Why Are Ancestral Technologies Re-emerging As Digital Technologies Accelerate?

As the development of digital technologies and conventional medicines is accelerating, we are rightfully seeing a mirrored accelerated re-emergence of ancestral technologies.

As screens have come to dominate our interactions and even children increasingly live and communicate in the digital space, you, like me, likely might harbor some apprehension over whether what we are seeing unfolding actually entails “progress.”

So before I delve into some of the reasons that ancestral technologies and medicines are re-emerging, let me delve into the problematic nature of a reality controlled by corporate interests, particularly in the realms of digital technologies and conventional medicine.

You are likely to hold reasonable skepticism of the increasingly monopolistic control of giant monoliths like Facebook, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Twitter, TikTok, and so forth. Many of these apps are inherently designed to be addictive; and, the promise to make life more convenient and connected offered by many of these companies (Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Facebook, etc.) is countered by the reality of a life that is more barren, sterile, and disconnected, people have begun realizing the importance of connecting in-person, IRL, or in “meatspace” in techie speak.

These Big Tech corporations essentially continue to privatize and influence how we interact, all the while mining our data from our actions and interactions in the digital space and making us increasingly reliant and addicted to their platforms. If the level of control and manipulation seems insidious, it is.

OkCupid is one example of the era of techno-fascism that we are in, when the app stands to gain from users staying on the platform rather than connecting in long-term relationships and disabling or de-activating their subscriptions. Users on OkCupid cannot ask for gifts or to be spoiled, or anything else that may remotely trigger SOSTA/FESTA, nor can they share outside interests if they are not for the primary purpose of dating. So dating apps increasingly function by monetizing desire while prohibiting people from doing so. They encourage people to present themselves superficially and engage with others superficially, while profiting from the problem of plenty (too many choices hinder your ability to choose/focus on one selection).

Skype, Microsoft, Google, Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, OkCupid, and Craigslist are just a few of the companies that have been cracking down on content and removing and/or shadow-banning users posting content that has even a semblance of something objectionable. With the reality of us living largely in the digital realm and the very real and harmful consequences of SOSTA/FESTA, women are being censored and harmed more than ever before.

If these bills don’t truly help, and have only made lives more dangerous and risky for women and marginalized people, why have they gained so much ground? As per the Vox article by Aja Romano, “There is one group that does stand to gain a significant amount from this [SOSTA-FESTA] bill package: a network of corporate giants ranging from Hollywood studios to Silicon Valley behemoths” (2018).

Romano elaborates on how this bill package threatens free speech and transfers more power into the hands of powerful digital technology companies: “Whether or not Section 230 is ultimately weakened overall because of FOSTA-SESTA, it seems clear that we’re in a moment when many of the freedoms and protections we’ve previously assumed were woven into the fabric of the web are being systematically unraveled, challenged, and overridden by powerful special interest groups. If this keeps happening without abatement or countering, we will inevitably be faced with a drastically different, far less democratic version of the internet” (Romano, 2018). [Bold font added for emphasis.] And here we are, four years later, in a techno-fascist surveillance state.

Digital technologies were created with the promise of empowering individuals and democratizing access to communication globally (see, for instance, Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, 2006). Yet, while many of us see the internet as the realized embodiment of the saying, “information wants to be free,” few people realize the origins of this quote. On the flip side, hacker Stewart Brand, who coined this saying, continued, “information also wants to be expensive.” It is this quandary and paradox that has accelerated the rise of misinformation and censorship online, as well as the race to privatize and data mine from users in online spaces.

The full context of this quote follows: “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better” (1984). So as ease of access to information has accelerated, so too has the reliability of the information that we access declined.

Google, a corporate search engine, is a poor substitute for a library, as information is ranked algorithmically according to a user’s search history, location, and the commercial influence of the sites. Information is not ranked according to credibility; yet the expediency of finding information has eclipsed the underlying importance of the reliability of the information we find. Big Tech relies on and, more importantly, capitalizes on this paradox of information both wanting to be free and information being expensive. As I have written, I believe our global information literacy crisis is interconnected with our health literacy crises.

As Anna Wiener wrote in her memoir, Uncanny Valley, of the Big Tech world, “Data collection and retention were unregulated. Investors salivated over predictive analytics, the lucrative potential of steroidal pattern-matching…. Transparency for the masses wasn’t ideal: better not see what companies in the data space had on them” (p. 39, 2020). Conventional Western medicine likewise is predicated on keeping people distanced from themselves, from our connectedness not only to ourselves, but to each other and this world.

As a sex worker and activist Olivia Snow discussed of SOSTA/FESTA in her article, “Are You Ready to Be Surveilled Like a Sex Worker?,” the bill “essentially outlaws sex workers’ presence on the internet by criminalizing proximity to sex work. Under this level of scrutiny, talking about sex work at all is a risk” (2022). As Snow discusses, the surveilling by Big Tech and finance companies was a harbinger of the overturning of Roe-Wade and the increasing level of state surveillance.

Snow elaborated on how to fight such surveillance. “The first step is to abandon any lingering trust you may have in the integrity of the state. Neither the intent nor effect of FOSTA or Dobbs is to eradicate sex work or abortions, which have existed for millennia and will continue to exist regardless of legality. Remember: these measures aren’t about the law; they’re about power” (Snow, 2022).

So in a time when we are being increasingly surveilled and controlled, when women have further lost autonomy on our own bodies and choices, when the medical-industrial complex and Big Tech continue to reign supreme in our lives, regaining a connection to yourself and learning how to live and communicate outside of these models is a tremendous act of rebellion.

While Big Tech and Big Pharma may be here to stay, it is no surprise that people are rebelling and re-claiming their power, racing to bring earth medicines back to the medicine cabinet and decentralization back to the Internet. The green wave and psychedelic renaissance have emerged because the medicinal value of substances like cannabis, psilocybin mushrooms, and all functional mushrooms can no longer be suppressed. Information is both free and expensive. You just need to know where to look.

Sources:

Grinspoon, Peter, M.D. (August 11, 2021). “The endocannabinoid system: Essential and mysterious.” Harvard Health Publishing. Retrieved from https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-endocannabinoid-system-essential-and-mysterious-202108112569

Lattin, Don. (2017). Changing Our Minds: Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy. Synergetic Press: Santa Fe and London.

Mader, Stewart. (2009). “Stewart Brand: Information wants to be free. It also wants to be expensive.” Retrieved from https://www.stewartmader.com/stewart-brand-information-wants-to-be-free-it-also-wants-to-be-expensive/

Markoff, John. (2006). What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. Penguin Books.

Merry Jane. (2020). The CBD Solution: How Cannabis, CBD, and Other Plant Allies Can Change Your Everyday Life. Lauren Wilson, Ed. Chronicle Books.

Mushroom References. (October 19, 2022). A Curated List of References Relevant to Physicians, Scientists and the Intellectually Curious. Retrieved from https://mushroomreferences.com/

Pollan, M. (2018). How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529343/how-to-change-your-mind-by-michael-pollan/

Romano, Aja. (July 2, 2018). “A new law intended to curb sex trafficking threatens the future of the internet as we know it.” Vox.com. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sesta-backpage-230-internet-freedom

Snow, Olivia. (June 27, 2022). “Are You Ready to Be Surveilled Like a Sex Worker?” Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/roe-abortion-sex-worker-policy/

Wiener, Anna. (2020). Uncanny Valley: A Memoir. Picador: New York.