As we begin to see the software we're snared in, Perspectiva wants to locate the “virtue in the virtual”
From Perspectiva
As the embedded video from Byline Times below shows, it’s becoming easier and easier to tell the story of how we are being treated, tracked and exploited by online media. (Byline are also bringing out The Little Black Book of Data Democracy).
Yet when we can finally see, describe and critique the systems that sell our interactions to advertisers and states, for profit and power, do we just obstruct and resist, like the Luddite cliche? Or can we find some ground to stand on, and from which we design these systems better, according to the humane values and experiences that we have reasserted?
To answer these questions, we’re happy to highlight this important initiative from our friends at the “souls-systems-society” think-tank Perspectiva, called the “Digital Ego” project. (It will be of great interest to those who follow our Technology and Futures categories on the DA).
Here’s the intro from the project’s main page:
The Digital Ego project is concerned with what it means to be free, to grow and to flourish in the digital age. Our starting point is an open-ended belief in humans’ potential for individual and collective growth and self-understanding.
Through the lens of the ego, we ask what it means to align technology with this freedom and flourishing; to map virtue onto the virtual aspects of our lives; and to speak more richly and meaningfully about our lived experiences of technology.
Technology is implicated in every aspect of contemporary life, and in our deepest collective and individual problems:
of personal identity and social cohesion
of manipulation, disinformation and authoritarianism
of environmental degradation and global inequality.
It isn’t the problem, or the solution. But it does define the context within which solutions must exist.
The Digital Ego project seeks to speak at a systematic level to technology’s mediation of modern life, asking what narratives and frames
can connect personal experience to the global picture;
can find virtue in the virtual realm;
and can place a properly understood sense of self and soul at the heart of our mediated lives.
It does so by calling for dialogue and action across five domains:
Inquiring into what it means to be free in the digital era
How can we be free to move, to grow and to flourish, at a time when many of us feel increasingly “stuck” within algorithmic systems - placing us in particular boxes, and encouraging lowest common denominator behaviours?
The answer blends political liberty with an ongoing vigilance towards our deeper needs – for genuinely open-minded exchange, for contemplation, for compassion.
Offering an invitation to community – to reclaiming a fuller sense of “we” for the digital era
Via the lens of the ego, we advocate for a shared endeavour of growth and self-realisation that respects individual needs for expression, becoming and belonging.
At the same time, we challenge narratives that are premised around division and an “Us vs Them” mentality.
In our fragmented times, this means working together to re-expand the domain of shared experience, embracing richer accounts of what “connection” can look like in the digital arena.
Challenging the mindset of optimisation engrained in tech
Principles of efficiency and optimisation can help us further some goals, but faith in them as a general “life philosophy” is misplaced.
To become “unstuck” and recentre ourselves around forms of growth that matter, we need to let go of a fixation upon speed for its own sake.
We need to rethink unexamined assumptions about both the nature of progress and technology’s role in determining it.
Insisting upon the connections between the domains of systems, souls and society
We are committed to an integrated and cross-level understanding, rather than presenting a purely analytical framework or a top-down expert intervention.
As we look at what it means to grow and flourish through the lenses of technology and identity, it will be vital to root this in a plurality of contexts, ranging across psychological, spiritual, political, societal and ecological domains.
Proposing a meta-ethical framework for understanding human flourishing in the digital context
Our approach is grounded in virtue ethics, together with a close attentiveness to lived and felt experience. We seek to push debates about human/tech relations towards framings open to the positive affordances of the digital era.
At the same time, we want to safeguard what is implied by “human growth and change”, in ways that algorithmic optimisation cannot capture.
The Digital Ego project kicks off with two major essays. Tom Chatfield’s Finding Virtue in the Virtual. From Tom:
What does it mean to place the ethics of technology upon firm foundations in the 21st-century?
In this essay, I make the case that virtue ethics offers a practical, humane basis for doing so: that it can help us scrutinise the values entailed by the design, deployment, and regulation of technology; and that it can do so with a greater flexibility and faithfulness to lived experience than other overarching ethical accounts.
And secondly, Dan Nixon’s What is this? The case for continually questioning our online experience. From Dan:
How is the social fabric being rendered digital? How does a particular ‘currency of ideas’ shape how we see ourselves and others on social media platforms, and what might we experiment with here?
How do our egos come to take centre-stage in our online spaces? What options do we have, amidst the algorithms and incentives underpinning our media ecosystem, for getting a more expansive view of what’s really going on?
Some great questions here. And as one of the essays’ subsection title puts it, quoting Rilke, “be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart - and try to love the questions themselves”.