Notes: The Enframed Present

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Some assorted thoughts on the enframing process currently transitioning humanity out of the Western Enlightenment into the Modern.  These are as a result of some recent and not-so-recent reading/viewing.

"We Need to Remake the Internet."  This is a great TED talk and I am late in mentioning it.  Basically, this Virtual Reality pioneer, Jaron Lanier, sees one major aspect of the enframing process.  Of course, like other brilliant minds I have previously mentioned, he does not realize what he is seeing.  He's right only he's got it backward.  The internet is going to remake us.  This is an old Vox article that I came across early this year.

Along those same lines of futurism, "In a First, Most North American robots last year didn't go to automotive plants." So it has started.  Robots are really entering society at large in a big way.  This is only the beginning.  Who's going to stop it?  Specifically, "Orders by life sciences, pharmaceutical and biomedical companies rose 69% last year, the group reported, while demand from food and consumer goods companies grew by 56%."

The emergence of robots and the power digital technology holds over every aspect of human behavior creates friction within most persons, for they find neuroplasticity difficult and do not see the need for it.  Instead, they are hardwired in a particular way that often finds technology threatening.  "Why Human Beings Are Hardwired for Spiritual and 'Magical Thinking'" is an excellent article on some psychological fundamentals that will see the emergent future as strange.  A future that does not respect our inherent neurological needs will be, by definition, threatening to those needs.  

The brains of "magical thinkers" are hardwired that way.  And it is asking a lot of any adult to rewire their brain.  Most people don't know how to do it.  If more people understood this much of the tension in America today would be relieved.  We would see our differences for what they truly are, difference in brain function and, therefore, worthy of mutual respect and understanding.  

The other side of the coin is that we need narrative in our lives.  Enframing is experienced as disenchantment by many.  Flex-brains are more susceptible to it than Hard-brains, though anyone can experience it.  "How psychology fills the gap from the disenchantment of the world" shows that, increasingly, this relatively new science is addressing the "nihilism" in human life.  

Lest we think we are so special, chimpanzees and other apes often display qualities that are very human-like.  "First lethal attacks by chimpanzees on gorillas observed" revealing, for the first time, that chimps will not only attack other chimps, they will go after gorillas and kill them to protect their turf.  Sounds like humanity to me.  Think of the tens of thousands of generations of proto-humans that lived this way and bequeathed to us the same instincts for territory and violence.  Deeply hardwired stuff there.  Difficult to rewire. 

"The Exponential Age Will Transform Economics Forever" gave me a head's up to a new book that I subsequently bought and read.  I plan a review of that book after I've digested it a bit more.  Essentially, Azeem Azhar, points out that: "It’s hard for us to fathom exponential change – but our inability to do so could tear apart businesses, economies and the fabric of society."  He definitely see the tension in the enframing process, but he does not express it in those terms.

Think we are still in charge?  Control is mostly an illusion to begin with and even then only a matter of degree.  "Backlash grows against decision to grant patent to AI system."  In a world first, an AI system in South Africa created a new food container based on fractal geometry.  That country granted the patent for the unique design to its designer - an artificial intelligence algorithm.  Another tiny legal step in the enframing process.  

I want to point out that I don't see enframing as a bad thing.  It is the next step in the evolution of human consciousness.  It does not matter whether anyone sees it happening.  It does not matter if anyone believes the world will turn out this way.  It is only a matter of the enframing process.  I am mature enough to realize my personal aspirations have nothing to do with the way the world will turn out.  Legality to virtual beings (and algorithms are beings) is the same as cryptocurrency being virtual capital.  This is part of a great transformation in human consciousness that hardwired people will mostly resist.

For me, among the most destructive forces on the planet is marketing/advertising.  (Most arguments against "Big Tech" are really addressing marketing problems, not technology ones.  So everyone is confused on this issue.  The harm is not "Big Tech", it is consumer marketing.)  The destruction has proceeded for decades now and completely changed humanity in way that practically all humans have no problem with at all.  Privacy in the advanced world, for example, has greatly diminished without mass protest in the streets.  That is because the two most powerful forces on the planet are human consumption and convenience.  In "People didn't used to be 'consumers.'  What happened?" Salon explores how human beings were turned into economic agents of consumption manipulated not by technology, but by marketing technique.

"The term consumer grew in popularity over the 20th century, pushing aside the once-common citizen. Some of the word's biggest critics have been, at least historically, the disparagers of capitalism: socialists. 'It is clear why "consumer" as a description is so popular,' wrote Raymond Williams, a Welsh socialist, in the 1961 book The Long Revolution. '[A] considerable and increasing part of our economic activity goes to ensuring that we consume what industry finds it convenient for us to produce. As this tendency strengthens, it becomes increasingly obvious that society is not controlling its economic life, but is in part being controlled by it.'"  Once again, the enframing process at work.

A new manifestation of enframing is the near-future metaverse.  According to Fast Company, this is no pipe dream or passing fade.  "Why the metaverse will prove to be more than a buzzword" explains the appeal of what it will bring to human experience, especially to Gen Z and Gen Alpha.  The article uses online gaming as an example of the economic clout behind such immersive experiences.  These will become the first generations to think "virtual first."

"By thinking 'virtual first,' you can see how these [virtual] spaces become highly experimental, creative, and valuable. The products you can design aren’t bound by physics or marketing convention—they can be anything, and are now directly 'ownable' through blockchain. Interestingly, this presents an opportunity for ailing brands to reinvent themselves in the metaverse; just look at the crypto casino that Atari has built in Decentraland.

"I believe that the metaverse is here to stay. That means brands and marketers now have the exciting opportunity to create products that exist in multiple realities. The winners will understand that the metaverse is not a copy of our world, and so we should not simply paste our products, experiences, and brands into it."  Once again, this is a problem with marketing, not technology.

In the "real" world enframing is a progressive force through time.  But reality within the metaverse will be enframed by design.  The metaverse will be inherently a complete marketing reality.  Though I do not mean metaverse planners are thinking about enframing planning to enframe humanity.  No one is actually doing that because they do not formulate their actions with enframing in mind.  They approach this as a marketing problem that leverages immersive technology.

The transformation of human consciousness has side effects outside the direct periphery of enframing.  In other words, enframing creates a disruption in society that has (unintended) consequences outside the act of enframing itself.  One of those is the explosion of LGBTQ people, especially among younger generations who are more adaptive to enframing without realizing it.    Newsweek reported: "Nearly 40 Percent of U.S. Gen Zs, 30 Percent of young Christians Identify as LGBTQ, Poll Shows."  This represents flexible brains emerging in the world and the obvious difficulties this huge wave of change makes for tradition and precedent.  These people will grow into political and economic power in the years ahead and change the world. 

The neuroplastic Flex-brains of Gen Z and Alpha, immerse in immersive technology will accept enframing the way most of accepted the loss of privacy.  Without a whimper, as if the world is supposed to be this way.  This, along with other things such as emotional intelligence, flow, openness to strange uncertainty, will lead to the transformation in human consciousness proclaimed by the original Western Enlightenment.

Indeed, we are the last generations of the Enlightenment.  Our children's children will birth the Modern.  The exponential rate of technological change has disoriented us.  Some fine that cool.  Most find it wrong, just wrong.  No one is properly oriented to the present.  Technology future-shifts our reality but our hardwired brains past-shift our behavior.  This creates great tension that could lead to more violence like what we saw upon the US Capitol on January 6 this year.  This year?  My god, that seems ages ago now.  We are moving so fast that recent events are further away than they used to be.