Review of Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect by Andrey Mir
Source:
Excerpts:
Today, it’s easy to conclude that much of the utopian and dystopian rhetoric deployed around communications technology over the past two decades was overblown. Despite the hopes and fears invested in the digital revolution, the world looks much the same, but a bit worse (to borrow a phrase from French novelist Michel Houellebecq). But what if the advent of universal, always-connected communications devices has been far more consequential than either techno-utopians or the most jaundiced Luddites could have realized—just not in the way they imagined?
Media ecologist Andrey Mir, a sometime contributor to City Journal, advances just such an argument in his fascinating new book, Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror. The upshot of Mir’s analysis is that, over the past two decades, civilization has undergone a shift comparable with that experienced over the much longer period during which literacy displaced orality. The spread of digital communications technologies, he argues, has put a definitive end to what Marshall McLuhan called the “Gutenberg galaxy” dominated by literacy—already eroded in McLuhan’s own time, especially by the emergence of television. Succeeding it is a new hybrid Mir calls “digital orality,” which is “simultaneous and impulsive like instant oral exchange but recordable, shareable, and transportable like writing and print.”
Mir’s more original contribution is his synthesis of the media ecology of McLuhan, Ong, and Logan with an unjustly neglected hypothesis developed by the philosopher Karl Jaspers in The Origin and Goal of History. Jaspers’s 1949 book is best known for introducing the notion of the “Axial Age”: a “spiritual process,” as he describes it, “that occurred between 800 and 200 B.C.,” in which “[m]an, as we know him today, came into being.” The basis of this supposition is the enigmatic fact that the civilizations of China, India, the Middle East, and Greece attempted to articulate abstract philosophical accounts of the nature of humanity and its place in the universe, as well as universal moral precepts, within the same period, without much communication with one another.
In a less developed thread of his argument, Mir takes up Jaspers’s teleological account of history as leading inexorably to the unity of mankind. Writing after the cataclysm of the Second World War gave way to the rise of the first global institutions, Jaspers hoped that the philosophical universalism that arose during the Axial Age would be fulfilled in a global human society built on shared values. To this prognosis, Mir adds a technological prophecy: “humankind will become one, but it will become one with its medium and its environment when all three merge into the ultimate medium: a networked cognitive interface with AI.”
Yet, technology isn’t a deity looming above us, decreeing our destiny; it’s a human creation. Legal and regulatory battles over its essence and ramifications are underway globally. Mir’s examination of media ecology provides valuable insights into the disruptions anticipated from new technologies like AI—disruptions we were ill-equipped to handle with the advent of smartphones and social media. We should leverage such perspectives when deliberating the appropriate roles and applications of technology, as we’ve now begun to do, albeit tardily, with social media. This approach could aid in mitigating the severe disruptions currently threatening us.