By LEON SARCOS
The counterculture was born against technocratic domination, the cult of everything being quantified. The trend towards technocratic totalitarianism and new technologies had already been noted very precisely by the theoreticians of this movement, which encouraged the young people who embodied the famous rebellion of the sixties in the United States and the French May, fighting for a more humanized society.
I thinkstated Theodore Roszak, that it is up to all of us to prevent the final consolidation of a technocratic totalitarianism in which we would end up ingeniously adapted to an existence totally alienated from everything that has always made human life an interesting adventure.
If the counterculture fails Roszak expressed at the time—, it seems to me that we have nothing in reserve, only the arguments of the anti-utopian novelists George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Although there is no doubt that those hideous despotisms that will be created will be much more stable than today’s technocratic world. And it is that they will be equipped with intimacy manipulation techniques as fine and discreet as a spider’s web.
Orwell’s novel comes in handy to explain the subjugation of societies by consolidated dictatorships and emerging autocracies that, through threats of repression and death, exercise control, now supported by new technologies; For its part, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World suggests the manipulation and control of the free world through the administration of pleasure through new digital innovations.
It is undoubtedly the philosopher Byung Chul Han who has disaggregated with greater precision, depth and capacity for synthesis the ravages that the technological revolution has caused on the life of the human being in liberal societies with free exchange economies. Han argues that capitalism must be tamed; in other words, humanize it.
Individuals today exploit themselves and feel fear towards the other, the different, thus living in the desert or in the hell of the same. We are in the network, but we do not listen to the other, we only make noise.
Our life is impregnated with hyper-transparency, and hyper-consumerism, with an excess of information and a positivity that leads to a society of fatigue. Surviving will become something absolute, as if we were in a permanent state of war. Today we are all infomaniacs and information is the opposite of the support that gives peace of mind in life. Information is a pornographic way of knowing.
Today there is no language, there is dumbness and helplessness. The language is being silenced. On the one hand, there is this immense noise, the noise of communication; on the other, this enormous silence. Silence has a language. Stillness has a language. Noise and silence no.
Not only is there no language; instead of classic censorship, writing has limits: you can only write in the format and length that the guideline dictates; take it or leave it, which is as emasculating a form of censorship as the one that doesn’t allow you to say what you want to say. Furthermore, good reading is over, because we are obliged to read pills, or to read in Morse code.
The worst thing is that everyone becomes obedient, trying to put their ideas in capsules to stick to the new rules, and each one justifies himself in silence. There are no professional writers more qualified than others who, because of the quality of their writing, are given more space by publishers. Egalitarianism also reached the letters.
Everything is subject to control, a number of words, a single style and a single way of saying. Soon there will be insurgent movements against these forms of control and new warriors of words will appear, who will surely be persecuted and accused of being editorial conspirators; New media will be created without restrictions and legislation and of course there will be debates and confrontations.
To know –says Chul Han— is completely different from being informed. Knowledge and truth are outdated now. Knowledge also has a different temporal structure, it encompasses the past and the future, and the temporality of information is only the present. Information is an input of knowledge. Knowledge allows comparison, which is a condition of thinking.
Today emotions are seen as a productive force. Emotions are used as a control tool. By influencing emotions, I can control and manipulate human behavior through the subconscious. Intelligence is a differentiation activity within a system. No machine can produce more than its input. Life is spirit.
The mobile phone is an instrument of domination. It acts like a rosary… With a certain vertigo, the material world, made of atoms and molecules, of things that we can have and smell, is dissolving. Some non-things, which we still want, buy and sell, continue to influence us. The digital world is hybridizing more and more noticeably with what we still consider the real world, to the point of being confused with each other: it has made existence increasingly intangible and fleeting.
With the pandemic we are going to telework… We are going towards the society of homo ludensthat of total domination, that in which people only dedicate themselves to playing… The disappearance of rituals implies that the community is disappearing.
The digital society has a new class division, of course digital. big data It is not only used for surveillance, but particularly to control human behavior. If the decisions we make with the feeling of being free are totally manipulated, then our free will is in danger. If we take the example of Acxiom, today LiveRamp, a data company, it divides people into categories. The last of those categories is waste. Acxiom exchanges data on 300 million Americans, almost everyone. Perhaps that company knows more about the lives of American citizens than the FBI and more than the NSA.
At Axciom, thanks to algorithms, people are divided into 70 categories and are offered in catalogs as retail sales products; you can buy one for each type of need. Each citizen is part of a category, or a subdivision of it that automatically programs his screen according to his tastes to market him. Consumers with a high market value are in the group of Shooting Stars and the waste, our lumpen, are low-scoring junk who don’t have access to credit. It is interesting to know that NSA and Acxiom work together, that is, the secret service and the market.
Byung also makes a very beautiful reflection on the extinction of eroticism: This Eros is not simply limited to the one that stages sexual relations between bodies, but includes what is capable of giving them a transcendental meaning: love. It is not only the erotic part that the system leaves in suspense, but also the meaning of love itself, that is, the dimension capable of giving a metaphysical texture to the encounter with the other.
When one accidentally sees and hears, in a sketch Much celebrated on the networks by millions of followers, to a woman who cries out full of impatience and desire, one realizes how eros is dying and love is annihilated in cold blood: Don’t promise me nonsense, that you’re going to lower the moon and the stars, what I want is for you to lower my panties, and insists this time in a higher tone, almost desperate: Get my panties down…!
About beauty, he tells us: Beauty is inessential without memory… The salvation of the beautiful is the salvation of the different. Beauty is necessarily an appearance, an impression. Concealment is essential to beauty. Hiding, slowing down, distracting, are also space-time strategies of the beautiful… In the presence of the beautiful, the soul is compelled to engender something beautiful by itself. Today the beautiful is deprived of all consecration. It has ceased to be an event of truth.
The aesthetic pleasure produced by beauty consists largely in the fact that, entering the state of pure contemplation, we are relieved at the moment of all wanting, that is, of all desire and care, so to speak, freed from ourselves…
Regarding love: We don’t want to be vulnerable; we avoid hurting or being hurt in any way. Falling in love is no longer allowed, in French it would be said tomber amoreux. We live in the era of Likes, because it speeds up communication. It is the time when liking dominates, the Like —Heidegger would say— a time without eros and without beauty.
Time without infatuation, without mystery, without the depth and without the eros and the beauty of the seductive courtship of the peacock, so full of dignity and greatness, without the enchantment of the love prayer whispered in the ear or the sublime poem sung at parties of Aphrodite and Lesbos, without the beautiful saying in the sacred confessions of intelligence, without the ceremony of words of impeccable use and accent, but also of those that overflow paragraphs of such beauty, without in the tiny kiss of the preamble, the solemn ritual of communion and the pure joy in the celebrations of tradition and the gentilicio… without the skin twitching from memories, erect soldiers about to burst into tears when Serrat sings, almost like an epilogue to everyone’s life, those little things. These are times of melancholy, in which, truly, artificial intelligence could never say… I miss beauty so much!
