Adam has invented something new. He has invented tomorrow. You will invent things everyday now that the burden of immortality has been lifted from you.
The work of Take Back the Tech! in Afghanistan has been brought to fruition: the training program to equip Afghan girls and women with IT skills, particularly for using media tools, has helped them put together a set of videos that tell the chilling tales of their lives lived behind the veil of invisibility in Afghan society. You can see these simple but great videos on Afghan Youth Voices, which also features a bunch of noteworthy new endeavors like the Women's Blogging Project (in Dari, I believe, but it could also be in Pashto) and the Afghan Memory Project.
There is something particularly charming about tech creations (and I mean things like websites, not inventions) from the developing world - their simplicity, 1990s graphics and occasionally dysfunctional links are delightfully candid, but at the same time you slowly realize that these creations, no matter how primitively put together, are doing the same thing in their context as the equivalent products in the developed world are, if not having a greater impact than the latter. That homepage of an organization reminiscent of geocities fan pages is no less able to put the organization in touch with other organizations, with the rest of the world, and with the social groups that their support work targets.
By no means am I naïvely putting all hopes into a technical solution for places that barely have basic means to sustenance, yet is not the capacity to frog-leap linear milestones of development one of the remarkable traits of technology?
Even more remarkable is when self-expression and technology coalesces: virtual and therefore the potential for ideal versions of the self are created. These versions of the self can be portrayed and memorialized in a controlled fashion; the shifting, unpredictable and unfathomable self is stabilized and processed and then dispatched for public consumption.
This contrived creation, the digital double, immortalizes the mortal, disobedient double of physical reality.
Even more remarkable is when self-expression and technology coalesces: virtual and therefore the potential for ideal versions of the self are created. These versions of the self can be portrayed and memorialized in a controlled fashion; the shifting, unpredictable and unfathomable self is stabilized and processed and then dispatched for public consumption.
This contrived creation, the digital double, immortalizes the mortal, disobedient double of physical reality.
Joseph Campbell postulates that religious rituals are a medium through which man undergoes an esoteric transformation from having a sense of a separate self to rise to communion with divine unity. "When the will of the individual to his own mortality is
extinguished...through an effective realization of the immortality of
being itself, and of its play through all things, he is united with that
being, in experience, in an stunning crisis of release from the
psychology of guilt and mortality." (The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology) Consider as ritualistic behavior the act of whipping out your phone, texting or taking and uploading photos while real life proceeds on around you. On your social media networks, these moments are captured and shared, moments that were momentarily devoid of your participation, but become the very moments that define your digital self. The deceiving tints of Instagram mask the washed out greys of reality's ambiguity, the very ambiguities that permit free interpretation. Eyes, jewelry and the color of that raspberry sauce upon the dessert pop and everything else recedes, because who is really interested in how the muted green of skin seems to restrain a dormant, horrific carnal humanness? Or how it might not seem so? Physical reality like mortality becomes dull and unpleasantly uncertain in comparison, and so the "will of the individual to his own mortality" festers. The rituals of gadget use realize the unity of the individual with the digital realm of aspirations, ideals, picture-perfectness, free speech and democratic representation - a kind of paradise really.
What becomes of the individual, who, may we be reminded, is still very much real? I think the apparent attainment (or potential attainment) of ideals breeds idealism, which breeds courage and a kind of scorn for consequences. This is precisely why things like "Take Back the Tech" is powerful: give even a small group of people this access to the whole process I described above, and you get optimism, idealism, grandiose ambition, fanaticism even, and importantly, fearlessness. Idealism and optimism propel people towards (sometimes ostensibly) unattainable goals. Fearlessness permits people to do so. To put it in simpler terms (which potentially may cliché-fy and trivialize my entire post) we can say "technology empowers people." Of course, the nature of that empowerment is what I sought to elucidate and hopefully that suggests how it is different from other forms of empowerment (such as giving someone a stack of cash or access to credit).
On a slightly lighter note, optimism and fearlessness, when fueled further by inebriation, does no one any good. In the hope of rescuing the relevance of my post's title, let's just say there are certainly perils to self-expression, especially via digital forms that leave stubborn reminders the next morning. I take it back: this really isn't on a lighter note at all, it feels horridly grave in my hungover mind. Like everything else, I will laugh it off!
