The Gods of Now
A few years ago, I decided to make up my own job.
What I “did” no longer fit inside an easy definition. So I started calling myself a Culture Alchemist. I have always been fascinated by places of flux; drawn to the tectonic crevasses where evolutionary forces give birth to new forms. No matter where I go, I always find myself here: unearthing and investigating patterns of transformation.
Look at something long enough, and what you are watching will inevitably reveal the lesson.
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You might remember the scene in Harry Potter when Dumbledore is consulting his Pensieve. As he contemplates the silvery white soup of swimming memories, the reader watches as he pulls more magical threads — i.e. thoughts — out of his head and places them in the mix.
The idea being that a head gets cluttered with a lifetime of thinking.
I feel like on its best days the internet functions like this. It’s a place where we come to preserve the thoughts and experiences that (we believe) make life meaningful; a slurry of data and mostly extraneous details that ultimately warps our sense of reality because it gives us the ability to access the past and paint the future simultaneously.
At the end of the day, it’s a distortion chamber so complex that we have outrun the map. No one really knows how to navigate this inter-dimensional labyrinth. It’s like the economy, stupid — when the machine running things evolves into a meta-being with its own set of rules, we have left the station, folks.
Buckle up because this is wild, liminal territory with its own weather system.
A wily frontier, by any definition.
Most of us alive today are not exactly trained in how to use a technology so wholly absorbing and all-consuming that it influences our ability to gauge what’s actually real. Which is both hilarious (a sense of humor in this lifetime is essential, is it not?) and deeply disturbing when you think about the effects of that unchecked chaos at scale.
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Having spent most of my career building digital technologies and playing in pioneering spaces that are rapidly shaping the external world it has become clear to me that many people simply don’t recognize the scope of the game they are playing.
If you accept something blindly, you have diminished your ability to see.
It is so easy to yell at what’s broken. I think that’s why I became a designer, truth be told — because I had a lot of righteous anger back then and very few places to put it. I saw solving problems as an atonement process. A way of leaving the world better — more right — than others had left it.
The other, harder option: take responsibility for your part in the mess.
When I started teaching, I stressed to all my design students the inherent ethical responsibility of their role in constructing such environments. Real people would use the tools and technology they designed, and some of them for less than honorable purposes. The point being:
All technology is inherently neutral.
A fork could kill you.
Intention fundamentally shapes the use of all tools.
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The technology you use designs you.
I now think of technology as a lattice that architects and engenders life; a system that facilitates the simultaneous exchange and access of more information than we can conceivably imagine. Analogous in many way to the nature of DNA, technology’s deep weave with our psyche has spawned countless radical movements, innovative ideas, and new power structures previously unfathomable.
Together, we collectively participate in an experiment so massive that it has reshaped our brains, our bodies, and our planet.
Yet fluency with a tool doesn’t always equate to functional mastery.
After all — infants can use iPhones. But they didn’t design them.
It’s a different playing field, is all I’m saying.
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One could argue that the internet is a simulacrum: a representation of something that is, by nature of its construction, inherently disconnected from reality. It’s telling that some of the first simulacra created by humans were images of early gods.
Perhaps the joke is on us.
Occasionally it feels as though we are actively investing in the very thing designed to defeat us. I say this recognizing that without the internet, much of my work would not exist. In my darkest philosophical moments, I like to ask: Are we manifesting another broken Eden? A place of endless possibilities that has been perverted by power-hungry snakes?
What, exactly, are we wanting to perpetuate?
Everyday we log on and boot up our brains, jumping face first into the soup. We surf an endless tide of information that provides us absolute access to everything we can imagine, at anytime. Walking the infinite looping corridors of the internet, we can almost fool ourselves into thinking that our online existence is enough.
After all, we have given ourselves the tools of gods.
Why waste time feeling bothered about all the garbage in the halls?
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I don’t have answers, but I do have questions. The most pressing of which is:
Have we gotten lost inside our own glittering image?
Things are invisible until suddenly they’re not. Like a mirage, the dazzling reflections presented back to us online can be misleading — even dangerous. We have the keys to do great things and we use this technology to post doctored photos of us looking like dogs.
Like babies with lightning bolts.
We are free to devote our lives to whatever we want, which is intoxicating. Maybe that’s why I can’t stop thinking about all these magical little threads swimming around in this rowdy chaos realm of warring factions, fertilizing anything they touch because that’s how the thoughts work: they direct and amplify energy. They power the myth machine that we choose to believe in. We’re all praying to something, after all.
With each and every thought.
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Katharine Hargreaves is a spiritual mentor, transformational facilitator, ceremonial guide, and initiated medicine womxn. Her first book, The Art of the Experiment, is a transformational manual for people who want to change their life but don’t know where to start. For more information on Katharine and how to work with her, visit her website.
