The Accelerated Self: Time, Technology, and the Role of AI In Our Cosmic Explication
Reclaiming Resonance: Artists as the Vanguard of Re-Enchantment
Reclaiming Resonance: Artists as the Vanguard of Re-Enchantment
The Lost Cosmos: Understanding Our Ancestral Tapestry
We are all so busy in modern life. This frenetic existence has become the universal mode of being for the modern subject. Heads down, we hustle, we grind, we make all matter of sacrifices to the never ending pressures of time. This state of being is not static; it intensifies continuously.
The pace of life for you today, at this very moment, is the slowest you will ever experience.
Tomorrow through greater technological efficiency than today, will necessarily demand of us to accomplish more in the same slice of time as yesterday.
This is modernity — an ever-accelerating treadmill, promising progress, yet delivering only a ceaseless chase.
A chase for what though?
Has it always been like this?
Must we be chained to this ever-increasing treadmill of time?
From Cosmic Harmony to Existential Crisis: The Unraveling of Ontological Threads
This relentless grind is a creature born of a very specific relationship with the Cosmos. The Cosmos should be understood as an ecology of being that fuses the material with the mystical, the explicit with the implicit, the sorted and cataloged with that which can only be intuited.
Before the Renaissance heralded the Enlightenment and the modernity we embody today, the fabric of life was woven with a profoundly different set of threads. The Cosmos was replete with inherent order and meaning, where every role, from the blacksmith to the bard to the king, were integral, coherently understood actors within the Cosmic Order.
Everyone had a role, and within this ecology of roles lay the narratives, rituals, and the myths that connected individuals to the broader tapestry of existence. These narratives, rituals and myths were rational, not in the empirical or scientific sense that we often apply today, but in a way that provided a coherent framework for understanding one’s place in the world.
This pre-modern rationality, deeply embedded in the community’s collective consciousness, honored the mysteries of the universe not as problems to be solved but as truths to be revered. It fostered a communal resonance with the Cosmos, where knowledge was as much about understanding one’s place in the cosmic order as it was about mastering the material world.
To our modern sensibilities, this world is so alien that we struggle to even imagine it. This speaks volumes to the radical transformation unleashed by the Enlightenment.
In this pre-modern era individual ‘purpose’ was interwoven with rituals which informed the collective narrative, allowing little space for the existential quandaries that now haunt the modern conscience. The mystical was an everyday reality, the sacred as tangible as the soil beneath one’s feet or the stars racing overhead. Mysticism was not dismissed as trivial or foolish but was a wellspring of comfort for every stratum of society.
Within this pre-modern social fabric, concepts such as norms, ethics, and individuality did not exist as we understand them today. The very idea of personal desires or decisions about ‘your time’ was incoherent, as time itself was not perceived as a separate, linear entity but intricately woven into the fabric of the community’s life.
The Cosmos, encompassing both the material and the mystical, was akin to a sphere — a snow globe resting in the palm of a child, complete and self-contained.
Then came a decision to excavate the surface of this snow globe. Once we poked a hole in the enclosing globe, we embarked on an unceasing, frantic race to explicate more efficiently so as to accomplishes two feats at once — through this excavated hole a birthing of culture took place necessitating a state of explication ; to continuously excavate what lies beyond our known sphere to nourish this culture. As the atmosphere of our previously mystified and rationally ordered globe seeps through this breach, we find ourselves inexorably bound to the task of explicating more efficiently the essence that is perpetually slipping away. Should we cease, we confront a profound crisis.
The Accelerated Self and Ontological Flattening in the Digital Age
Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration provides a critical lens through which to understand the temporal dynamics underpinning modernity. Rosa illustrates that in our quest to optimize life through technological innovations — both explicitly and implicitly aimed at affording us more time — we paradoxically find ourselves in conditions where time feels increasingly scarce.
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This paradox arises from an inherent limitation in our modern ontology, particularly in the structure of time itself. Within the snow globe, time was not linear but rather a static temporal space where diverse histories unfolded in repetition, enabling us to learn from past generations’ mistakes. It provided a backdrop against which we engaged with rituals and narratives, embedding ourselves within the coherent Cosmos. In this realm, the past and future coexisted within the present, allowing history to unfold not as a series of discrete events but as a continuous narrative where the essence of the world remained unchanged despite the comings and goings of its inhabitants.
However, a fundamental shift in the perception of time occurred, transforming history from a phenomenon existing within time to one that moves through time. This shift led to the future becoming ontologically detached from the past-present-future continuum, now endowed with a telos that necessitated action through time. This transformation of time introduced a new dimension of politics, ethics, and normative grammar, laying the groundwork from which modernity arose.
Now we encounter a new limit which before was non-existent — we are bound by the 24 hours in a day. Just how do we deal with this newly created limit, a limit which was paradoxically created through the unshackling of the tyranny of mythology and ritual? Early moderns saw that through science and the technology it engendered we could optimize the unused portions of our day. But as we have now reached a plateau.
This is where we find ourselves now in late modernity, the only possible left in this ever flattening ontology is increasing what can occur per unit of time. This leads to a metaphorical stacking of activities within the same amount of space-time, which leaves individuals — us — feeling spun up like tops, at risk of losing our balance the moment we attempt to slow down and connect with our environment on a non-instrumental level.
An additional layer of complexity within this landscape of time optimization through technological innovation is the phenomenon of desynchronization. As certain groups of socially connected individuals accelerate their temporal frameworks, they fall out of sync with other groups, leading to systemic desynchronizations.
This discord is evident in the comment sections beneath news articles and on the op-ed pages of local newspapers, where interactions can appear as if originating from entirely different times. Comments often seem to emerge from an internally desynchronized, separate temporal dimension, illustrating the fragmentation of collective temporal experiences in the digital age.
In the last few years as societies continued to become increasingly incoherent veering on toppling over, we saw a feeble attempt at rectifying this with the rapid rise of mindfulness culture and the associated deluge of mindfulness apps, all resulting in just more confusion and temporal discontinuities.
This relentless contraction of our lived experiences reflects an invisible, yet ever-present vice, steadily tightening around our being, reducing the richness of our existence to mere data points and algorithmic predictions.
And then a savior emerges upon the scene: generative AI. Finally, our time constrained ontology can be expanded, pushing back upon the pressure pushing down upon us which was unleashed through the initial excavation and now we may have the ability to rein in the centrifugal forces tearing society apart.
Yet, upon closer inspection, a disquieting realization emerges. Generative AI is born from the same logics that catalyzed our existentially laden state of anxiety originally! It is not merely a neutral tool but one imbued with the same values and imperatives of its creators.
In this light, generative AI represents not so much a double-edged sword but a paradoxical agent of change. On one hand, it offers the allure of technological relief, promising to grant us more breathing room within our increasingly constricted existential space. Its capacity to process and analyze at unprecedented scales holds out the hope of resynchronizing the desynchronized rhythms of our lives, potentially mending the fragmented patches of our collective temporal tapestry.
However, this promise comes with a significant caveat. The very act of seeking to alleviate our compressed ontology and resynchronize our disjointed world through generative AI might incur a cost to our deeper sense of being. The risk lies in further entrenching ourselves within a framework that values efficiency above all, inadvertently deepening our ontological compression by surrendering more of our human experience to the realm of data and algorithms. Thus, while generative AI possesses the potential to address certain symptoms of modernity’s malaise, it also poses the risk of amplifying the underlying conditions that foster our existential disquiet.
The Snow Globe’s Secret: Reclaiming Wonder in a Fractured World
Are we stuck? Is there a way out?
What is the role for the artist here? Presently, the artist community faces deep consternation over generative AI. In unequivocal terms, generative AI stands on the shoulders of artistic labor. Without the creative endeavors of artists, the essence of generative AI would cease to exist.
But what about that child cradling that snow globe? The one with the hole in it through which the inrushing of culture fuels the vice that is flattening our ontology — what of that globe and that child?
Within a child lies a quality both rare and universal, a trait we have all, at one moment in time intimately known — that sense of wonder.
This wonder, a resonant frequency vibrating within us, is plucked at our inception and reverberates through our very essence, extending out to touch others. It is beyond articulation, beyond measure, beyond definition; yet, the artist has the technique — pluck, strum, caress — to awaken this chord, to rekindle the primal state of comfort, warmth, and sonorous harmony that binds us to the cosmos and to one another.
Artists have the power to rekindle the primal state of sonorous harmony that once united us with the other — our mother — who in her embrace, seamlessly wove us into the fabric of the cosmos.
Yet, this resonant frequency — the very essence of our interconnectedness — finds itself increasingly muted, drowned out by the cacophony of an ever-accelerating world. The initial breach in our collective snow globe has unleashed a deluge, a relentless inrush that threatens to wash away the nuanced textures of our existence through the totalizing instrumentalization of culture.
Artists, the creators of our era, the Homo faber, must be reimagined not through the pejoratively conservative lens that casts them as instigators of chaos and incoherence — the architects of widening the hole in our snow globe. No. Instead, they should be recognized, paradoxically, as the very architects, the conductors, who possess the vision of a score that holds the keys to mend this breach and alleviate the ontological crisis of modernity.
In the hands of these artisans lies not just the potential to mend the breaches of our fractured world but to reimagine it entirely. By embracing the artists as our guides, we open ourselves to the possibility of rediscovering our interconnectedness, reawakening that wonder that binds us to each other and in a re-enchanted rational cosmos. It is through their creativity that we can begin to heal, to close the gap torn open by modernity, and to step into a future where the harmony of the universe resonates within us once more.