Werring Worlds

Technic’s Hypostases

‘To our contemporary world, Technic is God, in that it acts as the overall form encompassing all the various principles that structure our world.’ – Federico Campagna

  • To define technic we must first define techne. Techne is the artisan, the designer, the crafts person who has mastered a skill (art, pottery, etc.) in all of its parts and sees it through construction. Techne is holistic construction where the creator has full control of the process. Technic on the other hand is defined by industrialization. The piece meal multi step construction where no single person has control of what is made nor how it was made.
  • Hypostases are are the underpinnings of our reality, or as Campagna puts it our ‘reality-settings’. Can they be changed? Absolutely but how long that would take and what it would look like is beyond the scope of this piece. Instead, lets explore the reality setting of the technic that we are currently mired in.
  • Campagna lists five hypostases of the technic;
    • Absolute Language; There can be nothing outside of the technic.
    • Measure; Infinite Series (Growth, Expansion, Domination etc.).
    • Unit; Replication without meaning.
    • Abstract General Entity; Life as object or resource to exploit in furthering the series.
    • Life as Vulnerability; Life as hindrance to the series. Restarting of the cycle.
  • Absolute language within the technic eliminates choice, eliminates the possibility of alternatives hypostases or a life beyond the technic. If all you are allowed to know is that which furthers the series, how can you possibly act to make change or even imagine that change is possible? Absolute language stalls change before it happens.
  • The series is that which the technic has decided is the ultimate goal. In our world the series has taken many forms from capitalism to totalitarianism. The unit is its replication or constant expansion into new realms of exploitation (the commons, digital spaces, countries etc.).
  • The A.G.E. is us, all humans and non-humans and our environments. It is our ideas, our dreams, our hopes and our lives exploited and in many cases sacrificed for the technic. The most obvious of which is mentioned by Hannah Arendt in her book ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ when she says that the real mission of the totalitarian apparatus was to “make men superfluous”. The ultimate sacrifice within the technic is to give your life and it makes this easy because the technic doesn’t ask for consent. The technic tells you, you are meaningless, worthless, useless, all while pushing you to work for its continuation and stamping our any ideas or hopes of something better.
  • Life is a vulnerability to an infinite series, it can never truly have full control unless it eliminates the possibility of change, unless it can ensure its continuity forever, it would cease to exist. So it creates things to replace us in an attempt to gain control (A.I. to replace the artists, programmers, legal frameworks etc.). When it fails from time to time, it learns and fine tunes the series. After revolutions, disasters, etc. incremental changes tighten control all over again. Incremental changes all it to shapeshift and revive itself. Incremental changes allow it to regain it’s power and start again.
  • The stories we tell, our hopes, fears, ideas, etc. inform our reality settings and our reality settings change our cultures and lock us in to certain futures. We think we should be worried about A.I. but the real problem for all life on this planet is already with us in the form of ever adaptable hypostases of our own creation and they’re hell bent on destroying us all.

‘But we cannot our bonds unless we know them. However unconscious its influences may be, a legacy of domination permeates our thinking, values, emotions, indeed our very musculature. History dominates us all the more when we are ignorant of it.’ – Murray Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom

A.Z. Device

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