BACKLIGHT TECHNOLOGY AGAINST EVIL By Tsoncho Tsonchev *** The Montréal Review, October 2024 |
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What we call "evil" is very much what we cannot rationally comprehend, or something that causes pain and discomfort, and also something that resists and defeats our energy and effort, our will to live the world we imagine. Evil is always beyond the rational and the explicable. Once explained, evil is no longer "evil," a metaphysical problem, but simply a "problem" to be solved with a certain set of measures. St. Augustine rightly argued that we should not call natural disasters "evil." Nature can be explained, and its destructive power is considered "unconscious." Therefore, we do not blame nature for its actions and effects. What we call "evil" is that which is supposed to be good, moral, rational, humane, intelligent, kind, caring and loving, but is not—and that cannot be explained. Nature is simply what it is: it is beyond good and evil. There can be no moral qualification of physical laws because they are not charged with moral power. Mechanics or matter doesn't bear responsibility. Humans do. If climate change is natural and not man-made, we would not blame nature for its course of action. We either accept it or consider it a "problem" (not an "evil") and look for a solution. If the changes are caused by the actions of “conscious” beings, humans, and those actions lead to self-destruction, then we have not only a problem, but a metaphysical dilemma. Evil is very often, if not always, an act or force that transgresses moral or ethical boundaries. It's about something that doesn't live up to its dignity and purpose. It is something that happens in and by a person (or even an institution, community, corporation) that is capable of and should bear responsibility, having been endowed with consciousness (individual and collective) and purpose. One can be harmed by a natural disaster, but one does not blame nature for its wild mechanical power. Another can be harmed by a human person or institution, and the blame is placed on the aggressor. Nature is not responsible. Man is. Nature is blind and passive, open to manipulation, and ultimately weaker under the active power of the human mind. The human mind is the active force in nature. This was understood and mystified by Hegel for a reason. Man is seeing and active and ultimately stronger than the passive power of nature. Of course, it can be argued that the human mind is also a result of nature. That reason is a kind of self-consciousness of nature. Also that rational thought in its neuro-micro-levels, the material stuff of the brain, is as natural as nature, and therefore ultimately also passive. But no, reason, or what we call mind or spirit, in its highest form is capable of modifying and controlling the inanimate ground from which it supposedly springs, and in its full power and existentiality it truly transcends the reach of matter. It is mind, not matter, that is the active force of all existence. Nature, or matter, is passive and therefore free of moral obligation. It's a tool, a technology, a building block, never equal to the mason's vision that makes it what it is or, above all, that gives it meaning, form and direction. Mankind, slow to learn its own rational responsibility and at the same time unable to accept the mindless action of natural forces, weary of wrestling with the elements, found a way to place the blame for its misfortunes and lost sense of purpose on the shoulders of an invisible God-Creator. One who could be called both aeides and eidenai. Unable to fully master and explain natural disasters, which were considered senseless and unacceptable, man invented or (why not!) evoked the memory of the existence of a great Creator of life and death, a First Mover and Last Reaper, a Lord, to call it so, who is conscious and rational, stronger and more capable than anything that could possibly be conceived by the human mind. To have this Creator as eidenai and aeides, as Hades, the one ultimately responsible for all natural disasters, illnesses, loss of friends or children, is to be able to rationalize and unload the emotional and physical pain caused by the blind force of nature. It is a kind of theorapeutic method of dealing with nature's irresponsibility and unsolvable problems. And also a way to satisfy the innate human sense of right and justice. Ivan Karamazov is an excellent expression of this invention or memory of the God-Creator. Ivan believes in the existence of God. But this belief makes him an atheist. For him, the Lord of this world has no soul, no pity, no regard for human life. It is a "wild god," to use Barbara Ehrenreich's phrase. A God who is vicious, who disciplines and punishes, but never truly rewards. What reward for the suffering Job? What can replace the loss of what you, poor Job, loved? Multiplication, cloning? Do they replace the unique? Multiplication and mass production turn everything into an "item," a replaceable cog, thus completing the loss and uniqueness of the original being. Sameness is the arch-enemy of dignity. And what did the righteous Job learn from his suffering? Did he become more righteous? Or did he simply become aware that the same fate befalls the "good" and the "bad," and that God does what God does, just as nature does: without regard to reason or purpose. God and Satan bet on poor Job, and Satan lost. So what? What was the upside for Job? Speaking against God and faith, Ivan says that he has the right, no! the duty, to reject such a God. To say either that there is no God, or, if there is, that God is worthless: the Lord is blind to the scandal of human suffering, just as nature is, but also, and this is the problem, the Lord is responsible for the evil done, unlike nature, precisely because of his sovereignty and his claim to goodness, justice, and reason. In Ivan's eyes, God doesn't live up to his high purpose. God is evil. Ivan's answer is to revolt against this monster, Leviathan, to do something, to sacrifice, today and tomorrow, because he, as a (responsible) human being, not as aeides (the invisible, the unseen), cannot allow the killing of children, the death of the innocent, the suffering of the righteous. If God is truly eidenai ("the one who knows all that is good and beautiful"), then he would give up the burden and make man more than himself. This, it seems, is Ivan's atheism: that he puts himself in God's place, that he makes himself God. A blasphemy punishable by death. Because of all this, Ivan is widely considered to be an atheist. A socialist, a revolutionary, a reformer. But not a techno-socialist, a Bolshevik, or a Benthamite utilitarian. He is no less a believer than Alyosha. His "atheistic" revolt is actually inspired by his deep faith in a truly unjust God. The Benthamite reformer is cold to such speculations and passions. The Benthamite is an architect, a mason. He is interested in utility and comfort, in profit, prudence, progress, and the laws of nature. His "method" is geometry. There is no place in it for emotion and metaphysics. To satisfy body and soul, the Benthamite would nevertheless agree with and repeat Spinoza's vision:
In a Benthamite world, Job's suffering is meaningless, but God or Satan play no part in it. Job suffers simply because he is alive. And if cloning and multiplication can help ease his burden, then let's clone and reproduce. If there is a God for the Benthamite, he would surely be a utilitarian reformer turned techno-socialist. Techno-socialism doesn't speculate on the existence of immeasurable, vaguely defined concepts of sovereign morality. Like Sponoza, it deals with problems, not metaphysics. The Russian Bolsheviks purged all manner of "believers" from their ranks as soon as they could, and filled the gaps with pale techno-bureaucrats. Plekhanov's followers, the Social Democrats, did not win the battle against the Bolsheviks at the end of the 19th century, but they won the war locally and globally in an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, way. Why? Because scientific materialism didn't stop spreading, and the desire to treat nature as a problem, not as metaphysics, didn't diminish. Hades, aeides, must return to obscurity, which is its proper place. There is no need for Ivan's misdirected passion. There is no need for a futile rationalization of reality, which has a utilitarian but not a moral value. Alyosha, the believer, is silent. He listens to his brother's plea and accepts God just as he accepts the existence of good and evil. Alyosha resigns himself, so to speak, to the unruly power of the divine nature. Like a swimmer, he doesn't fight against the waves of time, he runs on them, touching no bottom. He probably trusts that even the most despicable evil is the result of a greater plan, and like the story of Job, one day all will be restored - the same, the unique that was lost will be restored and renewed, and Job will prove that even without a bottom and hard ground under his feet, he played the game well, proved his righteousness, lived up to his dignity even in the midst of absurdity, and defeated not Leviathan's will but "reality" itself. In Alyosha's eyes, suffering is crowned with meaning. And he understands the pain and passion of his brother Ivan, and he stands up and kisses him in silence. Because silence is the answer to absurdity, to the scandal of injustice and senseless pain. One day Ivan, and all like him, will enter that silence and find the truth that Alyosha and Job found (eventually, in silence). *** Evil must be contained. Evil becomes simply a "problem" not only when we treat it as a natural phenomenon, but also when we lose all emotional connection to the source of evil. The metaphysical problem of evil, evil as something that "ought not to be," disappears when we treat the source of evil as an object. That is, when we treat the evildoer without passion, without expecting anything human from him or her, without seeing him or her as a human being capable of rational or emotional response. The method of "changed perspective," as we can call it, allows us, the victims of evil, to deal with our inner psychological pain and, at the same time, to find hard, mechanical ways, disregarding the norms of humanity, to deal with evildoers, even at the cost of their total destruction. The dehumanization of the evildoer, the enemy, and the troublemaker has been a common method of mercilessly dealing with opponents in wars and political conflicts. It allows total war and all kinds of technical measures to exterminate the "enemy". In milder forms, when the compromised person to be eliminated or dettered, the person who acts in a way that is wrong and dangerous to others (and to himself), the psychopath, for example, is considered "possessed," that is, not himself. The enemy "in him" is treated according to the so-called "changed perspective": dehumanization. There is no "person" anymore, only a human form. There is a mental disorder and a natural error that requires a natural response for the sake of safety and survival. In dealing with the psychopath, we are not dealing with "evil", a metaphysical problem, we are dealing with a natural problem that requires a natural "remedy". The emotional connection to a being that cannot respond to rational arguments and human pain is broken, and this opens the possibility of dealing with "it" as one deals with nature, treating the imbecile as a problem beyond the norms of good and evil. Foucault's theoretical hypothesis of totalitarian society, described in his Discipline and Punish—a more insightful and complex work of literature than Orwell's popular novel "1984"—appears precisely as a vision of political and social order in which the metaphysical problem of evil is solved by applying a "changed perspective" of treating human ills or "sins" in a mechanical way - through surveillance, i.e. observation, and rational methods (technology), "science.” Evil must be contained and prevented. Natural disasters and moral evils must be eliminated. If natural disasters could be eliminated by manipulating natural phenomena, matter, moral evils are dealt with by restricting freedoms and psychological control (education, culture). Moral evils, the real evil, are considered unsolvable in a positive way: by allowing freedom and time of self-correction. Even if freedom offers a chance for autonomous moral growth, the sacrifices that would be made to achieve that growth would be too high a price to pay. It would also be a very Darwinian way to leave the species to solve its own shortcomings without the help of supervised rational design. For rational beings like humans, who cannot function without a rational perception of reality (and authority), the Darwinian option is not the preferred or natural one. A rational being solves a problem of irrationality and evil by finding rational solutions. Utilitarianism, the Benthamite prison and philosophy, seems to be the perfect blueprint or principle for solving human evils in a rational, non-Darwinian way. Freedom is the first casualty in this battle. "Controlled (or conscious) freedom," the freedom of reason, is the ultimate goal and solution. It is the "final solution." Because it deals with evil from what I've called a "changed perspective," a perspective that treats man not as a person, a subject, but as an object, a mechanism, a problem, a mindless source of pain and wrongdoing. This perspective eliminates the emotional attachment (pity or sympathy) that one may have to the troublemaker (seeing him, despite everything, as a fellow human being) and seeks every means to eliminate the source of disturbance and pain. It does so in a scientific way, through monitoring and rational methods, through calculations and fine-tuning, whenever possible, limiting unnecessary bloodshed, open violence, and all the possibilities of guilt and psychological unease that may arise for the executive powers appointed to solve the problem of evil. If Christianity taught us to believe that man could be born of nature and become a life-giving spirit, if it asked us to believe that man, born naturally in the flesh, in spite of his low starting point, could, precisely because of his disadvantage at birth, outgrow the God-man Christ, born of spirit and flesh, utilitarianism teaches us that man has limits, natural limits, and that these limits must be respected in order to make human life more bearable, happier. How are these limits respected? By setting limits to absolute human freedom, while promoting freedom sanctioned by reason, a freedom that is aware of the evils of unconstrained human imagination and agency. Freedom, sanctioned by reason, is supposed to come to each of us through culture and through the (scientific) construction of a reality made up of that culture. This is exactly what religion tries to construct: a widespread culture that forms a reality that is supposed to prevent human violence, evil, and sin, but which is sanctioned not so much by reason as by faith in an unnatural power. If religious freedom with its life-giving culture is sanctioned by faith, the rational freedom of modern man with its life-giving culture is sanctioned by reason. What Christianity failed to do, despite all its attempts, including borrowing the language and concepts of ancient Greece, was to fully integrate reason into its domain. The Enlightenment, a result of Christianity itself, in turn failed to keep faith within the domain of reason. The idea of human autonomy and self-growth somehow fell short of its Christian origins, of the right to believe in the existence of absolute good and right without the need for proof. And I have no choice but turn to that unlikely prophet, Foucault, mapping the culture and reality of the Enlightenment—a culture and reality of this age and time. *** A human form that is a source of evil is best manipulated and most effectively eliminated by technology. Technology allows for anonymity of action, limited responsibility, and merciless punishment. It makes the process of defense and control cheaper, more orderly, and large-scale. Once rules are invented, tested, and applied, they can remain in place for a long time, with no additional changes, only minor and necessary improvements and updates. Bureaucracy is technology. Law is technology. Money is technology. Tax systems are technology. Technology is everything conceived by the human mind to achieve a particular result of the human imagination. We have social technology: the science of government. It works through a system of hierarchy and coercion. We also have material technology, such as machines, which help and serve the goals of rational authority. The most direct way against the evil of the misdirected human will, against what we may call the "empty human form," is confinement. We have different forms of confinement, but the most creative and effective is invisible confinement. The object of confinement is placed in a cell of limited possibilities, in a fixed position, observed, and unaware of the artificiality of his position. Confinement is a method of dealing with evil. Christian communities had the soft technology of excomunication to deal with troublemakers and criminals. This technique as an idea wasn't new. It's alluded to in the early pages of Genesis, where God doesn't punish Cain with death, but expels him from human society. Another form of excommunication is exile. It was practiced in ancient Greece and Rome. Today, open excommunication is not widely used. The act of exclusion is concealed. People are excommunicated, but through various forms of confinement. They are free, like Cain, but they carry their chains everywhere. "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains," as Rousseau famously said. They may not be in prison, but they live in a prison, and that prison is so well constructed, so perfect thanks to the development of technology and the supporting culture of confinement and control, that they are not aware of the practical impossibility of acting evil or good by their own will. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes the measures taken against a plague. The book was published in 1975 and described the measures taken in a seventeenth-century town. The measures taken were not very different from what we have seen globally, in our own time, with the Covid pandemic. Individuals and communities were confined to contain the “evil.” There was a rational organization of social, scientific, and governmental forces working in symphony against the perceived threat. The majority of the population, in Foucault's town and in our time, was ordered to stay indoors, there was quarantine, distribution of free food (cash aid, in our time), regulations. Everyone was confined to his place, and if he moved, he did so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment. In Quebec, during the pandemic, there was a particularly strong social and moral pressure on people who did not respect the rules of confinement and were not vaccinated. There were plans to impose taxes and penalties on those who violated public health measures. To the technology of government and other forms of surveillance and punishment was added the socio-cultural pressure on dissenters. People were fired from their jobs for not following the rules, communities were divided, and dissenters were vilified. In the plague-ravaged town, Foucault notes, inspection was constant and the "gaze" was alert everywhere. The threat of evil mobilized the entire immune system of society, and as one might suspect, the system, in its shock, was on the verge of turning against its own healthy cells - families and innocent individuals. The surveillance in the city described by Foucault was based on a system of permanent registration. A system that is actually quite common and indispensable for the functioning of the modern state. In the case of the Covid pandemic, Canada introduced the so-called ArriveCan app, which was practically a registration tracking scheme that the Liberal government tried to implement permanently even after the end of the pandemic. Obviously, the app was seen as a useful technology for the state to deal with the permanent evil facing society. This power against evil is what Foucault calls "disciplinary power." Discipline is training, coercion, regularity, repetition, building a habit and a character for the achievement of a particular goal. Discipline is essentially an external force. The individual may voluntarily subject himself to it, but since it is something that is carried out and made possible by the power of the will, it is always the result of an external impulse. The ascetic, for example, disciplines his mind and body because he wants to achieve a vision that is beyond himself; the inspiration for his ascetic actions may come from within, from his own will and aspiration, but it is nevertheless related to something beyond his own nature, something greater than himself. Man is not born to suffer voluntarily and to limit his desires and needs. The soldier, another example, is disciplined to endure long hours of sleeplessness, various kinds of discomfort, the harshness of nature and weather, battles and wounds, the loss of comrades and family ties, just as the ambitious athlete trains beyond measure to win the prize. Not the will is the ultimate good here, not the senseless suffering and training of body and mind, but the prize. The prize, the goal, is what makes discipline possible. In short, discipline is related to will, even personal will, but what essentially ignites that will is beyond and above the personal and natural. It might be the ought of a moral vision. Or the ought of physical survival. Or the ought of authoritative power that has assumed the burden of responsibility in the struggle against "evil." Society, culture, state power discipline and create subjects and, at best, citizens. And Foucault notes that the aim of disciplinary power, that which is imposed purely from the outside on individuals and communities, has one goal: not to make a festival of diversity, a wedding-like celebration, but to penetrate with regulations into the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of complete hierarchy. During the pandemic, people around the world were ordered to wear masks in public. At first, there were many who were against this regulation. People found it inconvenient, unnatural. Masks made it difficult to breathe. But eventually the majority overcame their reluctance and became convinced and, more importantly, accustomed and willing to wear masks. Behind masks, people began to feel better, safer, more private. Their facial expression was hidden and they felt almost like they were behind a safe wall where they could find security and privacy. Exposure makes people vulnerable, and masks in public spaces create a sense of security: from the spread of the virus to the spread of human gaze and judgment. The reason for these public measures and orders was to limit the spread of the virus, and the effect was the revelation of how easy it is, after initial resistance and hesitation, to get people to discipline themselves and act in a unified and uniform way. Masks became part of life. Faces were only visible when communication took place through the medium, the "window" of the electronic device, the personal computer; the presence and diversity of the human face and expression disappeared from the physical space of cities, squares, markets and so on, and was fully revealed in the artificial space, the face-book of digital technology, the space created by the human mind, a space constructed entirely by the human imagination, a non-natural environment, numerical and fluorescent, fully immersed in what Arendt called "the human condition". What is significant, and symbolically important, is that this non-natural, man-made environment allows "penetration" and surveillance, or observation, as Foucault says, down to the smallest details of human biology and personality (psychology). It allows the collection of data and the measurement, analysis and improvement of a disciplinary force aimed at fighting "evil". Or, to use Foucault’s own words uttered in the distant year of 1975: “[N]ot masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignement to each individual of his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ desease.” This was the most significant effect and revelation of the fight against natural disease. The immune system, whatever the cost, would eventually deal with the virus without the help of human reason, but what the immune system cannot do is to understand the human desire for absolute security and control. What was the purpose of all this "assigned truth"? To fight evil and disorder, to fight the natural diversity that is still beyond human control, to assign "diversity" and order by human design, to classify and define, to fight everything that is still not conditioned by the authoritative and visionary power of sovereign reason. The pandemic, the plague or the covid or any other kind of desease, is an opportunity for the creation of a new, humanly constructed world. To win the battle against disease through rational, non-natural, conscious effort, through the inventiveness of human reason, is to gain power and capacity over the natural forces of this world, over what is still beyond our understanding and control, including the evil of corrupted human nature. The struggle and victory over natural disease is, if not an actual possibility, at least an opportunity, an opening for further disciplinary action, experimentation and expansion of authoritative power. "If it is true that leprosy gives rise to rituals of exclusion, which to a certain extent provided the model and general form of the great Confinement," Foucault wrote in 1975, long before we personally and globally experienced the great Confinement of 2020-22, "then the plague (in our case Covid) gave rise to disciplinary projects." But the gravity and seriousness of disciplinary projects could suddenly be mocked by rare yet revealing events that show that behind the claws and grip of discipline and surveillance there is a festival of life. A festival not beyond the reach of the disciplinary force, but in its very unconquered heart. Dr. Jay K. Varma, New York City's chief public health adviser under Mayor Bill de Blasio from April 2020 to May 2021, and one of the chief architects of the city's vaccine policy, a consistent proponent of masks and social distancing rules, was caught on video having sex parties and attending a dance in the basement of a Wall Street bank. The New York Times reported two years after the end of the pandemic regulations:
Dr. Varma defended himself with the usual arguments of official disciplinary rhetoric:
In other words, he is a victim of political conspiracy and extremism. The enemy, in his words, comes not from anarchist or liberal factions, but from the vicious "right-wing" milieus. The paradox of the disciplinary power in the liberal state, which is also extremist in character, is that it tries to put on the mantle of responsibility and rectitude and to convince its wavering subjects that the enemy is exactly what the disciplinary power is (but does not want to reveal). The hypocrisy and stupidity of its most negligent officials here is very similar to the hypocrisy and stupidity of Nazi or Communist officials and bureaucrats. The doctor defends his narrative despite the facts. And it is a wonder if this is not simply a banality of evil. This is not the only case of ridicule and exposure of the failures of the system of control imposed on society in general. There are many examples of similar cases in which the disciplinarians act against their own rules. "Woe to you, lawyers!" it is written in the Gospel of Luke, "for you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in you hindered.” It is very possible that the system of discipline and punishment at this point is so constructed that it permits the Dionysian bacchanalia among its operative members only to improve itself from within, over time. The parties must stop one day - the day when man no longer decides, when law and technology join forces and become autonomous, independent, sovereign, thus finally closing the last open gate for undisciplined human action. This point of improvement was reached to some extent under the Stalinist regime, where no state official or bureaucrat was safe from the terror of state discipline and punishment. But it could also be said that historically, under any disciplinary power, there has always been a free space, located in the social margins, where the most marginalized subjects and groups, as well as the most entitled and elite among the ruling class, were free to enjoy the Dionysian festivity. The poorest were so completely abandoned that they were free to do as they pleased; the richest were so far removed from society that they were able to do anything they imagined. Beasts and angels on the fringes of society, as Aristotle would say, not fully human. Beasts and angels, the very targets of disciplinary power, waiting to be domesticated at the "last trumpet." Nietzsche spoke of the death of God at the end of the 19th century and the birth of Superman. Neither God, whom we don't know and have never seen, was dead, nor was Superman the man Nietzsche imagined. The disciplinary power has its own divine logic, creating its own semi-gods and shaping reality in a way that no single person can comprehend and understand. The Dionysian festivity will, must, cease and give way to the pure forms and order of pure reason. Not Christianity, but the ideal of the Enlightenment - human reason - closes the doors, one after the other, in the most incomprehensible and creative way, against the passions, wars, loves and excesses of ancient paganism. The (future) Olympic gods of disciplinary power are gods of marble: frozen, timeless, cold, confined. "You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but do not be alarmed. These things must come to pass, but the end is yet to come." The end will come when no one expects it, when there is peace and quiet, when the wine finally turns into insipid water. *** At one point, Foucault says, "the rulers dreamed of the state of the plague." But he couldn't imagine that there would come, and very soon, a time, a culture, and an environment whose birth and growth could be loosely dated, say, to April 4, 1975 (the date of Microsoft's founding), on the metal "wings" of the Altair, then to August 23, 1991 (the public opening of the "universal networked information system," or World Wide Web), when there would be no need, even for a plague emergency, to assign to each individual his "true" name, his "true" place, his "true" body, his "true" disease. Mass digitalisation and the spread and use of digital information technology, an almost perfect organism born of the human mind and imagination, opened up the possibility of mass classification, ordering and re-ordering. Digital information technologies are an almost perfect organism, because on the one hand they are highly centralized, monopolized, private and yet state-backed (a few companies dominate the field, such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook/Meta; they control the digital ecosystem), and on the other hand they are largely decentralized, supported by so-called "open source" development. The "software" they produce, the very technology that animates the matter of the "hardware" they use, was given for free to develop. The copyright holders granted users the right to use, study, modify, and redistribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose, only to take back everything delegated, harvesting for free the energy and genius of dispersed knowledge. In the case of Microsoft, which from the beginning was against decentralization (see Gates' An Open Letter to Hobbyists, 1976) and slowly embraced open source development, we have this amazing breakthrough just at the right moment of growth and expansion of technologies, when its historically centralized system merged in 2020 with OpenAI, sneaking into all available fields of existence for data collection, without the need to bring more aliens of knowledge to the board of elected. “Visibility is a trap,” Foucault famously said.
What kind of "backlighting" did Foucault have in mind? In practice, it is not entirely clear. But most of us experience some kind of "backlighting" every day, not just imagine it, like Foucault, as a Benthamite theorem. Perhaps this backlighting is right in front of you, as it is in front of me: most computer screens (monitors) ("monitor" - a device, according to one of the dictionary definitions, used for observing, checking, or keeping a continuous record of something) cannot function without backlighting. Backlighting enables the connection between the person and the tower. Behind the bright screens of computers or cell phones, we are observed through "personal windows" where we are physically alone. From our perspective, the window of the computer screen is a window to the outside world. From the perspective of the producer of that window, the screen is an opportunity for observation, control, and the collection of a continuous record of our individual interests, passions, questions, relationships, and liberties. From our perspective, we are alone in, let's say, our bedroom, with our personal electronic device, in the privacy of our physical space. We are hidden in front of the backlight, observing the world. But from the point of view of the producer of this light and gate to the world, we are on the periphery, in the crowd, the “world,” locked in the cage of the private IP address. From his point of view, we are actors, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. If we are still used to thinking of physical space as the only real space we can inhabit, the guard at the center of the tower has always perceived us as belonging to digital space-a space of symbols and psyche, the most incomprehensible and elusive of all spaces, the key to the greatest mystery: the mystery of human evil and behavior. Perhaps it should be noted that the guard is more often a bot than a human, and for the bot, physical space is an unknown dimension. It is impossible for the computing machine to comprehend the tragedy (or comedy) of the theater behind the screens, and to act empathetically on par with the vagaries of the human sense. For the bot, the actor it observes is always "dehumanized." The actor is always treated in a scientific way, where hard data require hard solutions. And where every problem has a single, absolute solution--there is one solution, just as there is one truth. If we add to all this the culture of commercialism, of profit, to which the majority belongs, and of which OpenAI is an official part, we may have the double effect of witnessing a situation in which man is exploited both by the "nanny" state, which takes care of everything, including man's conscience, and by the "market" force, which exploits everything for the sake of profit, including man's mind. And we can conclude that the pharmakon of digital technology, which seeks solutions in the fields of both security and commerce, places the human being in that gray area where a person is neither alive nor dead, neither absent nor physically present, neither active nor passive. Man is locked in his physical and digital cell, blinded by the lights, as the singer sings, with that deep, Kafkaesque, not fully conscious sense of being completely alone in a "cold and empty city of sin," with "no one around to judge him," but in fact only alone and judged. Judged not by people like him - that wouldn't solve the problem of evil - but by technology, an increasingly autonomous creature of the human mind.
*** MORE FROM THE SAME AUTHOR: CULTURE AND REALITY The Montréal Review, May 2024 *** THE "PALE HORSE" OF OLYMPIC CEREMONY The Montréal Review, July 2024 *** |