Introduction

HUMAN PASSION TO TECHNO-POWER

Nature of Power and its Appearance 

In the Hyperconnected World

It has been asserted that man alone is capable of progressive improvement; 

that he alone makes use of tools or fire . . . mainly due to his power 

of speaking and handling down his acquired knowledge.

(Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man)

Whereas we find man having fatherly power naturally at the birth of physical life, we also find appearance of power spontaneously at the birth of social life. Arising from its root force, power started revealing its creative aspect when the Homo erectus, using his freed hands and energetic imagination, shaped the dimension of his passion to power as “techno-power” to give meaning to life and his society. It began to expand when the descendants of an ancestral line of apelike creatures first picked up stones as tools and laid the foundation of the power of science and technology. Power’s appearance as a brutish, cruel, and savage force, determined its application as unjustified behavior. But its creative aspect viewed as noble and altruistic, to have helped man and society grow into a large group and a humanity, the passion to power is a justified and noble motive to have worked in mankind’s evolution, growth, and progression. However, changing its many faces, emerging from the hands of a family head, passing on to the control of a tribal chief, monopolized by nobility, exploited by religious and political leaders, dominated by the wealthy, instructed by the sages, directed by ideologies, principled by knowledge, systemized by science and technology, and managed by the elected authority, power before today’s hyperconnected world has been inaccessible to those it oppressed and subjected to obey. 

Whereas in the past, power has remained in the hands of centrally operating authority just like a state-controlled currency, today in the contemporary era of network, in which everyone is connected with everyone in every corner of the globe, power is like a current accessible freely to everyone. The revolution of modern technology is fast diffusing power from the possession of a centralized authority and is empowering individuals, even those who in the past have been victims of rich and powerful lords. Modern technology is a function of how smart we are, not how rich or powerful we could be. Cyber-revolution, heading rapidly towards enlightening a cyber-renaissance, is developing amazingly a borderless, nonracial, non-preferential, physically alienated, yet intellectually close-connected humanity, where highest value would be the power of smart brain. Thus, the culminating enlightenment of the cyber-renaissance would be, that the spectrum of power freeing from the hold of rich and elite, is rapidly passing on into the hands of those who were powerless in the past. With everyday technological progress it is slipping out of the hands of rich and powerful and is shining in the hands of intellectually smart ones. 

MIRZA ASHRAF_______________________________________________________________

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