Because you see, we humans have been engaged for centuries in a slow decoupling of information from its embodied presence, reaching a point of near total abstraction by the 21st century.1 The shift from oral to written traditions and the invention of written vowels2 are early milestones in this historical arc, provenance of digital data and derivatives today.
That was the first step necessary.
What came next was not strictly necessary, but follows hermetically.
It was globalization: not the mechanisms by which financial markets entered into exchange with one another across state boundaries, but the very idea of a single global market (notice how these two things are also not the same). These economic structures were in turn mirrored by a certain globalized cultural hegemony, whose endangerment towards extinction of richly diverse locally embedded traditions, carefully stewarded over centuries or longer, remains actively underway.
It was a shift in agriculture away from specific locally grounded practices and towards monocrops, centralized seed suppliers, and universalized tools. It was derivatives and futures. It was courier services. It was a mind that could be treated separately from a body and it was entire industries of pharmaceuticals that followed.
Could it be that “we, both philosophically and technologically, are learning to understand what it is to construct reality?”3
1. If your first instinct reading these words is to jump to your feet shouting that information is extremely embodied (the physical reality of tubes, data centers, solar farms or coal mines, etc) 1) we probably have quite a bit in common, drop me a line; and 2) please read my sentence again. These two statements use some of the same words but they are not the same.
2. Dan Abram, *The Spell of the Sensuous*
3. Roy Ascott, Technoetics