By Sohail Inayatullah, 1997
Has The Future Arrived?
Many claim that with the advent of the web and internet, the future has arrived. The dream of an interconnected planet where physical labor becomes minimally important and knowledge creation becomes the source of value and wealth appears to now here. But perhaps the “cyber/information era” view of the future is overly linear, exponentially so, and forgetful that two-thirds of the world does not have a phone and much of the world lives over two hours from a phone connection.
While new technologies has speeded up time for the elite West and the elite in the non-West, for the majority of the world there is no information era. Moreover, in the hyperjump to starspace, we have forgotten that while ideas and the spirit can soar, there are cyclical processes, such as the life and death of individuals, nations and civilisations that cannot be so easily transformed. There are more people making their living by processing ideas,[i]
Perhaps we are engaged in a non-productive pyramid scheme where we are getting further and further away from food production and manufacturing, building virtualities on virtualites until there is nothing there, as in advaita vedanta[ii] wherein the world is maya, an illusion.
The coming of the information era, ostensibly providing untold riches in bits of freedom for all, in fact limits the futures of others because it robs them of their future alternatives. Reality has become constructed as the worldwideweb, but perhaps this web is Max Weber’s iron cage – the future with no exit, wherein there is an inverse relationship between data and wisdom, between quick bytes and long term commitment, between engagement to technology and engagement with humans, plants and animals. We know now from email culture that the twin dangers of immediacy and speed do not lead to greater community and friendship, rather they can lead to bitter misunderstandings.[iii]
Email then is perhaps not the great connector leading to higher levels of information but the great disconnector that gives the mirage of connection and community. Email without occasional face to face communication can transform friendships into antagonistic relationships. Just as words lose the informational depth of silence, email loses information embedded in silence and face to face gestures. The assimilation and reflection as well as the intuition and the insight needed to make sense of intellectual and emotional data are lost as the urgent need to respond to others quickens. Slow time, lunar time, women’s time, spiritual timeless time, cyclical rise and fall time and circular seasonal time are among the victims, leading to temporal impoverishment, a loss of temporal diversity where “21C” is for all instead of peculiar to Western civilisation.[iv]
Cybertechnologies thus create not just rich and poor in terms of information, but a world of quick inattentive time and slow attentive time. One is committed to quick money and quick time, a world where data and information are far more important than knowledge and wisdom. Cybertechnologies not only create an information rich and poor but also an information quick and slow. Time on the screen is different from time spent gazing at sand in the desert or wandering in the Himalayas. Screen time does not slow the heart beat down relaxing one into the superconscious, rather we become lost in many bits, creating perhaps an era of accelerating information but certainly not a knowledge future or a future where the subtle mysteries of the world, the spiritual everpresent is felt.
This quickening of the self was anticipated by McLuhan in 1980. “Excessive speed of change isolates already fragmented individuals. At the speed [speech] of light man has neither goals, objectives or private identity. He is an item in the data bank – software only, easily forgotten – and deeply resentful.[v]
Selves lose reflective space, jumping from one object to another, one Website to another, one email to another. It is not a communicative world that will transpire but a world of selves downloading their emotional confusion onto each other. Writes Zia Sardar, “Far from creating a community based on consensus, the information technologies could easily create states of alienated and atomised individuals, glued to their computer terminal, terrorising and being terrorised by all those whose values conflict with their own.”[vi] It is as if we have all become psychic with all thoughts interpenetrating creating a global schizophrenia.[vii]
THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD
But for cyber enthusiasts, new technologies give more choice. They reduce the power of Big business and Big State, creating a vast frontier for creative individuals to explore. “Cyberspace has the potential to be egalitarian, to bring everyone into a network arrangement. It has the capacity to create community; to provide untold opportunities for communication, exchange and keeping in touch.”[viii]
Cybertechnologies will allow more interaction creating a global ecumene. They create wealth, indeed, a jump in wealth. The new technologies promise a transformational society where the future is always beckoning, a new discovery is yearly.[ix]
The oppressive dimensions of bounded identity – to nation, village, gender, culture – will all disappear as we move in and out of identities and communities. It is the end of scarcity as an operating myth and the beginning of abundance, of information that wants to be free. The late 20th century is the demarcation from the industrial to the information/knowledge era. Progress is occurring now. Forget the cycle of rise and fall and life and death. That was but misinformation.
But while the growth data looks impressive and the stock of Microsoft continues upward, there are some hidden costs. For example, what of negative dimensions of the new technologies such as surveillance? Police in Brisbane, Australia use up to a 100 hidden cameras in malls to watch for criminal activities.[x]
Hundreds more are anticipated creating an electronic grid in central Brisbane. While this might be possibly benign in Brisbane (Aborigines might have different views though), imagining a large grid over Milosevic’s Yugoslavia or Taliban’s Afghanistan (or under Zia-ul Haq’s Pakistan where every “immoral” gaze would have led to arrest) it is enough to frighten the most fanatical techno-optimist. Or is it? Many believe that privacy issues will be forgotten dimensions of the debate on cyberfutures once we each have our own self-encryptors so that no one can read or enter us (the 21st century chastity belt). Technology will tame technology. Over time, the benefits of the new technologies will become global with poverty, homelessness and anomie all wiped out. All will eventually have access – even the poorest – as the billions of brains that we are, once connected, will solve the many problems of oppression.[xi]
While we have always imagined such a future, it is only now that technology allows it so.
While cyber-enthusiasts rightfully point to the opportunities of the one world created by new technologies. But they forget that the one world of globalism remains fundamentally capitalistic with the local (local economy and power over one’s future) increasingly being attacked. The tiny Pacific Island of Niue recently discovered that 10% of its national revenue was being sucked out through international sex-line services.[xii]
The information era as P.R. Sarkar points out is late capitalism, a system in which all other varnas – psycho-social classes and ways of knowing (the intellectual, the worker and the warrior) – become the “boot lickers of the merchants.”[xiii]
And: “In order to accumulate more and more in their houses, they torture others to starvation … they suck the very living plasma of others to enrich the capabilities.”[xiv]
While intellectuals invent metaphors of postmodernity and post-industrialism, capital continues to accumulate unevenly, the poor become poorer and less powerful (however, they can now have a Website). The information era still exists in the context of the world capitalist system – it is not an external development of it, and it will not create the contradictions that end it. The knowledge society or non-material society that many futurists imagine conveniently forgets humans’ very real suffering. But for virtual realities, we have virtual theories.
A REAL INFORMATION SOCIETY
Still, there are progressive dimensions to the new technologies. As Fatma Aloo of the Tanzanian Media Women’s Association argues, “They are a necessarily evil.”[xv]
Women and other marginalised groups must use and design them for their own empowerment or they will be further left out and behind.
What is needed then is the creation of a progressive information society. It would be a world sytem that was diverse in how it viewed knowledge, appreciating the different ways civilisations ordered the real. It would not just be technical but emotional and spiritual as well and ultimately one that used knowledge to create better human conditions, to reduce dhukka (suffering) and realise moksa (spiritual liberation from the bonds of action and reaction). The challenge then is not just to increase our ability to produce and understand information but to enhance the capacity of the deeper layers of mind, particularly in developing the vijinanamaya kosa (where knowledge of what is eternal and temporal is realised). Certainly, even though the Web is less rigid than a library, it is not the total information technology some assume – spiritual energies and shamanistic dissenting spaces cannot enter. Of course, underlying an alternative view of an information society is a commitment to prama or a dynamic equilibrium wherein internal/external and spiritual/material are balanced.
A GAIA OF CIVILISATIONS
We thus need to imagine and help create social spaces so the new technologies participate in and allow for the coming of a real global civilisation, a gaia of cultures. One where there is deep multi-culturalism, where the epistemologies of varied cultures – how they see self and other are respected – flourish. To realise this, open communication and travel are necessary. But certainly not enough.
What we also learn from other cultures is that the new electronic technologies are just one of the possible technologies creating world space. Indeed they just act at the most superficial levels. As important as cyberspace is microvita space or the noosphere being created through our world imaginations. Mystic P.R. Sarkar reminds us that behind our wilful actions is the agency of microvita – the basic substance of existence, which is both mental and physical, mind and body. Microvita can be used by minds (the image of monks on the Himalayas sending out positive thoughts is the organising metaphor here, as is the Muslim prayer in unison throughout the world with direction and focus) to change the vibrational levels of humans, making them more sensitive to others, to nature and to the divine. And as Sheldrake reminds, as images and beliefs of one diverse world become more common it will be easier to imagine one world and live as one world, as a blissful universal family. The Web then can participate in the historical decolonisation process giving power to communities and individuals in the overall context of global human, economic, environmental and cultural rights.
Or can it?
[i]. See, for example, William E. Halal, “The Rise of the Knowledge Entrepreneur,” The Futurist (November-December 1996), pages 13-16. Halal writes that in the US “Blue-collar workers should dwindle from 20% of the US work force in 1995 to 10% or less within a decade or two. …non-professional white-collar workers [will be reduced] from 40% to 20%-30%. The remaining 60%-70% or so of the work force may then be composed of knowledge workers. …meanwhile, productivity, living standards and the quality of life will soar to unprecedented levels,” page 13.
Also see, The Think Tank Directory in which it is reported that the number of think tanks have exploded from 62 in 1945 to 1200 in 1996. For more information on this email: grs@cjnetworks.com or write 214 S.W. 6th Avenue, Suite 301, Topeka, KS 66603, USA.
[ii]. One of the six schools of classical Indian philosophy. Only Brahman, the supreme consciousness, is postulated as real. Everything else is but an illusion – maya.
[iii]. See, S.C Gwynne and John F. Dickerson, “Lost in the E-Mail,” Time (April 21, 1997), pages 64-66. They report on the dangers in businesses when bosses use email to berate employees, creating considerable ill-will and inefficiencies. Email exports the anger of the sender to the receiver. Diane Morse Houghten writes that “E-mail leaves a lot of blank spaces in what we say, which the recipient tends to fill with the most negative interpretation” (page 65).
To avoid sending the wrong message, four rules are suggested: “(1) Never discuss bad news, never criticize and never discuss personal issues over email. And if there’s a chance that what you say could be taken the wrong way, wlakd down the hall to discuss it in person or pick up the phone” (page 66).
[iv]. For more on the temporal hegemony, particularly in the construction of the 21st century as neutral universal timing instead of as particular to the West, see Sohail Inayatullah, “Listening to Non-Western Perspectives” in David Hicks and Richard Slaughter, eds, 1998 Education Yearbook (Kogan Page, 1998).
[v]. Marshall McLuhan quoted in New Internationalist special issue titled, “Seduced by Technology: The human costs of computers” New Internationalist, 286, December 1996, page 26.
[vi]. Zia Sardar, “The future of democracy and human rights,” Futures, 28(9), November, 1996, page 847.
[vii]. Sohail Inayatullah, “Frames of Reference, The Breakdown of the Self and the Search for Reintegration” in Eleonora Masini and Yogesh Atal, eds. The Futures of Cultures (Bangkok, Unesco, 1993).
[viii]. Dale Spender quoted in Carmel Shute, “Women With Byte” page 9.
[ix]. Ismail Serageldin in “Islam, Science and Values,” International Journal of Science and Technology, Spring 1996, 9(2), 1996, pages 100-114 compiles an impressive array of statistics. “Items in the Library of Congress are doubling every 14 years and, at the rate things are going, will soon be developing every 7 years. …In the US, there are 55,000 trade books published annually. …The gap of scientists and engineers in North and South is vast with 3800 per million in the US and 200 per million in the South. … [Finally], currently a billion email messages pass between 35 million users, and the volume of traffic on the Internet is doubling every 10 months,” 100-101. Of course, why anyone would want to count email messages is the key issue – as ridiculous would be to count the number of words said daily through talking, or perhaps even count the silence inbetween words.
[x]. Stated on the television show Sixty Minutes, Channel 9, Brisbane, Australia, March 16.
[xi]. While these are optimistic forecasts, Roar Bjonnes reports that according to The Nation Magazine “368 of the world’s richest pople own as much wealth as 40% of the world’s poor. In other words, 368 billionaires own as much as 2.5 billion poor people. Moreover, the trend is toward greater inequity with the “share of global income between the world’s rich and the world’s poor doubling from 30-1 in 1960 to 59 to 1, in 1989. The information revolution will have to be quite dramatic to reverse these figures. Email: Rbjonnes@igc.apc.org, 13 August 1995. Bjonnes is former editor of Commonfuture and Prout Journal.
[xii]. “Niue takes moral stand on sex lines,” The Courier-Mail (February 20, 1997), page 19.
[xiii]. P.R. Sarkar, The Human Society (Calcutta, AM Publications, 1984), page 97.
[xiv]. P.R. Sarkar, Problem of the Day (Ananda Nagar, India, AM Publications, 1959), page 3.
[xv]. Personal Comments to the author, Santiago de Compostelo, Spain, May 20, 1997.