Techism (and you thought totalitarianism was scary): conclusion

Black Box
by the Argentinian surrealist painter Ruben Cukier

'We call the unconscious "nothing," and yet it is a reality in potentia. The thought we shall think, the deed we shall do, even the fate we shall lament tomorrow, all lie unconscious in our today.'

Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 9 (Part 1) Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious [498]

black box. 1 : a usually complicated electronic device whose internal mechanism is usually hidden from or mysterious to the user; broadly : anything that has mysterious or unknown internal functions or mechanisms... Merriam-Webster.

In this series, we have seen how IBM's Watson currently is at the pinnacle of "deep computing", and yet can contain suppositions within its algorithms with little basis in reality and that are hidden from our consciousness; why Marshall McLuhan said 'The medium is the message' (and so we never see the enemy because it is ourselves); and how greed-inspired technology could spell disaster for our heirs.
It is not a pretty picture.

We were surprised when the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet Union was disbanded. We were shocked to the core when the Twin Towers fell, and are stunned each time that our economies melt down. Yet all of these things were fated within our unconscious. We do not think, and the "like button" provides us with an easy valve to propagate yet more memes onto the world. We are fascinated by black boxes; we buy them; we become them. We lose the ability to adapt. What starts as the personal unconscious manifests itself as the collective consciousness: something far more dangerous to our survival. Question everything. "Like" nothing.


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