Words by Hanna Sarsa
Every spring, I’m overcome with cleaning mania. I scour my flat of detritus, excess and objects of unknown purpose. On this year’s quest, I found an old iPhone in one of my drawers. Completely cold to touch, it lay there like a corpse in a coffin — its mineral intestines no longer warmed by my hand or an electric current. Long after the clothes bags had been taken to the charity shop and the orphaned cables matched with their mother appliances, the phone still waited for its final resting place. This titanium corpse — once as good as a prosthetic arm and my portal to the infinite space of potentiality — having reached its obsolescence, is a curious relic.
Looking at it, I imagined a people, lifetimes from now, in an Arrakis-type desert, finding a mountain of these gadgets dusted in sand. They will be unfamiliar with the lore of Anthropocentrism, strangers to a time when qualities were thought to be an element of the human consciousness and not a property of the object. Opening up these devices, they would find precious metals and mineral components — little specks of ancient time trapped inside a legion of lifeless objects. What kind of spirituality will they think animated such a civilisation? Will they wonder, as Thomas Berry did in 1988, if our civilisation really thought it was “moving into a wonderland so magnificent that it is worth such a destructive presence to the natural world”?
There is a chance the wonderland is already around us. As writer Natasha Lennart expresses: “We don’t call digitally integrated life mystical or paranormal; tech companies would rather we simply call it ‘progress’ and reap the profits themselves”. This is the religiosity in Western thinking, a pious focus on overcoming earthly existence, a gaze forever fixed on some Kingdom-come — the end that justifies the means. The concept of technological salvation mimics this ecclesial mindset. Such faith is reliant on technology to take us out of the crowded physical place where things touch and affect us and into a homogenous, empty space where we continue the projection of something onto an imagined nothing. It perpetuates a belief that things are only things once they’ve passed through the human consciousness; we project the world onto a blank canvas. Like the plot of a film that unspools from the idiot premise, technology has been stumbling over itself to try and patch up the plundering that results from this belief system.
This isn’t the only existence imaginable, however. To accept that human beings did not erupt on an empty planet with their God-like ability to order chaos into civilisation is to re-enter the living world. In doing so, we lose our imaginary omnipotent agency, sure, but we gain relationship. From the zeitgeist of somatic practices and the emerging science on grounding to conscious efforts to address accessibility for marginalised communities to the ‘outdoors’, we’re beginning to appreciate our interconnectedness. Taking a step back from dreams of rapture, we find the blank canvas alive with infinitely intricate reciprocities and relations — a rather magical world, in fact, albeit terribly neglected. We’re discovering that we want to stay on this planet, alive, with one another. This means we can’t spiritually bypass the fact that object relations preside over more than just the Hinge dates we go on and the way family holidays make us feel.
The material world we inhabit and shape, in turn, inhabits and shapes us.
Technology is of us, and in us, somehow.
The word tecno means ‘art’ and ‘skill’, and both come from human hands. Play is how we innately relate to the material world around us, and as such, technology has, first and foremost, been a playground. Andreas Weber writes in Enlivenment, “Play unfolds from a person’s free choice about how to do what is necessary”. Technology has undoubtedly provided many answers to the how, but only we can really define necessity for ourselves. That’s the freedom part of it. It is where the material and spiritual intersect, introducing perennial questions like, who gets to play? And according to whose rules? Technological monotheism and the consequential monoculture risk of losing this playfulness.
Technology and its craft — the relationship between the maker and the material — could be underpinned by an understanding that we aren’t going anywhere. If we desire to make ourselves at home on this planet rather than leave it behind, then repairing, reassembling, and reconciling become the necessity of technology rather than perpetual newness.
The feeling I had, cradling the titanium corpse of my phone, was the glitching of the projection of the empty, crisp space where life is purged of death, disease, and disability.
I do believe technology is in our design. Maybe it is how us humans relate to a place and what we think it lacks. But what if life, symbiotic and enmeshed, wasn’t a problem to be fixed?
Then, technology could be the embodiment of play, an extension of our design that isn’t at war with the natural world but of it.
I think that sounds kind of fun.
This essay forms part of our research for an upcoming OS Experiment. OS Experiments critically and playfully explore the multiple possibilities tomorrow contains. In 2024, we’re curious to make sense of sensory possibilities. Stay tuned for the launch of Experiment 02 — exploring Touch.
Hanna Sarsa is a Helsinki-born, London-based writer, producer and cultural researcher who moonlights in matters of metaphysics, world-building, and cosmological reconstructions.
"Technology is of us, and in us, somehow."
Fascinating. It confirms for me this notion of digital liveness which makes dimensions fade and get more and more blurred.
https://aliveinsocialmedia.substack.com/p/whats-digital-liveness-a-modelization