A book to see anew
Re-becoming provides history-based perspectives into the many ways our human intelligence is distinct from the artificial intelligence that threatens to surpass us.
As a memorable and sometimes quirky journey, Re-becoming sheds light on what we are missing from the richness of human culture by plunging into technical pursuits. Engage in an untypical, dense stream of thought to challenge your perspective on the human world and that of our inventions.
By subscribing to the newsletter you’ll receive First Chapter for free and updates on the upcoming release
While technological progress seems still accelerating, something strange has happened to freedom and hope.
Freedom has begun to have the scent of tension, similar to the one in the hallway of a psychiatric hospital; everyone is dressed up and ready, but without a doorknob, there is nowhere to go.
Hope, on the other hand, has begun to taste like the sudden realization that you have become invisible to people the moment you fall to the sidewalk after twisting your ankle.
Zeroing in on human
to discuss what really matters in a tech world
Computer “Systems”
as a supposed destiny
Affective response toward modernity and technology
The rupture of the soul
Hardened cogs replace the need for heroes
Progress as torture
Evacuation of meaning
…and more, many more
pacfrom hard to social sciences, and philosophy to poetry,
each chapter is an intellectual feast
Chapter 1: F.W. Taylor’s Scientific Management | R.Wright’s “Systems” as a destiny | Norbert Weiner’s missile-directing war invention | Kybernētēs by Ancients | Clerk Maxwell “Governors” | Bronisław Tretnowski and André-Marie Ampère human-centered cybernetics | The burden of responsibility of Norbert Weiner and Dr. Vannevar Bush | The invention of computers as a supplement to the atomic bomb | Dr. Vannevar Bush’s vision of new ways of thinking | Lewis Mumford’s prediction of deforming inner worlds of humans | The risk of broken Homeostatic equilibrium | From simple machines to Technology | Greek notion of new inventions as Pandora’s box | The thinking soul and Aristotelian god-like ways of knowing and doing | Shameless act of Prometheus | Devices demonic lurks in the choral ode of Antigone | Heidegger’s monstrous, uncanny powers | The moral choices from using empowering devices in the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien | Plato’s story of Gyges | Power coexistence with morality by Eric Katz | Arthur C. Clarke 3rd law of technology indistinguishable from magic | Hesiod’s despicable mankind | The dissolution of the soul & the lineage of the concept of ‘person’ | Poet’s collected living story | The mask and the person | Herbert Marcuse’s bondage to the system | The mechanical norms | John Kenneth Galbraith notion of dispensing talent | Technosphere as a new power structure |Ernst Kapp ’life tactics’ | Slave as a machine | Dehumanized ‘bodily’ machines of early modernity | Objectification in labor | Georges Canguilhem’s issue with human-body-as-a-machine | Man-machines replacing tool-machines | Ayn Rand’s warning of losing identity | Machine as a mode of revealing by Heidegger. | Roots of the term “machine” | Grotesque artificial “marvelous” spectacles | Philosophers attack against demonic, ill-adopted machinery | Laberius’s offense to Ceaser and the revealed power of authenticity | Canguilheim’s life permission of monstrosities as a distortion | CGI in cinema and superhero fatigue | A notion of amplified self | Unmasking the “trick” of wonders | Marvelous technologies in the hands of technically illiterates | Superheroes mastering technological amplifiers of their powers | Favors of Autonomous-miraculous as a new Faustian bargain | The divide between real self and the imagined self | The unremovable mask of the person | Hediegger’s question of the meaning of ‘being’ | Grotesque as a monstrous fusion of human and nonhuman | Pre-modern dress rehearsal for post-trans-anti-meta-humanism | Nicholas Cusa’s blurring the line dividing god and men Exorbitant realms of Ceasar Nero’s Golden House | Absurdity and unrestrained fancy to mask reality | Satire against established. | Progress as a torture | Mechanics atrophying the spiritual | Beginnings of modernity in Baudelaire’s eyes | Future as an imitation of the past | Dreams of some being torture for others | What it means to forget a man | ‘Technicity’ and dissolution of meaning | The hollow sign of “man” | Collectible fetish objects | True suffocating beautiful H.G.Gadamer fusion of horizon | The evacuation of meaning | Ayn Rand’s emancipation of men | Oversimplification & Douglas Adam’s greatest universal joke | Impossibility of axioms & Hilbert’s Entscheidungs-problem | Purity of logical systems (Principia Mathematica) | Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness | Wittgensteins’s language games | Jean Baudrillard’s procession of simulacra | The shift toward digital as a more flimsy material for expression | Bitten by our own creations | Government-owned infrastructure as material foundation of digital phantasms | The roots of the Internet & its Cold War roots | Ted Nelson’s Dream Machines | The assemblage of the system of systems | Human Flourishing & Market Economy
From hacking to startups, Dr. B.A. Gonczarek uses his experiences to re-position ourselves and tell a very human story about not-that-human pursuits.