Here we are back again at the kitchen table of knowledge, huddling away from a supposed
Midwestern cold storm of record, which we seem to have two to three times a year.
Always the worst in history.
And thankfully, we're warm, we're safe, we're well fed, showered, well slept as a result
of tools.
and the technology that enables those tools
and allows us to have the convenience
and the comfort of modern life.
Yet we find ourselves sitting at this table
to discuss just that, the nature of technology
and how it shapes our lives,
how it affects our lives, how it changes us,
and to perhaps break ourselves away from
to perhaps break ourselves away from this presumed idea that the things around us are
agnostic, that the hammer is only a weapon of violence when I have the intent to use it with
violence. And it's a tool of building an achievement when I choose to hammer in a nail.
That's always been my contention, at least since I put thought to it. But today we're here to
discuss Martin Heidegger and his thoughts surrounding this subject. So Grant is going to
open this up for us, kind of present and lay out the case made by Heidegger.
Kind of. We're going to lay it out in the only way possible, which is in dialogue. I mean,
I think that's the only way you can do philosophy. It starts with Socrates that way, it has a dialogue.
And this is going to be just a dialogue to help us understand the question concerning technology, an essay by Martin Heidegger.
And to hope anybody who's listening along, you'll also come to greater understanding.
We're reading it because we're also reading Crypto Sovereignty by Eric Kaysen.
And then you get to chapter 14 towards the end, 16.
And he says, before you go further, you really need to understand Martin Heidegger on technology.
And he says to read the question concerning technology. So proceeding at pace, then we pick this up. Martin Heidegger within philosophy, just a seminal figure in 20th century philosophy, a real heavy hitter who renewed the way that we talked about philosophy and thought about philosophy.
a reputation for being very dense for inventing terminology for focusing very specifically like
on the etymology of words as far as influencing their meaning and so doing some like going back
to the greek where a lot of philosophizing comes from and he's german he's writing in german
talking about the the meat the roots of these german words that we now use but where do these
roots come from what does that mean for the ways that we used to live and used to employ these terms
So we're going to walk through this step by step, see what we can learn from it, see how we can apply it to Bitcoin.
And then next week, we'll proceed on to see how Eric Kasin uses the question concerning technology to help explain the kind of Bitcoin within his theories.
So the question concerning technology, what type of philosophizing would we be doing here?
So for Heidegger, how he starts this essay, questioning is about building a way.
When we talked about Nick Land, he had talked about philosophy as an initiation into thought. For Heidegger, he says, questioning is about building a way, a way that leads through language. What he's going to try to do in this essay, he says, as we question technology, is open up a free relationship to technology.
We're going to talk about what that even means to have a free relationship to technology,
a relationship really to the essence of technology.
We're going to try to find a way then to get to the essence of technology leading through
language.
The question concerning technology, we might say then, that question is, what is the way
to understand the essence of technology?
And first, so we have to talk about what is the essence of a thing?
That's a very philosophical way of accounting for something.
but maybe think of it this way is how heidegger talks about it like what's the essence of a tree
you want to know the essence of a tree you don't talk about a specific elm tree an oak tree a cedar
or a pine any one particular tree does not hold all of the essence of a tree the essence is
some broader thing that all trees are so if you want to know the essence of technology we're not
going to look at particular examine particular existing pieces of technology don't look at
planes and cars and power lines and stuff to get to the essence of it heidegger points out kind of
counterintuitively the essence of technology is nothing technological he kind of starts that way
and it kind of has this sound a contradiction or paradox which is a good place to begin with
philosophy because um digging into that we're to get traction on something that seems confusing
uh so again this is philosophy the essence of technology is not technological this is
to talk about the essence of technology is the domain of philosophers everybody's welcome here
you don't have to be a tech a developer a coder an engineer you can be those things and also
philosophize about technology but we all have an encounter with whatever modern technology is
And so we all have something. This is going to speak to all of us if Heidegger does this correctly. And I think he does. So hopefully we can get that out. One common or definition. So beginning to look at the essence of technology, like a common way that we think about it or define it maybe is technology is a tool.
As you start off in the introduction, Lucas, technology is a means to an end to go even more general than tool.
It's something that helps you achieve a purpose that you set out to achieve.
It's a human activity that does that.
So when we consider technology in that way, it presents as neutral, as you said, kind of agnostic relation.
It's only a means to an end.
You have an end, so you invent technology as the most efficient way to bring that about.
if that's your model, which is kind of the default model of technology, I have something I need. I'm
going to invent a tool, a technology to help me get it in a more efficient way. It seems like then
the only questions we can ask ourselves are like technical ones. How can we do this better,
more efficiently? How can we master our tools, wield technology better? So that's where Heidegger
begins. And he says, this definition is correct. This is like, it is the common accounting we give
of technology, but we're going to do philosophizing here. So Heidegger says, we're going to start with
the correct and move toward the true. We're going to try to find the deeper thing that maybe shows
how a correct definition of technology is not a full definition. It doesn't get at the deeper
truth of what the essence of technology is. So even looking at the correct definition of
technology as a tool and an instrument, we need to get deeper than that. We need to go deeper.
And the first step he does in going deeper in this essay is to talk about, I mean, what is a means to
an end? It's as a logical relation, it's cause and effect. You have an effect and you have something
you make to be the cause to that effect. And Heidegger goes deep into the first part of this
essay. It's interesting if you want to see how philosophers talk about cause and effect. He talks
about Aristotle having four ways of conceiving of that. And the key from that discussion, I think,
is just that the cause is responsible for a thing becoming a free object in the world
that then beams forth its essence. And I'll get this out, and I want to talk about this,
because this, I think, is one of, for me, a psychedelic part of this essay. And by psychedelic,
I just mean that it's going to hopefully change your perception of the world around you, which is populated by objects.
So if we say that technology is about a means to an end, and a means to an end is a cause-effect relationship,
and causing is about being responsible for bringing an object into the world,
what does it mean when the object is in the world?
And this is where Heidegger really does a beautiful job talking about objects, something just so basic.
So an object that is brought forth in the world beams forth its essence.
It's kind of focused on being as a verb here, to be, right?
The activity of enduring through time.
An object in the world, we tend to have this kind of passive accounting of the things around us.
All the objects kind of recede from us.
They're in the background.
They're just there, but in a very passive sense, only there when we need them, really.
But don't think of it that way.
For Heidegger, an object in the world shines forth its essence.
It is presenting itself as a verb, presencing, he says, the constant presencing of a thing
that is present.
So it's not just being present, but this book is presencing as, you know, it's very fully
and really in the world apart from us doing its book thing.
So again, passively is how we use,
but practically we usually regard it kind of passively,
objects in the background where they're invisible to us.
But if we begin to think about it like Heidegger,
maybe things now become more visible.
These objects in the world, they're shining forth, presencing.
And this is kind of the first step to move toward
a free relationship towards something, free from us in a sense,
free from what we impose on objects, free from our own desires, designs, purposes for the thing.
So this is kind of the very basic kind of ground laying to where we're going to go a lot further
than this. But has all that made sense so far? Technology is a means to an end. Means to an end
is causal relationship. And causation is bringing an object into the world. An object being in the
world is a very full and independent thing. And it's about being in the world as like an activity.
Yeah. So to kind of go backwards, maybe, I guess I'd look here and I see the bookshelf that is
actively bookshelving. It's doing its bookshelf thing, holding up books. The cup is cupping.
It's holding my coffee. There's a bottle over there and it's bottling.
But even more than cupping, it's being a cup beyond our perp.
For us, it's cupping.
Like we see it only as cupping, right?
Because that's what it does for us.
But it does something more than that.
Our perception of what it does for us, the bookshelf bookshelving, doesn't exhaust everything that that bookshelf is.
It is an object aside and apart from our designs and purposes too.
how is it aside and apart from our designs and purposes if it would not exist without us
yeah and that this kind of does go into so when he talks about aristotle discussing cause and effect
there's four ways that aristotle talks about causing things there is both that efficient
cause that's one way we brought this into the world so that's that we are the maker that's the
The only reason you hear bookshelf is because of us.
There's also what Aristotle called kind of final cause, the telos, the teleology of the bookshelf.
That's the purpose.
That also kind of explains why it's here.
We needed this to hold the books.
And so it's here.
We built it for that purpose.
But there's two other kinds of causation.
There's also material and formal cause.
The matter is like whatever woodish substance that you get from Ikea, right?
Cardboard.
Yeah.
The finest European card.
And the so that's the material cause is kind of caused by its matter.
In a sense, the matter is responsible for being here just as much as we are.
Right. We caused it by building it.
But the matter is also causing it to endure, to presence, to exist.
The form is also causing it.
It's tough to imagine matter and form apart from each other.
But imagine maybe abstractly the form, the shape that the matter takes is also in keeping it here as an object.
If it's in a different form, it's no longer a bookshelf as an object.
It's a heap on the ground or it's still in the tree or something like that.
So you have material, formal, efficient and final cause.
So there are ways of reckoning the causation, the responsibility for this being here.
That's a bit aside from human purposive endeavor, if that makes sense.
So like a boulder is the matter.
Yeah.
But the rock is the matter.
The rock is the matter.
And the boulder.
And the sculpture that I make from it is the form.
But that form existed prior to me using my chisel on it.
It was always in there.
Yeah.
Right.
So I think maybe that just makes me think about humans and our ability to transform ourselves into something.
to become a great father, to become a great guitar player, to become a great athlete
that was always within that person. And that, you know, the person themselves is the matter,
but the shaping of that person, the practice and the diligence and the
um deliberateness that they practice whatever it is that makes them that final form that was always
within them it's kind of easier to regard ourselves as independent objects in the world that have
an independence from other people and other objects but so imagine the bookshelf in the
same way as the person having that independence of unfolding and revealing that doesn't exhaust
itself in the same way another person doesn't exhaust itself i can only learn so much in a
conversation about lucas of who lucas is there's always going to be something that withdraws from
my perception that doesn't reveal itself um the the bookshelf is the same way now i mean it's not
the same in that it doesn't have an interiority right we don't know it does we don't think it
does it doesn't think bookshelf thoughts but heidegger at least wants to get us i think as
develop a free relationship to the bookshelf to try to begin to regard things as they are apart
from us. So maybe to help us do this a bit more, he begins to talk about, I said he's really
conscious of the etymology of words, where they come from, and also just kind of the old practices
that we once had relating to those words. So he looks back to the Greek ideas of poesis,
or poesis or poesis
poesis, we'll say
the word is like poetry
is where it comes from
that's where you get poetry
poesis and physis
physical, right?
poesis and physis
these are both ways
of bringing forth
an independent object
into the world
that shines forth
that reveals something
that presences
they're both human practice
so poesis
they're both practices
they're both ways
of revealing of a thing
um and you you gave the idea of the sculptor revealing i mean that's a great example that's
a way in which something object reveals itself in the world um we're going to talk a little bit
uh about police let's all just get into that um we're considering the essence of technology we
began with the correct definition of technology as an instrument a means to an end um
in analyzing that heidegger finds that the cause is about bringing an object in the world that
shines forth, beams its presence, which is revealing a thing. This brings us to what's
important about that. So if we already have a correct definition, then what more do we need?
We want to get to the truth, though, so Heidegger says, and he looks at the root of truth as well.
Aletheia is the Greek word, one of the Greek words for truth, and that's lethe, which is
forgetting the river lethe, people might have heard of, was a river in Hades in myth,
where if you drank from it, you forgot your past life,
so you could be reincarnated anew or something like that.
So lethe, forgetting, and then A is like negation,
anormal, not normal.
So aletheia, the negation of forgetting, is what truth is.
Is the negation of forgetting remembering?
Remembering, but it's also embedded within that Greek word,
it also has the meaning of,
forgetting has the meaning of concealing.
And so Heidegger goes with that kind of etymological strand
and says it's unconcealing or revealing.
The truth is about revealing, removing from concealment.
So aletheia truth is about that.
So let's look at poesis then.
If poesis is the activity of bringing forth an object in the world
to reveal it, allow itself to begin this object,
to shine forth and reveal things about it,
it's different than physis.
So physis is the way that nature reveals itself.
A seed that you plant grows, it blossoms, it reveals in a way apart from human action.
I mean, we can be involved in that process, but it's not necessary.
Physus is a blossoming from inherent natural processes.
Poesis is poetry, again, we say the poetic making of the artist or craftsman who use
techne, which is art or craft, the activity of the craftsman to bring that object into
the world.
So physis, a natural bringing about of an object into the world so it can reveal itself.
Poesis, the poetic revealing, the poetic making through the artist or craftsman using techne, art or craft, their activity to bring something into the world.
And just to give an example so that kind of makes sense, techne for the Greeks was a form of knowing.
It's what the craftsman knows and how they come to know through their activity.
So the carpenter, through the techne of carpentry, the full art or skill of working with wood, they come to learn things about the wood.
The wood reveals itself to the carpenter in a way that whatever industrial process made this bookshelf did not reveal anything to the machines.
The carpenter learns about the qualities of the wood, how it splinters, what the grain is, what are good woods to use.
they learn through their techne as they engage in poesis the act of making and bringing something
into the world a lot of things the object reveals a lot to them so when you have a skill
you uncover or reveal many things through the operation of your skill the great chef knows a
lot of things about ingredients that we don't know about the ingredients even as we enjoy the final
dish um does that make sense as far as like poesis as a form of revealing and then physics as
different i guess so if physics is natural then poesis is unnatural
natural and unnatural or you could look at it that way just reminding ourselves of course that
humans are natural and heidegger's not gonna really die on that hill of saying it's unnatural
i guess the poesis would be natural only to humans and physics would be natural to
the world around yeah is there a through line for cause and effect i know i'm going backwards
just a little bit but is there a
is the effect always to save time
so we started off with technology as a means to an end and that's how we got to causation yeah
is the end always to save time.
So what do you mean by that?
So I have the combine to harvest wheat
because it saves time versus hand threshing.
I have the hammer to pound in nails
because it saves time versus hand shaping a peg to go in there I mean there are other benefits but the common
I guess what I'm looking at is like,
when we think about Bitcoin and we go back to like Bitcoin is time by Dr. Gigi,
then we, and we also pair that with, you know,
what is the only thing that we can out and make more of?
and technically we could make more bitcoin if we really wanted to but we can't make more time
and so we only have one truly finite resource um so i guess yeah i'm just curious if all of
technology has a common end yeah that's a great question we're talking about the essence of
technology so um we do want to know the answer to that question and that's kind of the direction of
this essay we're going to see what all of modern technology is oriented towards heidegger is going
to end up framing it a bit different than the saving of time but i think you could probably
cash it out in those terms and just to draw that line so technology as techne is a form of aletheia
so it is a form of truth it is a form of revealing of things in the world by bringing up the bookshelf
does reveal itself to us in certain ways.
I mean, I said it's limited, but it does reveal itself.
And so you're right to begin asking these questions.
Technology for Heidegger is a mode of revealing.
We're just going to see here in the question concerning technology,
the limitations of that revealing and kind of what it means
for how we should think about technology.
So we're questioning concerning the essence of technology.
we've arrived at technology as a mode of revealing as a form of poetic creation,
creation using art and craft or technique.
But Heidegger, what he's really considering in this essay is modern technology.
So that's kind of where we're going to go.
Modern technology, Heidegger says, reveals in a way that's different than the craftsperson,
than that carpenter we talked about, who reveals a table from wood or the sculptor
revealing the sculpture that's pregnant in the marble modern technology heidegger says is a
challenging revealing um we seek through modern technology not to reveal not as an expression of
techne not as the carpenter working with different types of wood learning the best way to express
that wood in the final product but only toward one ultimate end and this is what you're getting at
um for heidegger maybe not he doesn't frame it as to save time but i think you could again
to re-describe this in that way. He says, the challenging revealing of modern technology is to
demand energy from the thing that we're working, the technology operates on, in order to extract
and then store that energy. That's what all of modern technology is oriented towards for Heidegger.
I mean, and, you know, proof of work is as much about energy as time. So this is, you're right
to make that connection um we modern technology is a challenging revealing of objects by demanding
the energy from them extracting that and then storing that energy which is different than again
in the poetic revealing of the carpenter who learns in the technique that they use when they're
revealing the thing because again it's about extracting demanding isolating the attitude
toward the substance is different.
So the objects are now revealed
through a challenging revealing
that seeks only their energy.
The earth is revealed as a coal mining area.
The soil is revealed as a mineral deposit.
The peasant maybe used to be the steward of the land
who puts the seed in the soil,
that cultivates it,
they even rely on the physis of the seed,
this sort of natural growing in their cultivation.
Now we consider that an operation of nitrogen
and phosphates, and then we manipulate even the physis of the seed through GMO, through
genetic modification.
Mechanized agriculture is about challenging the soil, demanding from the soil that it
reveal itself as an energy source for us.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, the farmers that I used to work with in southwest Kansas referred to themselves
as water miners.
Yeah, that's such a modern technological way of regarding oneself.
And it's just, you're right, you know, it's just an equation. If I take eight tons of biomass off, then I need to replace eight tons of biomass. And, you know, if I take 300 pounds of nitrogen off, I need to replace 300 pounds of nitrogen. So that makes perfect sense in this.
yeah yeah and calculation is a key part the kind of reduction to doing a calculation regarding
things um so modern technology uses a challenging revealing to draw forth energy and then store that
energy to extract and store and then use that stored energy in further cycles of extraction
and storing talk one second so he was writing this during the 40s right this is that this is
His career spans the 30s through the 40s, maybe in the 50s.
And this is after World War II, this is.
Yeah.
So he was living through a time not dissimilar to the time that we are living through, which would have been a rapid shifting of technology.
you know going from trains to jet engines going from horses to cars yeah going from
newspapers to radio to television um the all of this modern and especially you know the the
the henry ford system of you know this is the factory here's the raw materials and outcome the
widgets and everything in it is an equation so yeah i guess i wanted to make sure so we're framing
that because that's what he is calling modern technology i assume modern for him right yeah
modern for him but also modern like the modern technology at that time i think he would say
share something with the modern technology of today the radio which is something that he's
reacting against is comparable to the internet right yeah or tiktok yeah yeah exactly so yeah
just to think about you know the time frame the 40s and the 50s that was the fastest
fastest evolution of technology ever and then we really kind of went dead for about 75 80 years like
we've not innovated very much at all we've iterated but we haven't innovated and today
we're now innovating the car may be replaced by the autonomous quadcopter and the jet may be
replaced by the rocket um or perhaps some other level of physics um and so yeah i think it's i
just think it's a prescient um it's a timely thing to consider because he he was living through
a pace of technological evolution not dissimilar to the one that we are currently living in yeah
that our parents really didn't feel i mean they they certainly felt change but not in the not in
not at the pace that we see it.
Yeah.
No, it's a very timely essay.
The only note,
it's helpful to, of course,
see why it's timely for us,
just as it was for Heidegger.
He's living through times of change.
We're living through times of change.
But that's the key part,
not the specific technologies.
Again, the essence of technology
doesn't depend on
whether it's the radio
versus the internet.
It depends on
what these things share
to get an idea of the essence.
So modern technology, a challenging, revealing, demanding to draw forth energy from the thing upon which it works to then store.
But he also says that is a revealing.
That is a revealing of some sort of truth.
It may be different than a poetic revealing through technique that respects physics.
Like this is also another example I want to get because I love this one.
I'm reading Wes Jackson, the founder of the Land Institute in Salina.
He wrote a collection of essays.
But he talks about Native Americans used to, when they were harvesting the grain, they would store it both from the small heads and the large heads.
And they would do this kind of based on a mythical belief that they shouldn't discriminate amongst God's creations.
But this had kind of secondary side effects of like preserving genetic diversity.
and through their then poesis of stewarding their grain production in this way they reveal kind of
a respect for the dignity of the underlying thing the seed thinking it's a thing of the gods they
reveal kind of a durability which we call genetic diversity because we reduce it to kind of
calculation scientific thinking but for them it just revealed that the thing was able to be used
over and over again modern technology though a challenging revealing to extract energy reveals
something different. What does it reveal? This is a big point for Heidegger. So it's kind of the next
point. It reveals reality objects around us as standing reserve. So modern technology orders
the entire world, all objects as standing reserve, as things that are on call for our use without any
other meaning or significance. When you were accounting objects at the beginning, the cup
cupping, the bookshelf bookshelf thing, that's standing reserve. These things are there for us.
We create all of these things because they have utility for our purposes.
Modern technology revealing a standing reserve in which objects cease as things in themselves with an active presencing with a shining forth of their own being and are now, again, raw commodities that we can recycle, not recycle, but store and use, set aside for further use, be on call.
Everything about them otherwise is concealed.
the wood at the trees and maybe for the lumberjacks of yore they saw the whole forest they saw it as
something we maintained they harvested trees that were good for the purpose of being converted into
furniture or fuel or something like that now wood becomes a raw commodity it's the cellulose you
can extract to make paper and to enter that paper into a circle of production to produce energy
so now we look at all of the world around us as something to be extracted from as standing reserve
um and in doing so we kill the essence and yes and he's going to say not only do we kill
the essence of the thing fully because we don't allow it to presence itself we damage our own
essence our human essence is kind of where he's going to go um this another for a word on top of
this, Heidegger is kind of constructing a vocabulary to help us see the world anew because
it's so easy when you talk about modern technology to slip into the common ways of regarding it,
which again, all of the objects fall comfortably in place by receding away from our perception as
only things we use them for. But to get objects to presence, to shine forth again, we need kind
of a new frame, a new way of looking at them. So the particular mindset, the call to action that we
feel to order the world as standing reserve through modern technology, Heidegger calls that
enframement, which is that it's a human mindset of seeing the world through the lens of modern
technology, which we're all kind of default in, I think, enframement, to see the world as standing
reserve as resources for our extraction. Enframement comes from the German word gestel,
which actually means bookshelf. So a good metaphor again, that the bookshelf in framing the world is
about placing things on shelf for further use, extracting their resources and energy, and then
we place it there so that when we need it, we come back, the standing reserve is on call, and we can
use it for our purposes again. So Heidegger says, the challenging revealing in which the world is
seen as something to be extracted for standing reserve, that whole mindset is called enframement.
so you can now have a word to try to get outside of once you name the thing we now at least have a
bit of a handle on we have some traction on our modern mindset we can call it in frame and frame
it here's where we've arrived manifest the essence of modern technology we understand technology
again not by looking at individual pieces of modern technology the radio the um the car but
by considering the mindset we have in relation to it.
That's something that's shared between the radio and the internet
is the mindset that it imbues or causes us to have in relation to us,
the call to action it gives us to continue ordering things for our use.
Do you think that that makes sense,
like in-frame it as a mindset that provokes us
and calls us to action to order?
Is in-frame a subset of perspective?
um and can you get outside of in framement to have a perspective that is not in framing
yes according to heidegger that's where he's going to go with his essay it's going to be
you know we're going to ask that question how do we get out get outside of in framing
perspective is a good way to looking at it i was trying to in i was trying to kind of
pull that from heidegger too like what is in framing i use the word mindset
he actually calls it like a calling forth it calls us to do something um which would be like
a purpose it's a purpose maybe you could say it's um but a purpose that is provoking us to do things
in a certain way look at the world in a certain way it's like a purpose that pushes us so that's
what i'm wondering is there does there exist does there exist a perspective that is not an
enframement yes okay and just to give it the so that's what you talk does that mean does that mean
that so if i escape my enframement and instead i view the cup so this is i guess this is where
i feel like i'm starting to uh humanize all the things around me um where i don't frame the cup
as serving a purpose i i have a relationship with the cup and i um and i view myself in harmony
with the cup and i don't look at the deer as a source of food i look at the deer as um
well i guess perhaps this is just a you look at everything as a oneness maybe you begin to recall
um maybe religious perceptions of things religion would be another mindset another alternative way
but to give a practical example or to give what example we've already talked about
And framing is that challenging revealing of modern technology that provokes us to want to see things as the resources we can extract from them.
But he's already talked about poesis.
That's another form of revealing.
Again, the carpenter reveals things from the wood without a challenging revealing.
He doesn't challenge the wood to give up its essence by becoming only a resource to be used.
The carpenter has to work with the wood.
They have to understand the qualities of the different woods.
The limitations.
The constraints.
Yeah, definitely.
Was Heidegger religious?
Do we know?
I would assume, I mean, this is probably an obvious answer to this question.
I would assume he was.
I just don't know enough about him.
He famously kind of had a strong relationship with nature.
He would go out into the black forest.
He had a small cabin there, and he would go out and live close to the land, and that's where he would do his thinking and his writing.
And I don't know his explicit religious beliefs, but I would very much assume so.
And, yeah, so we began questioning a certain technology.
Heidegger says the essence of technology is nothing technological, whether it's this call to action, this mindset of enframing.
That's the thing that unites all these different things to reveal the world of standing reserves, raw materials.
You gave a great example.
We were talking about this before.
we've started filming, what did Elon say about the end state of technology?
That, you know, we're coming to a world where you'll never have to do anything more than think
about something and may not even need to think about it in order to have it.
Yes.
And that basically anything that you could want would appear possibly before you even want it.
And my concern with that is that having read the Dopamine Nation book by Anna Limbke and viewing our state of mind and our ability to interact with the world in a positive way as this seesaw between pain and pleasure, and pain being the craving, pain being the wanting, and pleasure being the seeking, pleasure being the doing.
Yeah. Um, then it seems to me that should we achieve that Elon-esque end state of
whatever I want appears before I even want it. And I feel as though that seesaw of pain and pleasure
would be permanently dumped to the pain side.
Yeah. And I just love that example. Cause that's like, I see that as the total in state, total
inframing mindset total capture by inframing if technology on the common correct definition
is an instrument to get us the thing that we want a means to an end this is just like elon taking
that a hundred percent saying you just think the cause and the effect appears and then at that point
inframing is absolute and it's the the horror the dystopia if i didn't even capture this we've
talked about before if the effect appears for the cause we if you're saying we get the thing before
we want it if the algorithm can detect that we have an incipient want forming in us by habits
and and all the data it has then in framing maybe becomes absolute and captures us perfectly because
we don't even see that we're willing it that ability to see it heidegger is going to say
at least places us outside of it so that's a horror story that maybe you know goes beyond
even Heidegger if we can, if one's just outside before we have them.
You know, this is the, this is what we used to feel as such an unnatural thing of, you
and I talked about baseball and then I opened up Netflix and there was a baseball movie
in the queue and I opened up Amazon and there were baseball cards that were suggested to
me, et cetera, et cetera.
where we realized that there was something that was taking what we were just ruminating on even
and placing it before us.
Yeah.
And feeling, at least at the beginning, feeling very violated by that.
That sense of violation is a good feeling because that is what gets you out of Enframed.
We'll get there.
Handless handle one objection people might have.
This is what Heidegger handles, and we talked about this too.
one objection might be no modern technology is not a form of reveal a challenging reveal
to extract resources instead modern technology is itself revealed by pure science i mean
this is the um you might say the bill nye yay science point of view where you know we have
scientific theories and then those scientific theories challenge us to reveal things so we
invent technology to better see the world or something like that um but so heidegger just says
yeah so scientific theories are part of the challenging fourth process they are revealing
the world that we're asking it to reveal basically we come up with new scientific theories to better
explain the world in terms of its underlying units like atoms and molecules to break it down right
we don't see the deer we see the molecules and the physics of it which then allow us to more easier
extract the meat or what we want from it.
So science, modern science, actually is a part of this challenging fourth process to
help us order the world as standing reserve.
It happens first as scientific theory.
That scientific theory is then used to help us break down the world into isolatable elements which we can demand challenge manipulate and exploit as standing reserve
It's I guess what does that seem like how science operates to you?
Because he even says, like, if you want to know and this may be obvious, but you want to know what the world's going to look like in the future.
Look at the scientific theories of today and see how they're breaking down the world, because that's the world we're going to build from them.
We have both of those things.
I just saw a rubric earlier today of science for science sake, engineering for engineering sake, engineering for the sake of science and science for the sake of engineering.
And the point of that rubric was to say that science for the sake of engineering pushes us forward and moves us to create a solar panel that can work in space because we need to power a satellite in space.
Yeah.
that serves the purpose of having, you know, internet across the world or whatever.
Engineering for the sake of science causes us to build a large hadron collider, a particle
reactor, because we're like, I don't know what would happen. Like, that's the question. And it's
like, we're not, we're not trying to build a bridge. We're not, there's no purpose of
finding out what happens other than to find out what happens.
And then be like, well, when we get there, we'll figure it out.
Yeah.
And so I, I would say that.
I think Heidegger was, I think he would place that.
They both occur.
I would, yeah, I can see that point, but I think Heidegger would place even science for
science's sake as.
Well, science for science's sake is just like, it's all theoretical.
There's nothing.
We're never, we're never taking the theory and putting it into the world.
were just mind masturbating.
So I think Heidegger would disagree and say,
that's a scientific theory we're placing on call
for future use to order the world.
Scientific theory, science is inherently about order.
It's about how we order things in a very empirical way.
And I'll just back up on to make one point.
Heidegger's not trying to demonize modern technology.
So he's not a total luddite.
He's not Ted Kaczynski.
I mean, he wants us, at the end, to be able to get outside of in framing, but he lived with modern technologies that he used, and he doesn't, again, want us to demonize technology.
That's like the two poles that he's trying to exist between.
One is total, just capture by in frame it, and the other is like Ted Kaczynski, Ludi, demonization of technology.
He's not going there, so he's somewhere in the middle there.
And this is, we'll get right to the question I was forestalling earlier that you brought up.
Is the enframing inevitable? Can we escape enframement? Are we condemned to look at the world as something to be ordered to extract resources from it, place it on call as standing reserved? Are we trapped by the essence of modern technology?
so this brings us back to the beginning of the essay heidegger says we're questioning concerning
technology in order to establish a free relationship to it that free relationship
is that escape from capture by enframement that ability to get out of a mindset and freely regard
the things around us in their objecthood as apart from things to be extracted but then i mean that's
the question is free relationship even possible to the world and that kind of brings up the question
of free will um which is a perennial philosophical issue heidegger sidesteps that or maybe just
doesn't think that that's a relevant question um he wants us to rethink being free in a different
way and i love this part so um he's not going to talk about free will but kind of free within space
so freedom in the sense of being free from obstruction the clearing in the woods is free
of trees that type of freedom is what he's going to talk about here free and in talking about this
heidegger kind of begins to talk in almost a mystical pitch in the essay and this will give
us i'm going to read a little portion here give you a taste of his prose while also again in my
estimation this is kind of the most mystical that he sounds he says freedom is that which conceals
in a way that opens to light, in who's clearing their shimmers that veil that covers what comes
to presence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils. So that's a lot. There's a lot to
unpack on that. And I want to walk through that by helping us visualize it, because this is how I
really think one of the best ways to really truly understand philosophy is to do it visually. Yes,
you want to? I was just going to, can I take a shot in the dark?
Go shot in the dark. Shoot. Is freedom then looking at social media as
the thing which veils community by offering connection?
Yeah. It hides, it hides community. Yes. We lose community, but to look at it from that
perspective and to say this thing promising this this thing that offers what is a necessary
condition for community which is connection right is also not only not sufficient for community
it is in direct opposition to community which is that it is it's hiding community
Yeah.
Behind the veil of connection.
You enter the clearing in the woods and there sits that network which promises, which reveals to you the possibility of connection.
But there's a veil over its heart, which is the lack of actual community.
Yeah.
And that's a perfect example.
And so again, to help visualize this.
So close your eyes, Lucas.
And anybody who's watching, close your eyes, even if you're driving.
It's that important.
So it's hard to process the language when you hear from Heinegger.
We're going to walk through this as a literal kind of visualization.
So Lucas, you're walking through a dark forest and there's only the path forward.
That's the way you are on.
You're on the way through this dark forest.
On both sides of the way that you're on, it's concealed in darkness and foliage.
not only concealed, but it's so tangled and dark that you can't extricate even a particular plant
or tree from it. It's just like foliage obscuring the presence of foliage, that dark. So you're on
this way forward in this forest. Then suddenly you burst into a forest clearing that's free of trees.
Sunlight streams down into an open space, maybe the size of a basketball court. You enter into
this freedom this free space there in the middle of this free space in the middle of the woods
stands a shimmering veiled figure a human figure shimmering shining forth but veiled a person
so you can't see their face so that's the process a kind of an imagination visualization of that
passage that I read of a free space in which a thing reveals itself shimmering forth in its own
essence, but which is also still veiled in some essential way. So you can open your eyes if you
choose to. So what is the point of that? And you've actually, we already jumped the gun on that,
because I think the internet one's a good thing. Social media is in that clearing,
and yet it still has a veil on it. It's withholding part of its essence. The key,
the clearing is open it's a space of revealing that is always free the space of revealing is a
free space but there's also always a call that mindset you call it a perspective maybe
the in framing when you enter that free space of revealing and framing is one way that that
happens you enter the clearing you regard the veiled figure as a resource perhaps someone you
can ask for directions to get out of the forest as someone you need to protect yourself against
right who are they you regard them um in their relation to you from an framing mindset in an
instrumental means and sort of way that's a form of call uh to to reveal of the object as you enter
the clearing that free space poesis or poetic revealing is another way perhaps this figure
will be then a source of inspiration or discovery for your particular techne or skill if you are a
When you enter that free space of revealing, the mindset, perspective, the call that you have is going to kind of dictate what you see in that shimmering image, what you allow that image to show you.
And the most importantly, some ways, some calls, some mindset, to quote Heidegger, lets the veil appear as what veils.
That's a really important part because we want to get out of enframement.
We want to be able to see the limitations of it.
You want to see the veil.
The veil is always going to be there in some way.
Even for the person with a particular techne, they're only going to see it from their perspective or mindset.
It's not going to reveal or exhaust itself fully.
Every human will appear to you veiled because there's always something in them.
Every object is also always veiled with some aspect of its essence because there's always something about it.
We don't fully exhaust in our interaction with it.
we can spend a lifetime
like regarding a coffee cup
and never fully discern
its full essence
without like becoming the cup
or something like that.
The thing always withdraws
something of itself.
And the key in that
is just to recognize the withdrawal,
to recognize the veil,
to see the limitations,
your own blinders in a sense.
Does that make sense?
What I'm thinking about is
that I
I should yearn to
I should learn
I should look upon the veil
not
as
the thing
occluding me
from seeing
what is behind it
but I should look upon the veil
only as a veil
that
what is important is not what is behind but what is important is that there is a veil
but i'm not sure yeah where i'm going with that no you're revealing concealment in a sense like
truth is aletheia to remove from concealment but you can't always fully or you can ever you can't
ever remove something fully from concealment you can't ever fully know something but the point is
to reveal to yourself the aspect of concealment which in frame it doesn't allow us to do i would
Take it quick.
Yeah.
Do you remember when texting came about?
Like, do you remember like...
The decisive moment, I don't know if I remember that,
but I don't know if I have some key to that.
I mean, I just remember being in college
and it was like having the old Nokia brick phone.
Yeah.
And it wasn't Verizon.
It was Altel at the time before they got bought by Verizon.
And they gave, I think they gave everybody like three months
or a month of free texting or something like that.
And then after that, it was...
a dime text or something like that. It was, you know, like to consider today, it's insane.
But I remember thinking when it first came out, like, this is absurd. Like,
all I'm doing is emailing someone and I'm being charged to email them.
And why would I ever want to email someone who I can call? And it turns out I was completely
wrong about that thing yeah but it is you know how many people did you talk to today
today is a question that is answered by how many people did i text
as opposed to how many people did i talk to yeah talk talk um you see the etymology of the word
changing with talk it once meant orally verbalizing something and now it does mean sending an electronic
transmission i talked to them a day i sent them a text yeah but i don't know why that popped up
but just to think about yeah um and you don't see that at the moment i guess i didn't have a
perception of it as something that was going to capture and change the way i thought about
how i was talking to other people i remember thinking of the cell phone maybe not texting but
um you'd be out in the tractor in the age before cell phones and you were at the mercy of somebody
coming to get you or if something broke down of like walking to go get help or something like that
but when you had the telephone telephone the cell phone the game changed it was like this is so nice
but it changed in a way that i think makes people more reckless i think that i am so i have a cell
phone in my vehicle if i get into an accident i can call for help but having the cell phone in my
vehicle we know improves my chances of having an accident like a hundredfold yeah um so it
the thing that it purports to save you from may well be permission to do the thing that
the to do the thing from which you need saved yeah no i'm also reading right now uh feminism
against progress by mary harrington and she calls that progress through theology the belief that all
things we think that all things are good exactly because we don't reckon all the consequences that
we don't see them bring about oh the cell phone is good because of all these reasons but then
the increased accidents is kind of just like we don't really focus on that yeah like you it's like
you know you think that you're making your teenager safer by giving them a cell phone
when they go drive because they can call you for help yet what you're doing is you're
putting beneath them a, uh, a fail stop that says, oh, you can take more risk. You can not
consider yourself to be responsible because now I'm here, uh, a tap away to be that,
to be that savior for you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I think about that. Like I think about,
when I was in high school one time, I got, I blew a tire. I had to change a tire. I didn't have a
jack and i ended up figuring it out like yeah i walked like a mile and found a fence post and then
i found like a brick or something i can't remember i don't even remember how i did it but i changed a
tire in the middle of nowhere without you know the ability to to jack up the vehicle and what would
i have done otherwise well i would have called somebody and sat there you would not have learned
those things along the way that's like the techne of the craftsmen they're learning things constantly
the carpenter is constantly learning things as they get things done but when things are got done
for you by technology you don't learn all the things on the way you might learn i wouldn't
have revealed that self-sufficiency as well that too i would have i would have yeah which was always
there yeah yeah it would have remained concealed yeah that's the inframing so and that's where
goes right now, what are the dangers of inframing? That's one of them right there,
what it reveals from us about ourselves maybe. And there's also the danger, so I'll kind of
rail off some of these, the danger that man will stop seeing objects and see only standing reserve
and be concerned only with ordering that standing reserve for further use. And the danger then is
that we come to see ourselves as standing reserve, right? Heidegger uses the phrase human resources,
which is now a very common phrase, verbiage.
Maybe it was new at the time.
We come to see ourselves as standing reserved as resources to be used by others,
others to be used as resources by us, as us.
He also notes, when all is revealed as cause and effect through technology,
which regards things in that way, everything, even God, can lose its mystery.
God becomes the first cause.
I mean, that's even some theologians begin to talk about God as like the first mover.
and that's kind of very banal and non-mysterious way to regard a god you don't look at god in the
full mystery of what god is you only look at it like oh the world is cause and effect technology
shows me this god is the first cause and you talk about god this very um logical and kind of sterile
way the final turn then we kind of mentioned this earlier man comes to encounter only him or herself
just encounter them as like man or resource,
but not in their essence.
We've perhaps come to fail to see
in framing as a frame, as a claim,
as a specific call speaking to us
and asking us to view the world in a certain way.
And so lose the ability to listen to other calls
that might provoke us to see the world
in different ways, other frames.
The threat of technology is not,
the real threat of technology, Heidegger says,
is not like that robot apocalypse where like terminators come after us and shoot us it's not
death by robot dogs not death of the body but the death of our essence yeah the the inability to
reveal the world to ourselves by stepping outside of a frame in which we can fully see the world
see god in the world see the world as independent of us yeah the way that i have experienced this
is as I've gotten, I won't even say that as I've gotten older, I would say that as I have become
more dependent upon technology, I have become less and less able to view myself as the star of
the movie that I, you know, you're, you're 16 years old or you're 14 or you're eight or you're
20 or whatever, however old you may be. And one thing happens that is a win and it propels you
forward. I, you know, I styled my hair in a different way and it made me feel good about
myself. That was a win. Um, or I, um, you know, I threw, threw trash over my shoulder and got it
into the trash can on, you know, on a, on a bounce off the wall. That was a, that was a perfect shot.
It's like these things that lift you up and they push you, they, the essence is that you're,
you're living in a movie, that you are the main character. And I feel that technology
as it relates to the ever-present social media ever-present screens yeah that it has now become
the main player it has now become the star yeah and we feel more like this is the npc
this is the non-player character right we see ourselves maybe as only economic units we go
work get a paycheck spend that paycheck to consume like that's the name of the story that's
the only story there is there's no movie where you do something interesting there's no mystery
to you or me humans are not possessors of infinite worth there's nothing infinite about a human they're
this much flesh and blood they're that much economic production capability there's no mystery
there and so that's kind of the inframing mindset towards another person you look at a person and
think what can they do for me yeah this is we i think we had this conversation about like
the dating apps are the stand it's a standing reserve right it's great example of that it's
nothing more than odds you go back to the well yeah you know drop in the line and it's a menu
everybody's a menu item they're describing themselves in the terms that they think they
need to describe themselves because that's the way you frame yourself within a dating app to be
legible to other people it makes you tasty on the menu yeah you put yourself out there as standing
reserve on call for other people yeah yeah um so that the those are the the dangers of enframement um again he not demonizing technology but the benefits of technology modern technology are manifest This essay is not about them Those are the dangers
Within that danger, there's also a saving power, Heidegger thinks.
Enframing is a danger because it threatens, again, to sweep us away from believing or sweep us into believing that all unconcealment is simply as revealing things to be ordered a standing reserve.
So we lose all the mystery, all the other ways of seeing.
Within that danger, we can also be saved. If we begin to pay heed to how technology is revealing things to us, we then can have the capacity to be conscious of our own in framing and sort of consciously regard things differently.
We can do this, be conscious of in framing by not being enthralled by particular technologies, but remain cognizant of the essence of technology that is being revealed to us.
stop seeing technology only as an instrument, only neutrally, agnostically, as a tool to get
something done, but begin to regard, maybe with suspicion, any new technology, not just like,
when an indigenous tribe receives a bottle of Coca-Cola, they have no inkling of the world
that's being unleashed on them, right? And we're the same way. We're all indigenous peoples. When
a new technology is given to us we need to look at that as like potentially black magic that could
have some you know wreak some dire effect upon us this is jonathan height um linking the
downfall of the experience of of life of modern modern females to the advent of the front-facing
camera right where these technologies this opened all so normal it's a normal scene being like how
happy this had this effect on us that's like ontological and scope affect our essence yeah
we're yeah you you look at it oh this is great it's like having a it's having like having a live
mirror yeah how could that go wrong how could that ever go wrong and then all of a sudden that live
mirror becomes a scoreboard yeah on social media where you are offering yourself up to be judged
yeah um and then basing your self-worth upon that yeah and you mentioned this earlier there's a sense
of violation with a lot of these technologies and this again is actually a good thing like in framing
endangers our relation to truth because it conceals the fact of concealment of truth of
what we could know about ourselves in the world um it brings us into this frenzied ordering but
that endangering if we're if we have that feeling then we can like begin to look at technology
it's not something wrong with us it's not like i'm i feel shitty and bad it's not an internal
characteristic or some defect it's you know it's an aspect of the way the world has changed
that our humanity our evolved cultural practices and biology was not ready for
so yeah that that violation could help us understand the framework in and to regard
like we need to get out of it and understand that the truth is out there to be revealed in
different ways and simply ordering as reserves yeah to this day there has never been a time in
my life when i have felt more violated than when itunes put the new youtube album on everyone's
iphone yeah that was a thing and you had no choice in that and the the comparison it's like
it would be like someone breaking into your house yeah to leave a gift uh-huh and they expect you
to appreciate the gift and not consider that they broke into your house that's a good and then and
And then to also reveal that, oh, they didn't break into the house.
They have their own key.
You know, and so many update code, like Microsoft pushed updates are that way.
All the things that you liked about the prior version are gone.
It's like, I didn't sign up.
I probably did sign up.
I probably clicked a box somewhere.
But and that's like the interesting way in which, I mean, Bitcoin is technology, but
technologies are forms of revealing.
They reveal truth.
It reveals the way that the fiat machinery was working.
It reveals a violation that we didn't know how to describe before.
And so looking at Bitcoin as a form of technology, that reveals something.
You know, it reveals a latent sense of violation that we can now find and peg to a source.
But it also reveals something about ourselves, too.
You know, you're not a toxic Bitcoin maxi.
You're just an asshole who figured out money.
Yeah, that's a good description.
Yeah.
Yeah. And so we read James Polis is human forever. I mean, obviously, like right in line with this about preserving our humanity, how Bitcoin is one way we can help do that. In that book, he talks about there being kind of a first generation after COVID that lacks memory.
And I thought about this when reading this, that the value of people who've matured a bit and have wisdom and have seen technology over time, you kind of have some insight into the essence of technology.
And so like we people who were before the Internet, before the cell phone, have important stories to tell about people who grow up with that in frame that just being they already they're born seeing the world through the lens of the Internet and the cell phone.
There's no other world. And you can help people get out of the frame. And we can maybe ourselves get out of the frame by talking to our elders, too. Right. Like that storehouse of human wisdom is a very important resource. It's kind of, I think, overlooked in a digital age.
Yeah, I stopped and saw my grandmother on the way back. And she told a story just about there was a snowstorm coming in. And she talked about, you know, when she was growing up, they never, ever canceled school. There's just no such thing as canceling school.
when there was a, when there was a blizzard and, and by the way, like back then they would have
huge blizzards, like not, you know, we got three inches in Kansas city and it shut the whole town
down for a weekend. They would get 36 inches and they would walk to school and the teacher would
walk to school and then stay at the house of the family that lived closest so that they could have
school again the next day. And the reason I thought about that is because like two days after that,
I, I congratulated myself on walking to the gym two and a half miles in bitter cold, you know,
and it was like, oh, this is an achievement. It's like, that's not an achievement. Like that was
just as a Tuesday, um, you know, for, for that. And you framed this, uh, the, like the, the public
use of a cell phone. Should you be able to frame that in your mind as masturbating in public?
Yeah. You know, like I, I left my phone when I worked out today and I just, I was up on a stair
climber and I was just looking around and I was like, everybody is masturbating. Everyone around
me. And I knew that it wasn't like that when I started working out, you know, 10 years ago or
12 years ago. I'm glad you bring that example up. I think there are little, so in frame,
one of the ways being captured by it, I think, is we begin to regard all these practices as normal
and natural because everybody's doing them. And so if we can adopt mental habits where we look at
things anew, it's kind of what Heidegger does by giving us new terminology and frame them. We now
have a new tool cognitively to begin to extricate ourselves from capture. Another one of those is,
like you said, if you mentally, like say, every time I see someone in public on a cell phone,
I'm going to consider that as having the same social sanction of shame as if they were
masturbating in public and it's not i don't think this is a crude thing because i do look at it as
like a closed loop of desire somebody is indulging in there's a incurvatus in say is a latin phrase i
think kind of augustine saint augustine i think originated it the idea is people kind of curved
inward on themselves in a self-centered state focusing on their own desires rather than god
and others and the cell phone i mean it kind of does that when people are on that in public
Like we should see that as antisocial.
And so curved in physically too.
Exactly.
And I've got a loop.
Just imagine them as a loop, right?
Just all, they're a circuit that's separated from everybody else, focusing on their fulfillment
of their own desires in a sort of mass, but not masturbatory way.
And like, so what are some, I was thinking about this.
What are some other mental hacks we can do to like get out of and frame it?
Another one I've been doing myself is regarding all short form content as inherently propaganda.
So to say anything that is a short video, a tweet lacks context, right?
And that's inherently propagandistic.
If you have only the video of something happening in the moment without all of the events around
it, you only have what somebody is showing you.
So anytime you see a video, don't share it.
Try to figure out if you're going to explore it, like what the deep context is.
So then this maybe inoculates us against scrolling through feeds.
don't retweet, retweet, retweet, retweet, retweet, or repost whatever you do on Instagram and retik
talk, whatever you do there. Maybe we don't share stuff. We say propaganda, propaganda, propaganda.
So again, just a mental hack. And another one, regard all memes, all the mimetic phrases you see,
the repeated phrases people use in Twitter or wherever as hypnotism. These are like ways to
get us all to think the same way like sodium pentothal or whatever they're ways to like
prevent you from thinking a different way about a thing because there's a track laid in your mind
where you say the meme and then you seed your mind to others or chemicalize it into blankness right
through this um as i was walking today i pictured myself like pulling out weeds like that's what
those things are they're weeds in your mind and every time you're in public or talking to somebody
else and you're about to say a meme like based or something like that instead of saying based say
what's a synonym for what i'm trying to say and then rephrase it in your own words and see what
comes out see if you have an original thought by removing the hypnotism of the mean for a mental
structure yeah yeah picking up the cell phone too like just the act of picking up the cell phone
without having anything.
Checking it a million times a day.
Is just like having the old school rotary phone
and just going up, going to pick it up.
Well, just going, it's not ringing.
It's like, yeah, it's the idea of picking up the phone.
It has it wrong.
And you're just picking it up and you're listening for nothing.
Yeah.
And then you're setting it back down.
Yeah.
So see if you can create your own mental hacks
to like prevent yourself from subconsciously falling into like inframing behaviors.
I like the meme, I like the memetic, the memetic one, because we, we commonly view those memes
as uniting.
Yeah, and they are, that's exactly what they are.
Yeah.
The niters is the tribe.
They're uniting in a way that obliterates independent thought.
Absolutely.
And it creates mass migration towards one ideology.
And this is why, you know, we can throw everything back to it,
but this is why the average guy became a Nazi in Germany.
It was because the power of that pulled everyone together.
Yeah.
Not because they can't, you know, 99.9% of those people would not have come to that on their own.
Some sort of meme.
And another one, even within the Bitcoin community, if you're thinking of retweeting something and just attaching Bitcoin fixes this, that's a meme. Instead of saying Bitcoin fixes this, think to yourself, how does Bitcoin fix this? What's the process by which Bitcoin gets rid of this harmful social practice or like technological abomination that I'm tweeting about?
and so instead of just doing the me think for yourself and like that's i do like i'm in guilt
as everybody else right you do it we all do it it's easy it's socially gratifying because we're
participating in community like you say but it's also if you get outside of it words appear in your
mind that are your own or that are gods and not the hypnotism of the community so yeah um so that's
one saving power maybe those little cognitive hacks can get us out of and frame it a big one
is another one for heidegger is art so we talked about poesis and throughout this essay in doing
his philosophical heavy lifting um heidegger quotes and builds from the words of poets he's
using poetry to do some heavy lifting here um and he quotes holderland saying poetically dwells man
upon this earth as kind of how we should live in art as a way to get out of enfraignment live
poetically in a sense of poesis in engaging in activities with techne in the sense of revealing
something about the thing and not just reveal revealing the thing as commodity as raw materials
as standing reserve um in the more ancient sense art as techne was about bringing out like the
presence of the gods, a dialogue with the divine and human destinies. It was about yielding a truth.
Art was about truth. Aletheia, about revealing, not about aesthetic pleasure, not about even not
a cultural activity. We think of, there's a thing now we call the artist. That's a ridiculous thing.
We're all artists. We're all in the art of being right now. Like we're engaging in that art,
whether you think you are or not we all need to as holden says dwell poetically on this earth
by living outside of and framing and finding our own like drawing our own revelations from the
objects around us letting them rather not draw them don't challenge them forth but let the object
shine forth and see if you find the presence of the gods right in the shimmer of the light
on the top of the water or something i have nothing to add to that i was drawing a picture
so this is actually doing my i was doing art you were inspiring my art so the saving power of art
this is the last thing i have here too for the notes um the saving power of art becomes more
apparent as we go deeper into and frame oh you talked about this kind of the unease that we feel
um reveals to us the mystery maybe we once fell in the kind of presence of really good art if
nothing else you had you had your childhood when we all lived poetically when the world was
mysterious there were gods everywhere you didn't know how things worked you regarded everything
with astonishment you were constantly interrogating what why why why why you know so yeah the child
yeah i ask why nine times in a row yeah um yeah that's that's my notes that's a walk a romp
through the question concerning technology uh let's maybe what even before we kind of close on
the essay but like what's the relevance to bitcoin like i don't know where he was casing and maybe
not where casing is going to go with this but what does this provoke in you regarding bitcoin
the what ardian uh ardian tola um an albanian philosopher technologist developer on bitcoin
incredible this incredible mind thinking in the bitcoin space the incredible one-liner that he
dropped to us that i think both of us have kind of been pondering for a while now it's bitcoin is
the enemy and putting it to guests throwing it at them too yeah and so yeah i mean just like
just like facebook is the enemy or x is the enemy or 24-hour news coverage is the enemy yeah you
know there is something about bitcoin that is the enemy which is that with facebook we focus on
connection and we lack community with bitcoin we focus on wealth and we lack yeah i don't know
growth we like community whatever we lack everything else you know like you become
hyper focused upon one thing that if the world adopts this that all the problems are solved
yet you're trying to press pause on your own problems on the problems of the people around you
that, yes, they would be solved if they would just adopt Bitcoin,
but actually they wouldn't.
You know, like, it's not going to.
And if you're thinking, you know, I have stored my Bitcoin
so I can help my family when I'm rich,
I'm going to sell you for the health, help them now.
Like what people need is more, is not,
you think you can make all the problems go away
if you have enough money.
And maybe that's certainly true for many problems,
but what many people need is like presence.
Yeah, just think you've got someone in front of you drowning.
Yeah.
And you're standing on the shore and you're saying, hey, I've got a life preserver over here.
And as soon as it's filled with air, you'll be able to get it and I'll pull you out.
And they're like, well, you can swim.
Like, help me out, bro.
Yeah.
Bitcoin is a means of exchange, not just a store of value.
Use it.
Yeah.
So Bitcoin is modern technology, though.
Heidegger says modern technology challenges forth a call that we view all things as what we can extract from them in the form of resources.
Does Bitcoin cause us to view the world as standing reserve?
We can extract energy from it to get up the hash rate.
We can mine Bitcoin for ourselves and hold it as a standing reserve for later use.
I mean, is it within like that's the inframing mindset, I guess.
How many people now look at the entire world as they're Bitcoiners and they look at the entire world as a means to get more Bitcoin?
Yeah.
You know, they look at it as a standing reserve of Bitcoin.
You know, and that's, I think, why what brought me into Bitcoin, Alex Gladstein, it's kind of outside of the inframing mindset because it is Bitcoin is not just a tool to extract energy or, you know, wealth or whatever.
It's a way that people can live within oppressive regimes, gain a sort of equality with people who live within monetary systems that aren't entirely wrecked.
And so there are ways to regard Bitcoin outside of that in framing mindset, I think.
Yeah. Yeah. So when I come to the clearing in the path and there stands the shimmering glowing figure that is being and the veil and that shimmering glowing figure is Bitcoin.
What is what is the veil veil?
Yeah, that's a good question. And maybe it's even, we can never know that. We can always, we can at least know.
That's exactly what we talked about, right? It's not what it's veiling. It's that there is a veil.
That there is a veil. We can at least know there is something not transparent about Bitcoin.
You think you understand it perfectly and all of its implications. Maybe behind the veil, Bitcoin is the enemy.
Maybe behind the veil is something else about Bitcoin is good that we don't know.
Maybe he's behind the veil. It's just simply, you know, who knows? It's not revealed to us. So we haven't exhausted our exploration of Bitcoin. We never will. That's a humbling thing. The person who you think is an expert and wants to push an update to the system because they say, Bitcoin has revealed everything to me. We can know about it. I know how it operates. I know how it's incentive system functions and everything about it. Let's just upgrade so we can trade GIFs on chain or whatever, you know.
So maybe there's a veil there they haven't seen.
Well, it could be.
Yeah.
So anything else on Heidegger?
Heidegger, the question concerning technology,
that's going to get us to where we could talk about
crypto sovereignty by Eric Kaysen in the future.
But anything else on Martin Heidegger,
the question concerning technology.
Yeah, keep your cell phone in your pocket
the way you would keep your other...
Don't keep it in your pocket,
because that's going to...
Keep it, sorry.
Keep it hidden from public the way you would
your other masturbatory devices.
There we go.
If that's your fetish still, man, keep that to yourself.
And it is too.
Like there was, I was sitting in the sauna and I looked over the shoulder of a guy who
had his phone out and he was watching porn.
Was he sitting in the sauna?
He's scrolling through.
I mean, it's just so normalized for some people.
He probably didn't even realize it for him.
It's just like.
And commenting out loud on it.
Was he really?
Yeah.
Trying to make a social at least.
Yeah.
In Kravatis would say it's like out Kravatis with you.
What a grand, grand world.
Yeah.
I'm happy for it.
That's a wrap, man.