1 Homelessness in the High Tech Age Dr. Dennis M.

Weiss Professor of Philosophy York College of Pennsylvania York, PA 17405 dweiss@ycp.edu http://goose.ycp.edu/~dweiss (717) 815 1513 Abstract: In Between Man and Man, Martin Buber distinguishes between epochs of habitation and epochs of homelessness. In the former, Buber writes, man lives in the world as in a house, an in a home. In the latter, man lives in the world as in an open field and at times does not even have four pegs with which to set up a tent. (126) Buber was one among many authors who characterized the twentieth century by its pervasive homelessness, and while he recognized many factors contributing to this characterization, the impact of technology was certainly foremost among them. As Marshall McLuhan noted, Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than a place for everything and everything in its place. McLuhan and Buber might be stand-ins for a debate that has continued into the twenty-first century and which the forces of globalization and technological development have deepened. What has been the impact of technology on our sense of place? Has technology undermined our sense of rootedness and place and fostered a pervasive feeling of global homelessness? Critics of technology have often argued yes, suggesting that technology has de-territorialized space, transforming it from a meaningful space of connection and context to a mere site, a location in Cartesian space. Critics as diverse as Albert Borgmann, Leon Kass, Sven Birkets, and Vandana Shiva have articulated such arguments. On the other hand, more optimistic proponents of technology, such as Howard Rheingold, Kenneth Gergen, or William Mitchell tend to argue that technology fosters new opportunities to create new places or homes or revivify our existing spaces. In this presentation, I wish to examine this debate through the lens of philosophical anthropology, a philosophical discipline which, while now somewhat defunct, had developed a rich tradition of thinking about humankinds place in the cosmos. Indeed, questions about place, technology, and human nature were central to the work of a number of philosophical anthropologists, including Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner, both of whom offer some resources for mediating the debate over technologys impact on our sense of place. From a perspective that bears some resemblance to the more recent work of Yi-Fu Tuan, especially Cosmos and Hearth, I will argue that philosophical anthropology offers a more dialectical perspective on the debate over technology and place that allows us to resolve many of the tensions in this debate and reconcile our experience of homelessness in the high tech age.

2 In Making Gender Sherry Ortner argues that there are certain basic existential questions or structures (she also refers to them as riddles) which are apparent in all cultures, which humanity everywhere must cope with, and while the individual answers posed to these questions admit of great variability, the questions themselves have a certain constancy and regularity (178-179). These are, Ortner suggests, factors built into the structure of the most generalized situation in which all human beings, in whatever culture, find themselves (25). One such basic question is what we might refer to as the question of place: what is our place in the cosmos? Is the human being at home in the world? How does one go about making a home for oneself in the world? This conferences interest in globalization is one contemporary dimension of this concern over place and what I would like to do in this presentation is to begin to explore the nature of home and place in the technopolis. What has been the impact of technology on how we human beings address this question of our place in the cosmos and our being at home in the world? In 1938, writing about mans place in the cosmos, Martin Buber distinguished between epochs of habitation and epochs of homelessness. In the former, Buber writes, man lives in the world as in a house, as in a home. In the latter, man lives in the world as in an open field and at times does not even have four pegs with which to set up a tent (126). From Aristotle to the medieval Christians, Buber argues, human beings have lived in the world as in a home. These were periods of habitation in which the human being had a fixed place in the cosmos. The cosmos for Aristotle, and later Aquinas, was a manifold universe, ordered as an image, in which every thing and every being has its place and the being man feels himself at home in union with them all (134). This cosmological unity and the certitude with which human beings considered their place in it was shattered by Copernicus. All the walls of the house werecrumbling beneath the blows of Copernicus, the unlimited was pressing in from every side, and man was standing in a universe which in actual fact could no longer be experienced as a house (131). Following Copernicus, the original contact between the human being and the universe is dissolved and the human being finds his or her self a stranger in the universe. With the introduction of infinite space, we are no longer able to form an image of the universe, no longer able to transform it from a cold and meaningless space into a place, a home, an abode. Our own time, Buber argues, is best characterized by its pervasive homelessness. Buber suggests that this pervasive homelessness is a product of several factors, including our inability to fix an image of a finite and self-enclosed world in the modern physical universe and the dissolution of small organic communities. Solitude and a feeling of homelessness is further exacerbated by the third factor Buber mentions: man lagging behind his works. "Man is no longer able to master the world which he himself brought about: it is becoming stronger than he is, it is winning free of him" Buber notes, for instance, that in the realm of technique, while machines were invented in order to serve man, man has become their extension, an adjunct to their periphery, doing their bidding. There seems to much agreement with Buber regarding both our current state of homelessness and the role of technology. Some forty years later, echoing Buber, Robert McDermott observes, The deepest contemporary ontological problem is that of homelessness. The vast, limitless, perhaps infinite universe does not award us a place.

3 The planet earth is a node in the midst of cosmic unintelligibility (13). Michael Jackson begins his At Home in the World with an epigraph from Susan Sontag: most serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness. Taking up the theme of being-at-home, Jackson too argues that ours is a century of uprootedness. All over the world, fewer and fewer people live out their lives in the place where they were born. Perhaps at no other time in history has the question of belonging seemed so urgent (1). Increasingly, our attempts to fashion an abode out of the cosmos has been frustrated. We are thought to be a rootless people. Karl Jaspers points out in The Spiritual Crisis of our Times: man today has been uprooted, having become aware that he exists in what is but a historically determined and changing situation. It is as if the foundations of being had been shattered. William Barrett, too, sees this as a dominant fact for the modern mind. To be homelesshow well we know it in this age of displaced persons! Homelessness is the destiny of modern man (133-134). In Without Earth There is No Heaven, Edwin Dobb suggests that contemporary cosmologists have given up on the idea of the cosmos as a home for human beings. The result, he argues, is a sense of abiding ontological solitude. In the cosmologies produced by the likes of Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, and Alan Guth, the cosmos is largely lifeless, a brilliant intellectual edifice, yet utterly vacant. And yet, Dobb contends, judging from the popularity of texts such as Hawkings A Brief History of Time and Carl Sagans television series Cosmos, we still seek from cosmology what we have always sought from it, which is to say, guidance in our attempts to construct a metaphysical map of the world, at a time when cosmology has envisioned a universe that negates such attempts (35) Dobb argues that a more adequate cosmology would be one which shifts emphasis from trying to discern the structure of the universe to trying to reckon our place within that structure. While the problem of homelessness, of finding a place in the cosmos, certainly predates the advent of digital technologies, it is clear that our own experience of the problem is shaped by and probably deepened by our increasing reliance on technology. Indeed, the issue of place has been a focus of theorists of technology beginning at least with Marshall McLuhan. In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan captures the general nature of technology and its impact on our sense of place. He writes, Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of time and space and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men.Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism.Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than a place for everything and everything in its place. You cant go home again. (16) Building on and extending McLuhans insights, Joshua Meyrowitz, in No Sense of Place, notes the manner in which electronic media has been deeply implicated in the restructuring of our sense of space, time, and place. Meyrowitz contends that the formerly close connection between ones sense of place and ones access to information has been shattered by the electronic media. Ones place is no longer synonymous with who one is

4 or to what information one has access. Place, he contends, has become a meaningless category due to the influence of electronic media. Due to the homogenization of place by the mass media, any place is now synonymous with every other place, and no place any longer has significance. Where I am is no longer defined by the place where my body is, but is susceptible to recoding according to the electronic media available to me. The flow of information across boundaries reduces every place to the figure of the same. As places lose their distinctive characteristics we feel increasingly rootless because our roots can no longer be defined in terms of some distinctive location. Our world may suddenly seem senseless to many people because, for the first time in modern history, it is relatively placeless (308). Similar arguments have been put forth by David Bolter, in his analysis of the impact of hypertext media on the shift from a hierarchical to a network culture, Kenneth Gergen, in his discussion of the role of technology in fashioning a saturated self, and in Frederic Jamesons accounts of our feelings of alienation in postmodern hyperspace. But while there seems to be widespread agreement on this descriptive account of our contemporary situation, there is less agreement on its significance and consequences. Especially in the last ten to fifteen years, we have witnessed a far reaching, potentially important, but polarizing debate on the role of technology in reshaping and redefining our place in the cosmos. On one side of this issue critics of our technological age decry our growing reliance on technology, are concerned over our increasing alienation from nature, and prophesize the loss of authentic subjectivity and true community. Such dystopic visions of the digital cosmos can be seen, for instance, in the work of Sven Birkerts, Neil Postman, and Mark Slouka. In Technopoly, for instance, Postman criticizes what he sees as technologys power to bring about total change. Technology alters those deeply embedded habits of thought which give to a culture its sense of what the world is likea sense of what is the natural order to things, of what is reasonable, of what is inevitable, of what is real (12). On the other side of this issue we have proponents of the digital age and their utopian vision of a more democratic, more individualistic society of progress, plenty, and peace. Howard Rheingolds vision, elaborated in his The Virtual Community, provides a representative example of this so-called West Coast line of thinking, which includes the essays of John Perry Barlow and others associated with the founding of the Whole Earth Lectronic Link, an early, influential virtual community. Rheingold, Barlow, and others argue that technology and the world it is fashioning move us away from stifling, hierarchical premodern and modern societies and toward more democratic, open, networked societies. Technology itself may well resolve the problems of rootlessness and homelessness by bringing people together, creating new communities, and empowering democracy. As Rheingold suggests in The Virtual Community, perhaps cyberspace is one of the informal public places where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became a mall (26). Similar visions of what Rob Kling has called technological utopianism can be found in Nicholas Negropontes Being Digital, William Mitchells City of Bits, and Raymond Kurzweils The Age of Intelligent Machines, among other works.

5 This is all to suggest then that a significant question many face today has to do with our place in the technopolis. This contemporary gloss on what I think Ortner was referring to as one of those basic existential questions or riddles all human beings must face suggests the important links between technology, place, and home. And yet while the question may be clear, the manner of response is anything but. While its fairly evident that there are strong feelings on either side of this issue, its equally evident that there is not much clarity in addressing these issues, though I dont think this is entirely the fault of our participants in this debate. Part of the problem in addressing this issue of our place in the technopolis stems from the fact that what we need is a multi-disciplinary approach to thinking about place and technology that doesnt yet fully exist. There are at least three significant strands to this multi-disciplinary approach that might usefully be brought together in closer dialogue: philosophy of technology, philosophical anthropology, and geography, or what is sometimes now being referred to as place studies. Philosophers of technology have not, I think, paid sufficient attention to the question of place, despite the clear connections between science and technology and our experiences of both space and place. This is unfortunate as many of the claims made on behalf of technology and place are premised on assumptions long critiqued by contemporary philosophers of technology, including the supposed neutrality of technology and thesis of technological determinism. My own area of interest, philosophical anthropology is that subdiscipline in philosophy which has been most interested in the question of mans place in the cosmos and has made great strides in addressing our place in nature but has been relatively silent on the place of technology in human life. And in place studies, we have a growing field of interest in the question of place, much of which overlaps with philosophical anthropologys interest in the human condition, but as yet no extended investigations into the role of technology in shaping space and place. Ive been especially interested in Yi-Fu Tuans work in this area, especially Space and Place and Cosmos and Hearth, and yet his work doesnt explicitly engage with technology. Edward Casey recognizes in The Fate of Place that our shunning of place as a crucial concept is due in part to the massive spread of electronic technology, which makes irrelevant where you are so long as you can link up with other users of the same technology (xiii), and yet there is little discussion of technology in his philosophical history of place. {In his preface, Casey references the work of Joshua Meyrowitz and suggests the hypothesis that the ancient dialectic of place and space is being replayed within the domain of technology itself. Moreover, the dromocentrism to which electronic technologies contribute so massively is itself not without placial significance: when life becomes sufficiently accelerated, we find ourselves more, not less, appreciative of the places we are so rapidly passing through. Every race, after all, is a race between someplace we start and someplace we end (343).} It may well be, circling back to philosophy of technology, that philosophers of technology share the view of our dystopians previously mentioned that technology is at odds with place and home. Technology is antithetical to place. This is certainly suggested in the philosophy of technology of Albert Borgmann and in the reflections on technology and globalization of Vandana Shiva. Still, though, even were we to find this claim persuasive, it could only be as a product of an extended analysis that brought together reflections on technology, the human condition, and the nature of place. And such an analysis has yet to happen.

To further substantiate this claim that what is needed in order to understand our place in the technopolis is a multidisciplinary approach bringing together philosophy of technology, philosophical anthropology, and place studies, and to provide a kind of prolegomenon to that work, I would like now to try and disambiguate some of the complicated issues that emerge when raising the question, what is our place in the technopolis? There are a variety of overlapping issues which emerge and which collectively require the resources of all three disciplines in order to address them properly. Permit me to highlight two core issues, oriented in terms of the twin poles of cosmos and hearth. To begin with cosmos, I cite as one small example of the kind of issue I would like to highlight the attention that preceded Garry Kasparovs battle with IBMs Deep Blue for world chess supremacy and the almost apocalyptic fan fare that greeted this battle between man and machine. In Newsweek, for instance, Steven Levy wrote that Kasparov was fighting for all of us: all of us, that is, with spit in our mouths and DNA in our cells. To chess enthusiasts the first-game loss was more than a shock: it was the apocalypse. The feeling was that supremacy in chess represented an important foothold in the battle against the computers relentless incursion in the human domain. USA Today ran a cover story on the chess match the headline of which read: Can this Man Save the Human Race? It was, according to the newspaper, the ultimate man versus machine showdown, brain cells versus microchips. The New York Times weighed in with the suggestion that the historic match was a symbolically, if not actually, profound event in the history of brains, human and otherwise. What led to this near hysteria over what amounted to a game most of the worlds human beings dont play all that well or at all? Partly it is owing to the centrality of the question of our nature and place in the cosmos and the manner in which technology impacts our answers to those questions. These are age-old questions about our place in the world, whether we have any special role in the scheme of things, about our essential characteristics. In the west, these questions were answered in the early Greek and Hebraic traditions by carving out a special place for human beings. We are special and unique, set apart by our rational abilities or our unique relationship to God. It was this view that flowered in Renaissance humanism and in, for instance, Pico della Mirandolas Oration on the Dignity of Man, where he observes that we human beings have a special place suspended between heaven and earth. As he has God say, I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine. Here we see the connection between place and anthropology: an anthropological world view defined and held fast by our special place.

7 It is now commonplace to point to the various revolutions that have knocked the human being from his special place: Copernicus and Kepler, Darwin and Freud. And yet their being commonplace makes them no easier to abide. The question of our place in the cosmos is still very much an issue and today very clearly tied to the question of technology, which has often been implicated in our reflections on our nature and place in the cosmos. We see it clearly so in the popular reactions to Deep Blue, as well as in a host of science fiction films from the same period: the Terminator, Alien, and Robocop series, the Net, A.I. The more recent Sci Fi series, Battlestar Gallactica, is practically an argument in its own right for the interlocking aspects of technology, anthropology, and place. Of course these news articles, movies, and television shows are mostly apocalyptic in tone, premised upon fear and distrust of technology. Recent work in science and technology studies would urge us to put aside our fears and distrust of technology and embrace the continuity between human and machine. In The Fourth Discontinuity, Bruce Mazlish argues that human pride and its attendant refusal or hesitations to acknowledge this continuity form a substratum upon which much of the distrust of technology and an industrialized society has been reared. This distrust, he argues, rests on the refusal by humans to understand and accept their natureas beings continuous with the tools and machines they construct. Once the discontinuity is overcome, we will be in a better position to decide more consciously how we wish to deal with our machines and our mechanical civilization. This change in our metaphysical awareness, this transcendence of the fourth discontinuity, is essential to our harmoniously coming to terms with an industrialized world. The fears of not having a place in the world are produced by our alienation from technology and if we could simply come to terms with our mechanical nature, our networked nature, then we could have a healthier relationship to our tools and not fear for our place. A similar theme emerges in Andrew Pickerings recent essays on cybernetics and Hal Ashbys homeostat, work that once again underscores the connections between place, technology, and human nature. Pickerings posthumanism can be viewed as the contemporary technological alternative to Picos humanism, wherein he wonders how we are to think about the issue of place recognizing that we now live within a gigantic material, technological, and scientific posthuman assemblage. Pickerings metaphor of the mangle and his interest in cybernetics and the homeostat is meant to suggest a new ontology and worldview that drives us into a quite different place and which opens out into an intense curiosity about humans and nonhumans in a worldin which we humans are only, at most, a part (PP 217) The Ashbyite ontology engineconjures up a symmetric, decentered and mangle-ish ontology in which the human does not occupy a privileged position (PP 216). The currently fashionable interest in posthumanism and the posthuman is simply the latest iteration of a longstanding concern over the nature of the human being, our relationship to technology, and the challenge of thinking the two together in terms of the question of place. Descending somewhat from cosmos to hearth, here too I would like to begin with an example, in this case To Catch a Predator, the hidden camera investigations conducted

8 by Dateline NBC and the organization Perverted Justice, which seek to identify and detain potential child sexual abusers who attempt to contact children over the Internet (Wikipedia). For those of you familiar with the show (first aired in November 2004), or any of its already numerous parodies, host Chris Hansen typically confronts the suspected pedophiles while sitting around the modern-day hearth, an island in the center of a typical suburban kitchen. To Catch a Predator is emblematic of the ambiguous and multistable site the home and hearth has become in the technopolis. The Internet has allowed child sexual abusers to disturb the sanctity of the homeplace, undermining the security of the home place as well as MySpace. Technology endangers that most human realm of the hearth, where we become most fully human, are humanized, intruding upon this most human of places. We reassert our primacy over both the offenders and the technology that enables them by figuratively re-enacting its arrest at the very site endangered by them, the hearth. Somewhat paradoxically, we do this relying on the very same tools that brought the danger into the home in the first place. This tension between hearth and technology is further underscored by two suggestive developments over the past ten or so years. It was during the mid 1990s that we witnessed the explosive growth of the Internet, especially in terms of public awareness. A number of key popular texts were published during this period, including Howard Rheingolds Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier which came out in 1993 and Sherry Turkles Life on the Screen, published in 1995, the same year in which Al Gore delivered several majors speeches on the emerging global information infrastructure. Newsweeks special edition Technomania came out in February of 1995. The mid-90s were the start of the so-called dot-com revolution. In 1994 the Internet was just coming to the general publics attention with the advent of the first Web browser. And it was during this same period that we witnessed explosive growth and interest in the homeplace. HGTV was launched in December of 1994 and quickly became the fastestgrowing new cable network. At the end of its second year, Beta Research Corporation confirmed that viewers regard HGTV programming as high quality and among their favorite basic channels. Media analysts are calling HGTV one of the most promising cable networks in recent years. The channel's rapid growth can be measured like this (from 1995 to 1997): HGTV began in 1993 with one employee Lowe and today has 150 employees, including staff at satellite offices in New York City, Detroit, Los Angeles and Chicago. When it went on the air, HGTV reached 6.5 million homes compared with the 31 million subscribers it has under contract now. Today, nearly one of every three U.S. cable homes receives HGTV. In the beginning, HGTV carried the messages of 40 national brands, while today there are 700. HGTV covered 44 markets in 1994 and today is in 1,513 markets. HGTV currently is distributed in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Japan.

9 This was also a very fruitful period in terms of the growth of gated communities and the interest in New Urbanism. In 1995, Timothy Egan, writing in the New York Times in an article titled The Serene Fortress, on the growth of gated, private communities, pointed out that the fastest-growing residential communities in the nation are private and usually gated, governed by a thicket of covenants, codes and restrictions. By some estimates, nearly four million Americans live in these closed-off, gated communities Celebration, Disneys planned community embodying the idea of the traditional town, was founded in 1994 and opened for its first residents in the summer of 1996. In this same period, some of the classic texts in the New Urbanism were published, including Peter Calthorpes The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream (1993); Peter Katzs The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (1994); and James Howard Kunstlers Geography of Nowhere (1994). While the simultaneity of these events is not in itself sufficient to establish a link, they are suggestive of the manner in which once again the fear of technology, likely connected to fears implicated in modernization, globalization, and the various processes that have seemingly resulted in the contemporary experience of rootlessness have led us to reinvigorate our sense of place at the hearth. Such is Tuans hypothesis in Cosmos and Hearth where he points to a strong counterideology emerging in the past thirty years that seeks to restore place as the locus of human fulfillment. We see once again then the complex interplay of technology, the human condition, and our sense of place. We are perhaps today witnessing another swing in this pendulum in the renewed interest in cosmopolitanism (Appiah, Nussbaum, Tuan), though some recognize the need to bring hearth and cosmos together: Appiahs rooted cosmopolitanism, Tuans cosmopolitan hearth. As Tuan puts it: the reflective, ironic, quizzical mode of thinking of the cosmopolite enables us to accept a human condition that we have always been tempted by fear and anxiety to deny, namely, the impermanence of our state wherever we are, our ultimate homelessness (188). I have suggested here that in order to fully come to terms with our place in the technopolis, we require a concerted, multi-disciplinary effort reflecting on the human condition, our place in the world, and our relationship to technology.