In other words, the inevitable progress of technology makes the technological sublime elusive. It is also true that technology tends to shrink into humble guises. (“Technology tends to be ubiquitous and cheap,” Kelly writes.) My son and I sometimes throw a “hoverball,” a small sphere with a propeller that glows in the dark and can be made to gracefully fly from person to person or follow the path of a boomerang. The hoverball is fun, not sublime, but there's technological greatness hidden within: the flight systems inside the hoverball are similar to those that created deadly gray areas on the Ukrainian battlefield where no human could venture. death by drone.
Standing on the beach at night and looking out over the dark, mysterious ocean, it's easy to feel challenged by something much larger and older than yourself. The natural sublime is great, ostentatious, unmistakable. Thanks to technology, moments like these can sneak up on you. Every now and then you might see a CCTV camera in the corner of the room and be reminded that we are always being watched. Noticing a satellite drifting across the night sky might make you think about how our species' reach is expanding; Taking daily statins can make you wonder how our bodies work. Thus, the technological sublime can be a diffuse feeling found in fragments. If you are a technophile, you can strive for this by always striving for the cutting edge.
Technologists are rational—at least that's the view. But they are also people, and people live in cultures and experience emotions, and the patterns through which those emotions are experienced have remained largely the same since the time of Edmund Burke. Listen to tech titans talk about what they do, and you'll often notice patterns of technological excellence. For example, artificial intelligence researchers in “edge labs” talk gloomily about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence, which they believe is a kind of fateful discovery, almost a potential possibility of the universe that they are almost witnessing. The fact that they are not completely in control of these systems seems to enhance their sense of the presence of something sublime.
Sublimity implies an element of passivity. I once went on a solo hike through Red Rock Canyon in Nevada; it was more than a hundred degrees outside, and the sun was blinding my eyes. Standing on a lonely stretch of trail overlooking a ravine, with no one around and an empty water bottle, I realized the riskiness of what I had done. I should have headed back immediately, but instead I stood looking out over the ancient, rust-colored canyon, feeling both over my head and very alive. The world was big and didn't care about me, and yet here I was, aware of that fact. I enjoyed the mixture of surprise and fear.
But is this how we should respond to technology? The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was fascinated by the moment when a frightening experience becomes sublime; “It’s as if,” he thought, “we are faced with a choice: worry about ourselves or go beyond the self.” Take the last path, to exaltation, and a person will become a “pure, weak-willed subject of knowledge,” an “eternal subject” – a person experiencing “exaltation” from ascension from himself. It sounds terribly abstract, but it's a good description of what it's like to be in awe and afraid of something bigger than you. People who seek the sublime in nature – climbers, scuba divers, etc. – often seek it out.
Sublimity is not an illusion. There are reasons why we experience this in nature, and also reasons why we experience the technological version. However, in both cases it is important to break the trance. At some point you will have to escape the oncoming wave. You need to come back to yourself – remember and accept the fact that you are a specific person with free will, obligations and values. In the natural world, returning to yourself can be as simple as walking away. But in technological terms, everything is more complicated, because we are responsible for the pace of research, discovery and invention. Technologists can create technological sublimation to some extent, and consumers of technology can become dependent on it. But the path to responsibility leads through disappointment. ♦
