by system
failure
Adam Curtis
gave recently an interesting interview
to Jarvis Cocker on the occasion of his new film
'HyperNormalisation'. Curtis makes some interesting points about the
nature of cybernetic world. He describes the dream of the Internet
Utopians who wanted to create a parallel world that could achieve
self-stability without political interference or any other type of
authority.
Curtis
explains that we have confused our dream of the internet. We have
confused an engineering system with the dream of the future. As an
engineering system, the internet is based on feedback. What it does
very efficiently and brilliantly, is constantly reading the past and
feeding back staff to the receiver.
Therefore,
as he also explains, if you have a system that it constantly tries to
manage the world by reading data from your behavior in the past, what
it can't imagine, is a kind of future that never existed before. It's
always reinforcing you, from what it knows you are. All the systems
online simplify you and then they feed you more of that. But the main
thing is, it cannot imagine another future because it always has to
look into the past.
To expand
Curtis' view little further, we could say that, in essence, Internet
reflects society's inability to vision a different future. As an
engineering system, Internet is only a tool in the hands of people,
and can be used accordingly. In the whole human history, perhaps the
most important thing that contributed to the generation of new ideas,
was what we define as communication. Communication between different
people and different cultures was boosting the cultural evolution of
the societies.
Today, while
we have a powerful tool which can be used to spread and develop new
ideas between people across the world with tremendous speed, it is
used mostly as a kind of "loop generator". The vast
majority of people are using Internet to be organized in large groups
who have the same short-term goals, the same desires, the same
interests, without being able, however, to expand their ideas outside
the dominant culture.
Curtis
mentions the example of the generation in Egypt and the generation of
the Occupy movement. There is no substantial difference between them.
They are middle-class liberals who really want to change the world.
It's a great and wonderful idea, but to do it, you got to have a
picture of the future. We don't have a picture of the future. We have
a system we are dissatisfied with, which sometimes is quite fake, but
we have no other picture of the future. That's the problem. And the
Internet, as an engineering system, does not supply it. It's
beautifully organizing people, but we need a picture of the future
somehow.
To cut a
long story short, the fact itself that the Internet Utopians were
dreaming a world of balance through an engineering system, proves
perfectly that the societies have lost their ability to dream of a
different future. In other words, people are not thinking
'dynamically', but 'linearly'. Although generally we are not
satisfied with the current system of values, we tolerate it, exactly
because we are unable to dream of a better one.
At the
moment where the now well-known "bots" started to dominate
the cyberspace, things became even worse. Due to the fact that they
are programs that have been designed to search for "already
there" information, they are generating more loops in which the
human receivers are trapped more frequently. These programs are
actually dictating the priorities inside the cyberspace, based
actually, on low-level human needs and interactions. Anything
different from this virtual reality, is actually being lost inside an
ocean of low-level information, which is used, for example, from
companies to sell products and services.
We have the
most powerful tool of communication in human history. Yet, instead of
using it dynamically, exchanging new ideas that could help us build a
better future, we are spending ourselves in endless loops, which are
actually mirrors of what we are, without any prospect for a truly
radical development.
The more we
are sinking inside this cybernetic world of endless loops, the more
we lose our ability to vision a different future. Any remnants of
this ability will be finally eliminated. This is the vicious circle
of “zerovision”.
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