Key Points
People have never been better, here in the Year of Our Simulation 2024, at hating the very forces underlying that simulationat hating, in other words, digital technology itself..
For someone trying to marshal a case against technology, then, a Descartes-style line of attack might go something like this: When we go as far into the technology as we can, stripping everything else away and breaking the problem down into its constituent bits, where do we end up?.
Certain technoliterates have been venturing versions of this Theory of Everything for a while now; earlier this year, an English professor at Dartmouth, Aden Evens, published what is, as far as I can tell, its first properly philosophical codification, The Digital and Its Discontents..
And two: Blaming technologys discontents on the 1s and 0s treats the digital as an endpoint, as some sort of logical conclusion to the history of human thoughtas if humanity, as Evens suggests, had finally achieved the dreams of an Enlightened rationality..
Im not here to say whether computer scientists should or shouldnt be evolving chips analogically, only to say that, were it to happen, itd be silly to claim that all the binarisms of modern existence, so thoroughly inculcated in us by our digitized machinery, would suddenly collapse into nuance and glorious analog complexity..
