The Dawn Of A Digital Civilization
The Virtual City: Tech Titans’ Grand Vision for a Digital Metropolis
The Metaverse and Omniverse projects seek to transform the Digital Environment into a virtual urban landscape. But will these grand visions succeed? Were tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Jen-Hsun Huang striving to create a more livable digital world?
In this episode, we explore the challenges and opportunities of urbanizing the Digital Environment and investigate the power dynamics at play.
Digital Pilgrims is a podcast that explores how digital technology. In short episodes, we journey into the “digital semiosphere,” where communication takes new forms and we explore what’s needed in a world where the old rules no longer apply.
Dive with us into the recent tech history and let’s understand the origins of this current uncertainty.
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Towards a Digital Civilization
It may be that the first thing that comes to mind when we think of ceremonies are those related to the religious or commemorative aspects of life. We are not used to thinking of productive practices in this way, but if we bear in mind that ceremonies commemorate all types of human activity, both of a spiritual and mundane or daily nature, we will be able to understand why the first way we organize ourselves tends to revolve around these activities. Productive tasks are decisive for understanding how we create environments of cohabitation. It is very clear how people organically establish themselves with regards to productive systems in the Digital Environment. Indeed, Web 1.0 was focused on facilitating work and commercial exchange. However, since the development of email and cloud collaboration in recent years, we have come a long way.
Behind the new tools that foster habitability of the Digital Environment today, there is a transcendental change in how we work and make decisions. Agile systems, like Lean systems and their successors, arose from the first Toyota adaptations of the classic Ford system and aimed to place humans at the center of the creative process not just as resources but as an essential part. At first, these kinds of dynamics were facilitated by digital technology, but recently they have been motivated by it, contained by the environment that is created online. New productive ceremonies are critical to the shape our society is taking. And they affect all of us.
When we consider death or the continuation of social ceremonies in the Digital Environment, we are probably talking about moving our rituals into digital reality. But some people may wonder whether these acts are not experimental practices carried out by some groups. We do not all get married over Zoom or celebrate our birthdays in a Minecraft space. However, more and more people work remotely and online. This direction the productive system has taken, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, elevates humans’ innate ability to handle themselves through three pillars: self-management, evolution of mastery, and the acquisition of experiential knowledge. Indeed, this central place given to people by agile systems is what makes them more than a productive system: they are the reflection of rituals that transform us.
When productive systems change, new models for productive interaction are created that also determine a component of habitability. We are all challenged by the opportunity of a more dynamic reality. The main difficulty lies in the fact that the digital space today is symbolically messy. While some understand and celebrate the ceremonial aspect made possible by the Digital Environment, others remain disconnected from this feeling. The appropriation of a new environment is a human activity that begins with an individual attitude but is projected onto the collective. Rituals and ceremonies help us to share and socialize with the community. We thereby strengthen our positive experiences, and it is also easier to assign meaning to moments of difficulty. We may say that these transformations materialize at the same time in a dialectic shift, new changes in the spaces where we carry out our activities. Just as the landscape transforms us, we transform the landscape we inhabit.
Architectural spaces organize a syntax of collective, urban, and individual symbols. In the city, people materialize the way in which we relate to each other, the expression of our desires, and how we build our culture. To paraphrase the architect Louis Kahn, the construction of space has inherently symbolic value. We erect monuments, make the buildings stand out that house our most important institutions, and organize material space to foster both cohabitation and participation. This construction is achieved through the difference between living in a space and inhabiting it. When people acquired mobile devices, they began a process of appropriation in which they created networks to begin to assign it meaning. But the digital city today is organized around its merely functional nature. For humans, appropriation necessarily implies emotional commitment. Becoming involved and taking a position is participating. We do so as we propose ways in which to grasp an idea of the world and make it our own.
The cloud, the protagonist of Web 3.0, is how we now symbolically represent the Digital Environment, understood as a space shared by all. It is also the beginning of the natural expression of our digital urbanity and where we “create architecture” for existence. When our online activity reached a sufficient degree of maturity due to individual involvement and the desire to develop decentralized practices of cooperation, we began to glimpse the territory’s symbolic limits. We found continuity between those ideas about the use of technology as a tool for defending community ceremonies, the development of movements for free and shared knowledge, and the transformation of productive systems towards a collective and dynamic model.
Although for some generations the concept is more incorporated than for others, we all inhabit the Digital Environment today. But do we all participate in the same way in the creation of conditions that allow the human factor to blossom there? This environment is becoming the central axis of development for interpersonal and productive relationships in the long term, and large companies know it. The multinational tech companies Meta and Nvidia recently announced with great fanfare their plans to transform the Digital Environment. The Metaverse and the Omniverse can be understood as attempts at urbanization. Just as they did in the first decade of the 21st century, large companies are trying to win the race to determine what the Internet of the future will look like and decide what can and cannot be done there. But we have gone through many changes since the dawn of social networks. We now know that creating the necessary conditions for symbolic ceremonies online and assigning them transcendent meaning are not among their interests.
Today, everyone has one or more devices that let them access the network from anywhere and at any time. In opposition to the programmed route imposed by large communications companies as of the 2000s, we see the appropriation that each individual is developing. However, urbanity is not ordered, nor is it constructed by individuals, companies, or institutions but rather through the agreement between these parties.
That is what digital urbanism is about: understanding that the digital space is not only a place for foundation but also for habitation. The Digital Environment does not have to be devoid of emotional or symbolic value. The complexities that exist among organizational, communications, and productive systems create an asymmetry between the structure and individuals that causes social anxiety and conflict. This is why we must develop an emotional map of the Digital Environment. That need is not based on a whim. In Byung-Chul Han’s words: “In the symbolic vacuum, we lose those images and metaphors for generating meaning and founding community that make life stable.” In this idea, there is a meeting point: rituals are devices that protect life. Because of its characteristics, the Digital Environment confronts us with a new way of being and acting. Until now, people had never needed to inhabit an immaterial environment. Of all the strategies we developed throughout our cultural history, the ability to give meaning is what can help us in this process of inhabiting and cohabitating in a new environment. Actively urbanizing the Digital Environment means embarking on a search to build ceremonies and rituals that allow us to establish communicational models through which we can achieve a different degree of interaction with the environment.
To do that, people must again be placed at the center of the ecosystem, changing the perspective to one that considers a human vision. Likewise, this cannot be a naïve exercise or a mission taken lightly. The progress of technology and the level of penetration created a new focus of knowledge, a different way of acting. The way we move and evolve in the Digital Environment catapulted us toward a new paradigm of reality that questions our most deeply assimilated habits.
The world as we knew it no longer exists. We are building a new world in which the Natural Environment is on the same level as the Digital. But we are still pulled at by what was and what could be. This process of growth of digital technology moves in two directions: we move closer to it as it throws itself towards us. It is a convergent transformation that occurs in the present and acts on both environments through mutual affectation. However, it sometimes seems that instead of linking up, these two forces crash into each other.
On the one hand, traditional models of cohabitation, institutions, and the state are trying to find a way of existing and projecting themselves into the digital sphere. We can see this, for example, in the new architectures that are being created in the cloud, in the appearance of models of emulation like the Metaverse, which aim to adapt resources, mechanisms, and processes that belong to the Natural Environment to a digital format. However, as we have seen, the logic of the Digital Environment is so different that those projects often do not prosper. What institutions, companies, and the state seem to be searching for is the answer to the question of how to exercise sovereignty in a space with no borders to mark out a territory.
On the other hand, we are seeing the arrival of a greater number of digital logics, a process driven by the rapid adoption of tools by individuals, as well as new ways of communicating and existing in the Digital Environment. Social networks and the labor within productive communities and communities of practice have had and will continue to have an impact on our reality, forcing us to rethink our traditional forms of organization, particularly how that organization extends beyond us as individuals and integrates us into something larger. If we are inhabiting a Digital Environment acted upon by business interests, institutional control, and the actions of collectives of individuals, we might wonder what happens when these three actors run up against each other.
In the next episode:
Explore the idea of digital citizenship and what it means to truly coexist in a digital world.
Digital Pilgrims is a podcast based upon the book “Digital Pilgrims. Towards a Quantum Humanity”.
