The inevitable progress of technology, in other words, makes the technological sublime elusive. And it’s also true that technologies tend to shrink themselves, taking on unassuming guises. (“Technologies tend toward ubiquity and cheapness,” Kelly writes.) My son and I sometimes throw around a “hoverball”—a little propeller-powered sphere that glows in the dark, and which can be made to float elegantly from person to person, or to follow a boomerang route. The hoverball is fun, not sublime, and yet technological sublimity hides inside it: the flight systems within the hoverball are related to the ones that have created deadly “gray zones” on the Ukrainian battlefield, into which no human can venture without risking death by drone.
Standing on the beach at night, staring out at the dark, mysterious ocean, it’s easy to feel challenged by something much larger and older than yourself. The natural sublime is big, ostentatious, unmistakable. With technology, such moments can sneak up on you. Every once in a while, you might catch a glimpse of a security camera in the corner of a room, and recall that we are always being watched. Spotting a satellite drifting across the night sky, you might think about how our species’ reach is extending; taking your daily statin, you might consider how engineered our bodies are. In this way, the technological sublime can be a diffuse feeling, encountered in fragments. If you’re a technophile, it’s something you might pursue, by always chasing the frontier.
Technologists are rational—at least, that’s the idea. But they’re also people, and people live in culture and have emotions, and the patterns through which those emotions are experienced have been largely the same since the time of Edmund Burke. Listen to the titans of tech talk about what they do, and you’ll often notice the patterns of the technological sublime. A.I. researchers at the “frontier labs,” for instance, speak in sombre tones about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence, which they believe is a sort of fated discovery, almost a potentiality of the universe, to which they are nearly witnesses. The fact that they aren’t entirely in control of these systems seems to heighten their sense of being in the presence of something sublime.
Sublimity involves an element of passivity. Once, I set out for a walk by myself in Red Rock Canyon, in Nevada; it was more than a hundred degrees outside, and the sun was blinding. Standing on a lonely stretch of path overlooking a ravine, with no one around and my water bottle empty, I realized the riskiness of what I’d done. I should’ve headed back immediately, but instead I stood, taking in the ancient rust-colored canyon, feeling both in over my head and very alive. The world was big, and didn’t care about me, and yet there I was, understanding this fact. I enjoyed the mixture of wonder and fear.
But is this how we should respond to technology? The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was fascinated by the moment when a scary experience becomes sublime; it’s almost, he thought, as though we face a choice between worrying about ourselves or transcending selfhood. Take the latter path, toward sublimity, and one becomes a “pure, will-less subject of knowing,” an “eternal subject”—a person who experiences “exaltation” at having ascended out of themselves. This sounds terribly abstract, but it’s a good description of what it feels like to stand in awe and fear of something bigger than you. People who pursue the sublime in nature—mountaineers, scuba divers, and the like—are often on the hunt for it.
Sublimity isn’t an illusion. There are reasons we feel it out in nature, and reasons we experience the technological version, too. Yet in both cases, it’s important to break the trance. At some point, you have to flee from the oncoming wave. You have to return to yourself—to remember, and embrace, the fact that you’re a particular person with agency, obligations, and values. In the natural world, returning to yourself can be as simple as walking away. But, in the technological one, it’s more complicated, because we’re in charge of the pace of exploration, discovery, and invention. Technologists can, to some degree, conjure the technological sublime, and consumers of technology can become addicted to it. But the path to responsibility leads through disenchantment. ♦
