Digital Pilgrims

Digital Pilgrims

Adrián Sicilia

Published by Adrián Sicilia, 2022.

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

DIGITAL PILGRIMS

First edition. September 1, 2022.

Copyright © 2022 Adrián Sicilia.

ISBN: 978-9878869803

Written by Adrián Sicilia.

Digital pilgrims

Towards a Quantum Humanity

Digital pilgrims

Towards a Quantum Humanity

Adrián Sicilia

Contributors

Luz Vítolo

Federico E. Testoni

Translated by

Mallory Craig-Kuhn

Table of Contents

Cover

Legal

Prologue

The digital environment

Mundus Novus

The power of imagination

The spirit of the times

Digital habitability

Foundations

Web 2.0

Towards digital urban planning

The human factor

A world in crisis

Multidimensional identity

Quantum humanity

A singular future

The dilemma of singularities

Evolutionary compromise

The pilgrim strategy

© 2023 Adrián Marcelo Sicilia

All rights reserved.

The scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of this book without permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

Digital version: Proyecto451

SINOPSIS

The present has the texture of the future. Hyper-digitalization has made all questions outdated, especially: what are we going to do? For decades, we have been inhabiting and moving within the Digital Environment. Today, the unavoidable question is: what and who are we going to be?

Digital Pilgrims proposes novel and urgent debates for a society that has been digitalizing itself for over fifty years. Our coexistence with mature artificial intelligences demands definitions. We are cyborgs moving in environments that exceed time and space, humans in search of meaning for this quantum reality.

It is not difficult to speculate about possible futures; the real challenge is to find a path forward in the face of the singularity that is starting to reveal itself, and in the face of the social impact we are just beginning to see. In the middle of the explosion, this book outlines the debates we cannot put off any longer. There are no answers here but rather a guide for us to finally discuss how to orient ourselves on this dizzying voyage.

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

Stephen Hawking

PROLOGUE

Reading a book is an increasingly strange act, but it is always fascinating. Looking to a fixed code to communicate seems anachronistic in a communications landscape that is more and more interactive. Immersing ourselves in a text that develops its considerations at length seems to contradict the brief forms that are multiplying all around us. In that anachronism, in that defiance of extension, lies something extraordinary.

Writing is a technology that has been with humanity since before even the foundational myths of our Western civilization were born. It is a tool that has helped us to understand the world and talk with others through the rise and fall of empires, through different ways of life and of thinking about the universe. It is a connection with collective knowledge, an abstract roundtable conversation. As marvelous as it is to read a book, today it feels strange. In any case, everything today feels a little strange.

This is not a text about new advances in technology and it does not focus on the future of the digital sphere, but it does reflect on both these topics. It does not set out to provide answers or formulas but rather to lay out those questions that have become urgent in order to open up the conversation.

More than fifty years after our encounter with the digital realm, the time has come to face the questions we have been avoiding. Is this new technology a tool that we use or something we should begin to think of differently? What drives this process, and what are its consequences? How does it affect us collectively?

We are far from being able to assign a clear meaning to the moment we are currently experiencing. However, we tend to forget that technological advances are not the central aspect of the changes we are going through but rather that these advances foster something more relevant. When we think about the transformation we are experiencing beyond technology, as a human and social process, it becomes crucial to look to history in order to recover the cultural toolkit that has allowed us to appropriate and resignify reality in the past.

Like all the objects (or texts) in our culture, we can think of it as the materialization of ancestral human ceremonies. One possible point of view tells us that in all our practices and objects, we can find an underlying form, an essential contract, that is prior to its function. Those basic conditions guarantee its functionality and usefulness in a particular society. A book, for example, could be our way of sitting around the fire to listen to the stories and contemplations of people who are very far away in space or in time. In it, we identify a desire for communication.

If we think about the underlying characteristics of every aspect of humanity as the expression of the ceremonies that shaped our culture, we can begin to understand ourselves a bit better as a society. This knowledge becomes important to understanding how we inhabit spaces. And today, the fact that we find ourselves living in a world mediated by digital technologies, a world that feels strange to us, promoting habitability is crucial. This text reflects on forms, social functions, and human habitability in relation to technology. It aims to explore those human contracts that came before our current practices. Perhaps we can find some certainty there.

These words are a contribution to the discussions we are having today in the exercise we have engaged in as humans since we first sat down around the fire in that age-old practice of listening to experiences and imagining possible worlds. No matter what we think about the origin or destiny of digital technologies, about their impact on the world, or even about how that world is organized, all of us, from the least initiated to the most experienced, feel we are living through critical times. We are missing some pieces of the puzzle. Even though we talk about this issue a lot, there seem to be no pillars organizing the debates.

We are still in the initial phase of our relationship with digital technology, perhaps in the very beginnings of the development of a new dimension and a way of understanding from an existential point of view the meaning of a change in such central concepts as space and time. This implies a challenge that will require us to bring together all our past experiences and build ourselves a framework to strengthen our possibilities of adaptation.

We are pilgrims searching for a meaning that will explain these new times, that can define this new reality. The path requires us to revisit and test our ability to imagine, cooperate, and self-organize. If we do not develop a collective attitude, we will likely not be able to handle the challenges ahead.

These words are an invitation to come on a voyage for which there is no map, no directions. I hope that in a few years, we will be able to say that on our pilgrimage, we found the way to make better choices and to carry out our symbolic invocations beyond time and space, that hyper-digitalized reality brings out the best in us, that humanity has discovered a bit more of itself.

These are stories told around a fire, calm contemplations during a sunset, a ritual in itself that advocates for the construction of more ceremonies in the digital world. It is an invitation to talk about the role of each person in our community. Perhaps after these questions, we will no longer be the same.

There are no revelations, just the drive to continue our pilgrimage, to see where it can take us.

Adrián Sicilia

THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT

Mundus Novus

Of the six letters that the explorer Amerigo Vespucci wrote about his trans-Atlantic travels, Mundus Novus had the greatest impact. In this letter, Vespucci indicated the existence of an unknown hemisphere. It was not Asia, nor the Indies Columbus thought he had reached. It was a completely new territory to the Europeans, irrefutable proof that the world stretched beyond known boundaries. European explorers found not only a territory they believed to be virgin but one brimming with mysteries to unveil. Although the first explorers could not begin to imagine the continent that lay beyond those coasts, they began to see that something was changing. This scene provides an eloquent vignette for understanding the 21st-century world we live in and the challenges it holds.

Vespucci’s document hailed the beginning of a new world, and that presented a challenge to those whose job it was to describe it. The art of creating maps was crucial for the sailors who set to sea, but it also relied on the models of the universe that were dominant during that period. Ancient cosmographers depicted a philosophical construction of the world in the way they laid out the elements known by their culture. Colorful, highly detailed maps used symbols to recreate territories in a way that could be understood mentally and in practice.

The graphic representation of something as vast and mysterious as the universe is a gargantuan task that allows humans to locate themselves in space and imagine the mystery implied by the universe itself. The greatest problem for 15th-century cosmographers lay in the difficulty of defining the world in the face of a broad awakening of awareness about it. Ideas were changing constantly. Indeed, the debate over these ideas put the spotlight on individuals who are crucial to understanding the difficulties we face today. Our world also seems to be changing. We could hazard to say that the current historical moment is similar to those crucial years in the late 1400s. While the explorers of old expanded frontiers, cosmographers strove to understand the limits of quickly aging knowledge. In the midst of it all were everyday people trying to make sense of a world that had changed.

This turning point between the Medieval period and the Renaissance placed two models at odds. The Church’s cryptic system, in which knowledge written in Latin was safeguarded as a form of power, was challenged by the horizontal management of experiential knowledge that began to blossom in cities as it was spread from mouth to mouth in guilds and brotherhoods. In this context, authorized knowledge held that the horizon was flat and fixed, while experiential knowledge, that of sailors, alleged there was something beyond that boundary. Two worldviews opposed each other. In the transition from the 15th century to the 16th, the discoveries of European voyages expanded possibilities, and the human notion of territory changed forever. With few certainties, the maps created during that period were particularly experimental.

When cartographers received Vespucci’s letter, they represented that new space in three different ways in a single publication: as a continent, as an island, and as an Asian peninsula. This explicit contradiction materialized the confusion of the historical moment. In 1503, Vespucci wrote: we arrived on the coasts of those countries and understood that that land was not an island but a continent. The world had suddenly expanded.

The material and social consequences of colonization for the people who already lived in the Americas are well known, as are the political and economic processes it unleashed in Europe. But what impact might it have had on the minds of contemporary Europeans as they began to understand what was happening? What might have been the experience of a Tiwanaku shepherd who already lived in the Americas but called the land by a different name? What impact did these changes have on the lives of everyday people amid these tensions?

The popularity of travel literature recounting journeys through the Americas during the centuries following these events is just one example of the hunger for knowledge that such an event awakens in humanity. What must have gone through the minds of sailors as they voyaged to those faraway lands? Every person who has boarded a ship bound for the unknown, whether through necessity or obligation, or of their own free will, must have felt some kind of anticipation. The progress of explorers