“What would it mean to build artificial intelligences and other machines that were more like octopuses, more like fungi, or more like forests?”
― James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
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People are gathering in the tents to hear the prophet speak. They’re caked in dust and oil from the day’s toil. Work meant to feed their hungry families, but when it doesn’t, they come to the prophet to fill up their aching bellies on his words. He whispers at first, makes them gather near. Tells them what they are all feeling, what they all know. The land is dying, in some places it’s already dead. The dust blows on the breeze, a warning and a death knell for civilization. His voice rises as he nears his sales pitch. He tells them of the megacities that are still green. The ones that gave up fossil fuels and use technology to restore their habitats and farms. The ones that have embedded all of the living world around them, even the newly released herds with chips and geolocation data to monitor their health. He shouts. ‘The world is reviving, mankind can restore what it once sought to destroy! ‘The people cheer. After the meeting, the people push their children forward. They beg the preacher to take them. Take them to the cities where they will be safe. Where they will never suffer hunger again. He pats their heads and smiles. He did his job well. He sold them the lie of technological redemption, and they lapped it up. In another decade, those desperate souls will be dead, and the cities will expand in their wake.
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Spiritual mechanism is technology laced with hope, laced with redemption. It sounds right, it pulls the right strings within us that we feel that technology is all we need to save us, to save everything. But is it true? Will technology save us, or is it just another capitalist gimmick packaged in an eco-spiritual veneer? Like the early greenwashing movement before it, that told us that plastics could be green (they biodegrade! It just takes a few thousand years!), and we believed them for a while until things got so bad we saw through the lies… Spiritual mechanism aims to make a few more bucks on a dying planet by lying to the only people who could have a chance of at least slowing it down. Capitalism is that guy on a sinking ship who reserved all the seats on the last rescue boat and maybe tries to auction a couple of seats as people drown. But enough anecdotes, let’s dig into what it is, how it bypasses our logic, and what we can do about it.
“You’re travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead – your next stop, the Twilight Zone!” – Rod Serling.
What you are experiencing is the dissonance between what you see and what you are told. You are experiencing a clash of ideologies that seek to warp reality to spin a profit. They know what they are doing and how you feel about what is happening. They have algorithms that run public opinion and know how to nudge you closer to their side. They adopt your movements, add a few tweaks, and splice in capitalism, creating a monstrous chimera. Eco-spirituality, low waste, no waste, solarpunk, punk, it starts slowly at first… Maybe with a cute Chobani commercial, then it becomes high-tech futures, urban centers, merch, and investment opportunities. Anything and everything can be retrofitted by capitalism at a moment’s notice.
So, what is this spiritual mechanism? It’s a chimera of mechanism (mechanistic thought, technic, etc.) and eco-spiritualism, which promotes a spiritual/ ecological connection to our world. Mechanistic thought sees things in parts or as objects instead of subjects within a living, holistic world. Add in the magic spin towards profit via capitalism, and you have an unholy trifecta of mass manipulation. Here, I made you a graphic:
Why don’t we notice the dissonance? You would think we would be able to recognize that a mechanistic framework or a capitalist scheme doesn’t go with ecospiritual ideals, right? Well, I think there are a few reasons why we don’t notice it… The first being that we are steeped within a capitalist, mechanistic culture. It might as well be the air we breathe, and when we have something that is anti-capitalist by design, that is important to our very being as we fight against capitalist influence, the easiest thing for capitalism to do is to promote it. … Because we’re not going to give up who we are, right? Our languages, religions, cultures, etc., and if this trifecta is subtle enough for long enough, it can completely change the very things that make us who we are. But there’s another thing we also have to grapple with when it comes to this unholy trifecta. Capitalism doesn’t have to only work from inside other cultures, etc. It can just co-opt elements and water them down for its already captive audience as a ‘fad’.
Ism 1: Classify anything and everything as an object.
Ism 2: All objects can and must be exploited.
What kind of worldview does this leave us with other than one that is anti-human and anti-life? Murray Bookchin shows us that Spiritual mechanism is unfortunately an umbrella term for a whole series of different exploitative ideologies that have their roots in Systems Theory and Cybernetics, and what those ideologies have done.
‘…indeed the life-forms that give substantially to the various systems, into interrelationships, “dynamics,” and “minds” that Capra, Prigogine, Bateson, et al., abstract into lifeless categories. Thus reductionism not only turns complex organisms and their equally complex evolution into mechanical “fluctuations,” debasing concrete organisms into abstract interrelationships; it turns life in all its rich specificity and particularity into an abstraction…’
– Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology
Thus, we realize that mechanism promotes the reclassification of subjects as objects. Capitalism seeks to exploit said objects and, in so doing, reclassifies life itself as an abstract concept. I guess to a capitalist, life is more abstract than the money they make. And since life seemingly has no value outside of the profit it can create, you might as well exploit it til the last drop. I guess that’s why they created such groups as ‘Competitive Enterprise Institute’ to announce that an ‘intellectual war’ was taking place and that to ‘reduce barriers to wealth creation’ it might be best to let corporations have private ownership of the environment. After all, who better to extract every last drop of life, I mean … manage those possible profits, than corporations, right?
So, how do we identify these anti-life ideologies? Question everything. Look at who is telling the story and do some digging into their background. Who are they associated with? What ideologies do they follow? Do those ideologies have roots in Cybernetics or Systems Theory? What are their frameworks? Are they holistic or mechanistic? Do they see subjects or objects? What type of technologies are they promoting? High technology? Low technology? Are they trying to sell something or exploit something, someplace, or someone? Sometimes you’ll have to dig deep, and they won’t advertise their true intentions up front. Others will try to break free from the paradigms they are trapped within, but still end up creating more of the same.
These last two are the trickiest because you run the risk of falling for the very thing you are trying to avoid.
It’s difficult work, but if we don’t do it, we disregard our minds, the foundations of what makes us human, and every single life on this planet. We cannot fall for ideologies of mechanism, objectification, profit, and exploitation. We cannot condemn our world and all its beings to death just because something is a little difficult. If there is even a microscopic chance in hell that we can make a difference, we have to go for it, and that starts with recognizing when we are being lied to by cybernetic wolves in ecological sheep’s clothing.
Question: Did you catch the mechanism in the first quote? Do we need technology that imitates life, or do we need to save life from the tendrils of technology?
Sources:
- ‘Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence’ James Bridle
- ‘The Philosophy of Social Ecology’ Murray Bookchin
- ‘Renewing the Earth’ John Clark
- ‘The Voice of the Earth’ Theodore Roszak