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No Man Is an Island

Both technologic and economic optimists presuppose a one-way interaction, between subject and object, of unrestrained use of the world and of others. Feedback from technological manipulations is allowed to affect only the type of knowledge of the object that is useful to further control, while the knower remains untouched. Expertise grows, sinisterly, while the expert does not. This is why technological progress outstrips wisdom, which is the sadly lacking ability to distinguish the merely possible from the genuinely worthwhile. Feedback from the policies of economic globalism similarly does not reach its hermetically sealed steel-and-glass-tower protagonists—or their shareholders—except through highly filtered statistics coming over the wire or in glossy annual reports.

RELATED TAGS: [technological/economic optimism, economic futurism, It/It relationship, knowledge for control, corporate insularity, power/progress/control versus wisdom, self-serving insularity, no man is an island]