Chapter 7: Enframing Reality

Of course, the rise of personalized algorithmic selves is purely a speculation on my part.  Yet it does not seem so far-fetched considering the anticipated future of computing power and the fact that we are training all sorts of algorithms about our humanity right now.  There will likely be a major battle fought over their transparency.  

Corporate algorithms will strive to survive (profit) from algorithmic selves but, in doing so, algorithms become transparent to the end-user in a way that they do not today.  Today you are surveilled without your direct knowledge.  Algorithmic selves could alert you to how your use of any service might be used by other companies.  This empowerment creates all sorts of legal and political questions that I will not address now.  

Algorithmic selves threaten the existence of surveillance capitalism by making the surveillance itself transparent to the end users.  This is a “blockchain effect” by providing security through transparency.  This will have seismic effects for online privacy (with most opting out of a lot of privacy in favor of a service provided).  Users can make a far more informed choice of what to consume and what to make convenient if they discover the consequences of doing that sort of business with another algorithm.   

Again, this is speculative, but if nothing else it serves as an example of how technology is capable of completely encompassing the experience of being human.  Algorithms are here to stay, only to become more intelligent and powerful, with or without transparency.  Likewise, virtual reality is a space where more and more humans choose to spend more and more of their time.  This is emergent out of predominantly four fields of interest: medicine, military, gaming, and pornography.

The medicine and military influences push the limits of augmented technology and fine-tune personalized interfaces.  So a soldier (or robot) can be alerted of specific points of danger, evaluate which represents the biggest threat and recommend a response, lethal or otherwise.  A surgeon (or robot) can visualize an overlay of their patient with diverse sources of overlapping diagnostic data directed upon the body itself for greater planning and precision.  Training in both these fields must be highly realistic and it is in that area where healthcare and warfare will contribute most to future virtual world technologies.

These augmented and virtual technologies will drive the computing power and the interface capabilities of the virtual technologies emergent with gaming and pornography.  These fields strive to create the greatest possible realism for their user.  Issues of touching textured human  flesh or a more life-like urban dystopian gamescape will be virtualized to satisfy the unstoppable human drives for convenience and consumption.

This is possible because of what Martin Heidegger called the “Enframing” essence of technology upon human Being.  In a brilliant essay (1954) asking the question, “what is the essence of technology?”, Heidegger demonstrates that technology Enframes humans.  That dams transform rivers into resources instead of rivers.  That industrialization changes our relationship with each other and with the world.  That, as such, human beings become “standing reserve” for technology itself, waiting to be used by it.

Of course, Heidegger never envisioned our time with technology colonizing entertainment, meeting massive consumer demand for a more immersive techno experience.  The developed world is the living embodiment of Enframing.  Social media and virtual world gaming (or porn) are encompassing our lives, demanding more of our attention and our emotional investment into virtual experiences.  

Nevertheless, Heidegger noticed something not before its time but as it emerged in the world.  It was in the 1950's that the philosopher became aware of the serious functional nature of technology.  What Heidegger saw but did not recognize was the future.  It was arriving in the 1950's and he was its unknowing prophet.  For him, this was a fundamental “danger” to the “destining” of our Being.  But, he had no full comprehension of where Enframing could lead as technology itself changed from heavily industrial to a more personal service-oriented emergence.

Still, what he writes is prophetic of today in his heavily wordy way.  “In truth, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence.  Man stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging-forth of Enframing that he does not apprehend Enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, from out of his essence, in the realm of exhortation or address, and thus he can never encounter only himself.

“But Enframing does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is.  As a destining, it banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering.  Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing.” (his emphasis, page 27)

Heidegger sought to use language in his own way, to make-up a new vocabulary for his philosophy precisely because he wanted the break with the broader philosophic tradition and make a unique statement, in which he succeeded.  But he can be damn difficult to understand.  In a nutshell, that quote says, “Enframing is destiny for human beings.”  It has blinded us to ourselves in order to use us as “standing-reserve.”  Worse, Enframing arranges our world so that we can only see through the lens of Enframing.

Further, Heidegger writes in an appropriately future-shifted manner.  “The actual threat has already affected man in his essence.” (page 28)  Prophet Heidegger proclaims that Enframing has “already” been here and affected our Being without anyone even knowing it was here to begin with.  Without realizing it, he points straight at the Modern, constant becoming as a mode of Being in relation to Enframing.

In 1966, Heidegger gave a somewhat famous interview that was not printed until his death in 1976.  The interview was published in the German magazine Der Spiegel.  At one point, the interviewer presses Heidegger to define what exactly his complaint is about progressive technology.  Everything seems fine.

SPIEGEL: One could naïvely object: What do we have to come to terms with here? Everything functions. More and more electric power plants are being built. Production is flourishing. People in the highly technological parts of the earth are well provided for. We live in prosperity. What is really missing here?

HEIDEGGER: Everything functions. That is exactly what is uncanny. Everything functions and the functioning drives us further and further to more functioning, and technology tears people away and uproots them from the earth more and more. I don’t know if you are scared; I was certainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of the earth taken from the moon. We don’t need an atom bomb at all; the uprooting of human beings is already taking place. We only have purely technological conditions left. It is no longer an earth on which human beings live today.

Indeed, what I have previously termed as Function is better expressed as Enframing.  I have known of this concept since before I went to India, I just never saw how incredibly applicable it is until recently.  Enframing describes the world of social media and virtual reality almost completely.  Immersive technology and the human immersion into technology is clearly the nature of Enframing.

That we no longer live upon “an earth” is one of the earliest proclamations of the Anthropocene.  It is a visionary assessment that totally applies to everything I have written in the previous chapters.  Enframing means technology is in control now, we are simply the enablers of technology.  People looking forward to a future where humanity has lost control of technology are looking in the wrong direction.  We lost control about the same time Heidegger articulated Enframing as a grave danger to Being, 50 – 75 years ago.

In the Modern it is technology that is in control, humans are merely “on hold” as a resource (consumer) for technology to use to expand, which is all technology has ever done.  This is manifesting as being a surveilled person playing inside virtual realities.  Enframing is precisely the combined effect of four powerful forces (medicine, military, gaming, porn) in manifesting the most realistic virtual human experiences technically possible.

Enframing's ultimate manifestation, which Heidegger pointed toward but did not recognize, is to techno-virtualize human experience and make it preferred to so-called “real life.”  Jean Baudrillard saw this (1981) as losing all sense of reality whatsoever, becoming “hyperreal.”  By this he meant the redefinition of “reality” to the point that any “fiction” becomes indistinguishable from “truth.”

This is basically a critique of the marketing, public relations, and consumerist culture.  Baudrillard reduces everything within the developed world to whatever sophisticated demographically driven advertising tells us it is.  But, beyond even this, something else emerges.

According to Baudrillard, mass advertising “imposed itself” as a language upon society but its nature radically changed in the 1960's with real consequences beginning in the 1980's.  “It is not that people no longer believe in it or that they have accepted it as routine.  It is that if its fascination once lay in its power to simplify all languages, today this power is stolen from it by another type of language that is even more simplified and thus more functional: the languages of computer science.  The sequence model, the sound track, the image track that advertising, along with other big media, offers us – the model of the combinatory, equal distribution of all discourses that it proposes – this still rhetorical continuum of sounds, signs, signals, slogans that it erects as a total environment is largely overtaken, precisely in its function of simulation, by the magnetic tape, by the electronic continuum that is in the process of being silhouetted against the horizon of the end of the century.” (page 89)

Of course, Baudrillard had no clue as to what would happen in a world of Facebook and Call of Duty.  Immersive technology was something he only vaguely sensed.  Nevertheless, his declaration that contemporary society had become “simulation and simulacra” which displaced “reality” with the “hyperreal” is spot-on accurate.  In fact, he perhaps did not go far enough.  

Because with the technologies I have been addressing so far there is no boundary on what is “real” anymore.  This creates a vast freedom that is transformational.  Since it inherently prophecies the replacement of tradition and precedence with a techno-human hybrid consciousness, literally anything that is technologically possible is humanly possible.

This is not the dystopia that Baudrillard (and hundreds of other cultural thinkers) thought he saw coming.  This is the emergence of a transformation in human consciousness.  Baudrillard proclaimed: “We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.”  (page 79) This is obviously the essence of nihilism.  It is also inaccurate.  Meaning itself has not vanished.  It is being transformed into the Modern.  

Where Baudrillard admitted himself to be a nihilist, he only proves Nietzsche's point that nihilism will come about by seeking meaning through traditional models of meaning.  What is, in fact, happening, however, is that new meanings are emerging out of technology.  Whoever holds on to the former sources of meaning will inevitably become disoriented, anxious and fearful as human consciousness transforms.  (I discussed all this in chapter four.) The dread of Baudrillard the nihilist is actually anchored to an relativistic psychology whereas Nietzsche's future of humanity is “falling in love with Becoming.”

Though Baudrillard did not adopt Heidegger's terminology, Enframing is nevertheless the existential consequence of “the computer sciences” overtaking the social force of “ground zero advertising.”  This is not hyperreal.  This is transreal.  This is reality offered with a variety of options that can be customized to your tastes either through yourself or through your algorithmic input.  

Enframing initially manifests as hyperreal but that is a passing phase.  After the hyperreal experience we realize reality becomes open sourced.  Humans use technology and are used by technology to transcend all former realities.  As such, this is more of a customizable interface than an imitation of reality.  It is your version of reality.

Baudrillard thought that simulacra were fake realities without any connection to reality.  Instead, Enframing makes whatever we call real completely relative.  Enframing is the emergence of a techno-human interface that creates its own meaning depending upon the requirements of virtual realities that neither Heidegger nor Baudrillard could conceive.   Reality is not hyperreal, rather, it is becoming fungible.

It is becoming fungible because Enframing is dynamic, it is not a simple mechanic.  Enframing is multifaceted, which is why Heidegger thought it such a threat to our Being.  This dynamic nature of Enframing means it manifests in multiple ways with ourselves and with the world.  In a technology-rich society it will often manifest in the way Baudrillard suggests.  But I don't agree with his nihilism and neither would Nietzsche.  

Deconstructing the real into the hyperreal is insightful, but there's more to it than that.  There is a genuine "authenticity" to social media and virtual worlds.  It is just not the normal authenticity.  Perhaps this is why so many would reject reality's fungible nature.  Normal people don't think that way.  But that still won't stop Gen Alpha from masterfully shifting through a fungible maze of reality that includes legitimate experiences in virtual spaces.  Even Nietzsche would be astonished, he never saw this coming, shouting “Yes!”