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From Prometheus to Dionysus - Can We Re-Enchant the Future?

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From Prometheus to Dionysus - Can We Re-Enchant the Future? SLIDE 1: From Prometheus to Dionysus - Can we Re-enchant the Future? Marie-Laure SALLES-DJELIC SLIDE 2: Since 2000, a handful of Space Barons are dreaming to reach well beyond the Moon. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Andy Beal, Paul Allen, Richard Branson and a few others are pouring billions of dollars and deploying enormous resources for this adventure. As the line-up of names shows, this space fever is highly concentrated in Silicon Valley. Space Barons are also Tech Barons, the Masters of our Algorithmic and Artificial Intelligence world and strong believers in the powers of predictive technologies. Elon Musk has gone quite far in laying out a plan for the colonization of Mars and the settlement there of a city of one million humans. When he is called upon to motivate such an expansive project, Musk hovers between two narratives – one dystopian, the other radically utopian and positive. Musk is worried about the survival of human civilization even more than about the state of our planet. He is convinced that we will not escape a radical nuclear war or something of the sort that will bring our species close to extinction. So he proposes to solve that problem through technology – that’s what Tech Barons do, after all, they look at everything as problems to be solved through technology. SLIDE 3: Evgeny Morozov calls this the “folly of Technological Solutionism”.1 In 2018, here is how Elon Musk presented this:2 SLIDE 4: If there is a third world war we want to make sure there is enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages…. 1 https://www.theguardian.com/global/2013/mar/20/save-everything-evgeny-morozov-review 2 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/11/elon-musk-colonise-mars-third-world-war 1 And the Moon he tells us is not far enough for comfort : It is important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars because in the event of a war it is more likely to survive than a moon base. The idea of a nuclear winter is far from new. It is as old as the nuclear age and has inspired generations of Science-Fiction writers. SLIDE 5: In his Foundation Series, started in the 1950s, Isaac Asimov envisions space settlement as a way to anticipate the looming destruction of the Galactic Empire and a following dark age. The raison d’être of those settlements is to preserve science and civilization and become, in time, the cornerstones of reconstruction. So Musk is not into radical invention. The most mean-spirited amongst us could even argue that he has not gone beyond his adolescent geek fascination for Science Fiction. But his very concrete and lavishly financed project could also be seen as a real challenge for apocalyptic Science-Fiction – Or when reality overcomes the wildest dreams of Science Fiction authors…. Beyond this scenario of doom, Musk at times is much more upbeat about the motives behind his Space projects. In his words – SLIDE 6: ”The future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we are a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species than if we are not… You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great – and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about…. I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.” Elon Musk, Making Life Multi-Planetary The projection here is into a future where man through technology is in control, including of the last remaining frontiers. Elon Musk and his Space Baron / Tech Baron friends exemplify, in this respect, a particular vision of the Future that has deep ideological roots in the Enlightenment revolution. They project a Panglossian Utopia, an enchanted Future, where Humanity enhanced through Technology will understand and solve all problems, make correct 2 predictions, choose the “better” future and overcome all obstacles and impossibilities. Man, finally, will have become God. SLIDE 7: The « We are doomed » and « We are God » narratives point to conflicting and contradictory eschatologies. How could we have brought ourselves to the brink of doom if we are God? In principle those two narratives should exclude each other!! In fact, they seem to be the two sides of our binary mindset. For many centuries now, our world has been geared to making us think in ones or zeros, in black or white, in heaven or hell, in saved or doomed, in right or wrong, in love or hate, in man or woman, in me or you, even in nope or like on dating platforms.…. The digital age is only the latest stage in this binarization of everything – a hard wired one with a hugely performative impact on all and every single dimensions of our lives. But this performative architecture is, happily, not powerful enough to fully bring us and the world in line with predictive models. This then could explain the persistence of spectacular prediction failures in spite of the intensification of predictive technologies. Still, it is not surprising in that context that when it comes to thinking about our future we would fall back onto such a binary opposition – opposing the scenario of doom to the Scenario of God. SLIDE 8: For the scenario of doom, there are multiple variants and for the sake of time I will rather attempt to outline a broad ideal type.. SLIDE 9: For the scenario of God, there is a clear center and I will turn my gaze to the Olympian hills of Silicon Valley and the liberal transhumanist narrative. SLIDE 10: The rest of this talk will be structured in the following way. 1. I will start with a rapid brush exploration of those two scenarii in turn and their binary and divergent eschatologies. 2. Going beyond their striking differences and apparent opposition, I will show how they do in fact belong to the same meta-narrative symbolically associated with the mythological figure of Prometheus 3 3. In order to overcome this binary reduction of our Future and our profound inability to fathom an alternative, progressive and humanist Utopia, I will then take you again back to mythology to explore this time the figure of dionysus. 4. Finally, I will try to show how dionysus helps us project an alternative – gives us tools to move towards some degree of re-enchantment of our future in a manner that is radically different from the dreadful Enchanted Kingdom of the Transhumanist Singularity ! 1. SLIDE 11: THE (NEW) GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHT SLIDE 12: The “Garden of Earthly delights” is the title of a Tryptich painting by the dutch Master Hyeronimus Bosch. Art historians know little about what Bosch had really in mind when he painted that Tryptich, somewhere between 1490 and 1510. So we are relatively free to use the symbolism of that painting in the way we want, and I will do so, diverting it in a somewhat cavalier way to bring along my own points. If there are any purist art historians in the room, I beg for forgiveness…. SLIDE 13: Let us start with the central Panel as a symbolic representation of our Humanity on Earth today – what do we see? Enjoyment through consumption all around, a chaotic aggregation of individual or group monads with no links, no connections, no engagement to each other, a sense of mess, a disappearing nature and environment – totally overwhelmed, swallowed in fact by this mindless Anthropocene, and no visible sign of a capacity to mobilize, to harmonize, to pacify this Earthly Garden of delights which is in fact in the process of turning to Hell… And the question, on all our minds (weirdly not on theirs it seems), is …. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. • SLIDE 14: The Scenario of Doom The first possible scenario is illustrated on the right hand side Panel…. The Scenario of doom, when you cannot anymore mistake Hell for Heaven. SLIDE 14b: But even more powerfully may be, we can also follow that scenario in the external panels. We generally do not know about those panels or we forget them. In principle they 4 represent Earth at the creation, before the introduction of life, with God being this tiny and nevertheless overpowering figure at the upper left. SLIDE 14c: But I propose to also see it as a representation of the doomest of all doom scenarios – Earth at the end of human life, symbolically re-enclosing itself, forging a protective shield that excludes us, leaves us, Humanity, forever outside. Today, there are many variants of this scenario, suggesting that doom could befall us from different directions. Our environment and its rapid degradation is one of those threats. SLIDE 15: The notion of the Anthropocene makes it plain, suggesting that we have entered an era where Humanity’s impact on earth, the environment and other living species has become highly significant and increasingly negative and destructive. Industrial production, transportation, technological density, demographic trends, our consumer society and high- energy and waste-generating ways of life all combine to bring about a major climate disruption and threaten the quality, resilience and survival of those natural resources and living beings that condition our own existence as a species. SLIDE 16: The latest IPCC Report – Global Warming of 1.5° - is gloomy, not least because the ‘slightly more optimist scenario’ of capping global warming at 1.5° is quite unlikely as it demands that in 2030 we would have reduced CO2 emissions globally by 45% from 2010 levels.3 Not clear how this could happen… Biodiversity in the meantime, is going steeply down.
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