/lit/ - Literature

>>19378724

The artificiality of modern life is not simply a symptom of technology. Technology is a co-conspirator in the creeping artifice. Complicit is the tendency towards making our thoughts and actions more symbolic. A symbolic thought has clean edges, clear emotional or moral valence, and a resonant power within a system of other symbolic thoughts. As we integrate technology into our lives, we also integrate our lives into technology by thinking in a way that technology is better able to capture and interact with.

All thoughts are symbols. The important distinction here between what I consider a symbolic thought and a representative thought, is what system the thought has resonant power in. A representative thought will have more descriptive power the better it describes what is known about the subject. A symbolic thought will have more power when it simply agrees more with other symbolic thoughts.

A system of symbolic thought is one that tends towards its own closure. A self-sustaining eco-system of symbols that all reinforce one another. Reality is a tangential intruder onto the system. One that can be increasingly nullified by internal symbolic systems that digest the incongruent elements of reality into their own safe symbols.

Technology enables and encourages symbolic thought because it is so suited to transmitting ideas of that nature. And it is so unsuited to transmitting representative thoughts. First because the medium is inherently unphysical. The only connections to the real world are themselves symbols. Second because it can transmit symbolic ideas in such a massive quantity that there are bound to be nucleations of these symbolic eco-systems.

When symbolic thought dominates, we become culturally unmoored. And that I think is the most central thing we can say about modern western culture. It is unmoored.