Looking through the techno-mirror

In praise of stillness

How often is the development of technology informed by careful contemplation or silence? We keep building technology with speed because we take it for granted that it is a sign of progress to do so. The movements around responsible innovation and ethics of technology have been welcome proponents of reflection, but even then, their main reference point is the established way of doing things, such as aiming for seemingly endless growth that modernity is built upon. And therefore such approaches are largely failing; they do not get a seat at the table or transcend feel-good exercises. The suggestion that embedding spiritual perspectives into such a process would produce better results is naive, unfortunately, unless we let go of the prevailing system and the incentives that feed it — The Machine.

To make an impact and contribute to a flip in our planetary script, spiritual traditions need to re-evaluate how they address technology, as does the tradition of ethical inquiry. This is an opportunity thanks to technology rather than something technology is responsible for. The waters have become muddled anyway. As transpersonal psychotherapist and academic Gabriel Fernandez-Borsot suggests, “spiritual traditions will have to clarify their proposals of what it means to be a fully developed human, and what role contemplative development plays in this” (p.13).

Insights from spirituality, and the practices it implies, have a chance to awaken technologists and all alike to the letting go of the speed of progress and embracing stillness and contemplation as paths towards more sustainable and regenerative futures. Openness to spiritual matters is our ‘birthright, as Lisa Miller has put it:

Each of us is endowed with a natural capacity to perceive a greater reality and consciously connect to the life force that moves in, through, and around us. Whether or not we participate in a spiritual practice or adhere to a faith tradition, whether or not we identify as religious or spiritual, our brain has a natural inclination toward and docking station for spiritual awareness. The awakened brain is the neural circuitry that allows us to see the world more fully and thus enhance our individual, societal, and global well-being. — Lisa Miller, The Awakened Brain: Psychology of Spirituality, p. 7-8.

Within the stillness, one can recognise the seeds for regrowth — growth that is evaluated and governed with different criteria to those that led us to this point, the point of polycrisis.

The techno-mirror

Paraphrasing Kevin Kelly, one of the phrases to reflect during this pursuit is “what technology wants”, both as a question and as an imperative about progress. In his 2002 essay “Technology and human becoming”, Philip Hefner talks about technology as a mirror that reflects not only human nature but also our intentions — what we want to get done: “The techno-mirror shows us that we want tools to do things for us, and it shows us what we want done”, in Hefner’s words (p. 657). We imbue those wants to the tools we make, but it appears that our wants are increasingly misguided.

Technologies expand our control over external things — they imply an output, an action towards something. Fernandez-Borsot suggests that a technological-empirical stance to the world privileges action instead of contemplation. Such stance has a thrust towards material objects in the external world rather than internal images:

(C)ontemplation remains alien to technology, other to it. Though one may use technology to support contemplative practices, those practices are themselves of a different nature than the poiesis of technological development, oriented to action by manipulation of the world. — Fernandez-Borsot (2023), Spirituality and technology: a threefold philosophical reflection, p. 13.

Material technologies are not well catered for slowing down, reflecting, and turning to one’s ever-present awareness where stillness is the only thing that is and remains. Yet ‘psychotechnologies’, individual or collective “methods of soul-craft” as defined by Euvie Ivanova, emphasise wholeness and connectedness without the need for material apparatuses that thrust attention away from the present moment.

“We create technology in order to compensate for our finitude”, says Hefner (p. 658). In contrast, practices like Vipassana meditation direct us to embrace the infinite — rather than finite — nature of our awareness. If you give it a chance, meditation enables you to momentarily do away with the scaffoldings that condition your mind; the scaffoldings that constrain it with thoughts and perceptions of material things. Like the continuous space between material things, our awareness is continuous and expansive. To look at the techno-mirror is to look past the reflection and through the mirror, beyond wants and needs — a right hemisphere manoeuvre.

The delusion of immortality through technology

Hefner notes how we see in the techno-mirror ourselves as “finite, frail, and mortal.” In the face of technology, we age and bleed, and the techno-mirror can lead us to believe that there is a fix for that, as if technologies would be able to address the ultimate questions about what it means to live and die.

In its engagement with finitude and death, technology becomes almost explicitly religious. Paul Tillich has said that religion focuses on what we care about most, what we are dependent on. This is his concept of ultimate concern. He also said that the mark of a theological issue is that it deals with what makes for our being or not-being. The struggle with finitude and death meets these criteria: it is a matter of religion, and it raises theological questions. Since it is a medium for these concerns and questions, technology is both religious and theological. Indeed, technology may be more religiously gripping than a sacred liturgy and more theologically urgent than a sacred dogma. — Hefner, Technology and human becoming, p 659.

Yet, many of our unique human qualities arise from awareness of mortality. Nevertheless, we read about tech billionaires seeking mortality via life-extending technologies — and in thinking that, they are utterly missing something fundamental about what it means to be human. The fact that us humans are the only living being on this planet (as far as we know) that is capable of reflecting on one’s finitude, puts us in a position of great responsibility to other living beings; to cultivate them and to enable them to flourish without subjecting them to our servitude.

This responsibility emerges from the realisation that anything that arises will also pass away, as it does in all nature, and fighting it will only cause more suffering. Throughout the age we live in, modernity, we have not done well with the responsibility. Yet, the realisation lets us choose otherwise to what the noise around us tells us to, to abandon attachment to things that were never as good as we told ourselves they were. We can attain this with a particular mode of attention — and spending time in nature in conducive for it. Even spending time with pictures about nature gives rise to such attention.

Embracing silence and transformation

Embracing stillness in the present moment means letting go of the past, the future, and relinquishing thoughts and actions — it is a meditative, contemplative state. It is the state of the eternal now, as Alan Watts used to say.

It is also one of silence that makes us encounter with the unfamiliar. The poet David Whyte writes:

Real silence puts any present understanding to shame, orphans us from certainty, leads us beyond the well-known and accepted reality, and confronts us with the unknown and previously unacceptable conversation about to break in upon our lives. — David Whyte, ”Silence” in Consolations

I want to leave you with one of the critical voices out there, the great

Nate Hagens

, and this testimony that a transformation in one’s worldview is possible; that there is social proof around us about individuals and collectives looking at the techno, or machine-mirror, and acknowledging they need to change their ways of attending to the world:

Thank you for reading. Happy holidays and let’s hope for a more peaceful 2025 for all living beings.

With love and kindness,

Aki