The Metaverse, or the Serious Business of Tech Frontiers (original) (raw)

‘The Pandemic Will Not be on Zoom’: A Retrospective from the Year 2050

Postdigital Science and Education, 2020

This paper aims to interpret, analyse, and critique educational pasts, presents, and futures. It is framed by potentially falsifiable memories of colonization and struggles for identity and social justice. We adopt the device of social science fiction (Gerlach and Hamilton 2003) as a specialist genre of speculative fiction (Graham et al. 2019). Such speculative approaches seek to develop provocations rather than predictions (Selwyn et al. 2020) and to implicate their readers rather than to inculcate them. In this tradition, we seek to ponder possibilities of post-pandemic educational futurities. Our work centres on the ramblings of an unknown scholar who, on the cusp of a post-scientific world, screams a maddened poem into the void titled ‘The Pandemic will not be on Zoom’. The events surrounding this poem are pieced together to reveal a world of stark inequities and digital and biological fractures. These fractures prefigured a bleak colonization of humankind by a deepmind hive Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Fig. 1) that caused us to become forever isolated from ourselves and that brought an end to the grand projects of science and education. In our conclusion, we call for other historians of futures past to help uncover timelines, and write alternative fictions, that promote pedagogies of hope, care, justice, and a brighter day.

Technology at the crossroads: A call for transformative technology in the post-pandemic era

International Journal of Theology, Philosophy and Science , 2021

Globalization is viewed in this work as a critical concept by which we understand the transition of human society into the post-pandemic era. In this vein, this paper attempts to look into the process of globalization and its central feature, technology. Technology has become a global force that affects political, social, ethical, and environmental. The ancient Greeks, such as Plato and Aristotle, who lived in aristocratic societies, rejected discourse on technology as unworthy. Social, political, and theoretical activities, rather than technical, were deemed as the highest forms. Plato, for instance, alluded to the artisans merely as the cheapest form of metal compared to gold associated with the philosopher-rulers, while silver is equivalent to the warrior class. Technological change, defined as "progress," is seen as an inevitable process in modern history. This paper explored issues of globalization and the implications of technology, employing crucial viewpoints of Martin Heidegger, acknowledged as one of the powerful and influential philosophers of the 20th century. Specifically, this paper explored "machination (Machenschaft)" and Heidegger's Technik (Technology) or Gestell (Enframing). Machination is not just human conduct but the act of manipulation. It is a revelation of beings as a whole as exploitable and manipulable objects. The world seems to be a collection of present-at-hand thing with no intrinsic meaning or purpose, a cold place where we cannot put down any roots. All we can do is calculate and control. We observe and measure everything. We make things go faster and faster. Thus, there is a need to discuss and recognize issues related to technology. Heidegger's thoughts offer analytic tools that contribute to a critical understanding of the multidimensional effects, risks, and possibilities brought about by modernity and its globalization.

The End of the Future: First Draft Excerpt from my forthcoming new book

The End of The Future

*If you are interested in reading more please go to the books section of this page and select "The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digitial Sovereignty". 'The much-vaunted " end of history " may be an ideological phantasm, but there is such a thing as the end of the future—or, at least, a crisis of futurity.'-Hito Steyerl: Postcinematic Essays After the Future 'We have no future because our present is too volatile. The only possibility that remains is the management of risk. The spinning top of the scenarios of the present moment.'-William Gibson, Pattern Recognition In the twenty-first century the future has become a universal property based solely on information. What had been of material value for much of the twentieth century, began in the late 1980s to transferred its worth into the realm of raw data, forcing the self to reside in a place of constant and perpetual exposure, and its surrounding community to linger faintly amongst the remains its former desires. We have become content to simulate the future rather than generate it. This has been the case since the 1970s when information technologies began their ascent. These technologies accelerated us into an era we referred to in a premillenary moment as 'postmodernity'. Its hallmark was to postdate reality and replace it with 'what 'Jean Baudrillard and Eco used to call the " hyperreal "-the ability to make the imitation more realistic than the original' (Graeber 110). The postmodern prompted us to delight in the fact their was nothing new to look forward to and therefore our sensibilities must rely on the clever commands of 'simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation and pastiche' (110). The future that we dreamt about would never appear in our outward lives, rather its contents could be said to have imploded, its flattened image compressed down to nothing more ambitious than one can be fit within the ultrathin surface of a screen. In the race towards the future, it would seem the computers bested our imaginations. Ours was to become a technologically mediated environment and creation itself recast as a process of transfer of information and rearrangement of control played amongst existing forces-albeit somewhat modified ones. In the twenty-first century, the means of production are no longer functioning as a locus of power; that now resided with the ability to discipline the velocity and magnitude of information.