Davis: Ch. 1-2 Jason Komoda

Davis portrays Herme’s “trickiness” as a “technical skill” and how he uses it to his advantage in order to become more powerful in life.  He then relates this idea to how technology could be put in a similar way, where it can be used to gain insightful information that can make humans more knowledgable, or manipulate us in ways we don’t really notice.  This idea gives us attention to this Huffington Post article about Hermes, where Lovekraft says that anytime we invest a lot of our time paying close attention to technical detail about a certain subject, we are “geeking-out” with Hermes.  I find this to be pretty accurate since I feel that the reason we tend to invest a lot of time to learn more about something is basically because we want to put that information in our brain and become more knowledgeable in that subject. What we really want is to just know more information in general, just like the way Hermes lived his life.  Also, the “trickery” part of Hermes is similar to the manipulation of the internet and technology. Let’s say we go on the internet and learn something for the first time. We don’t know what is right or wrong about that subject, so we tend to think what we’re reading is correct when in reality it could be a bunch of bull. Similarly, the many people who looked up to Hermes had no idea that there was a manipulative side to him, they thought that everything he said was pure.  Thus, the point is that technology could either be really helpful and insightful for us, or it can be detrimental and manipulating (if we aren’t careful with how we use it).

For a short segment Davis talks about an important virtual reality breakthrough called Osmose by Char Davies in the mid-1990s.  Osmose was created to stimulate how people connect with their own minds and bodies. I feel that this is a really good way to help people become more comfortable with themselves and their state of being in the real world (similar to meditation techniques).  Being able to experience an out of body experience just with technology, and knowing the fact that you will eventually return to your “real” body is actually a really cool thing that exists because you aren’t able to experience that any other way (besides drugs like DMT or if you believe in afterlife or reincarnation).  The second link below shows actual studies that were conducted with VR where participants who got to experience out of body experiences and a some of them actually said that their fear of dying was reduced after the study. More experiments definitely need to be done to see if it can truly help people with severe thanatophobia (fear of death), but the fact that technology can give us the opportunity to experience these types of things safely, and let us conduct these experiments in the first place is just insane.  Davis also says that Osmose is a reminder to us of how intimate we are with electronics and I cannot agree more. While using Osmose, we literally let electronics take over our mind, bodies, and senses. What we see, hear, feel in this simulated reality feels so genuine to us because we accept the fact that we’re comfortable with letting technology do this to us.

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