Educating the Silicon Citizen

December 19, 2022

I came across an article recently with an interesting name. It was called "Educating the Silicon Citizen." This raised all kinds of questions for me. We now exist in a digital society where half-hearted answers are everywhere. At millisecond speed one interpretation of the world can become de facto truth for a moment, and if the moment is right, perhaps it's authoritative news can linger much longer. It's not so much that we are agnostic to truth now so much as it is that our senses are not honed to it as sharply. 

I wonder, in this historical moment of quick answers, what have we sacrificed to this irony of total efficiency? It's hard to blame those of us who have to swim in the current in which we find ourself. But it can't be denied that it is not only young tech entrepreneurs-to-be that are "Silicon Citizens" now. We are all fit to that category now just because we have to navigate the modern world in order to cultivate ourselves. And yet what have we sacrificed to this paradigm in order to find the total efficiency of always having an answer? Have we compromised some efficiency of mind? 

It is true that the practice of being human has always had to adjust to the practical realities of the labor paradigm. We live in a moment, though, where the dominant mode of creative labor in the economy is simply rearranging informational priorities. At some point we have to take a step back and, taking the wide view, admit that for us to consider technical degrees as the new liberal arts, is a stretch. Holistically, our current and very real economic and knowledge paradigm is stretching all knowledge toward the technical, and this is bad for some deeper human purpose in life that we can honestly reflect on. 

I think that before we conclude yet another death of the humanities has come, we should casually observe that in all this frantic new tech economy there is a central and overwhelming secular concern, and this, and our general unpreparedness to deal with this, is what is causing the wailing and gnashing of teeth. Perhaps old spiritualisms are gone, but all the same, doesn't this great striving to make the new technological things betray a deep yearning to connect to a higher secular purpose? I think it does. Are we ready to treat of this new moment in terms of issues vital to politics and the state as the connection to a higher purpose in all this mad technological frenzy?