The Great Deception of the Tech World

Why should we prefer the historical description offered by the history of ideas over the historical explanation provided by the history of technology? And why is an explanation rooted in the history of the spirit preferable to one originating from the history of matter? On the concept of a deep explanation as one that reveals a layer of description that was not visible to the eye - meaning a depth that is always relative to previous descriptions, and only this relative depth transforms it (temporarily!) from a description into an explanation

A history of inferiority complexes turning into deep thoughts - The first landing of the moon on man (Source)

The transparent ideology of our time, like the shallow materialism following the scientific revolution, is the perception that the driving force of history is technology, which replaces the history of ideas. The history of ideas is somewhat outdated in its tendency towards the sensational claim that a certain idea caused a change or - preferably - a historical revolution, instead of understanding the value in identifying such an idea not in historical causality, but in finding a cross-section of analysis and a certain level of description of historical change. For example, the invention of another conceptualization of history by finding a new plane, or a new axis, etc., through which historical reality can be examined. Like a CT scan from a new angle, whose explanatory power lies precisely in seeing things that are not visible from another angle of analysis, and not necessarily causal explanatory power, of finding a new cause, because from every angle of analysis the same cause looks different. Sometimes cancer is understood as a learning failure, and sometimes cancer is understood as a computational failure, but it's the same phenomenon of information in DNA that can be analyzed from different directions.

And now, the entire technological-economic world has rallied around the narrative that technology drives the world, and has always been what drove the world. But this is just one level of description and not always the most interesting. Technological reductionism will lose the more interesting parts of expressions of change (even if technological) in planes where it is more interesting to examine it and more challenging to understand it, for example in the philosophical or ideational plane. Even if we decide that Google is the engine for historical change in the world, or the Internet, it is much more interesting to solve the question of what philosophy it creates, or culture, or aesthetics, or religion, that is, history in the cross-section of ideas. The same applies if we think that the economy is the driving force of history.

For every phenomenon, like the body, there are planes where it is more interesting to understand it, like the soul, and those that are less so, like chemistry. The same goes for history. So there is a hierarchy of planes, and the most apt plane is the relevant one. In it occurs the maximum of the bell curve of the planes (this is very different from the idea that there is a single correct explanatory plane, because the other planes also have relevance). Beyond that, every phenomenon progresses on many planes, meaning it's not true that only technology (as an independent basic force beneath phenomena) affects the progression of ideas, but also the progression of ideas affects the advancement of technology. There is a realistic justification for looking at the world in higher planes because they allow us to understand how upper phenomena affect lower phenomena, and not just vice versa. Even if being created consciousness, consciousness in turn created being, and the question of who created whom is uninteresting and fruitless. What's interesting and fruitful is to see the coupling between two modes of the phenomenon, and to free oneself from causality and control towards sexuality between ideas.

The problem with the unidirectional explanation, like the reduction of ideas to power and politics, is superficiality and lack of credibility. The influence is bidirectional, and perhaps bilateral, meaning like two sides of the same phenomenon, the same coin. Two levels of description, like body and soul. Just as a computer can be described at the level of mathematics, electricity, software, logic, user interface, and precisely the content level of the text written here is the relevant level, not the level of pixels that light up and turn off as the writing progresses. The problem is the perception that a good scientific explanation is a reduction of everything to it, and not a cross-section of reality. In other words, it all started with the scientific reduction of the world, which now returns to the Enlightenment as a boomerang - in the technological version.