Let’s start here, in midsummer 2017, among the Neolithic stones at Callanish in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.
We are standing in the dark waiting for the year’s earliest dawn. The gradual sunrise stirs a buzz among the dozen strangers assorted here, each drawn to the stone circle for their own reasons. Occasional drumming. A bagpiper salutes the gathering light.
We are in a ring of giant stones, each one twice the height of any human here. Rows of stumpier stones radiate outwards, flanking a long aisle that leads north. Each one is weatherbeaten, pockmarked with crystals, their grey surfaces marbled from three billion years of tectonic folding and squeezing.
The moment arrives. Sunshine breaks past the clouds. Now’s when a local mythical entity named The Shining One walks among the stones. I am visited by an acute sense of my coordinates in time. The planet, the ancient rocks, the neolithic builders, and the people here, each with their own lifescale, somehow in connection across the huge stretches.
The stones sprout from the earth and claw the open sky. Their dark, eye-like crystals glint in the sunshine, becoming warm to the touch. The wind rushes past and everything vibrates: people, stones, the air between. We are in a monolithic aerial, a vast resonating chamber, put here five thousand years ago for unfathomable reasons by people whose histories are irretrievable.
The technology at Callanish is still plugged in, still humming away. For its own quiet purposes it brings people together, binds them to the elements, the heavens, the epochs behind and ahead.
Humming rocks power our modern technology landscape as well.
A global web of factories and firms transmutes desert sand into computation units. At their centre, secretively and obsessively, silicon is purified, doped, ion-implanted, etched, integrated, charged, folded and squeezed. The world’s political regimes tussle to secure the machine brainpower that is essential to military might, public infrastructure, and economic growth.
Livening sparks.
For all that our civilisations and cultures have evolved, we remain the same biological entities that once raised the Callanish circles.
We breathe the air, vibrate on the same frequencies. We operate best in daylight hours, need nine months’ gestation, a well timed joke makes us laugh in our bellies. Our tongues are distinctly tuned to fennel and cumin and pepper and lime.
Yet our lives are incomparably faster, more densely packed. We are up in each other’s business, globally and intimately, every day.
And some of the assumptions that support our dense economic intertwinement are known to be faulty, self-destructive even. Relative economic stability is always assumed, whether of interest rates, growth, exchange rates, supply chain resilience and longevity, industrial significance, comparative advantage, national economic productivity, endowment effects, the labour value of goods and services.
examine any one of those, and you’ll see no stability and no expectation of a return to stability.
Instead, we live in and can can expect a continual set of indeterminate and unintelligible changes, events and disruptions, more than any individual can possibly hope to stay on top of. We are enmeshed in the hegemonic system and have at a glance visibility of all the information the price signal was supposed to anonymise and replace. As a wise aunt of mine once said, maybe the world is more complex than anyone can truly understand.
As a management theorist I enjoyed discussing the VUCA acronym, but its proposed replacement is also worth considering
so what does that mean for our selves outside the matrix?
For we surely exist outwith our brief interactions with capitalism. The richest parts of life are poorly valued in the logic of capitalism, whatever Sen Fitoussi said. Kennedy on gdp
And we do exist outwith due to phenomenology. People’s experiences are today embedded in the Real not the Synthetic.
ALL INTERACTIONS > SYNTHETIC INTERACTIONS > MONETISED INTERACTIONS
We birthed and nurtured a species of tools, evolving much faster and more deliberately than anything depending on natural selection. Language, cities, books, nitrogen fertiliser, the limited liability corporation, container ships, GPUs,
And we are on the cusp of another revolutionary moment.