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Technology and Empathy

For me technology has always been about making things more efficient to us make our lives less damaging and more comfortable, and also to allow people to connect in real time around the world to help organize a better world and also help people meet for social and affectionate reasons.

The technology we as a human race have created in recent decades has given us the ability to do all these things, yet the human situation continues to decline and the environmental situation continues to worsen at an exponentially increasing rate.

Here on Care2 we still see denials being posted by people who think that global warming is a natural trend, and that they data is skewed by environmental activists.

About 2003 I realized hope for a revival of the New Economy, or technology economy, became more a denial of technological and economic failure than hope.  Also, as I had been a volunteer rescuer at the WTC terror attack, I became its victim too, as post traumatic stress disorder had affected me as it has virtually every other rescuer.  The attack on the WTC produced the most concentrated destruction in history.

As I started to look for a new life, which ultimately resulted in my becoming a trucker, I sought therapy.  I bundled up all my ideas into key words and used the Internet, which I had invested more than a decade developing, to search for a therapist.  The therapist I found, Edwin Kahn, is a dedicated follower of Carl Rogers, the therapist who brought empathy to psychological healing.

Since then I have finished my degree; much of my work shows a parallel between society and technology, where the defining commonalities between the two can only be defined as Synergy.  Synergy is closely related to empathy by definition, and the coiner of the term Synergy, Ruth Benedict, was a close collaborator of Carl Rogers.

What is important to understand about Synergy and empathy, as I have tried to show in my writing, is that these natural human tools for interaction, which are limited to humanity, enable us to create technology.  And therefore, technology is good.  As many people say technology is bad as say it is good.  It has blamed, for instance, weapons of mass destruction, but to its credit it has helped us create medicine and has given us the Internet that we use to communicate as we do.

Others, who have pondered technology, say technology is neutral; that it is neither good nor bad, but is what we use it for-- the ethics of technology depend on who uses it.

By extending thoughts about empathy and Synergy in the direction of the study of technology, we can find new meaning for technology.  By combining these thoughts with other learnings, such as concept of a meme, and then by viewing these ideas against the backdrop of natural human group dynamics, such as the basic form of democracy found in natural peoples such as Native tribes, creates new meaning for technology, we can see that technology is a very human effort.  Technology has in it all the beneficial human values.

Technology is not, nor never, bad; it is the result of human collaboration in beneficial environments.  Technology can be stolen, however, by bad people-- and they use technology to hurt, steal, and to eradicate.


The people who create technology work well together-- they collaborate using the tools of communication: empathy, and memes, which are units of communicated thought.

The natural method of communication that evolved to enable us to be so effective as designers comes from the very basic communication method: affection.

Emotions are what make life special; they are what makes us feel that life is worthwhile even in its darkest moments.  Emotional communication creates these bonds, and by using emotional communication in a sophisticated way we create technology, which may feel cold and unemotional, but it is none the less the product of emotional communication.

A recent and very well documented example of how technology is stolen is found in the development of the small computers we use, especially their operating systems.  Very good people, some of whom I have known personally, developed the small communicating computer to be an extension of humanity, to help.  The initial design was created by very empathic people to help the technicians interface with phone communications equipment, as the phone systems of the time were a growing disaster.  (This was the Unix system, from which the Linux system evolved.)

Ultimately, this technology was stolen as free software from a collaborative effort called the "Home Brew Club" and was used to create private software industries: Microsoft Systems, and Apple Computers.  The Apple creators have documented themselves the larcenous activity that helped them create their monster corporations.

All technology follows this pattern, and studies of both natural peoples and animal communities shows us that this type of activity is very old.  Because there is trouble lurking around the corner for good humans, one must keep an open mind even when learning about highly questionable technologies, such as self-defense weapons.  Self-defense has been through history a key part of the lives of good people.

From what I have seen in my lifetime, where so much beneficial technology has been perverted into horrid uses, I think that self-defense will remain a valid use of technology.

The technology we are using right now, the Internet, is the Information Society.  With in Care2, everybody is aware of the present dynamics of the world as a yin/yang struggle between those that love animals and the environment, and those who say that exploitation, and the pain it causes, is actually a good thing.

In the Information Society, the defining struggle more resembles the political struggle between independent minded people and what you may think of as the "New World Order."  The technology itself seems to support the independent humans over the centralized control --and it should-- but, as I have tried to demonstrate, the technology of the individual has been hijacked by centralized controllers, the most obvious of which is Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates.

This struggle is ancient; the strongest example is the rise and fall of the Roman empire.  From my studies of society, I think much of history has been hijacked as well.  The Roman empire is credited with creating our present society, where the period following the empire's collapse is called the "Dark ages."  In reality the Romans contributed very little; they took other people's ideas, and their resources, to create the centralized Rome.  The defined our present economic structure, the one that is melting the polar ice, and coined a term from their monumental architecture to describes it: capital.  Europe's recovery from the Roman empire helped recover the concepts of democracy developed by the Greeks, which repressed by the Romans, and also led to alchemy, which democratically evolved into modern science.

While I find technology personally pleasing, I like to code programs and make web pages, it also scares me.  My fear is not from the misuse my technology-- that is impossible-- but because my technology may never lead anywhere, that the time I spend working on programs is wasted; my fear is that I am wasting my life away.

What is needed is obvious to me; a collaborative effort of Internet users, designers, coders, and advocates to create a decentralized yet Synergistic system that allows all people with empathic skills to interact collaboratively to begin the long process of righting a world gone so far bad.

I think this concept may be common, and even popular, but understanding why such system has never evolved, especially when there is so much support from the "free and open" software developers community, I think will help us understand why so much of technology fails.

Looking back on my career, I see that so many of the people whom I worked with and for, lack empathy.  Because of a lack of empathic facilities among the technology workforce, the motivation for most of my co-workers to create technology was positive reinforcement as BF Skinner described it: money.  Since public Information projects have never gotten the type of capital investment that other public projects, such as damns, have gotten from the government, then the effort will have be by people who can conceptualize, or imagine, the great benefits from a truly free, open, and accessible environment for all humanity.

This idea contradicts what I know about technology, that it is a product of empathic collaboration, and that these programmers would not have been involved in any initiating developments, as they lack the basic facilities for Synergy, which are empathic abilities.

It seems to me then, that technology has been hijacked once again, but to a far more deprecating degree than imagined.  Im my experience there have been many highly empathic people in the technology mix, but because of the changes in economic environment precipitated by the technology crash, and the vast corporate malfeseance that caused it, have forced all the empathic people who were contributing to technology into a desperate state where they had to find other ways to keep themselves solvent.

It would be nice if, say, the Care2 corporation would understand this and open itself as an entity to the creative people who form its foundation-- but that will never happen.

We are learning that Care2 itself lacks empathy; that Care2 is simply a vehicle for its owners.  The strongest evidence of this is the "censoring technology" built into the host management system.  It seems to promote the concept of the repression of free expression by allowing hosts to very easily eliminate the writings of others.  There is within the censoring system a joke- where the reason for the censorship can be checked off as "I just felt like doing it."

Censorship to Care2 Inc. is not an issue, and to me, fascism is not much of an issue to Care2 Inc.  Further proof of the lack of concern for freedom by the Care2 corporation is their resistance to the use of public domain software: the technology of the empathic Internet.
--
Empathy
http://thinman.com/empathy

Posted: Friday May 25, 2007, 8:34 am
      

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Khira W. (4) 		Friday July 13, 2007, 7:24 am
my comment is keep positive. don't say something will "never happen" -- the trick is to image it clearly and with the proper benefits that persons can get if they invest in structures like you say. for some of your words and for that trippy picture i'm giving you a green star. could i get a copy of that pic? i'd love to use it. congrats on finding a cool therapist!

yours in empathy, khira.

John V. (308) 		Friday July 13, 2007, 8:24 am
Hi Khira :)

Let me quote your home page: "New-Age Gnostic Eclecticism - a Meme against War. Focalizing E-Camp/Electronic Village at Summer Rainbow Gathering (Rainbow Family of Living Light)."

I am right now working on a "peace camp" in New Paltz to block the bulldozers that are about to destroy these valuable forests to build worthless subdivisions.

I do see the link between returning the Human Race back to natural and tribal Synergy, and the Information Society, which is also the Internet.

Frankly, I have never been comfortable with "positive." People who cannot learn, or people who have to be trained as human capital as they have no learning facilities, are not going to respond to affectionate overtures-- that will just excite their hunger.

Negativity likewise troubles me because it spreads. Negativity is a contagion against anti-empathy (what I call anti-anti-empathy): spreadable disease.

Empathy, as emotional communication, is a yin/yang process, and has to be applied as optimistically as possible. But when trouble starts, you have to look at what is important: self-survival and the survival of the Human Race / Planet.

That, at times, requires an intense dose of negativity to back "them" down, and save lives both human and natural.

The best strategy is to allow give the anti-empathic what they want, an easy attack on empathy, and then to utilize the kinds of strategy that the SevenSamurai used to protect the village in Kurosawa's famous film epic.


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Blog 3 May 25, 2007

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