will hit bottom or burn out – a realization that is now dawning on many individuals in Western society. There is no escaping self-corrective feedback, even if it takes the form of the total disintegration of the entire culture.” (pp. 242 – 243, my emphasis)
Marshall Berman stated in his work on modernity: “We cannot hand over the responsibility for development to any cadre of experts – precisely because, in the project of development, we are all experts. If scientific and technological cadres have accumulated vast powers in modern society, it is only because their visions and values have echoed, amplified and realized our own. They have only created means to fulfill ends embraced by the modern public: open-ended development of self and society, incessant transformation of the whole inner and outer world. As members of modern society, we are responsible for the directions we develop, for our goals and achievements, for their human costs. Our society will never be able to control its eruptive ‘powers of the underworld’ if it pretends that its scientists are the only ones out of control.” (page 85, my emphasis)
But both Berman's are wrong, I think, on the points that I emphasized. Morris is wrong because the colonization of the Lifeworld by largely functional systems is not the sign of "burn out." The world Morris is speaking about is the early postmodern world. But expressing such powerful Karma, Function heralds an era entirely of its own, apart from humanity. Instead of "hitting bottom" Function is growing as a force in the world as it ensnares human beings through rational mediaization and colonization.
Marshal is wrong because we have already relinquished the responsibility that he pleads for us to maintain. Most of us have given up our ability to control these various systems, we have surrendered our Lifeworlds to colonization. Willingly and happily, citizens of our society today have accepted the unintended and unanticipated affects of submitting to the principles of Function. Most of us live or seek to live in virtual and material wonderlands where we are told what we need and where we take pleasure from immensely powerful forces of marketing, money, and media.
We might even throw surveillance into the mix here, as another example. Our very privacy has been functionalized for the purpose of consumerism and the security of corporations and states. Most people don’t care that Facebook and Google are watching their every move, for example. They don’t care that these internet giants have developed algorithms not only to monitor online activity but too also create content that will be alluring to us while driving their enormous advertising revenues. They don’t care that these corporations buy/sell data (remember “Dataism” in Part One) with other sources so that your online activity is matched up with your debit card purchases and even when you take the subway, matching your activity with others who buy the same things or are on the same subway at the same time you are (there is data on all that which can be easily analyzed) so that they can “connect” you with other users as potential “friends” or with other “products” as potential “customers.” You are a Function of the algorithms. The vast majority of us are oblivious to the consequences of this and this is one thing that William Barrett, rather naively in his approach, feared most.
“The tendency toward materialism is perhaps a permanent one in human nature, and within its limits a valid one. With the advent of the science of mechanics, in the seventeenth century, the materialistic inclination turns toward mechanization: the tendency to see phenomena everywhere as bits of machinery incarnate…With the advent of the compute, however, this temptation toward mechanism becomes even more irresistible, for here we no longer have an obsolete machine of wheels and pulleys but one that seems able to reproduce the processes of the human mind.” (page 154)
“The dreamers of the computer insist that we shall someday be able to build a machine that can take over the operations of the human mind, and so in effect replace the human person. After all, why not? There should be no ‘mystic’ obstacle that should impede the progress of technology. But in the course of those visions they forget the very plain fact of the human body and its presence in and through consciousness. If that eventual machine were ever to be realized, it would be a curiously disembodied kind of consciousness, for it would be without the sensitivity, intuitions, and pathos of our human flesh and blood. And without these qualities we are less than wise, certainly less than human.” (pp. 160 – 161)
But that is the point. Or rather, it is not so much that we become less human is that our humanity is trivialized by systemic forces. To bring things back around to Harari, Function is systemic to making our humanity irrelevant compared with the rise of the “algorithmic self,” that is, humanity as defined by the various systems of power already mentioned. To some degree this has been brewing for centuries and is an inevitable consequence of Homo sapiens evolution into the rationalized society.
The Lifeworld has always been fundamentally functional in nature. That is, the Lifeworld's linguistically and culturally created background assumptions, applied in mundane, everyday fashion, functions as an active component in the way each human being observes and interprets their personal experience. The Lifeworld is the way the world is for you and the way you behave in the world.
In more primitive societies, the Lifeworld is naturally decentered and intermingled with the intersubjective dimensions of tribal myth and culture. You experience the world with others. You express yourself as part of others. The egocentric qualities of the modern Lifeworld are underdeveloped compared with the intersubjective dimension of tribal culture.
When the dawn of writing replaced the ancient oral traditions, with organized religion replacing purely mythic rituals, and with the early structure of commerce and trade transforming the hunter-gatherer economy, the language and culture influencing the Lifeworld became more sophisticated, objectified and more specialized. The Lifeworld became a more materially and rationally constructed amalgamation of functional components assisting individual orientation and expression.
Organized religion and pre-capitalist commerce became the primary, rudimentary influencers on how the Lifeworld was actually constructed within any given developing culture. But, the essence of the Lifeworld did not radically change. It remained robust along the vague seam between the tribal nest of its birth and the rudimentary pathology of early modernization.
It is absolutely critical to understand, however, that there emerged out of these early influences on the Lifeworld an overarching system of evolved power within the systems themselves that constituted both system and intersubjectivity. Organized religion was a precursor for ethical and legal administrative considerations in society. Capitalism evolved into a mass consumer society populated by the powerful, autonomous and independent influences of money, business, advertising, consumerism, leisure, entertainment, among many other characteristics we commonly take for granted today.
As western civilization evolved these more objectified and rationalized niches of the public sphere became viable outside of their traditional moorings. The stock markets are not controlled by human Lifeworlds, for example. They have their own, separate forces driving them like trade, employment, inflation, interest rates and debt. Sports, entertainment, and media outlets may seem to cater to the needs of the Lifeworld but, in fact, they follow their own agendas, independently validated separately from any specific Lifeworld or even intersubjectivity. Marketing, advertising and consumerism are all self-serving drivers of Lifeworld experiences and activities.
So the original functional nature of the Lifeworld has been transformed by "the colonization of the Lifeworld,” that is, by the systems themselves. This is important for a couple of reasons. First of all, it demonstrates that systems originally designed by we humans have moved beyond human control and follow their own Being outside of human Being. This is a revelation because worldviews that remain mythic or spiritual in nature cannot supplant the absolute material reality of systems expressing their own Karma on this planet, independently of any of us. There is a collective connection to the systems, of course, but that is inconsequential in how systems physically unfold on Earth.
Secondly, this points to a change of mode in the nature of Lifeworld. With colonization, the Lifeworld becomes less of a driver of culture and more of an object of culture. Lifeworld is now pure Function. Our Being is infused with functional mechanics of being consumers, our lives are defined by what we own and by the entertainment in which we consume. The most fundamental difference between primitive and modern humanity is that we are no longer a function of our Lifeworlds but rather Lifeworlds are now a function of modern emergent systems. Put negatively, our humanity has become subservient to numerous economic and cultural systems that tell us who we are. These systems have colonized the Lifeworld that was once populated by mythic and tribal proto-systems of culture.
As Marx, among others, pointed out in his concept of modern alienation, we are now functions of how the (chiefly economic) systems work rather than functions of a cultural heritage and hierarchy defined strictly by intersubjective, group demands of survival and sources of meaning. Absurdly, we serve the systems rather than the systems serving us.
This is a primary reason why I don't buy all the bullshit about reality being a trickster or illusionary or that human experience is a mere representation of reality, that the brain is isolated by our senses, without any direct connection to anything "real." To whatever degree that is accurate, the systems are nevertheless out there, working on you as physically real as you are. Playing off Nietzsche, we may have killed God, but the method of our murder was to inadvertently supplant God with autonomous systems acting algorithmically upon the Lifeworld.
The colonization of the Lifeworld produces fundamental challenges for humanity, such as alienation, disorientation, lack of meaning, and loss of human control over our lives. Colonization allows Emptiness to more robustly demonstrate its power and effect. As consumers we are insatiable to some extent. Our purchases are “empty” to begin with, as I previously explained in my post on Emptiness. Our initial excitement generally gives way to habit and a lack of gratitude. But the colonization also is a revelation. The forces of colonization are present without human anticipation or control. They were invented by us, but now they are affecting us of their own accord. For that reason, colonization reveals that there is the world out there for us. It is not an illusion because systems of ever-increasing autonomy act upon us. True, we invented the systems but we no longer control them, they have Karma and Being transcending ours.
This can be a rather bleak insight. Modernity is at least as “transgressive” as it is “progressive.” But it need not be this way at the individual level. There is still room for Nietzsche’s “free-spirit” and “self-overcoming” in the face of Function. The critical first step is to wake-up, see it as a collection of background assumptions (much like any other background assumptions in the Lifeworld), and be skeptical of every assumption; to recognize Function for what it is and to then take steps to “defunctionalize” our existence as much as possible. We may not be able to escape the will to power as expressed in money and media (such aspects of Function are highly invasive), but we can mitigate their colonizing affect by recognizing that Function is a force in the world and understanding how that force works as well as its consequences. Acknowledging Function brings choice into the equation. We can choose how much we wish to Be functional in our lives, separating media-driven actions from actions of authentic (and imperfect) personality.
Oddly, this choice offers the select few a wonderful opportunity. It brings our existential angst into sharp relief and serves a background out of which we can see ourselves clearly. Function need not interfere with our experience and cultivation of Flow, for example. We can still find creative outlets and enlightened reason and express ourselves through fulfilling work or hobbies, to cultivate habits of personal health and enrichment. By acknowledging the implications of Function we are inherently empowered to choose to distinguish ourselves in contrast to Function. It might be too much to save others from the slow, methodical sprawl of autonomous systems and the emergence of whatever Dataism might eventually become, from the framework of capital and marketing and administrative power. But by becoming more aware of these forces we can become something distinctive. “Becoming” is what those of us evolved beyond Function can take back from Function. For the rest of humanity Function is Becoming.
It is a question of who/what controls the act of Becoming who we are that defines who we are. Nietzsche understood this better than most. Actually, his ubermensch might have a lot in common with Homo deus. But it will most certainly involve a different “self-overcoming” than Nietzsche envisioned. Nietzsche knew nothing of computers and algorithms and the surrender of ourselves to systems that colonize our psyches and turn most of us into always almost happy consumers. The Lifeworld is so heavily colonized by so many different functional influences that the self-overcoming required today turns out to be an overcoming of systems as well as ourselves.
Homo deus is (or will be) a master of Function, using it instead of being used by it. Homo deus, in Harari’s view, is a challenger to billions of Homo sapiens. Homo deus is what we (Nietzsche’s “few”) become in the future. Nietzsche never offered mass salvation from the affect of nihilism upon “the herd.” The rest of us can still become “philosophers of the future” within a future of systems that worship data and trade in algorithms. For those of us who recognize Function for what it is there is the possibility to overcome it intimately, but only intimately. To that extent, this fundamental, largely unacknowledged, challenge of our time is also a clarifying opportunity to define ourselves as “overmen,” as higher cultural beings, to become who we are, to establish our human will to power against multiple, systemic wills to power.
We are in the midst of a great storm of incalculable proportions; the tsunami wrought of an asteroid hit upon the ocean that we each contain. The devastation is expected to be immense; it has already, in fact, been immense. Function is thriving in a data-driven world. Few will be unaffected by the change. Our kind’s days may be numbered as Harari suggests. Nietzsche’s overman might be next after all. But while we are here, let us live inspired lives as the philosopher urged us; discover who we truly are, beyond good and evil, dancing freely in the face of Function.
Comments