With the advent of technology, urbanization, and population growth, we are experiencing an increase in impersonalization; masses of people lead to an inevitable de-intimacy. Technological communication supersedes face-to-face, in-the-flesh interaction. These online forums, such as ILP, are embodiments of impersonalization; we are forwarding information through machines, a lifeless screen in front of us and a bunch of pixels. Even war has become impersonal; battles used to be fought mano-y-mano, with swords and spears; but now we have rifles, bombs, and drones which can be used at very far distances. The industrial revolution initiated this impersonalization of humanity; the mechanicalization of mankind’s mentality: specialization, repetition, cog-in-the-wheel. It’s only a matter of time that the outer matches the inner ( see Transhumanism ).
We characterize it as impersonalization, but what is happening is a loss of intimacy and connection in friendship because of an over-personalization. There are too many ways, at too much volume, in which trivial interactions supersede and take precedence over more important, meaningful interactions between people. People then begin to become the substance of these superficial interactions and their person thins out.
All this, of course, only stands for the more ordinary and average. Trivial things do not happen to exceptions because exceptions are incapable of being shallow, of being thinned out, made transparent and overpersonalized by a superfluity of information and media, like others.
What happens to exceptions, and this includes all the trivial ways in which there is interaction with other people, is always much more faceted. Or can be more faceted, I mean.
The human core will build itself upon anything, certainly upon these impersonalizations.
Higher levels of humanity/emotion/meaning-creation are possible the more contrast and distance obtains at a structural level, and technology is expanding those differences while leading to the inevitable flattening of lower levels to each other, synchronizing them as it were; to fear or see only that in technology which is this leveling and falsifying, in the way you and many others do, is to miss the bigger picture. If you were right about human nature it would have died out already.
Notice that the level of “human-ness” has increased over time, in parallel to technological development. But if you only focus on individual permutations this gives a psychological ground for a very irresistible engendering of our own personal fears and limitations. Even if, hypothetically, technology moves inward to the Mind and consciousness became entwined with it at the cellular level, you would not see technology destroy humanity, you would see humanity “destroy” (rise up with, mold in its own image, “humanize” and elevate) technology. What I mean by this is that science/technology is one impulse-purview while human consciousness is another, these are very distinct as you and many other intimate correctly (the difference can be very loosely conceptualized under the categories of top-down vs. bottom-up organization); but this distinction cannot be reduced either to technology or humanity, which means one’s core will assert itself in terms of the other, each in terms of the other, to achieve forms of temporalization and stabilization: these forms are impermanent in the same way typical non-technological consciousness is a being which is self-irreconcilable and made out of contradictions and self-impossibilities, only now we have raised the stakes.
To put it simply: technology cannot destroy the ‘human element’. It can only act as a new ground and world for its continual ascent, and the more “opposition” the greater the human rises and over-rises. This is what truth means. Nietzsche had it half-right: willing to power, yes, but also the fundamental irreconcilability and infinite depth of being, possibilizing self-contrast and self-contradiction as structure. What is ‘man’ but this same structure and ethos taken to the nth degree, taken now finally and alone of all nature in terms of itself? Do you know what you find when you pull apart being and look inside? This is “humanity”, remember, this is what human consciousness does, probably what all “self-consciousness” is and does; so what do you find in there? No less than joy, no less than the joyful as such. What we experience either as ‘pleasure’ (basic intimation of value) or ‘the pleasurability of pleasure’ (happiness, wider circles of affective self-regulation and responsiveness) are simply the controlled releasing of Being, especially states tending more toward those latter, higher and more comprehensive forms. The vicious circle exists in humanity’s favor, because this is all “humanity” means anyway.