Caught in the

brevity of this

tiny life

and the temporality

and inteval

of living now,

it is easy to lose

the longer vision

of humans

and their

evolution on

the blue planet.

 

Technology,

with its tools,

its embodiments

and its ways of thinking,

has always been

a texture of

humanity’s face,

shaping and honing

the nature of being

in this world

and surviving,

as brains grew and

civilisation

and culture formed.

 

From the first stone

flinted instruments

that began the

fateful dominance

of Homo Sapiens,

to the digital

and disembodied

world forming now,

the pattern of

technology’s power

has been set

and is changing us.

 

And in this

textured pattern

that will not

be held back,

and in the idea

of progress,

lies the fatality

of technology:

having, at once,

the potential for demise

and inequity

but, at the same time,

becoming the only way

forward to

a future or

possible futures.

 

Religion has told us

that humans are

the noblest

and highest form

of creature

inhabiting and

dominating this world,

ordained and sustained

by god or gods or deities;

but these divinities

are shaped and contrived

according to the human

desire for

the Ultimate

and our wish to

find our place

in the universe.

 

This premise

of human primacy,

with its

human-centric

view of

the universe,

shrouds the possibility

that we are no

more special

or any more significant

than any other

mortal creature

on this fragile world,

except that we

have made a success

of survival…so far.

 

And it also hides

the notion,

the one that comes

from the long view,

that humans

and the planet

are on the move,

just as they always

have been:

not static or

some platonic ideal,

not caught at

the apex of creation,

but moving towards

futures emerging

and turning,

and forms of being

yet to be seen.

 

Technologies and bodies

are the ground

of this moving and turning,

this evolving on

to where

technology and body

are partnered,

dependent

and co-extensive,

sitting inexorably

one with the other,

as a new symbiosis,

a cyborg,

to form a novel

and alternate being,

one astir with possibilities,

moving with

and beyond biology

to a place

where our species

becomes not

Homo Sapien

but a new creature

that embodies integration

and is re-formed

as Homo Techne.

 

4/6/2016