In this interview, Claire Milne, Inner Transition Coordinator for the Transition Network, discusses the addictive qualities of digital technologies, how we can make peace with them in our own lives, and how to repurpose these technologies for the transition to a more just, caring and ecological future.

On 20th November, Claire will join Gaia Trustee Philippe Sibaud at 42 Acres Shoreditch in London to launch Gaia’s new report Wh@t on Earth: How digital technologies are severing our relationship from ourselves, each other and our living planet. Book now!

Tell us about  your role at the Transition Network?

The Transition movement is about celebrating the wealth of our communities; it is a community-led global initiative to achieve spiritual growth and ecological, social and political change. I am both the Inner Transition Coordinator and I hold a role called Nurturing Collaboration. My roles are basically around the inner dimension of Transition and designing for collaborative culture.

Your work is in large part collaborative and reaching out to external organisations. Is there a place for digital technology in your work in Inner Transition?

I feel like although it [digital technology] plays a role in eroding deeper relationships I also feel like it’s playing, in some respects, very positive roles in connecting people at levels of scale that would otherwise be very difficult, if not impossible. So being able to collaborate beyond the local level – at the regional, national and international levels – is very helpful.

Like with anything, if we are able to be in full choice we can have a healthy relationship with digital technology and it can play a healthy role in our life. Then it starts to get more complicated because, you could equally say that hard-core Class A drugs are not wrong, because at the end of the day it’s about our relationship with them. But what we know about Class A drugs or even technology is that the way they interact with our neurobiology [has] the potential to be hurtful at the physiological and psychological level. Then it becomes more complicated because what we’re being asked to do is recover from addiction.

What part does technology play in the Transition Network’s ideal envisioned future?

I find it really helpful to ask the question: ‘is the world that I’m longing for and that my life is dedicated to in part creating screen based?’ The answer is really clearly no.

But another a part of me recognises that at the stage that we’re at, there is a need for some degree of that relationship with digital technology to enable that scale of change that is required in order to bring about transformation. And at the same time to have the depth of psychological and spiritual transformation that’s needed for us as a species, to survive, there is equal need for us to have times in our lives that are free from digital technology.

That comes back to the reality that technology has this addictive quality and therefore the creative tension that we’re all being asked to navigate at this point in history is how can we relate something that is so crucial to the transformation of our world in a way that doesn’t fall into encouraging that addiction.

And the degree to which we’re addicted to technology is seriously high, and plays out to the identity politics that were already there. The degree to which we are addicted and to what we are addicted to is correlated to the ideas we hold about what will make us lovable and feel like we belong and feel like we’re good enough. Technology just completely feeds into that, and that’s why at a psychological level it’s addictive.

In identity politics at the moment, there are certain aspects like the ‘work ethic’ that plays a big role in burn out. This core belief within us, seen as the capitalist protestant belief, that for us to be good enough – for us to be accepted by the tribe, for us to be loved – we need to be productive and we need to be good at stuff. It’s very clear that technology feeds that. It feeds this idea that we can be superhuman, we can get even more done, we can work 24/7. Social media feeds into identity politics, around what we look like and celebrity status and all the phenomena around getting likes. This is all about that addiction to looking good that feeds into these identity politics.

And I say this with compassion because it’s very easy to slip into a sort of persecutory tone, but the reality is that these are deep wounds and they’re painful and we develop behavioural strategies to protect us from feeling the wounding of believing we’re not lovable and don’t belong. These behavioural strategies have been really amplified and codified by technology.

We are at a tipping point in terms of the ecological damage that humans are causing to our living planet. We have so much knowledge about our impacts, but are arguably more disconnected from Earth than ever. Do you think digital tech is playing a role in that? Can we revive that important connection with the Earth in time before our crises totally overwhelm us?

On a good day I’ll feel like that’s possible and on a bad day I think that that’s just an absolute joke. And I don’t think anyone has the answer.

It comes back to that question: is the life I’m longing for screen-based? And I realise that’s not answering your question. I think that maybe what is important is being able to sit with the not knowing. Too much is unknown to know whether that depth of inner change is possible.

Because we cannot control what is happening, we can make a difference and make interventions. So whatever happens, we need to learn how to navigate challenging, precarious situations in the physical world. So the greatest privilege, and I think human right, is access to support around inner resilience: education around emotional intelligence, and inner resilience.

If we can be in choice around how we respond to things and in choice around how we respond to addictive substances like technology, then we have freedom. For me, the inner dimension of change and the inner dimension of transition are all about liberation from the ego and the superego, and the destruction of patriarchy and capitalism.

So ultimately, the future of the Earth and our interdependence with the other-than-human world is dependent on us liberating our egos from patriarchy and the conditions that then leads to the destruction of the Earth and other beings, because it is leading us to this state of disconnection, disillusionment and separation.

Do you see a correlation between technology and patriarchy?

I think it’s really important to look at the role that our relationship with technology is playing in coping with trauma. Because I think for a lot of people, connecting via technology enables us not to have to feel that trauma.

Connecting through technology really colludes with that dissociated state that comes with trauma. If we’re not in our bodies and in our hearts, then we can’t meet other beings from that heart-felt, emotional place, we’re just two heads meeting.

That dissociated state is what is very characteristic of a lot of society because there’s this sort of low-level trauma that’s just across the board, and I think that technology really speaks to that. A lot of the population are sort of drawn to connecting via technology because it protects us from feeling the pain and limitations around relationships.

Is there any practice that you employ to feel that reconnection with the Earth?

Well, an interesting one for me is the sit spot. And I work with the sit spot in two ways. There’s the kind of well-known sit spot where you go out and you find your spot in nature and take your attention 50% with yourself and 50% with your peripheral vision, which as a regular practice just allows this deepening of connection to the other-than-human world.

But the tune-up on that would be the inner sit spot. So bound out into the world to find your sit spot, and then practice the inner sit spot, whereby you go in to your inner world. It could take the form of a body scan or all sorts of mindfulness practices, but there’s something really beautiful about the combination of that classic sit spot out in the world and then combining that with an inner sit spot to make sure you are in connection with yourself as well.

Join Claire Milne, Philippe Sibaud and Gaia to launch the Wh@t on Earth Report and delve deeper into these reflections on 20th November, at 42 Acres Shoreditch, London.

Photo by docoverachiever

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“Civilization is not just about saving labor but also about “wasting” labor to make art, to make beautiful things, to “waste” time playing, like sports.”

Very interesting argument about the new type of civilizational progress made possible through universal networking, and why it does not show up in productivity statistics.

Excerpted from Kevin Kelly:

“(Robert) Gordon is focused, as most economists, on GDP which measures the amount of “labor saving” that has been accomplished. The more labor you save while making or serving something, the more productive you are. In the calculus of traditional economics productivity equals wealth. Gordon rightly points out that so far the internet has not saved a lot of labor. As I argue in my robot piece in Wired, Better Than Human (not my title), I think the real wealth in the future does not come from saving labor but in creating new kinds of things to do. In this sense long-term wealth depends on making new labor.

Civilization is not just about saving labor but also about “wasting” labor to make art, to make beautiful things, to “waste” time playing, like sports. Nobody ever suggested that Picasso should spend fewer hours painting per picture in order to boost his wealth or improve the economy. The value he added to the economy could not be optimized for productivity. It’s hard to shoehorn some of the most important things we do in life into the category of “being productive.” Generally any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity — output per hour — is a task we want automation to do. In short, productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring. None of these fare well under the scrutiny of productivity. That is why science and art are so hard to fund. But they are also the foundation of long-term growth. Yet our notions of jobs, of work, of the economy don’t include a lot of space for wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.

Long-term growth of that type that Robert Gordon studies is really weird if you think about it. As he notes, there wasn’t much of it in the world before 1750, before technological progress. Now several centuries later we have a thousand times as much wealth as before. Where does this extra good stuff come from? It is not moved from somewhere else, or borrowed. It is self-created. There’s a system which manufactures this wealth “out of nothing.” Much like life itself. There are certainly necessary conditions and ingredients, but it seems once you have those in place, the economy (the system) will self-generate this wealth.

A number of economists have wrestled with the origins of this self-generating wealth. Paul Romer and Brian Arthur both separately point to the recombining and re-mixing of existing ideas as the way economic growth occurs. This view focuses on knowledge as the prime motor in a self-renewing circle of increasing returns. Unlike say energy or matter, the more knowledge you spend, the more knowledge you earn, and the more breeds more in a never-ending virtuous spiral.

What is important is that this self-increasing cycle makes things that are new. New goods, new services, new dreams, new ambitions, even new needs. When things are new they are often not easy to measure, not easy to detect, nor easy to optimize. The 1st Industrial Revolution that introduced steam and railways also introduced new ideas about ownership, identity, privacy, and literacy. These ideas were not “productive” at first, but over time as they seeped into law, and culture, and became embedded into other existing technologies, they helped work to become more productive. For example ideas of ownership and capital became refined and unleashed new arrangements for funding large-scale projects in more efficient ways. In some cases these indirect ideas may have more long-term affect on growth than the immediate inventions of the time.

Likewise the grand shift our society is undergoing now, moving to a highly networked world in the third phase of industrialization, is producing many innovations that 1) are hard to perceive, 2) not really about optimizing labor, and 3) therefore hard to quantify in terms of productivity.

One has the sense that if we wait a while, the new things will trickled down and find places in the machinery of commerce where they can eventually boost the efficiency of work.

But it seems to me that there is second-order tilt in this shift to a networked world that says the real wealth in the long-term, or perhaps that should be the new wealth, will not be found merely in greater productivity, but in greater degrees of playing, creating, and exploring. We don’t have good metrics for new possibilities, for things that have never been seen before, because by definition, their boundaries, distinctions, and units are unknown. How does one measure “authenticity” or “hyperreality” or “stickiness”?

Productivity is the main accomplishment, and metric, of the two previous Industrial Revolutions. Productivity won’t go away; over the long term it will take fewer hours of human work to produce more of the goods and services those economies produce. Our system will do this primarily because most of this work will be done by bots.

The main accomplishment of this 3rd Industrialization, the networking of our brains, other brains and other things, is to add something onto the substrate of productivity. Call it consumptity, or generativity. By whatever name we settle on, this frontier expands the creative aspect of the whole system, increasing innovations, expanding possibilities, encouraging the inefficiencies of experiment and exploring, absorbing more of the qualities of play. We don’t have good measurements of these yet. Cynics will regard this as new age naiveté, or unadorned utopianism, or a blindness to the “realities” of real life of greedy corporations, or bad bosses, or the inevitable suffering of real work. It’s not.

The are two senses of growth: scale, that is, more, bigger, faster; and evolution. The linear progression of steam power, railways, electrification, and now computers and the internet is a type of the former; just more of the same, but only better. Therefore the productivity growth curve should continue up in a continuous linear fashion.

I suggest the growth of this 3rd regime is more like evolutionary growth, rather than developmental growth. The apparent stagnation we see in productivity, in real wages, in debt relief, is because we don’t reckon, and don’t perceive, the new directions of growth. It is not more of the same, but different.”

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