“What we are on the precipice of achieving technologically is inspiring. Truly. There’s another narrative this year, though… a feeling that marching forward, eyes fixed to that old techno-futurist glimmer alone, is walking blind.”

– Will Cady in “A New Story for the 2020s”

The ‘IT guy’ often seems best represented by a thirteen-year-old boy who is hypnotized by deathly games for world domination, and who hates being interrupted to eat dinner. Given that we are well into the human-caused Sixth Extinction, which the ‘IT guy’ seems not to notice, I was very excited to see the title of a tech post that suggested that the ‘IT guy’ might be maturing—even, perhaps, promoting tikkun olam—world healing.

But when I read the post, I felt a stab through my heart. Had this ballsy tech leader twigged to our peril as part of evolved life? No. In his virtual context, he appears brilliant. Out of context, in the living world, he seems clueless. No biological literacy; no biocentrism; no emergence.

Chalk it up to a narrow education embedded in engineered systems. Word to the wise: every IT guy should “get” the social commentary in Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (the 1818 edition), and Robert Louis Stephenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Also critical: all of the talking points in Werner Herzog’s Lo and Behold and Delaney Ruston’s Screenagers films.

Sadly, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Modernism is a trap from which few movers and shakers emerge. They miss everything that matters now. The question is: is it worse to waste your life making more gizmos that are somewhere between irrelevant and lethal, or to waste evolved life? The answer is: it doesn’t matter. More of the same process addictions will accomplish both.

So, let’s say the budding ‘IT guy’ has got his peach fuzz, and hope that in the next ten years his beard comes in—and, more importantly, that he has shielded and detoxed his devices and developed life-positive values.