November 28, 2023 Johannes Bongers / Boolean Works (since 1991)

technotlogyManifesto

ABSTRACTOnce, art and technology were lovers as poiesis and techne. In their creative union, poiesis — the process of bringing being and truth into existence — and techne — the revealing of the essence of things and the knowledge and craft of making — seamlessly intertwined, blending the artistic ideal with the purpose of the object. However, over time, this relationship unraveled. As techne increasingly rationalised, the once balanced partnership shifted, leading to the current dominance of modern technology, science and the marginalisation of art. This rise of technology, fuelled by the exploitation and distribution of all available resources, gave birth to capitalism. Rationalisation, oh the irony, has caused a tremendous chaos. It has led to a systemic collapse of the coherence between the psyche, the social, and the environment, paving the way for monotony and violence to infiltrate every aspect of life in a cascade of crises and catastrophes.Technotlogy emerges as a transformative paradigm, redefining the relationship between art, life, and technology. Technotlogy can be best understood as a freedom-practice bridging two extensions: the reintroduction of Joseph Beuys' concept of Erweiterte Kunst, Extended Art, which embodies a pan-ecological practice, and its counterpart, a new expanded understanding of technology; Extended Technology. In Technotlogy poiesis and techne are revitalised by adding insights from various disciplines as philosophy, biosemiotics and others.Unsurprisingly the architecture of Technotlogy consists of an operating system, an OS constructed out of various socio-political and philosophical insights and Apps – applications that are artistic-political projects. This dynamic framework is Open, is inherently relational, ethical-aesthetic, political, anti-fascist and collaborative, offering a radical approach to personal and collective agency.Like to collaborate or contact? Click here.

Content

Abstract
Intro
Preview Apps12 foundational kernels, vectors, loops & diagrams
1. Inside / Outside asymmetry
2. Technology and Extended Art
3. Extended Technology
4. Pan-Technology: Three Layers of Technology
5. Pan-Ecology: The Three Ecologies
6. Boolean Technology is divisive
7. Excessive Communication and the Loss of Diversity
8. Private means robbed from the public
9. Entropy, Complexity, and Sameness
10. Boolean Technology and the Rise of Totalitarianism
11. AI and the Loop of Reason (Link pdf)
12. Pan-Temporal Anxiety: The Three Anxieties of TimeJeder Mensch wird ein KünstlerPraxis
- OS
- AppsColophon

Intro

What is Technotlogy?

Technotlogy.com is not a commercial enterprise; it is a common good. Technotlogy offers a new concept of art and technology and reintroduces Joseph Beuys' concept of 'Erweiterte Kunst' (Extended Art) intertwined with a new extended concept of technology.Joseph Beuys proclaimed that 'only art can change the world,' implying that the essence of humanity lies in using one's creativity and thought to shape their personal and social environment. However, the once collaborative forces of poiesis and techne have now diverged. Technology, emancipated from craftsmanship and aided by science, has evolved into a technical and rational mentality. Art retreated into its shell and engages with the world only performatively. Art has become equal to artworks, not about renewing the world by using one's artistic-political potential. Meanwhile, technology's omnipresence has distorted the world and everything on it. It realises the unimaginable with a revolutionary surrender that was a cultural driving force up and to and including Beuys.Technotlogy is art, disguised as technology, aiming to transform the mentalities of both art and technology from the inside. The need to reverse the current situation screams for a new understanding of technology, especially since it has invaded and homogenised our minds, social structures, and environments. But alongside technology, art must also reconnect with its 'Erweiterte Kunstbegriff' (expanded concept of art), where artists—that is, all of us—come into contact with their creativity, not that of the creative industry, but the kind that lies at the foundation of every person to give shape to themselves and the world. Creativity is not production, on the contrary, it is a freedom practice.Technotlogy's power is unleashed only when the dangers and hidden potentials of technology are exposed. Only by dispelling this ignorance can technology and art both truly support in changing the world. And when art awakens to change the world, be prepared.

+ Today

Before Sam Altman was ousted by OpenAI's board in November 2023, his final speech on AGI focused on pushing back the veil of ignorance and advancing the frontier of discovery. However, the board deemed his approach too risky for humanity and briefly severed ties before investor demanded his return. This episode is pivotal: the sequence of discovery versus ignorance must be reconsidered.Technology, driven by a utilitarian rationale, has sidelined the artistic and vital impulse, funneling personal and communal energies – oil, animals, enslaved persons, women and child labor, data, social relations – into private domains and has subsequently ruined all ecologies. A.I. represents this culmination, where it has been permitted to scrape the entire written and creative output of all human intelligence to commodify it. Our future potential has not only been privatised and commodified, but on top of that, this technological appropriation suppresses the diversity and potential agency of individuals and collectives.In this era, marked by political cruelty, propelled by the limits of technology and media, inscribed by the horrors of mental depression induced by social media and disguised child labor, and the Palestinians facing the cybernetics of occupation, we find ourselves drowning in homogenisation. 20 political parties in parliament, 20 times sorry, 20 flavours of peanut butter, 20 streaming providers, one topic a day, 20 people drown each day in the Mediterranean Sea. Against this backdrop, suffering from the decoherence between mind, social and milieu, and responding to Sam Altman's call, Technotlogy emerges to lift our ignorance by turning the frontier of discovery towards trying to renew the world.

++ Architecture

Technotlogy is conceptualised as an Operating System (OS) alongside a suite of Apps, merging the transformative powers of art, theory, and technology. At its core, the OS is structured around a series of foundational kernels, vectors, loops and diagrams, forming the bedrock of Technotlogy’s philosophy. The Apps, designed as aesthetic-political projects, aim to revitalise individual and collective agency in a world stripped of it. Technotlogy stands as a collective call to newness, inviting those who wish to explore and redefine the interplay between life and art. You are encouraged to contribute your insights to Technotlogy’s structure and to develop your own apps.The existing Apps cover a diverse range of artistic-political structures. Examples include Gemeente Nieuwe IJssel and ANDSTERDAM, the artistic-political movement SOOOS, and the newly conceptualized organism Per~son, we offer the Pentalemma Game, a color experiment to overcode capitalism, and various other apps, each embodying our commitment to blending art, theory into technotlogy.

Preview Apps
We have heard that readers are interested in the theory, as well as in the practice, which is addressed in the last part of this Manifesto. To provide a glimpse, without the context, what follows is a preview of the Apps, illustrating the practical application of Technology. Links to the projects are in the descriptions.

12 kernels, vectors, loops & diagrams

In the landscape of Technotlogy, we introduce an approach that transcends the traditional boundaries of technology, art and philosophy. At the heart of our system lie the foundational elements – kernels, vectors, loops and diagrams – representing core principles that guides the functionality and philosophy of the Technotlogy Operating System (OS) that drive the Apps.

1. Inside / Outside asymmetry
"To ask for the origin of life is to ask for the origin of the environment. Living organisms are inscribed in their environments much like patterns woven into a carpet. The two cannot get apart, and yet there seems to be a distinct asymmetry in their relation" (Jesper Hoffmeyer, 1998).

2. The essence of technology is not technical (Heidegger, 1954). ‘Gestell’, or enframing, is Heidegger’s term for the way modern technology and science organize and reveal the world, transforming everything into a resource for exploitation and distribution. This framework dictates how entities are perceived and valued, primarily in terms of their utility, leading to the systematic exploitation of resources for human purposes. The ultimate danger of which Heidegger speaks is that Gestell projects itself onto the 'being' of 'human being' itself, onto the human essence, a warning that has not stopped the development of AGI. But Heidegger says, quoting the poet Hölderlin: "Where danger is, grows also the saving power", "Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch". Here Heidegger refers to art, which withdraws from the rational, scientific and exploitative mentality of Gestell. Art is the saving power, but he again warns, in 1954, that the signs that art is also bent to Gestell have already been observed.To reinstall the transformative power of art against Gestell – art changed over the decades in commodity, market, massmedia, spectacle and lost its potential to change the world – we reintroduce Joseph Beuys' 'Erweiterte Kunstbegriff' (Extended Concept of Art).In 1980 Joseph Beuys was asked: Kunst kann das Leben verändern? "Ja, Ich gehe weiter. Ich sagte: Nur Kunst kann das Leben verändern. Nur Kunst".

By extending the concept of art to include all forms of creative, social, political and ecological engagement, Beuys positioned art as a driving force for societal transformation. The traditional concept of art, though, has proved that it lives inside a niche within human society. Modern art's design concept – 'gestaltungsbegriff' –cannot be applied by all people and to all problems that lie before us. "Creativity that is not free, is a contradictio in terminis. Human creativity is in essence a freedom practice." This practice is pan-ecological and therefore critical and political, and its mentality opens the potential of art and being an artist – meaning everybody – in surprising and unforeseen ways. Technotlogy's critique on modern art goes further, art became part of the status quo, in doubling the performative act of engagement, that is cloaked as social and political, while the symbolic image/art product is a communication product to remain the status quo. Technotlogy's extended concept of art is a 'psychic, social and environmental sculpture', which resonates with the three ecologies and our background as sculptor.Today's predicament, needs artists rather than artworks, and with artists we mean everybody.

3. Extended Technology
In addition, we introduce an 'Extended Technology', an expanded understanding of technology. But to define this Extended Technology is not easy. Although we renew the world, what does it contain? Why is technology so powerful and what can turn and bend this from Gestell? As art has a binary in 'ratio', 'reason' that traditionally is expressed in math, functionality and utilitarianism, the question is what the binary is of technology. To our surprise, technology doesn't occur or operate in an environment with a binary opposition. Is this the main reason modern technology is so powerful? One theory argues technology is a schism, a binary in itself. Plato introduced the Pharmakon, something that is a poison and a medicine at the same time. Derrida reintroduced the Pharmakon concept in his philosophy and Bernard Stiegler proclaimed technology as a Pharmakon. Technology as Pharmakon, though, is not the essence of technology. Pharmakon is rather an expression of the ambiguity of any human concept, as reunion after the positive and negative consequences, as a result of the uncertain and unstable nature of human being, a cause after the fact. No attribution like Technology is Pharmakon can escape the meta-stable nature of the pre-individual. Extended technology is therefore not just an extension of application, which it is, since 'Extended technology' applies also to psychic, social and environmental processes, but 'Extended Technology' is also an extension of the term, the language, the discourse of Technology, in order to unreason Technology.In order to unreason technology, as art is extended towards life by Beuys, we no longer need to know what technology 'is', but rather free technology of its unvital growth. How to unreason technology to make its force available for the good, for life, for renewing the world as extended art does? Poiesis and Techne are not opposites but disparities, essential energies in the process of individuation.Over the years, at Boolean Works, we learned to interpret technology as a route, different from art and science, although deeply inspired by it's insights and experiences, to understand the world, the principles of life, newness and change. Technology is, much more than art, governed by temporality and principles of time, and therefore we studied many aspects of it.Operating in and between so many disciplines and societal domains, as we do, we learned to think and to act transversal. Later we learned the term was coined by Félix Guattari. Transversality is a concept that encourages crossing boundaries and fostering connections between different areas, disciplines, and levels of hierarchy. It is particularly useful in addressing multifaceted problems that do not fit neatly into one area of expertise or knowledge.Extended technology is a temporal and dynamic force – and instead of ordering, controlling, exploitating and (re)distributing – it crosses, opens and becomes, and most importantly is primarily aimed at life as process between organism and milieu. Extended Technology is transversal, therefore it is pan-ecological and, as we show later, able to counter the Three Anxieties of Time, the way digital technology has appropriated the past, present and future. Extended Technology is confronting the logic of Gestell as expressed in today's techno dystopia. Technology needs to be deconstructed into Extended technology to liberate its power for the reunion with Poiesis.

4. Pan-Technology: Three Layers of Technology
Philosophy's engagement with technology, as influential as it essence is unknown and enigmatic, evolved in the 20th century. Despite a wide range of theories, philosophers consistently focus on the one term 'technology.' In fact Aristotle used two terms, poeisis for creating the new, and techné, for the art of making and craftsmanship; we suggest they are lovers. Although in today's philosophy only 'technology' dominates, the interpretations differ significantly. Some, like Marx, the late Heidegger, Ellul, and the Frankfurt School, adopt an ontological perspective, arguing for a metaphysical foundation underlying technology. Others, including the young Heidegger, Derrida, and Stiegler, focusing on 'technical objects,' view technology as an interplay of these objects with human activity and with becoming human. This school views technology as an extension of human capabilities, such as machines extending the body, writing expanding memory, or AI/AGI supporting the mind and replacing creative and productive processes. Underlying the ontologist view and clearly driving the objectivists is the notion that capitalism either supplies the transformative energy for Gestell or accelerates each technical invention.It would be an intriguing puzzle if it weren't of the highest urgency to understand what technology 'is,' especially since we find ourselves enslaved by it. In the context of technology being ontological or functional, one must reflect: who are we, or what have we done, to ourselves and others to deserve this?Technotlogy differs from traditional views. It is not just an ontological concept, nor solely functional or limited to the realm of technical objects. Different from all philosophers, and instead of one term, Technotlogy identifies three overlapping strata of technological evolution. The first, BioMilieu Technology, began with the simultaneous birth of life and milieu. The idea of organism that is separated from milieu is not supported by empirical observation, and is a result of supreme ignorance of the human organism, finally led to the rise of capitalism and today's climate crisis. "Darwin proposed a theory of natural selection and evolution in which the unit of survival was either the family line or the species or subspecies or something of the sort. But today it is quite obvious that this is not the unit of survival in the real biological world. The unit of survival is the organism plus environment. We are learning by bitter experience that the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself" (Bateson 1972). The separation between organism and environment also gave rise to the idea that technology is expressed through technical objects. In this view technical objects are needed to complement the organism, leaving the environment out of the equation. Instead, organisms and their environments, born simultaneously, are one, a oneness that is mediated by what we call BioMilieu Technology. A key aspect of BioMilieu Technology is to continuously reconsider what 'relation' means. This clearly resonates with thinkers like Spinoza, Hume, Whitehead, Bergson and Deleuze although they never 'materially' fused organism and milieu.Gregory Bateson stated the following: ‘... the evolution of the horse from Eohippus was not a one-sided adjustment to life on grassy plains. Surely the grassy plains themselves were evolved pari passu with the evolution of the teeth and hooves of the horses and other ungulates. ... It is the context which evolves.’ (Bateson 1972) What Bateson calls 'context' is BioMilieu technology in action.Technology predates Homo sapiens, emerging when life itself began. The becoming of 'Being' started when Life, Milieu and BioMilieu technology began. 'Being' as BioMilieu technology is a Möbius Strip, a form with a twist that establishes the asymmetry between inside and outside, a precondition for life and agency to evolve.Humans, as part of life and as living organisms, primarily operate as biomilieu technologists. For example, human language can be considered as highly advanced biomilieu technology given birth to the ecology of the social and the ecology of mind. Even though humans have entered new stages of technology, BioMilieu technology remains foundational.With the advent of agriculture around 12.000 years ago, Homo sapiens began to territorialise, emulating the stationary nature of plant life. This led to a new understanding of being in time and space, differentiating time from space. This period is marked by the optimisation of the human environment – the exploitation of all Umwelten began – and gave rise to 'Gestell', as Heidegger termed it. Different from Heidegger, we argue Gestell is not ontological, but epistemological. The settlement of a nomadic organism on one location uncovers the nature of spacetime. The settlement changed the organism/milieu condition, and a new understanding of the spacetime relation. It gave rise to a different experiencing of being a BioMilieu technologist, of the division of spacetime, and of the exploration of new space without time, and the exploitation of the earth to harvest its potential. The organism split itself from the milieu. Gestell is this unnatural, or new natural, exploitation and understanding of being that organism. On the one hand is reason and rationality that came with Gestell nothing different than dealing with this situation. On the other, one could draw this moment as "The birth of time'.Time and technology
To us one of Henri Bergson's deepest insight is (1889) that human thought represents itself spatially, while in fact, thought and imagination is temporal – as duration. Heidegger and after him Peter Sloterdijk emphasise on space as most essential psychic, social and cultural. As sculptor, and architectural theorist, and deeply engaged with these thinkers, we think we we're all on the wrong track. We suggest that the new situation of a stationary being in one location instrumentalises space (Gestell) while ritualising temporality, and by trying to contain it, strive to grasp ourselves. It is not hard to understand why already Hume and later Kant, but especially Henri Bergson, Heidegger (yet again), Hannah Arendt, Gilbert Simondon and after him Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler, are utterly obsessed in their research how time dominates human existence and for Simondon time is the kernel of the technical 'mentality'. Much, much more fundamental than space ever can be. For us, Technotlogy is an ode to time, and an attempt to liberate this concept, as it is misunderstood and anthropomorphised, in today's academic and artistic milieus.Gestell, following BioMilieu, is the second layer of Technotlogy; a bifurcation, not a replacement. Unfortunately, what began as unity of organism and milieu in the BioMilieu technology evolved into the separation of organism from milieu in the Gestell stage. And of the separation of space and time. As it turns out, the next level of technology, Boolean technology, will colonise every aspect of time, in order to tame the human organism into production and consumption. The more the organism is abled to believe in itself, the more it becomes removed from its 'becoming'.The birth of Boolean Technology in the second half of the 20th century, based on the divisive Boolean Logic using the AND OR NOT operators*** in resulting in 1 or 0, marks the third layer of technology, further alienating human interactions from the tangible world. These three technological types – BioMilieu, Gestell, and Boolean – entangled and increasing capitalist's anti-vitality, lead us into today's predicament (Bongers 2022).* The climate crisis is first and foremost an epistemological crisis.
** Peter Sloterdijk's trilogy 'Spheres' does not mention Bergson at all, effectively excluding time from his narrative. It is makes sense to reread Spheres as 'Streams', imagining space as time/duration.
***For Alain Badiou there is not 1, only sets. Technotlogy challenges Badiou's math theory, through the deconstruction of AND OR NOT.

5. Pan-Ecology: The Three Ecologies"Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think 'transversally'. Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated, saturated, by 'degenerate' images and statements. In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he 'redevelops' by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness, becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology."In "The Three Ecologies" from 1989, Félix Guattari builds upon Gregory Bateson's assertion that "there is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds." Guattari expands the conventional understanding of environmental ecology to include the ecologies of mind and the social realm. He argues that each of these ecologies suffers under the excesses of capitalism, leading to a fractured coherence among them. This critical perspective was formed even before the advent of Boolean Technology, which specifically targets the ecology of mind through the exploitation of the social. This Boolean technology diminishes the richness of ideas and diversity, as it parasitically exploits and capitalises on social and public structures. In this context, the milieu or the biosphere, like the human mind and social fabric, is treated merely as a resource to be exploited and distributed.The crisis of the social and climate are on today’s agenda, for what its worth; the one most crucial, though, is politically excluded: the homogenisation of the human mind and the ecology of ideas and thought, the mind without which nothing makes any sense (Gregory Bateson 1972 | Félix Guattari 1989 | Bongers 1991).

6. Boolean Technology is DivisiveThere is a common perception that digital technology is fundamentally digital, characterized by the binary language of zeros and ones. However, this view simplifies a more complex issue. Often, what is assumed to be the cause is merely an effect. It is not the digital per se that should be our focus, but rather the underlying logic that leads to digital technology. This logic, rooted in Boolean algebra, is seldom discussed.Boolean logic, developed through historical milestones—from Aristotle’s early explorations to Leibniz’s Universal Language, and Claude Shannon’s 1937 thesis that paved the way for the transistor—has evolved. What began as a philosophical and mathematical inquiry – an odyssee towards a true logical world – now underpins the information age and forms the DNA of its dystopias. Boolean's fundamental operations–AND, OR, NOT, through intersection, union and complement leading to inclusion, exclusion and negation –cut much deeper, and is intrinsically divisive, than the resulting binary division of Boolean True/False, 1 or 0, driving wedges in our relational understanding of the world, our bodies, minds and the fabric of society. This perversion of Boolean logic serves to divide and diminish, reducing complex identities and relationships into simplified, consumable categories, turns becoming in the stasis of identity and being.At Boolean Works (since 1991), we challenge this mathematical distortion, embraced by tech and completely misunderstood by many. We aim to uncover how Boolean logic, in such a brief span of time, fostered a digital dystopia that has seeped into our cognitive, social, and material realms.We learned to interpret the Boolean operators AND OR NOT differently to confront the digital and its inherently fascistic dividing nature: AND as the synthesis within diversity, OR as the expansion within unity, and NOT as the critical edge that fosters, rather than forecloses, transformation. In other words, AND unites amidst diversity, OR diversifies within unity and NOT brings clarity from opposition. These interpretations aim to recalibrate how we perceive identity and existence.Technotlogy is a call to recalibrate identity and being, as do most Technotlogy apps like ANDSTERDAM and S.O.O.O.S, to move from a technosphere of divisiveness and stasis, to one of pluralism, manifold, variety, vitality, diversity and becoming.

7. Excessive Communication and the Loss of Diversity
It is a paradox that diversity, being a creation of communication, can also be destroyed due to excessive communication. Indeed, communication makes Umwelten more similar to each other. Or, in other words, too much communication can be described as a general reason for many ecological problems that lead to homogenization of the world and loss of diversity. This is the case both in biological communities and in cultures (Kull, 2005, Kull/Maran, 2014).At our 2022 request to elaborate on this paragraph Kull wrote back:A simple example is from linguistic diversity. Until the 19th century, the number of different languages as well as dialects in any country was seemingly in the maximum in the all history of humankind. After that, long-distance communication and tourism (another form of communication) grew enormously. A result was at least ten-fold decrease in number of languages and dialects.No language, no any semiotic system is closed. This means – for their life, for the diversity, communication with neighbours, with other, is necessary – in some extent. New views, other languages, other ways to express are the source of creativity and innovation to any culture. Until certain limit, it increases diversity. But the increase in diversity is a slow process and requires peace; it is a tendency in case of peaceful life and development.The decrease in diversity as a result of excessive communication includes not only spoken languages. The spatial diversity decreases due to mixing, and due to the attempts to adjust one’s behaviour with the one with whom it communicates. (It also decreases, of course, in case of violence and wars.) Once tourism grew, the hotels that initially were designed as following the local traditions of design, became more and more similar over the world as a result of pressure from tourists to fulfil their needs everywhere in the way as they have accustomed. Stepwise, the many types of meals were turned more and more into the same soup in all corners of the big pot. That is globalisation, and the reason for globalisation is precisely too much communication. Communication is semiotic process.Social media, truly a communicative system, is a good example of how too much communication contributes to the loss of diversity and devastating homogenisation.

8. Private means robbed from the public
'Privare' means to rob or steal in Latin. During Roman times, the public space in rural villas dominated the house over the family space. Later, the family robbed the public space for private use. A similar robbery of common goods took place in the Industrial Revolution, accelerated by a technical mentality. Just as with Earth's exploitation and the 'privatisation' of human labor, much of Boolean technology has appropriated public resources for private profit. AI/AGI, owned by tech moguls, is harvesting and scraping the ecology of mind, capturing all ideas and thoughts ever published and shared. Data is dead labour. It reflects the same strategy that Silicon Valley capitalists, like Peter Thiel and others, used to harvest the richness and potential of global collective communication—social media—to bend public opinion and politics, homogenising human creativity and vitality into conflict and hate. Privately owned Boolean Technology parasitises on commonly owned energy (Bongers, 1993 - 2023).

9. Entropy, Complexity, and Sameness
Entropy always increases, complexity comes and goes, and sameness grows under capitalism (Bongers, 2021).

10. Boolean Technology and the Rise of Totalitarianism
"The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchised individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualisation” (Foucault 1977). This anti-fascist call has been negated by Boolean Technology. Boolean technology, with its divisive logic and as a force of capitalism, energises the group to confine the individual, leaving them atomised in solitary identity. Boolean Technology has equipped the group with tools to individualise individuals, similar to how radio and film contributed to the rise of Nazi Germany, successfully erasing the essential rule Foucault offers, thus paving the way for herd mentality. Observe the developments in the USA, Hungary, India, and now in The Netherlands, where the herd mentality governs. Foucault's anti-fascist call resonates with the biosemiotic perspectives of Maran, Kull, and Hoffmeyer, bridging a vital gap between biology and the humanities.

11. AI and the Loop of Reason (March 2024)
At the heart of the annual GTC event by AI chip giant Nvidia, where all facets of the AI industry converge, the number of participating sectors has now become countless. Nvidia's market value has taken a breathtaking flight, increasing by 60% in just a few months, surpassing the dizzying threshold of two trillion dollars and still rising. Also, at the opening of GTC24 this month, just like in other years, a massive black hole looms large, with CEO Jensen Huang standing small below on stage. On the back wall, texts unfold, all in lowercase letters, projecting with the allure of an intergalactic message à la Star Wars. "i am visionary, i am a helper, i am a transformer, i am a trainer, i am a healer, i am a navigator", and then, subtly and almost casually from the sidelines, as if wrestling itself from the shadows of the stage, "i am ai". The opening of GTC24 turns out to revolve entirely around this last proclamation, "i am ai". This palindrome, this mirror image of itself, represents the loop of being; the entity that declares itself to exist by uttering these words. i am ai, I am artificial intelligence, however, is the mirror image and successor of Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”. This statement departs from human reason, thinking, from which ‘being’ is derived. The preceding 'i am' declarations illustrate the diverse applications of AI, the versatile roles under which technology is generally understood. Helper, transformer, trainer, healer, and navigator – each embodies the supposed functions of technology: instruments that support, that improve. But with the final "i am ai", AI itself takes the word, no longer just a means to an end, but as an entity in itself.In a surprising manner, "i am ai" resonates with the essence of technology as described by Martin Heidegger in 1954 in his 'Question Concerning Technology'. Heidegger warns therein of the true danger of technology, not so much in technological progress itself, but in how modern technology, hand in hand with science, turns against the essence of human being – the 'am' in 'i am'. Technology is not something positive with sometimes a negative effect, but foremost an expression of human reason: everything functions. That this reason, turning against us, is reflected in the cascade of crises and catastrophes we cause, through which technology now destroys the earth and has been able to infiltrate the body, our minds, the social, and facts and truth. The order that the Enlightenment was supposed to bring has turned into global chaos. The tragicomic thing is that, because humans think they are rational, and seem to have nothing else at their disposal, they must also become more reasonable, function better and better, even into the artificial version of themselves, into AI. This artificial version is doubly dangerous; it is an extension of the earlier route embarked upon, which is disastrous in itself and it turns against the ‘being’ and captures it. The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler set himself against Heidegger’s concept of technology, but ultimately their analyses converge in AI.Where technology has so far been seen as a tool or application, with the human being itself bearing the responsibility to set limits, philosophers reveal a prophetic truth, the "i am a visionary" from the beginning of the GTC24 opening. An even more fundamental critique of Reason was given ten years before Heidegger by Adorno and Horkheimer in their ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ from 1944, to which they added the chapter ‘Elements of Antisemitism’ in 1947. As Jewish-German thinkers who fled from the Nazis, they experienced ‘the rear side of reason’, and the associated rational technology, firsthand. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman makes painfully clear in ‘Modernity and the Holocaust’ that the Holocaust could only take place in a modern, reasonable, and bureaucratic society. “Zygmunt Bauman thereby brings the 'unthinkable' horror uncomfortably close,” wrote Arnold Heumakers upon the book's release in 1989. American historian Daniel Goldhagen, who describes the psychological cruelties of the Holocaust in detail and the German aberration, “keeps the Holocaust at a distance”. Human reason and technology form the dominant reading direction of the palindrome that, read from the other side, hides a human to which we can’t seem to gain access. It is indicative of the fate of a thinking human, who sometimes also wants to act and take action, that Heidegger saw through technology, and also the ‘being’, but that his membership from 1933 to 1934 in the Nazi party NSDAP, as a university administrator, and his antisemitic notes thereafter haunt his legacy to this day."i am ai" proclaims that the human ideal pursued by thinkers and mathematicians like Aristotle, Leibniz, and Boole, and which through the technician Claude Shannon and the transistor was reduced to a binary world of zeros and ones, has become reality in 2024. The ultimate dream of logical algebra, where logic, reason, and mathematics converge, has been realized. The Enlightenment Festival, which began in the 17th century with Descartes, reaches its culmination today; humanity has reached its destination. While the reality of AGI still awaits us, and the boundary between AI and AGI remains vague, the era of AI has indeed dawned. Google's recent warning to the Netherlands – not to lag behind in the AI race – and the call from Dutch entrepreneurs to the politicians to immediately allocate resources for applications, underline the momentum now felt. But that the threat of AI will not end in the generally outlined dystopias, against which regulation has been deployed, but in the uncontrolled magnification of a much more disastrous route that was embarked upon centuries ago, that the enlightenment of human reason seems like liberation but turns out to be a hell, we hear nothing about.Is that the reason, albeit quite remarkably, that philosophers and scientists, including those from the social sciences and humanities, university administrators, and politicians, all who have contributed to the millennia-old quest of human reason – assumed to be the most distinctive among all organisms – today are not massively blowing their horns and trumpets? One might have expected them to be dancing on the tables, worldwide with their glasses raised, in a festive procession to jointly celebrate "i am ai", the triumph of reason over itself.

12. Pan-TemporalityIntro
Pan-Temporality is a concept we developed after studying The Three Syntheses of Time from Gilles Deleuze's 'Difference and Repetition' from 1968 based on prior work of Kant and Bergson. Firstly, Pan-Temporality is an answer to the concept of time that is inherently plural, where 'Time' is a term that doesn't reflect the processive nature of time, and more importantly the productive quality of 'Times' since the Self and the I are effects rather than causes of temporal processes. Pan-Temporality seeks to illuminate how technological interventions not only modify temporal experiences but fundamentally disrupt the temporal syntheses that underlie personal and collective identity formation. By recognizing the multiplicity and the interactive nature of different temporalities, we better understand how technological impacts go beyond mere interference with cognition or social interaction—they reshape the very conditions under which these cognitive and social processes unfold. This understanding leads to a more nuanced appreciation of the potential for technologies to engender new forms of temporality, which might either enhance or undermine human agency. In this way, Pan-Temporality provides a framework to critically evaluate the implications of living in a technologically saturated environment, urging a reconsideration of how technologies shape not only the present but also the continuum of past and future possibilities. The first part of Pan-Temporality zoom in on how the traditional concepts of clock-time – past, present and future – are manipulated. The second part, later the two probably swap, will examine how technology interferes in the temporal process of the production of Self (Habit) and the I, a scattered stream of subjectivity.Part I: The Three Anxieties of Time
Boolean technology has reshaped our experience of time, giving rise to 'The Three Anxieties of Time', a concept we coined in 2023. Each of these anxieties echoes a fading temporal dimension: of the past, present, and future. Loosing the inner-experience and control over each temporal segment, and over their interrelation, affects – we're not educated psychologists – our Being in Time, bends our conscious and unconscious being and accelerates various cultural processes into alienation and depression. The three modes of time – past, present and future – is essentially a folk concept, clock time, inauthentic time. Other temporal concepts such as Bergson's 'duration' or 'intuition' and Deleuze's 'quasi-causality', the future as empty time filled with untamed vitality or the recursive time of cybernetics, highlight essential penetrations between the traditionally strict divisions of past, present, and future. Although understanding this temporal complexity is essential to grasp why 'being' dominates over 'becoming', to appreciate the nuances of Causes after the fact, or the temporal Möbius strips that the psyche produces when in trauma, the clear and distinct segmentation of time into past, present, and future remains predominant.It is precisely this deeply ingrained separation between past, present, and future, upon which the narrative nature of art in film and literature is built, that the three time-ecstasies of past, present and future (Ger Groot, 2009) have been appropriated and colonised by Boolean technology. They have been transformed in such a way that, while they were understood as the temporal essence of human experience, humans have now become dependent on and addicted to them, in fear of losing control and and even of being itself.

+ The Anxiety of the Past

In today's Boolean Era, the Anxiety of the Past emerges as our personal history is overshadowed by an onslaught of digital data. Our memories, once vivid and personal, have now been supplanted by the immediacy of experience and are submerged in a sea of commodified digital footprints, losing their narrative richness. And as the past is actualised in the present through memory, the Anxiety of the Past erodes the vitality and richness of the here and now. Be reminded, as we also will argue for the Anxiety of the Future, a declining variety and richness in memory and subsequently in the present, affects the pool that feeds the present and subsequently future variety and diversity. In environments with ever decreasing variety, and with tensions and stress, conflict and violence is always near. We see the growing symbiosis of nationalism and religion, two believe systems becoming one, as a result of the pool being less diverse.The Anxiety of the Past is first and foremost the fundamental uncertainty of our human status among other organisms, and of our understanding of 'being' when this leads into the predicament that is pan-ecological [mind, social, milieu], pan-technological [BioMilieu, Gestell and Boolean] and as turns out pan-temporal [past, present, future]. So the Anxiety of the Past is grounded in a both ontological and epistemological doubt.The Anxiety of the Past is not a new phenomenon. Philosophy's main concern was about memory and how memory - and through memory our onderstanding of the present – is manipulated by technology. In continental philosophy there is a dominant narrative about the relation between speech, writing, memory and thought that runs from Plato to Derrida and Stiegler.Plato himself feared that 'writing' would impair the development of knowledge, as it serves as a form of memory that supplants actual speech and thought. The invention of the printing press marked another significant milestone in the history of the memory and added to the Anxiety of the Past. The main concern was that the reliance on written records would lead to the disappearance of oral history. In the 1970s, the advent of the calculator and the digital watch was the first broad public introduction of the impact that digital technology would have on the brain, the calculator and watch preceded the iPhone.Derrida's 'différance' is a response to Plato. In différance, difference with an a, writing proofs its domination over speech since only writing expresses the context of language, where speech wrongfully claims to own the truth.Writing externalises the mind, and there is a school of philosophy, associated with Bernard Stiegler, which posits that technology involves the externalisation of mind and body to such an extent that technology, manifest in technical objects, assists the human being in becoming what nature alone could not facilitate. To us, this wide spread theory assumes:
1. the organism 'human being' is separated from the milieu from the beginning, {organism} AND {milieu}, to express it in Boolean style. The organism, though, is not separated from milieu: being = becoming.
2. the organism that becomes through technology is able to protect itself against the destructive nature of it. This is a paradox, the organism can not protect itself against something that constitutes it.

++ The Anxiety of the Present

The Anxiety of the Present is more than just digital distraction, even though 'news', updates, and notifications keep consumers on a tight temporal leash. The Anxiety of the Present is primarily an existential fear of non-existence, as the relentless digital flow stirs unsettling uncertainty about our ephemeral 'now', leading to an existential version of the Fear Of Missing Out. This unease arises not only from the digital content itself but also from its ongoing reminder of our transient presence.Boolean technology demonstrates, through its profound manipulations of the three syntheses, that Tech's Business Development often grasps - unknowingly unknowing - the nature of reality at a deeper, more fundamental level to make it productive (a knowing that Aristotle understands as techne) and is therefore able to manipulate its construction, than the reality that is served by biology, social science, economics or psychology. Within three decades, supported by the networks that electric and paper mass media had built, Boolean technology invaded the ecology of mind and the ecology of the social by interfering and injecting news, updates and notifications [conflicts and oppositions] in the social and psychic streams of thought. Boolean technology has colonised our deepest duration.The 2011 invention of Facebook's timeline reshaped psychic and social temporality, the structure and content of social relations. We were forced to live along this timeline, attached to it and never free. The Facebook timeline is a technological concept, an invention cloaked as discovery. All important technical inventions are temporal reversions, they execute their future potential in the here and now.From an information-theoretical and thermodynamic standpoint, Truth can be seen as the energy required to prove its contrary. The amount of communication (= energy) that is therefore needed is so vast that it can be interpreted as an attempt to reverse the arrow of time, the same arrow that generated entropy. Therefore, to understand Truth and Post-Truth, recognising its temporal and negentropic nature is crucial.There are 256 published articles about social media and mental health in the US. "We have overprotected children in the real world and underprotected them in the virtual world" (Jonathan Haid, sociologist in his 2024 book 'The Anxious Generation'). Teens are constantly online, submerged in this dystopia, with their minds being polluted and rewired, primed for future data production and distribution. Until recently, such practices would have been condemned as child abuse and child labor, offenses for which parents could have faced imprisonment (Bongers, October 2023).The Anxiety of the Present is about the existential realisation that comes with the recognition of our own temporality, of Heidegger's 'Being-towards-death', heightened by the digital age's rhythm and its ongoing demand for our attention. Given that race, ethnicity, and household income play a critical role in The Anxiety of the Present, acting as a proxy for the future, it becomes clear that the 'Technology of the Present' colonises and proletarianises at the expense of mental health, social peace and the actualisation of the 'living present' and future.

+++ The Anxiety of the Future

In concluding 'The Three Anxieties of Time,' we arrive at the Anxiety of the Future, a pivotal aspect. Beyond being a mere repository for hope and the unknown, the future, where 'Time is out of joint,' represents a realm where only memory and the present seem to 'exist.' Yet, the future, as the 'third synthesis of time,' evolves from memories actualised in the 'living present.' It is 'empty time,' destined to be filled with potential, but it risks becoming an abyss if not enriched with diversity and 'untamed vitality.' As our memories and the present become more homogenised and conflicted, largely due to a surge in communication, this once-promising domain remains barren and cold.Boolean Technology, imposing a reductive and divisive logic on our life experiences, strips this future of the necessary diversity, leaving it void and inhibiting its vibrant actualisation in the present. This void affects social dynamics – the struggle – as a queue leading up a hill, where the Dream awaits just beyond the top. In this line, people stand patiently, only to see others, perceived as less deserving, bypassing them, fuelling a sense of injustice and betrayal. But many of the by-passers are refugees and victims of violence and poverty themselves, trying to escape their own predicament. Social technology, privately owned, and populist politics, fuel these conflicts for their own goal.The Future Anxiety, by Boolean Technology and its technical mentality and social divisiveness, is amplified and deepened by the climate crisis, a manifestation of Gestell. Since World War II, Boolean Technology and the peak of Gestell have formed a destructive alliance: one suppressing the future and agency of individuals and groups, the other threatening humanity's very existence. Technology, thus, occupies two Orders of Magnitude of the Future, eradicating both personal prospects and those of humanity at large, eroding the coherence between mind, society, and environment. We are led to an existential emptiness, where, at the summit of our long climb, instead of the promised dream, we face the abyss.Our anxieties extend beyond the future politics that Bruno Latour suggests will be equal to climate politics. It is not the politics but the politicians, seizing opportunities as seen in the US, India, the EU, and the Netherlands, who stoke these anxieties. They mirror the sentiments where the political elite overlooks the struggles of the ordinary while advancing policies that seem disconnected from their realities. It’s a world where distrust grows as people feel bypassed in their own journey towards a better future.

As mentioned earlier, 12.000 years ago the initial split of space and time marked the birth of 'Gestell'. Now, with Boolean Technology on steroids, finally time itself becomes elusive, reshaping our material understanding and our inner-, intra-, inter-, trans- and outeractions as biomilieu technologists.We find ourselves not just cut off and outside any milieu but in a triadic-techno-nexus that redefines our existential reality. The ‘Three Anxieties of Time’ reflect a radical shift in our temporal reality as humans. We're not just living in time; we're increasingly losing our temporal agency to the overwhelming influence of technology, which commodifies our moments and modes of time, alienating us from the narrativity of our own stories.

12. Pan-Temporality
Part II: A Series of Irreducible Perspectives
Working on it (April 2024)

Jeder Mensch wird ein Künstler

Martin Heidegger's statement "Only a God Can Save Us" from his 1966 Der Spiegel interview, points at the limitations of philosophy in addressing the crises of civilisation. He predicted philosophy would be replaced by 'cybernetics'. This viewpoint underscores today’s need to think beyond traditional philosophical frameworks.Human beings, failing to understand themselves as unified with their milieu, as one, and considering themselves superior after detaching from 'nature,' have become susceptible and vulnerable. Modern technology, as capitalist technology, exploiting this disconnect, has manipulated humanity into a state of slavery and serfdom.In this epistemological crisis it is hard to rethink a future path and mode of being for this organism. Following the three ecological modes: alone, the organism dies. Seeking solace together, it loses the richness of 'single person perspective' and may fear the opening of the gate for the herd mentality. Lastly, escape and immerse into pure biomilieu mediation, floating in being one, effectively further impoverishes other organisms' Umwelten, ironically leading in decreasing diversity. Here we are.To solve this puzzle, at Boolean Works we first deconstructed Boolean Logic AND, OR, NOT, later expanded Félix Guattari's 'The Three Ecologies' with a technological dimension, but it turned out this wasn't good enough. Also technology itself, as a concept, needed to be unraveled for a better understanding of the overall condition. In this search it became clear technology is at least triadic with at its basis, BioMilieu Technology as the organism-milieu mediation; mediating oneness. The other two, Gestell and Boolean Technology, being logical systems of (private) capital, have deprived humans first of their spatial being, later of being in time, of diversity and richness and finally the threat of capturing human 'being' altogether.Technotlogy affirms Beuys statement 'Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler' but adapts it, according to the drastic psychic, social and environmental change since, and in remembrance of our temporal inspirators Bergson and Deleuze, into Jeder Mensch wird ein Künstler, Each human becomes an artist. Technotlogy spans a becoming that synthesises the pan-technological, pan-ecological and confronts the pan-temporal takeover of The Three Anxieties of Time. In this new style of becoming artists in a organism=milieu mode – a technotlogical future among other organisms might emerge.Technotlogy invites you to participate and contribute to both its foundational ideas and knowledge and new Apps.

PRAXIS

Technotlogy OS
Operating System supporting aesthetic-political Apps

Technotlogy's architecture is analogous to the 'iPhone diagram', where the Operating System (OS) and Applications (Apps) are distinct, yet the OS supports and facilitates the Apps. Technotlogy's OS is not a typical operating system, and its Apps are not standard technical applications. To draw an analogy with a different domain, such as a business or organisation, their OS comprises long-standing concepts, like Finance and IT. On top of this are the Apps – products, branches, divisions, or projects, varying in size and scope. The OS is long-lasting, while Apps quickly adjust to new conditions. The OS of Technotlogy is composed of various kernels, vectors and diagrams, and does not contain a single idea or ideology but a set of interconnected insights. Many focus on rediscovering and organising personal and collective agency. The Apps in Technotlogy are 'projects': personal, social, material, political, ranging in scale, even forming cosmologies of their own, like fungi, all supported by the OS architecture of Technotlogy.

Technotlogy Apps

Colophon

Johannes Bongers
Gendringen, The Netherlands,
founder of Technotlogy.com© 2024 Concept, text, works, diagrams and photos by Johannes Bongers / Boolean Works (since 1991).

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