Heidegger & Cobra in Dialogue: Technology (Part 1)

 

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At the beginning of 2025, the Doomsday Clock struck 89 seconds to midnight. And today, as 2025 comes to a close, technology is ever preciously the topic of the hour.

In this post I want to shed light on Heidegger's most famous, most referenced, and most talked about essay: The Question Concerning Technology. This was famously the essay in which he described the "destroying power" of technology and the "saving power" of art, where both art and technology share an essence in relation to the revealing of truth.

It's important to talk about technology in the way that Heidegger meant it, because Cobra uses the term "technology" in precisely the sense that Heidegger used it. As in, there is the "commonplace" sense that we talk about technology, where we say "technology" when we really mean smartphones, laptops, AI, etc. But there is a deeper sense in which we can talk about technology. Not in its obvious meaning, but regarding its essence. The essence of technology can reveal itself as a human attitude, a belief, a way of existing in the world.

"The sword represents technology," Cobra said to us in New York.

This is a statement worth dwelling on.

A philosophy professor once told me that math and philosophy are "the sword and the shield to defeat the dragon." Technology is a sword in the sense that, at this late stage in human civilization, the monsters are becoming increasingly abstract and the weapons to defeat those monsters must necessarily also become increasingly abstract. When the wealthy elites ran out of land to colonize, they found a new means for wealth extraction: the colonization of our attention. Because whatever has a grip on humanity's attention, then becomes the thing to seize their desire, that desire then transforming into a credit card swipe.

For example, if your attention is dominated by Labubus, Dubai chocolate, and AI, then you become increasingly likely to spend money on those things. But if you guard your attention carefully and well, it is likely the case that your spending decisions are also much more intentional and wise.

And it is unfortunately the case that technology is the weapon being used to manipulate our attention, so that we desire the things that the wealthy are proffering us, so that, in a totally disinhibited state, we thoughtlessly offer our money over to those things.

Think: data scientists are concocting black box machine learning models to fine-tune the algorithms that are powering the social media apps that we are mercilessly bound to because the content is so shiny and so interesting. Technology is a weapon, and I mean that in an ordinary, everyday sense that we can observe and feel in our day to day. Something as abstract as a "random forest model", which takes the form of maybe several hundreds or thousands of lines of code, is destroying the fabric of society: we suffer from a loneliness epidemic, societal trust is at all-time lows, and everything being sold to us feels like a scam.

I'm not saying this from a high horse though. I make dumb purchases all the time. But I am pointing out that there is an alternative, that you can choose for yourself what to pay attention to, because there is a war being fought for your attention, and an alternative way of paying attention starts from becoming more intentional, more selective, and more thoughtful about what you attend to.

Cobra pointed out that people have lost their connections to their souls. Without the connection to one's own soul, one loses the ability to produce things soulfully. Whether that takes the form of a good book, a good movie, a good painting, or a good conversation, soulfulness is the very thing that keeps a society nourished. To experience the presence of the soul is to feel the breath of God rush through your entire being. It is a basic human need to feel and experience divinity. When a person has developed their inner channel enough to produce soul-filled work in the world, money naturally flows to that person. This is what people refer to as wealth generation, value creation, etc.

But because the large majority of human beings have lost the ability to create value, a different phenomenon takes root: wealth extraction. A musician might have money flowing to them because their fans love the music that they make. In the process, there exists hundreds of middlemen extracting value from those money flows, e.g. a predatory music label takes a cut of that musician's album sales. When there are people who do not know how to create value for the world on their own, they resort to manipulation tactics to extract money, time, and attention from the people who are creating value for the world.

It is up to you which side of society you want to be a part of: the one birthing the new, or the one extracting what is left from the old.