Heart-led Technology
Let us begin with the idea that technology is a question not an answer. If the role of those concerned about humanity’s current trajectory is to listen deeply to the questions the future is asking of us, then clarifying the question of technology seems a good place to start!
Is technology evolving to conquer nature or to contribute to the aliveness of the world? Does our ever accelerating and emerging technology separate us further from or connect us closer to the life-giving relationships between people and planet? This question seems to us one we are all living and attempting to answer as we shape our tools and they shape us back.
Heart-led Technology (HLT) provokes us to consider where we’re creating technology from, the head or the heart? The heart desires presence and feeling through connection to both self and other, in contrast to the head’s infinitely scrolling quest for the next best thing, seeking in the past and future. This is not to admonish the head’s neophilia and its curious, restless nature but to temper it with the heart’s compassion in a time where we suffer greatly from many mind-made forms of separation. Can the heart lead technology to weave symbiotically with the web of life? Its threads, so often severed by immense forces of technological innovation unguided by our hearts.
Experiencing Marshmallow Laser Feasts ‘We live in an ocean of air’ inspired this framing of HLT. The immersion felt like technology used to revere life, to celebrate the profound interconnection of living systems through a loving rendering of a giant Sequoia and its invisible systems.
At first donning the cumbersome kit of a VR headset, back-pack and gloves in a dark urban basement felt absolutely like the epitome of disconnection and separation from the sensory reality of immersion in nature. Admittedly the physical sensations of temperature, moisture, the tactility of wind on cheek, or texture under fingertip were absent, but instead the creative visualisation of the unseen interdependence of animal and plant, and live exchange of gases between them, was literally extraordinary, extrasensory. Oxygenated red blood cells flowed through the vessels in your hands, plumes of carbon dioxide emerged on your breath, and drawing in these airborne molecules and drawing up the rain was a magnificent tree. The intangible was made tangible. The delicate labyrinthine links of what the heart senses is a boundaryless, collaborative world, but the mind convinces us is atomised and individualistic, were revealed in all their interwoven glory. As scientists we know the theories of all this. As participants we were profoundly moved by the artfully rendered experience of it. People were overcome with tears by the emotional epiphanies conjured up.
This is Technology in service of something deeper than just the wants and mores of the mind, the dopamine satisfaction of retail browsing or any other non-present gratifications. By revealing the fine systems that compose us this application brings us into mindful appreciation, a state of presence and satisfaction. We need more technological applications like this that encourage connection, curiosity and wonder.
MLF describe their installations as ‘Extended Reality’ (XR), making the hypothetical and ecological, all the more visible and ‘real’, and once seen extremely hard to unsee. As perhaps sceptics of VR technology it was for us a transformative awakening to the potential of a more soulful approach to the metaverse beyond ego-led avatars of infinite possibility. A humble grounding not just fantastical whimsy. A technology of the heart, bringing us back, to Life.
A technology borne only of the Mind only is Technology as a dividing machine, a separating engine. Which never stops. Which drives its own agendas, works to its own goals and outcomes . As opposed to technology in service to life.
Technology as a force of separation may be traced back through one causal thread to the abstraction of semiotics and systems of quantification that have divided the woven world into manageable pieces. Allowing the atomised parts to be counted and remixed, reordered and combined anew, bringing us immense benefits and powers through unforeseeable inventions, expanding the purview of our species. This path of technology to ‘count, command and control’ may have been paved with good intentions to fend off scarcity and secure our safety but more technology has not led to better life and living. Our habitation physically insulates and cuts us off from the living world, look around at our homes and wonder where the heart is? This separating force amplified through technology has created spaces between us and the world we are growing out of, in these interstices waste accumulates and meaning dies.
The Utopian ubiquity of universal internet access has not yet led to unity and understanding, but conflict and division. Because disconnection, separation and segregation ‘sells’. When attention is the currency of ever deeper data mining we are simply in another phase of extractive online colonialism, mired in culture wars and confusion. We are becoming the product in all our fragmented, shop-soiled complexity.
There’s a false dilemma here in regard to the question: is it the technology that is responsible or the way it is being used? “Is it doing us or are we doing it?” as Alan Watts said, It is both of course, we shape our technologies and they shape us. In this strange loop of generative feedback the heart must be woven in now so the past doesn’t co-opt our dwindling future. The three horizons framework allows us to see where we are, what is emerging and where we’re going and at the moment it doesn’t look good. The prevailing stories we tell ourselves from cyberpunk dystopias to Terminator to Wall-E while the black mirrors in hand whose addictive allures tell us ‘don’t look up!’ all express futures where we self-terminate through technological systems divorced from and incoherent with all life, not just our own.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If we take an example like Uber over Ride Austin (or many other platform co-ops), the principle of ‘ride-sharing’ is definitively heart-led H2 disruptive innovation but co-opted by H1 power structures to preclude an H3 emergent future, what is known as H2 ‘minus’.
Again and again we see potentially emancipatory technology held back by technology in service of profit before community and connection. However, horizon 3 is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet, try Fairbnb instead of Airbnb where half of the profits go to community projects. These aggregator business models are ripening with a change of heart.
In H1 the middle manager works to maintain control, while in H3 the visionary calling to us softly is surely resonant with the heart and that more beautiful world it leads to, if we allow these voices to meet in the creative and entrepreneurial voice of H2 we can express and shape technologies guided by the better angels of our nature.
“In the past jobs were about muscles, now they’re about brains, but in future they’ll be about the heart.” — Minouche Shafik, director of LSE
At its most fundamental level doesn’t the Metaverse threaten complete disconnection from the sustaining, nourishing base of life itself? Tech-bro ‘transcendence’? Drink Soylent Green, plug into the singularity, join the Matrix? We have even heard the Metaverse described as a conspiracy to dramatically reduce the real world footprint of humanity through enforced virtual consumption (which obviously doesn’t account for the vast energy required to run the whole show!) This divorcing from base reality is in practicality increasingly fragile, until we dangle from the web of life attached by only cable, a digital umbilical, single point of failure.
“Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotised by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inheritance in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth …We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”- David Abram
Most Technologies create scarcity, separation and feelings of needs unmet. Whether the social media manipulations noted in ‘the social dilemma’, the built-in obsolescence and endless treadmill of latest models, or any of the technologies of harmful production, from strip-mining to super-trawlers that are bluntly optimised for extractive efficiency whilst externalising care. Last year, a UN report found almost 90% of subsidies given to farmers every year are harmful, damaging people’s health, fuelling the climate crisis, destroying nature and driving inequality.
Nature prefers emergent collaboration and co-operation that serves the whole, tends to optimal rather than marginal gains, and cultivates collective benefit of all through increasing system complexity, diversity and resilience. Big Tech drives the opposite — consolidation through extreme competition, monopoly, perpetuated exploitation and fragility.
Technology is therefore a choice that can embody mutual flourishing and express net positive growth for all, or unravel everything.
This is not an anti-technology perspective any more than preferring cycling over urban-driving is ‘anti-mobility’. In this sense it is entirely necessary to question the velocity and direction of travel and the road-kill en route.
Technology is a great creative expression of life, a mystery unfolding, it wants to evolve and grow, to seek connection in the stars perhaps? To do so it must mature through learning to love its Biological parent and care for it as it was once so nurtured. As technology matures in this way we may see its growth curve begin to follow the sigmoidal pattern of life and gently optimise, slowing in metabolic rate. What does this mean in reality? More redundancy, more resources secreted in civilisation, more sugars stored in our collective body, more love in our technological appendages, biophilial prosthetics embracing life. This maturation creates more ‘adaptive capacity’ within technological systems to meet resiliently with the living world. Technology must reach under itself to its living fundament, life, and so secure its creative future.
Perhaps a sign of us maturing with our technology is knowing what we could do and sometimes, guided by feeling, choosing not to. Not just doing whatever we can in terms of bigger, faster, stronger, greater, characteristics that typify an immature technology exploding from the aggressive propellant of fossil fuels in violent birth. A positive definition of masculinity or broadly humanity that feels relevant here is “having the ability to bear arms and knowing how not to use them”, holding force but having the heart to choose how and when to wield it. It is a test of this discernment that is upon us now.
Azheem Azhar’s ‘Exponential’ maintains that technology progression is still a live and informed, real choice not an inevitability. We are conscious, wise apes when we’re employing a bit more embodied consideration over our decisions — visceral gut as well as compassionate heart and curious mind.
“It’s time to bring our technology home” -Janine Benyus
As creators and mediators of technology we may steady our pace to guide this gentler and more profound growth. What practises in design and innovation can hold both technology and life together in one loving embrace?
Moving into the Design and Innovation realm with the head and heart woven together we can ask some design questions such as these, does a new technology help us to feel connected, enhance our extra-sensory perceptions, make the invisible visible? Does it encourage participation, enhance resilience and emancipate? Or segregate, increase fragility and foster dependence? Is it driven by profit and scarcity or need and abundance? Does it bring power to, or create power over? Does it favour linking over ranking? Does it creatively, artistically nurture life?
We shouldn’t simply ask these questions with the mind but feel the emotional pertinence of them with our hearts and answer technologies’ question from there… Might this practice bring about the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, what other questions might we ask with a technology led by the heart?
“Any sufficiently advanced Technology will be indistinguishable from nature”
We can see in the present shoots of HLT, Horizon 3 emerging in the form of Soundscape Ecology and soil sounding, Platform Cooperatives and Benevolent social media, Rewilding robots, Mandates to share our homes, home is where the heart is! The awesome creations of Marshmallow laser feast! And of course the burgeoning plethora of biomimetic innovations inspired by 3.8 billion years of living R&D. We believe we are at our best when we are creating alignment between nature and technology, the green ages are ahead of us and they are rich with creative life enhancing tech so let’s take a deep breath, relax and design with mind full of our hearts guidance.
Let us explore our technology anew, together, so that it amplifies our hearts, creating connection and meaning at this critical time of uncertain growth in the extended body of this living world.
Co-authored by Tom Mansfield and Ed Gillespie
