For several decades, our world has been caught in an increasingly violent and accelerated explosion of continuous technological innovation, a kind of expansion of possibilities that seems to have no end. A massive bombardment of advances, by now so fierce that many have lost their sensitivity to news of new breakthroughs (a significant shift from the widespread cultural enthusiasm the world showed at the beginning of this phenomenon).
This age of continuous advancement offers us a virtual world, of which this article is a tiny part, and which absorbs us in an increasingly obsessive way. Our relationship with the virtual is becoming less and less healthy due to the absence of that gracious balance to which we have grown unaccustomed.
We have virtualized our existence and created new needs. Present society faces an original and complicated dilemma that it has not yet discovered how to solve.
In response, at least two movements can be recognized, apparently opposite but deeply similar:
- Digital escapism: That is, the pursuit of a metaversal life. An escape into worlds of our machine-made creation, about which so many dystopian stories have already been written and produced, warning of the consequences of abandoning our bodies and the physical world.
- Analog escapism: An anachronistic regression that seeks refuge in a romanticized image of the past. The hope that we can solve the excesses of technology by rejecting it, ignoring it, or limiting ourselves to earlier versions of it. A comprehensible response, but one as incapable of stopping technological advancement as digital escapism is of replacing physical reality.
Nostalgia can become just as evasive as fantasy.
Even though I chose to write the lines of this article first on paper rather than on a keyboard, I ask you not to escape into the past out of the exhaustion and fear produced by the vision of an unbalanced present and a dystopian future (although, if you have read enough dystopias, some of you will recognize that this is already the present).
Do not deny the virtuality that our progress demands, but do not flee into the fantasy it offers us either.
I believe you can recognize, as I do, that mastery over the passions and ataraxic steadiness on the middle way is a very great challenge for unenlightened mortals like ourselves; for that reason, it would be unfair to ask such a thing of you.
Let us not depend on our self-mastery, nor trust blindly in our discipline. Let us cut off the hand that incites us to sin; let us tie ourselves to the mast while crossing the siren-infested sea, so we do not fall overboard. That is: let us balance the world instead of ourselves: let us develop a post-virtual society.
The next stage should not be pre-technological or metaversal, but post-virtual.
Let us stop merely adapting the physical to the virtual world, and begin adapting the virtual to the physical world. Because progress demands that we make technology more compatible with human life.
Let us build technology that respects our limitations, rhythms, and needs while expanding us as beings. Let us not make things more complex, but simpler.
We, at BCC, believe this change will not happen by accident. We believe technology must be deliberately designed to serve human life, and not the other way around. This is what a post-virtual society consists of.
This is our vision. Support us if you share it. Thank you for reading.