Letting Go...

"Either we cross a new threshold, enter a new stage of hominization, by inventing some human attribute that is as essential as language but operates at a much higher level, or we continue to 'communicate' through the media and think within the context of separate institutions, which contribute to the suffocation and division of intelligence. In the latter case we will no longer be confronted only by problems of power and survival. But if we are committed to the process of collective intelligence, we will gradually create the technologies, sign systems, forms of social organization and regulation that enable us to think as a group, concentrate our intellectual and spiritual forces, and negotiate practical real-time solutions to the complex problems we must inevitably confront. We will gradually learn to find our way within a mutating, wandering cosmos, to become to the extent possible, its authors, to collectively invent ourselves as a species. Collective intelligence is less concerned with self-control of human communities than with a fundamental letting-go that is capable of altering our very notion of identity and the mechanisms of domination and conflict, lifting restrictions on heretofore banned communications, and effecting the mutual liberation of isolated thoughts."
-Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence. Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace, from Prologue, p. xxvi-xxvii

What is it with French male theorists' inability to use the word humankind! Other than that, I'm intrigued by what Levy says. There are so many publications out there about the posthuman condition or our mutation into a new species, one irrevocably yoked to, inflected by, technological systems. However, I am always suspicious of utopian notions that are not accompanied by examples of what this might actually mean or what it might look like. Of course, it could just be me that even views this type of theorizing as utopian; for some people it is a nightmarish dystopia. I'd like to cautiously occupy a shifting middle ground, neither technophobic nor technophilic, neither repulsed nor seduced...