encyclopedia ei ( エイ ) do ( ド ) li ( リ ) ca ( カ )

Over the years I’ve come to realise that a few threads I’ve focussed on in my career are the same line:

• the discomfort of technological abstraction explicitly stated in our earlier games
• the movement toward New Computers, theorising novel network topologies give rise to interfaces that trend away from mass broadcast
  • as well, the focus on “human-scale networks” that could resist the incentive catalysis of an Eternal September moment
  • and on “earshot networking” that only propagated information as far as friends-of-friends on purpose
• experimenting with local-only posting that kept specific information specific to an isolated group of peers
• trying to create ‘playful interfaces’ that surprise and encourage an open-ended, creative relationship in unexpected places
• finally, believing that the forceful slowness of a forum might, in fact, rewrite the habits of using technology backward onto the user

All this has a throughline in an emphasis on encouraging an ‘encounter’ with the Other, an emphasis that I’ve long carried from a Christian personalist lens I seem to have had since birth. It’s similar but distinct from the Hegelian sense.¹

I’ve lately come to see it less as a technological problem to solve than a part of a general ethics that itself includes a relationship to technology. I don’t think it’s solved by designing technological solutions in some final “right way”; receptivity to encounter is a posture toward the world. It’s a stance one tries, over and over, to take; it requires one to try and fail, and try and fail, to engage with the Other without judgment, without making them an It to be assessed or filtered. It is a mantra shared from friend to friend, in what we expect from our tools and from each other.

A trend I’ve noticed, as I tried tending to longer-form communication platforms, is not just that people found it more intimidating than shooting off a microblog message, but that they also treated it more like sharing independent reflections than as a conversation. That is to say, people often spoke past each other; a forum post could be (and, twenty years ago, was) just a bunch of small quotes and one-sentence replies – but it was more likely that we’d get 5 paragraphs from each person that didn’t really build upon prior posts. I think because of this, nobody felt heard; there was no conviviality or encounter. Instead it felt more like a communal repository of people who proximally existed, but didn’t really co-exist, if you know what I mean.

So how can one cultivate opportunities of encounter if slower paced designs still engendered a sort of mutual atomisation under the guise of a community? I see this as an open area of study – I don’t really have an answer to this yet.

Text selections

Consider the face-to-face relation of Lévinas. I think there’s very obvious tie-ins to Buber here but I haven’t read yet. I apparently am the most Buberian to have not read Buber yet invented but I will come to it soon.

Mounier

Some selections from Emmanuel Mounier’s Personalism:

Thus, if the first condition of individualism is the centralization of the individual in himself, the first condition of personalism is his decentralization, in order to set him in the open perspectives of personal life.

This development is founded upon a series of original actions, to which there is no equivalent elsewhere in the whole universe:

(1) Going out of the self. The person being capable of detachment from itself, of self-dispossession, of decentralizing itself in order to become available for others. In the personalist tradition (in Christianity especially) the ascetic of self-dispossession is the central ascetic of the personal life. Only those who are thus liberated can ever liberate others or the world. The ancients used to talk of the overcoming of self-love: nowadays we call self-love ego-centricity, narcissism, or individualism.

(2) Understanding. This is ceasing to see myself from my own point of view, and looking at myself from the standpoint of others. Not looking for myself in someone else chosen for his likeness to me, nor seeking to know another according to some general knowledge (a taste for psychology is not an interest in other persons) but accepting his singularity with my own, in an action that welcomes him, and in an effort that re-centres myself. It is to be all things to all men, but without ceasing to be, or to be myself. For there is a manner of understanding everyone which is equivalent to loving nothing and ceasing to be anything a merging of oneself with others that is not a comprehension of them.

(3) Taking upon oneself sharing the destiny, the troubles, the joy or the task of another; taking him ‘upon one’s heart’.

(4) Giving. The vitality of the personal impulse is to be found neither in self-defence (as in petty-bourgeois individualism) nor in life-and-death struggle (as with existentialism) but in generosity or self-bestowal ultimately, in giving without measure and without hope of reward. The economic of personality is an economic of donation, not of compensation nor of calculation. Generosity dissolves the opacity and annuls the solitude of the subject, even when it calls forth no response: but its impact upon the serried ranks of opposing instincts, interests and reasonings can be truly irresistible. It disarms refusal by offering to another what is of eminent value in his own estimation, at the very moment when he might expect to be over-ridden as an obstacle, and he is himself caught in its contagion: hence the great liberating value of forgiveness, and of confidence. Generosity fails only in the face of certain resentments more mysterious than those of contrary interest, hatreds which seem to be directed against disinterestedness itself.

(5) Faithfulness. The adventure of the person is one that is continuous from birth to death. Devotion to the person, therefore, love or friendship, cannot be perfect except in continuity. This continuity is not a mere prolongation or repetition of the same thing, like that of a material or logical generalization: it is a perpetual renewal. Personal faithfulness is creative faithfulness.

Whenever I treat another person as though he were not present, or as a repository of information for my use (G. Marcel), an instrument at my disposal; or when I set him down in a list without right of appeal in such a case I am behaving towards him as though he were an object, which means in effect, despairing of him. But if I treat him as a subject, as a presence which is to recognize that I am unable to define or classify him, that he is inexhaustible, filled with hopes upon which alone he can act this is to give him credit. To despair of anyone is to make him desperate: whereas the credit that generosity extends regenerates his own confidence. It acts as the appeal (Jaspers’ ‘invocation’) that nourishes the spirit. They are mistaken who speak of love as self-identification. That is only true of sympathy, or of those ‘elective affinities’ in which one is seeking to assimilate more of some good quality, or to find some resonance of oneself in someone similar. Real love is creative of distinction; it is a gratitude and a will towards another because he is other than oneself.