Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
Just as today’s culture wars and identity politics are an overlay on the long-standing equity struggles of left versus right, Dan Zimmer argues in Noema that a new dimension is being added to the political lexicon, which he labels “Up” versus “Down.” In essence, this frame demarcates two contrasting visions of the future. One embraces AI-driven technological acceleration as the path to creating a new and better world, while the other strives for the ecological balance of a planet in distress.
For Zimmer, the “up” constituency consists of the libertarian boomers of Silicon Valley and their deregulatory allies who want to barge ahead toward the singularity of a transhumanist future with no holds barred, even dreaming of “extending the light of consciousness to the stars.” The “down” constituency is composed of environmentalist doomers and regulators who harbor an instinctive hostility toward technology as a hubristic attempt to substitute for the natural wisdom of restraint and self-limitation.
“The enemy of this rising technological faction is less the traditional left or right than environmentalists and the regulations that they have been crafting to restrain technology since the 1970s,” writes Zimmer. “This tension between technologists and environmentalists cuts across traditional political boundaries, splitting the MAGA movement into “tech” and “green” factions and increasingly dividing the left into its own techno-solutionist and ecological camps. While the traditional left and right focus on human welfare, contemporary politics is being reshaped by people who claim to champion the cause of nothing less than Life itself.”
Swimming Upstream Against Entropy
What Zimmer means by “Life with a capital L” is “the sum total of all living things reconceived as a single process.” But there is a deep dissonance between technological and ecological camps over what Life itself is.
Zimmer traces the common root of these contending visions to the rise of cybernetics in the 1970s, which came to understand that all living things are “complex information processing systems.”
What preoccupied the thinkers of cybernetics was how complex systems could maintain themselves in a hostile universe, “securing the energy needed to maintain complexity” against the dissipating onslaught of entropy.
It was in this context that the pioneering mathematician Norbert Wiener proposed expanding the definition of Life to all phenomena that can “swim upstream against the current of increasing entropy.” He saw that, by self-regulating the flow of information through recursive circuits, any system would be able to learn from its environment and adapt in order to maintain itself, replicate and further develop.
This accounted for all the marvelous technological achievements of human civilization that reached beyond the primal imperative of mere survival.
It was within this same framework that James Lovelock developed the idea of the Earth as a self-organizing system of information feedback loops — Gaia — which has managed through evolutionary adaptation to maintain the equilibrium, or homeostasis, of a livable biosphere against all odds.
“The temptation to deify technology as the ultimate solution, as tech accelerationists are prone to do, mimics the mistake of deep ecologists who resist its promise.”
Following from this, Zimmer argues that today’s tech accelerationist camp “views Life primarily as an information process to expand and enhance, while the other conceives of Life chiefly as a complex system to maintain and balance. These contrasting perspectives inspire rival political visions: one gazing upward toward Life’s cosmic conquests and the other downward toward Life’s planetary entanglements.”
He continues: “They demand a new political language and orientation — neither left nor right — that I propose can best be captured by the contrast between a technological ‘Up’ and an ecological ‘Down.’”
By my reading, this could also be cast as the tension between inorganic, or disembodied, intelligence — such as AI — and grounded, or embodied, intelligence.
Zimmer rightly grasps that “the extreme positions of Far Up and Deep Down are not only incompatible, but they are also mutually hostile. If the Far Up is correct in viewing human beings as the vehicle for freeing Life from its biological shackles, then the Down-wing’s drive to relinquish technical mastery needlessly condemns Life to perish on Earth. …One group promises that everything can be improved, while the other warns of the ease with which everything can be destroyed.”
The Mingling Estuary
The temptation to deify technology as the ultimate solution, as tech accelerationists are prone to do, mimics the mistake of deep ecologists who resist its promise. The wise course would foreswear the false opposition of technology and ecology. It would seek to align and integrate human technological prowess with natural systems rather than against them. The “more than human intelligence” emerging from that conjunction would constitute a kind of planetary sapience.
Anthropo-technogenesis got us into the mess of climate destabilization and it can help us get out. AI-driven planetary-scale computation that enhances our understanding of how Earth systems work, for example, can help steer human agency away from damaging undertakings toward reparative, restorative and climate-stabilizing ones.
At the same time, what can be taken from the prudence of deep ecologists is the ancient Greek concept of katechon, in its early Greek meaning of “restraint” or “withholding from becoming.” In other words, what we don’t do is as important as what we do.
Taken together, this discerning admixture portends what some call the “Good Anthropocene.” Or to put it in terms of the cybernetic concept of Life, “homeostasis plus.”
“Ultimately,” Zimmer similarly hopes, “the most significant implication of the Up/Down distinction may well be that technological and ecological approaches to Life itself do not differ as much as we may think. The extreme ends of the spectrum mirror one another in their impatience to see humankind give way to Life’s greater goals, while the middle ranges open onto broad areas of overlap — new terrain where developments in information processing technology enrich our understanding of complex planetary systems and vice versa. It is in the estuary where Up and Down mingle that a truly progressive politics that serves all that lives will grow.”
