Timeline, 2019
“timeline taɪmˌlaɪn (anglicism computing) Chronology, computing history.
… the localization (for GPS, only with an iPhone plugged into the cigarette lighter, whereas geo-tracking services like FourSquare have to establish their position using relay antennas, so as not to drain the battery) terminating a task (such as uploading a photo to Flickr), even if another program has been opened before the upload has finished. However, it is impossible to manage the update of a twitter timeline or to keep instant messaging software open in another window.- (20minutes.fr)”
Wiktionary
“The assembly line does not correspond to the image that I had in mind. […] I imagined something with a quick pace – that “hellish pace” which is mentioned in the tracts. “The assembly line”: these words evoke a sequence, staccato and lively.
The first impression is, on the contrary, that of a slow but continuous movement of all of the cars. As for the operations, they seem to be carried out with a sort of resigned monotony, but without the hastiness that I was expecting. It is like a long, gloomy slide, which after some time generates a sort of drowsiness, punctuated by sounds, shocks, flashes, repeated cyclically and regularly. The formless music of the line, the sliding grey carcasses of raw sheet metal, the routine nature of the gestures: I feel myself progressively enveloped, numbed. Time stops.”
Robert Linhardt, The Assembly Line
“So she was considering, in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For techno- logical man it is time that occupies the same role. Time is still loaded with a thousand decisions and indecisions which terrify a society that has yielded so much of its autonomy to merely automatic processes and routines. The problem, therefore, is to control panic by "killing time" or by shredding it into "ragtime – literally into shreds of time."
Marshall Mc Luhan, The Mechanical Bride
… the localization (for GPS, only with an iPhone plugged into the cigarette lighter, whereas geo-tracking services like FourSquare have to establish their position using relay antennas, so as not to drain the battery) terminating a task (such as uploading a photo to Flickr), even if another program has been opened before the upload has finished. However, it is impossible to manage the update of a twitter timeline or to keep instant messaging software open in another window.- (20minutes.fr)”
Wiktionary
“The assembly line does not correspond to the image that I had in mind. […] I imagined something with a quick pace – that “hellish pace” which is mentioned in the tracts. “The assembly line”: these words evoke a sequence, staccato and lively.
The first impression is, on the contrary, that of a slow but continuous movement of all of the cars. As for the operations, they seem to be carried out with a sort of resigned monotony, but without the hastiness that I was expecting. It is like a long, gloomy slide, which after some time generates a sort of drowsiness, punctuated by sounds, shocks, flashes, repeated cyclically and regularly. The formless music of the line, the sliding grey carcasses of raw sheet metal, the routine nature of the gestures: I feel myself progressively enveloped, numbed. Time stops.”
Robert Linhardt, The Assembly Line
“So she was considering, in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For techno- logical man it is time that occupies the same role. Time is still loaded with a thousand decisions and indecisions which terrify a society that has yielded so much of its autonomy to merely automatic processes and routines. The problem, therefore, is to control panic by "killing time" or by shredding it into "ragtime – literally into shreds of time."
Marshall Mc Luhan, The Mechanical Bride
I am reading. My gaze has difficulty following the line. It jumps to the next one, moves around the page, becomes impatient. I am forced to make the repeated effort of returning to the linearity of the text. I know this lack of attention well, this impatient gaze, it is the one adopted when faced with digital interfaces, where it has become used to using the screen like a space for video games, a responsive labyrinth which unfurls in all directions.
On a formal level, the two dimensional space of the page is not actually dissimilar from that of the screen, whether it be tactile or not, but its nature is totally different. The page only provides access to itself, I can only go beyond it in the linear continuity of the text, coming from the preceding page, moving on to the following one. I can only activate it with the thinking that the text generates within my mind. The linearity of the text serves as a basis for the mobility of my thinking. Inversely, linearity is only a minor characteristic of the screen, especially when it serves as our interface with the computer. So in the end what counts is not the continuity of the text, but on the contrary its fragmentation. The text opens out onto other texts, is accompanied by images that are gathered together into groups which open out onto other groups and other images, that I can see. But also it is combined with my own images, transmitting them and receiving them in exchange for other objects, images, text, and sound, information mainly. In other words, precisely something other than text, images or sound, because information is only valid for and through its organization and circulation.
For the digital or computer interface, content is secondary. What is important is the way in which the content comes together or falls apart. And if the inherent characteristic of information is its movement, its value varies according to its position in space and time. This is why I can’t stop looking at the device, can’t stop “refreshing” it, because nothing is older than yesterday’s newspaper, or indeed the update one from a minute ago. In fact, the digital interface only has value if it is synchronized with the immediate present. I have to constantly update it and at the same time update myself, in an infinite and endless process which seems to be both its program and its hidden finality. The timeline replaces the production line as the new technical space which imposes a rhythm that I have to follow, otherwise I risk, not being excluded from the factory, but indeed cut off from my own existence.
The appearance of the Game Boy in 1989 represents a turning point in the establishment of this behavioral posture which is worthy of interest. Before portable consoles, video games were played in dedicated spaces, then in homes where the video game resulted in the autonomy of the television screen. Instead of the broadcast of a common and linear program, each user would now find themselves isolated, engaged in an identical and yet personalized interaction with the video game. If terrestrial television functions according to a system of channels which keeps one at home, then the games console corresponds more to the principle of the electronic bracelet. It no longer provides us with a given time and place, but rather transforms every place that I find myself into an extension of the prison stranglehold. Like a prisoner on supervised release, I can move away from the urban technical complex, but must return to it regularly in order to recharge the terminal.
The portable console produced by Nintendo was not the first of its kind, but it did establish the domination of a technical paradigm. 118 million Game Boys were sold over a ten year period, not to mention the number of competing models that were sold during the same period. What the Game Boy allows for, is the neutralization of physical space. Wherever I might find myself, I have equal access to the interface. Whereas television still claims to produce content, the games console assumes the predominance of its system. Its sole function is to keep me in front of the screen, on the job, wherever I am. Tetris, the Game Boy’s flagship game develops no other quality than the dexterity necessary for the line worker to do their job. Thirty years later, Candy Crush continues to function according to the same principle, developing the same qualities that I would need to efficiently fill out charts, write reports or fill in forms. At the same time, it allows me to fill up dead time or the downtime in between two notifications.
In general, digital time is not linked to the nature of the activity being carried out, but rather to its structure. Also, irrespective of whether it is considered leisure time or during working hours. So called “free” time is in fact time which has been freed from history; retaining nothing of the past or the future in order to dedicate itself exclusively and slavishly to the maintenance of the present.[1] Deprived of all continuity, this obsession with the timeline, literally the production line of the present, leads to persistent fragmentation. I open one application, then another, with each information leading me to another according to a structural logic that creates competition between the different systems that I use. I cannot grasp the scope of the digital space. The only thing that I can be sure of is that it far exceeds my person. When I turn the computer, the telephone, the console or the television off, it is not because I have reached the end, but indeed on the contrary, because they have gotten the better of me. Nor is this where the anxiety that they produce ends, while I’m offline I am always worried about falling hopelessly behind the timeline.
Like the workers who thought that they had left the Lumière factories, we have simply left the factory, to then enter the image where we pursue the same mechanical work, only now on a symbolical level. It is interesting to see how this exploitation of symbolic work evolved between the film Matrix, released in 1999 and Ready Player One, released in 2018. In 1999 the situation was described literally as the exploitation of man by machines, a historical situation which necessitated an awareness and a revolt “in reality”. Twenty years later, Steven Spielberg’s film cynically proposes a quasi-utopian model of a society removed from history, controlled by lawyers, the police and businessmen. The members of this society “revolt” but they are revolting in order to hold on to their virtual existences. Not only does this revolt not take place “in reality”, but actually and explicitly aims to maintain the alienation of the body, by and in the virtual. The revolution demands that the illusion be maintained.
By explicitly setting the existence of his characters in the image rather than in the space not occupied by their bodies, Spielberg produces a relatively accurate vision of the construction of our societies. Because they take place in the image, all of the dematerialized activities can only have a symbolic effect. When I put a photograph of my meal online and in exchange I receive a number of gratifications – small hearts, thumbs up or other graphic interjections – a transaction has indeed taken place. But this transaction, even if it could go beyond its symbolic function, can only have value outside of a system of transactional equivalence. It would require, to put it simply, being able to convert the currency into something else. But, as the film shows very accurately, the regulating authority of society actually does reside in a very struct control of access to the exeriority of the virtual system. Society, as modeled by Spielberg, proposes that I exchange what is in my possession for a fictional currency and also organizes its symbolic spending. A little like in a casino, it is the inverse conversion which proves to be almost impossible. Though the characters can spend with extreme ease, the possibility of earning a wage which is not virtual seems to be absent from the society being described.
Yet it is indeed the digital interface which maintains the social body in its own simulation; nothing can happen as even the revolution will take place virtually. In such a system, the immediate reward offered by the economy of the symbolic is the best defense against the possibility of a political thinking that would be fully realized. And it is easy to see that control is not exercised directly on the social body but on its fiction. Overthrowing the system first requires grasping the fundamental opacity and operability of the interface. Only from here will it be possible to unlock the twin locks simultaneously, as each one guarantees the security of the other:
1. One must step outside the rhythm of the production line, a rhythm which renders all thought impossible.
2. It is necessary to think in order to grasp the system of belief which keeps us shackled to the production line.
At the beginning of the industrial revolution, Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland. One of his main characters, the White Rabbit, is equipped with a pocket watch and is always running in the book[2]. The White Rabbit is late, but late for what? It is very likely that he is simply just late, structurally late in his relationship with the mechanism of the watch. On an implicit level, obviously the lateness is incarnated in the authority who is the owner of the mechanism (the Queen). What one fails to see is the extent to which technology is not only an instrument of authority, but how it establishes that authority. It is only possible to be late in the context of a predefined time.
The bell, followed by the clock have already modified time by cutting it up and giving it rhythm, thus allowing us to distinguish between various activities, allowing for the measurement of, and thus the monetization of, time. Technology emerged synchronously with the rise of industry and capitalism. Alienation could be described as the temporary neutralization of my presence in time. It is the external organization of my relationship with time and it which produces an abstract constraint on my body. I no longer eat when I am hungry but rather when it is time to eat, I no longer rest when I am tired but when the bell rings signaling downtime, vacation time or retirement.
The digital interface goes even further as it dismantles time itself, my body no longer experiments with continuous time, experienced according to moments which are free or restricted, it is scattered among the debris of a fragmented time. I have to construct myself within fragmented time, shifting from one fragment to another by reconciling the febrile passage from physical time to technological time. The temporality of the body enters into competition with that of a multitude of algorithms, activated by the combined activities of a multitude of other entities, individuals, companies, bots or spam, wherever they might be in the world, thus uploading along with each notification the DNA of a particular mode of relationship with time, crushing and recombining cultures, technologies and time zones.
The heart of the problem not only resides in the interface but also in its occultation. Technology, in its stated fantasy of real time, of the live, of the instantaneous – snapchat, instagram – indicates not only its obsession with the present, but also presents itself as always as immediate. Quickly overtaking us, technology insinuates that it doesn’t count. Nevertheless, this interface which presents itself as a contact with the other is in fact first and foremost a contact with a technological apparatus. Symmetrically, the other is not so much in contact with me as in contact with the same interface. The question emerges as to why these interfaces never assume their real nature, but on the contrary, strive to disappear even further, to blend into me, to the point that soon I will no longer be able to distinguish them from my own body. The intermediary, the code, progressively disappears, it is now the finger or the retina which activates the interface, the number is incorporated.[3]
Today, if I want to pose a question to X or to Y, I write to them without even thinking. In the near future my brain might be able to carry out this operation almost alone, but already the existing interfaces have become natural extensions of my physical body. The interface redefines and unifies my social environment and my personal environment. I write to X or Y on one of the four or five messaging platforms that I use in my downtime, irrespective of whether it is during my working hours or my private life. Whatever the hour, X or Y answers me, validating the fact that I am not at that moment really isolated in a given place, but that we permanently share the same space and that this space can no longer be defined as personal or professional. To such an extent that I am no longer certain that I am able to be alone, because if I do isolate myself I really do feel more than alone, amputated from a part of myself, because X or Y, and even more so the interfaces that manifest them, are now experienced as extensions of my body. And yet this “common space” is not so much a community as a singular mode of creating relationships. And this relational mode is hidden, thus multiplying its influence on the relationships that it establishes. The technology is so powerful that we interiorize it. Nevertheless, what establishes this incorporation of technology, its immanence and its immediacy, is not a technological fact, but is founded on two beliefs:
On one hand we believe that technology could not be anything other than what it is. On the other hand we believe in technology.
We believe that technology cannot be any different because we are looking at it from a technological point of view, which thus produces an illusion of immanence. However, technology is the product of human decision making which in return creates its own environment of activity. This results in two things. On one hand that technology and science are first and foremost a construction, and that this construction could indeed be different. And on the other hand that this construction is founded on the conditions and directions of techno-scientific research, which depend in particular on its financing. It can, as such, not exist outside of ideological frameworks. In an essay about scientific innovation, David Graber asks why the 2000’s did not see the appearance of flying cars, autonomous energy sources or the total automatization of work, things that actually seemed within our grasp a half-century earlier. He writes:
Research is always done in the context of a given ideological framework which limits its scope of application and orientates the results that are produced. Between two possible avenues of research, those who finance the research will not choose the best one, but rather the one which is more profitable for them. These orientations determine the exploitable results. Similarly, they determine a point of view where one must consider the functioning and use of mechanisms and systems. Users of dating applications generally complain that the applications are useless. They usually criticize the functioning of the tool which isn’t working, or, more painfully, themselves, as being ill adapted, defective products of a market that has been streamlined by algorithms. And yet, in reality everything functions perfectly, once we look at things from the point of view of the technology.
Though the dating app allows anyone to find his or her future partner, at the same time this results in it’s own disappearance, with the user finding right from the moment that they begin to use the app a reason to do without it.[5] With each technology committed to a profit making model, one could imagine that its own self-interest is totally opposed to that of the user. In order to be sustainable the application asks that I spend as much time as possible using it. Thus its desired function is not to help me meet my soul-mate, it is to keep me under the illusion that it will happen. We know that this principle is built and controlled by calling upon a combination of technical instruments, of cognitive sciences, the fruit of advanced and costly research which functions in a similar fashion to highly accurate tools. If on the surface this doesn’t work, it is because the tools that one uses are incorporated into the mechanism or system that one is using. There where we pridefully imagine ourselves to be the ones who benefit from this technology, we are in fact the raw materials of much vaster process.[6]
Because if we believe so blindly in the immanence, immediacy and benevolence of technology, it is first and foremost that we believe in technology. If we have trouble grasping how technology functions first and foremost as an ideological tool, it is because it is caught up in a broader ideological construction which is that of progress. And if this ideology of progress can not be questioned, it is that while it presents itself as rational, it reveals itself ultimately as a religious belief. Here one could employ the theory of Pierre Musso who explains how Christianity has progressively evolved to become an industrial religion. This religion takes up the contract of the Catholic religion where the Church organizes people’s submission to religious rules in exchange for the promise of a better after-life. In the wake of the shifting of a number concepts, it is today the Firm, the Company, which has taken on the role of organizing structure and which, on the basis of a belief in progress to come, ensures the docility of workers and consumers.
The transition is made starting with Catholic dogma itself: “the power of the monastic institution”, writes Pierre Musso, “is its ability to set a rhythm for organizing life and activities. Whereas it should simply have been a place of prayer hostile to the economy, the monastery actually adopted manual labor, measurement and technology for its rational and regulated organization: it appears as the ancestor of the workshop which was followed by the factory. Not only are the monks mechanics and inventors, but their disdain for the body also paves the way for the machine.”[7]
Industry thus develops as a cult founded on a belief in science and progress. The factory and then the Company provide them with a church. Musso considers that “in texts, images, places and objects, industrial religion formulates faith in this great promise. Industrialist faith operates in the name of this founding “revolution”, announcing a new “golden age” on earth, happiness to come, happiness promised in a recurring fashion with each new wave of techno-scientific innovation, sometimes via some kind of messianic social novelty, other times in the form of hero-entrepreneurs or techno-geniuses, from Henry Ford to Steve Jobs. The repetition of the mythical tale of the “Industrial Revolution” allows, among other things, to increasingly marginalize the “political revolution” to the benefit of a vision of the world carried forward by industrialists, scholars and engineers, creators of technologies which are more and more complex and revolutionary.”[8]
If I work backwards through the reasoning which leads me to the hypothesis of an industrial religion, I am able to precisely map out the discomfort that the presence of digital interfaces produces “within me”. This discomfort is caused by a dissonance between technological promise and its true reward. There where I should live as an “augmented” individual, the feeling that I have is first one of decline, of fragmentation, if not of being torn apart, both in space and in time. In reality we have little time to think about this discomfort. If we become aware of it, we first look for the cause in a malfunction of the technology, or in ourselves, assuming that we have incorrectly used the tool that is available to us. Yet one must assume that the tool functions perfectly, but that we are not the ones using it. What stops us from taking this leap is a complex fiduciary edifice. In effect technology presents itself as being transparent, practically part of our bodies, to the extent that we can’t distinguish it at first. If we do, we can often only consider its use in an environment that it has itself defined.
Our body might also malfunction but it has just as much difficulty breaking free from this malfunction that it has laboriously learned, indifferently, both in play as in work[9]. It has just as much difficulty to be aware that its technicization, synchronized with that of its environment, saturates its affects and its attention, through gratifications and rewards that are as effective as they are symbolic, all the more hypnotic as they add a precise rhythm to their activity, one which simultaneously stops us from thinking and from going mad. On the horizon of this apparatus for exploiting time, having moved past the various spectacles of cinema and politics, is a religion of technology forced upon us by technology as dogma and management as a cult. Obviously, it is neither technology in itself, nor the religious mechanism which produces what could be described by the traditionally used term “alienation”. It is more-so the way that this system produces the control and exploitation of the bodies that it holds sway over. The digital interface is a two way mechanism, it uses me just as much, if not more, than I use it, it modifies my body and my environment.
In a sense I am comforted by the idea that this anxiety that I feel, when faced with the shredded time of technology, is the result of a precise organization of reality by man. I am reassured that I am not at fault, and also reassured that it is a construction, as vast as it might be. This implies on one hand that this construction is not the only construction possible, but also that this construction can be modified. It is not a matter of fighting against “Progress”. It is a matter of taking into account the fact that “Progress” is simply a condition of organization of the world, a manner of considering man and his environment, and that this particular condition is maintained as the only option at the price of a double violence. Not only does progress carry a certain level of violence within it by subjecting me to a certain number of systems or mechanisms of exploitation, but it is also supported by a structural violence in order to maintain the reign of its particular modality as the only option, at the expense of other possibilities for the world. It is enough to observe the space occupied by the notion of “democracy” in the rhetoric of Western military operations over the last sixty years – even though most of these occurrences could easily be replaced by the term “hegemony” with little or no effect. To impose a model of functioning is to guarantee that behaviors will emerge within a predefined framework.
The violence of the mechanism should obviously not simply be reduced to it’s explicit violence through police or military action. One should see the structural violence of the system that David Graber defined in the following way: “Structures that could only be created and maintained by the threat of violence, even if in their ordinary, day-to-day workings, no actual physical violence need take place. If one reflects on the matter, the same can be said of most phenomena that are ordinarily referred to as “structural violence” in the literature – racism, sexism, class privilege – even if their actual mode of operation is infinitely more complex.”[10]
One might find this to be exaggerated, this reasoning which links structural violence to the difficulty that one might experience when trying to concentrate on reading or writing. Yet this is the exact question which provided the starting point for Virginia Woolf when she claimed for women, the possibility of having “a room of one’s own”. It is the same question raised by Jack London when his character, laborer Martin Eden, exhausted by his day of work, tries at night to write or read. In both cases, what is required, in the name of a human group, has often been identified by the same group. As long as they are deprived of the possibility of thought, the worker, the housewife or the contractual worker are unable to see themselves as exploited. It is indeed here the paradox that was identified by Robert Linhardt when he discovered the world of the factory.[11]
For the Western individual, reality is polarized by a fake, and thus ineffectual, décor: he or she works in order to have access to leisure activities. And yet this dichotomy hides the fact that this leisure space has been colonized by work, producing notably what is called the economy of attention. In a symmetrical fashion, the leisure ethos has colonized that of work, producing a whole set of “benevolent” concepts such as the open space, teleworking, Friday wear, etc. This profound reconfiguration of the contract did not emerge from social demands or grievances or from revolutions, it was carried out on via technology, from above, driven by business. This reorganization seemingly renders the image of work more sympathetic, multiplying the possibilities for leisure, to the point of intentionally making it difficult to tell the difference between them. Obviously what emerges between the lines is a constant perfecting of the organization of time, in the service of the “religion of technology”.
Being able to concentrate on reading is to have and recognize the possibility of thinking. Being able to concentrate on writing is to have time which is not “employed”, in other words not in the service of an activity which is foreign to me. The fundamental question is to know if I am using my time to do things which seem significant to me, whether it be work time or leisure time, that I use for myself or that I dedicate to effective personal or social relationships. If this is not the case, one could assume that this time has been siphoned away, with my consent, with the same mixture of cunning and menace that leads certain to exchange their land or their goods for a handful of glass beads.
The scientific and technological reorganization of time doesn’t only produce the systematic exploitation of our temporal resources. It also creates a décor which renders any possibility of having access to time ineffectual. In exactly the same way that a certain number of companies are working to privatize water resources, others are working on the privatization of temporal resources. This privatization functions through the methodical replacing of things by their images. The contemporary individual sees his existence progressively shifted to the symbolic field which has been erected as an operating décor. It is literally the décor produced by Spielberg’s film as described above[12]. What is inherent to the image, as it penetrates deeply into our socio-technological environments today, is that it appears immediately, which is an obvious paradox as it is by its very nature a mediation of the object that it represents. But if it overtakes the reality that it is supposed to represent in this way, it is because it does not embrace that reality.[13]
Starting with this observation and this analysis of a structural occupation and exploitation of time, consideration should be given to the leeway that one has. Can we consider technology outside of the framework of a fiduciary architecture? Can we decolonize our bodies and minds from the grip of a digital religion? Can we find our feet in reality and in time?
The first hypothesis that can be put forward is that a techno-scientific civilization founded on notions of efficacy, profit and progress, is neither the sole, nor the best way of envisioning and organizing reality. From here emerge a number of corollary hypotheses.
-The alternatives to a techno-scientific civilization are not necessarily antagonistic but they must be radically different. They do not target the destruction of the dominant model, but they do aim to establish themselves as an alterity.
Because the dominant model aspires towards hegemony, any and all aspirations towards the development of a different model could and would be seen as hostile in that they results in the deconstruction of the techno-scientific model. This deconstruction is not a social deconstruction, but rather on the contrary a recovery, given that the techno-scientific model has rid itself of politics, which has been replaced with a managerial model.
The development of an alterity is not anti-scientific, and it aims to deactivate the religious foundation of beliefs which polarize the scientific model. An alternative model can perfectly incorporate a techno-scientific dimension, but it has to deconstruct the fiduciary structure which assumes the hegemony of the techno-scientific model.
Among the key paradigms of the model to be dismantled can be found the notion of progress, whose form is that of a promise which is constantly being postponed. The notion of progress operates hand in hand with the idea of growth, the fantasy of infinite multiplication beginning with a finite quantity[14]. This notion is just as applicable to energy resources as it is to the human body, the productivity of which we ceaselessly seek to boost. This ideological system operates throughout the totality of its “model spaces”, from sport to sexual relationships, from the university to the business. One might note the particular nature of productivity, which is that it is always only quantitative (including the fact that this quality is itself evaluated quantitively).
Kenneth Goldsmith, when analyzing the contemporary literary space, notes the exponential increase in the quantity of information[15]. He cites a study on the volume of the texts in circulation: “By using words as a unit of measurement […], we estimate that 4,500 billion words were consumed in 1980. And we have calculated that the consumption of words reached 10,845 billion words in 2008, which corresponds approximately to 100,000 words[16] per person and per day in the United States”.
Beyond a certain stage, one might assume that the human body and human space is operating at a critical level of saturation.[17] Nevertheless, the hypothesis of a reduction in the number of vehicles, in traffic, in the circulation of people, objects and/or information is never envisaged, as it lacks a fiduciary basis which would render it at the same time credible and imaginable.
From this emerges the following idea: That belief in progress can only be deactivated by an alternative form of thinking, based on a reasonable evaluation of the data of the world. That this thinking is rooted in everyone’s understanding that the promise of progress only engages he or she who receives it. The idea is not to frontally oppose an over-powerful model, but rather to grasp that the model is based on nothing more than an illusion.
The basis of this awakening is not a revolution, but an accumulation of sensible gestures. Refusing a solicitation, a purchase, a rule, lucidly adjusting one’s use of the world. Let us be clear; it is not because the gestures are simple that they are easy. On the contrary, one can observe an economy which is inherent to these daily gestures, whose operation has been set out by technology thanks to processes which present themselves as inoffensive or benevolent – user-friendly. On this daily and anecdotal level, each gesture and each choice is proposed by inducing the desired response, conveniently producing a cascade of repeated consent. Yet it is precisely these micro-behaviors which form the guiding rules of a piloted use of the world. It is the sum of these minuscule prohibitions which guarantees the maintenance of order. Challenging them exposes one to a retort, the violence of which would only be disproportionate in appearance.[18]
This dismantlement can only be personal, but it is always stated in common, simply because it defines another form of individual and collective relationships. From there it is capable of producing alternative structures and capable of defending them. Once again it is not a question of refusing the fact of technology, but rather a question of shifting the finalities. This also assumes the clear nature of its finalities.[19]
Unity comes perhaps with searching on a different scale, the augmented body, which is often an issue. But the augmented body is also a matter of an obsession with performance. Though the idea of the augmented body makes sense, it does require an understanding of what this augmented whole would produce through my association with technology along with the space that I would occupy, as a body or as an individual. How to consider what a complete, augmented body, intertwined with a multitude of interfaces and entities, human or technological, would be, because in this space where I would exist, augmented by others, I am like the cell which is incapable of knowing the body that it is a part of?
In a similar fashion, my augmented thinking is a thinking which is outside of time, it is a cut up thinking, it connects, establishes links between scattered elements. Sometimes the simple fact of finding these elements is enough, not that they are enough for me, but by remobilizing them, I subject them to the numerous extensions of my body which employ them elsewhere. There where the constructed text would be inhabitable by a sole body, the digital body is only able to carry fragmented information in order to exist as a cumulative whole. The question, both inside and outside of this system, is to know whether we can imagine a link between my body and another body which is devoid of violence.
NOTES /
[1] The successful Carpe Diem, in the tattoo-shops as in psychology and self-help literature, can be seen as an injunction relative to the use of time.
[2] It is interesting to see the reappearance of the White rabbit in the film The Matrix, even more if we relate Alice in Wonderland to the industrial revolution. A relation already underlined by Marshall Mc Luhan in Understanding media.
[3] This goes beyond the simple prosthesis augmenting my body “from outside” that was described by Mc Luhan – like the wheel functioning as an extension to the foot, or the radio as an extension to the ear.
[4] David Graber, Bureaucracy
[5] Among the dating-apps, the regular distinction between sexual interest and love interest can be seen as a lure. One suggest that the ideal love partner will also satisfy my physical needs and that the ideal sex partner is the one who will also satisfy my sentimental needs. Still the distinction remains as a perfect excuse for the dysfunction of the dispositive, often rooted in the idea of an irreducible distinction between genres. This fake opposition functions like the opposition between left and right in the contemporary political game. By polarizing any choice with an artificial opposition, we are diverted from more significant and operative differences.
[6] In 1964, Mc Luhan writes : Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man’s sex relation to the motorcar.” Understanding media, p46
[7] Pierre Musso, La Religion industrielle d’Occident, p.168
[8] Pierre Musso, La Religion industrielle d’Occident, p.453
[9] The human body dysfunctions, because it has to establish himself from an outer point of view. On the contrary, this dysfunctional body is perfectly fit for its use by an interface.
[10] David Graber, Bureaucracy
[11] Robert Linhardt, L’établi
[12] The movie ends precisely by the shutting of this decor. In the last scene, the teenage hero is lounging in a vast bohemian-like loft. He is resting in a confortable chair with the heroine. Both of them are now the owners and main shareholders of the virtual world in which the population lives. A voice-over explains that this world is now closed twice a week in order to push the people to reconnect with the real world… This hypocritical demonstration, concluded by « There is nothing more real than reality » happens cynically inside the symbolic space of a movie.
[13] I once needed a white shirt, with certain qualities. I had the choice between fabricating (or have fabricated) the shirt or shopping a preexisting item. In such a situation you realize how making has gotten much more difficult than shopping. Then the shopping itself, visiting small shops, brand shops and malls, make you realize that it is barely impossible to select a product by its real specifications (quality of the fabric, nature of the cotton, shape, finish). It appears that the quality of the object has nothing to do with its symbolic construction and value from which we usually make our decisions. The price is not related to the quality of the object, nor is the brand, the talk of the salesman or the information on the label. The only way to measure the quality of the product is to spend time to understand how it is actually made and to incorporate this understanding through experience. Yet, in a technologically ragged time, this experience appears way more complex than a withdrawal, back to the socially accepted exercise of a simulated choice.
[14] The reaction of a techno-scientific model to the ecological crisis is a perfect example of the unrealistic principle. Facing the energy crisis, the only response available is one of an electric car, which environmental cost is as bad as for a petrol car. Same-wise in the information field the digital solution, because it is dematerialized, is seen as a neutral and green solution. Yet stock and exchange of data consume vast and expanding energy. The hypothesis or reducing the quantity is never envisioned. On the opposite, the last decade have seen an explosion of the car traffic, plane traffic and everyday spams, which saturate our mental space.
[15] Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative writing
[16] Which is approximately the length of George Orwell’s novel 1984.
[17] It would be interesting to know the quantity of messages treated by a person along the past century. How many telegrams, letters, emails or messenger notification every day, both in the professional and private fields.
[18] This is no surprise that most dictatorship accumulates bureaucratic rules, mostly absurd and attacking minor liberties, forbidding particular books, films or music.
[19] For the first time [on March 16th, 2018], I find myself talking with ease about an algorithm. I mention it, as if it was the weather or a common object. I realize that, without any knowledge about its motives, I consider this algorithm as something familiar. After all, I spend hours, everyday, interacting with algorithms. This is more than the time I spend interacting with animals. The algorithm kingdom has become more familiar, more domestic to me than the animal kingdom. Except I miss an algorithm etiology, a code ethic.
On a formal level, the two dimensional space of the page is not actually dissimilar from that of the screen, whether it be tactile or not, but its nature is totally different. The page only provides access to itself, I can only go beyond it in the linear continuity of the text, coming from the preceding page, moving on to the following one. I can only activate it with the thinking that the text generates within my mind. The linearity of the text serves as a basis for the mobility of my thinking. Inversely, linearity is only a minor characteristic of the screen, especially when it serves as our interface with the computer. So in the end what counts is not the continuity of the text, but on the contrary its fragmentation. The text opens out onto other texts, is accompanied by images that are gathered together into groups which open out onto other groups and other images, that I can see. But also it is combined with my own images, transmitting them and receiving them in exchange for other objects, images, text, and sound, information mainly. In other words, precisely something other than text, images or sound, because information is only valid for and through its organization and circulation.
For the digital or computer interface, content is secondary. What is important is the way in which the content comes together or falls apart. And if the inherent characteristic of information is its movement, its value varies according to its position in space and time. This is why I can’t stop looking at the device, can’t stop “refreshing” it, because nothing is older than yesterday’s newspaper, or indeed the update one from a minute ago. In fact, the digital interface only has value if it is synchronized with the immediate present. I have to constantly update it and at the same time update myself, in an infinite and endless process which seems to be both its program and its hidden finality. The timeline replaces the production line as the new technical space which imposes a rhythm that I have to follow, otherwise I risk, not being excluded from the factory, but indeed cut off from my own existence.
The appearance of the Game Boy in 1989 represents a turning point in the establishment of this behavioral posture which is worthy of interest. Before portable consoles, video games were played in dedicated spaces, then in homes where the video game resulted in the autonomy of the television screen. Instead of the broadcast of a common and linear program, each user would now find themselves isolated, engaged in an identical and yet personalized interaction with the video game. If terrestrial television functions according to a system of channels which keeps one at home, then the games console corresponds more to the principle of the electronic bracelet. It no longer provides us with a given time and place, but rather transforms every place that I find myself into an extension of the prison stranglehold. Like a prisoner on supervised release, I can move away from the urban technical complex, but must return to it regularly in order to recharge the terminal.
The portable console produced by Nintendo was not the first of its kind, but it did establish the domination of a technical paradigm. 118 million Game Boys were sold over a ten year period, not to mention the number of competing models that were sold during the same period. What the Game Boy allows for, is the neutralization of physical space. Wherever I might find myself, I have equal access to the interface. Whereas television still claims to produce content, the games console assumes the predominance of its system. Its sole function is to keep me in front of the screen, on the job, wherever I am. Tetris, the Game Boy’s flagship game develops no other quality than the dexterity necessary for the line worker to do their job. Thirty years later, Candy Crush continues to function according to the same principle, developing the same qualities that I would need to efficiently fill out charts, write reports or fill in forms. At the same time, it allows me to fill up dead time or the downtime in between two notifications.
In general, digital time is not linked to the nature of the activity being carried out, but rather to its structure. Also, irrespective of whether it is considered leisure time or during working hours. So called “free” time is in fact time which has been freed from history; retaining nothing of the past or the future in order to dedicate itself exclusively and slavishly to the maintenance of the present.[1] Deprived of all continuity, this obsession with the timeline, literally the production line of the present, leads to persistent fragmentation. I open one application, then another, with each information leading me to another according to a structural logic that creates competition between the different systems that I use. I cannot grasp the scope of the digital space. The only thing that I can be sure of is that it far exceeds my person. When I turn the computer, the telephone, the console or the television off, it is not because I have reached the end, but indeed on the contrary, because they have gotten the better of me. Nor is this where the anxiety that they produce ends, while I’m offline I am always worried about falling hopelessly behind the timeline.
Like the workers who thought that they had left the Lumière factories, we have simply left the factory, to then enter the image where we pursue the same mechanical work, only now on a symbolical level. It is interesting to see how this exploitation of symbolic work evolved between the film Matrix, released in 1999 and Ready Player One, released in 2018. In 1999 the situation was described literally as the exploitation of man by machines, a historical situation which necessitated an awareness and a revolt “in reality”. Twenty years later, Steven Spielberg’s film cynically proposes a quasi-utopian model of a society removed from history, controlled by lawyers, the police and businessmen. The members of this society “revolt” but they are revolting in order to hold on to their virtual existences. Not only does this revolt not take place “in reality”, but actually and explicitly aims to maintain the alienation of the body, by and in the virtual. The revolution demands that the illusion be maintained.
By explicitly setting the existence of his characters in the image rather than in the space not occupied by their bodies, Spielberg produces a relatively accurate vision of the construction of our societies. Because they take place in the image, all of the dematerialized activities can only have a symbolic effect. When I put a photograph of my meal online and in exchange I receive a number of gratifications – small hearts, thumbs up or other graphic interjections – a transaction has indeed taken place. But this transaction, even if it could go beyond its symbolic function, can only have value outside of a system of transactional equivalence. It would require, to put it simply, being able to convert the currency into something else. But, as the film shows very accurately, the regulating authority of society actually does reside in a very struct control of access to the exeriority of the virtual system. Society, as modeled by Spielberg, proposes that I exchange what is in my possession for a fictional currency and also organizes its symbolic spending. A little like in a casino, it is the inverse conversion which proves to be almost impossible. Though the characters can spend with extreme ease, the possibility of earning a wage which is not virtual seems to be absent from the society being described.
Yet it is indeed the digital interface which maintains the social body in its own simulation; nothing can happen as even the revolution will take place virtually. In such a system, the immediate reward offered by the economy of the symbolic is the best defense against the possibility of a political thinking that would be fully realized. And it is easy to see that control is not exercised directly on the social body but on its fiction. Overthrowing the system first requires grasping the fundamental opacity and operability of the interface. Only from here will it be possible to unlock the twin locks simultaneously, as each one guarantees the security of the other:
1. One must step outside the rhythm of the production line, a rhythm which renders all thought impossible.
2. It is necessary to think in order to grasp the system of belief which keeps us shackled to the production line.
At the beginning of the industrial revolution, Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland. One of his main characters, the White Rabbit, is equipped with a pocket watch and is always running in the book[2]. The White Rabbit is late, but late for what? It is very likely that he is simply just late, structurally late in his relationship with the mechanism of the watch. On an implicit level, obviously the lateness is incarnated in the authority who is the owner of the mechanism (the Queen). What one fails to see is the extent to which technology is not only an instrument of authority, but how it establishes that authority. It is only possible to be late in the context of a predefined time.
The bell, followed by the clock have already modified time by cutting it up and giving it rhythm, thus allowing us to distinguish between various activities, allowing for the measurement of, and thus the monetization of, time. Technology emerged synchronously with the rise of industry and capitalism. Alienation could be described as the temporary neutralization of my presence in time. It is the external organization of my relationship with time and it which produces an abstract constraint on my body. I no longer eat when I am hungry but rather when it is time to eat, I no longer rest when I am tired but when the bell rings signaling downtime, vacation time or retirement.
The digital interface goes even further as it dismantles time itself, my body no longer experiments with continuous time, experienced according to moments which are free or restricted, it is scattered among the debris of a fragmented time. I have to construct myself within fragmented time, shifting from one fragment to another by reconciling the febrile passage from physical time to technological time. The temporality of the body enters into competition with that of a multitude of algorithms, activated by the combined activities of a multitude of other entities, individuals, companies, bots or spam, wherever they might be in the world, thus uploading along with each notification the DNA of a particular mode of relationship with time, crushing and recombining cultures, technologies and time zones.
The heart of the problem not only resides in the interface but also in its occultation. Technology, in its stated fantasy of real time, of the live, of the instantaneous – snapchat, instagram – indicates not only its obsession with the present, but also presents itself as always as immediate. Quickly overtaking us, technology insinuates that it doesn’t count. Nevertheless, this interface which presents itself as a contact with the other is in fact first and foremost a contact with a technological apparatus. Symmetrically, the other is not so much in contact with me as in contact with the same interface. The question emerges as to why these interfaces never assume their real nature, but on the contrary, strive to disappear even further, to blend into me, to the point that soon I will no longer be able to distinguish them from my own body. The intermediary, the code, progressively disappears, it is now the finger or the retina which activates the interface, the number is incorporated.[3]
Today, if I want to pose a question to X or to Y, I write to them without even thinking. In the near future my brain might be able to carry out this operation almost alone, but already the existing interfaces have become natural extensions of my physical body. The interface redefines and unifies my social environment and my personal environment. I write to X or Y on one of the four or five messaging platforms that I use in my downtime, irrespective of whether it is during my working hours or my private life. Whatever the hour, X or Y answers me, validating the fact that I am not at that moment really isolated in a given place, but that we permanently share the same space and that this space can no longer be defined as personal or professional. To such an extent that I am no longer certain that I am able to be alone, because if I do isolate myself I really do feel more than alone, amputated from a part of myself, because X or Y, and even more so the interfaces that manifest them, are now experienced as extensions of my body. And yet this “common space” is not so much a community as a singular mode of creating relationships. And this relational mode is hidden, thus multiplying its influence on the relationships that it establishes. The technology is so powerful that we interiorize it. Nevertheless, what establishes this incorporation of technology, its immanence and its immediacy, is not a technological fact, but is founded on two beliefs:
On one hand we believe that technology could not be anything other than what it is. On the other hand we believe in technology.
We believe that technology cannot be any different because we are looking at it from a technological point of view, which thus produces an illusion of immanence. However, technology is the product of human decision making which in return creates its own environment of activity. This results in two things. On one hand that technology and science are first and foremost a construction, and that this construction could indeed be different. And on the other hand that this construction is founded on the conditions and directions of techno-scientific research, which depend in particular on its financing. It can, as such, not exist outside of ideological frameworks. In an essay about scientific innovation, David Graber asks why the 2000’s did not see the appearance of flying cars, autonomous energy sources or the total automatization of work, things that actually seemed within our grasp a half-century earlier. He writes:
“The technologies that emerged were in almost every case the kind that proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia imagined by Abbie Hoffman or Guy Debord, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. Information technology has allowed a financialization of capital that has driven workers ever more desperately into debt, while, at the same time, allowed employers to create new “flexible” work regimes that have destroyed traditional job security and led to a massive increase in overall working hours for almost every segment of the population. Added to the exporting of traditional factory jobs, this has put the union movement to rout and thus destroyed any real possibility of effective working class politics. Meanwhile, despite unprecedented investment in research on medicine and life sciences, we still await cures for cancer or even of the common cold; instead, the most dramatic medical breakthroughs we have seen have taken the form of drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, or Ritalin – tailor-made, one might say, to ensure that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy.”[4]
Research is always done in the context of a given ideological framework which limits its scope of application and orientates the results that are produced. Between two possible avenues of research, those who finance the research will not choose the best one, but rather the one which is more profitable for them. These orientations determine the exploitable results. Similarly, they determine a point of view where one must consider the functioning and use of mechanisms and systems. Users of dating applications generally complain that the applications are useless. They usually criticize the functioning of the tool which isn’t working, or, more painfully, themselves, as being ill adapted, defective products of a market that has been streamlined by algorithms. And yet, in reality everything functions perfectly, once we look at things from the point of view of the technology.
Though the dating app allows anyone to find his or her future partner, at the same time this results in it’s own disappearance, with the user finding right from the moment that they begin to use the app a reason to do without it.[5] With each technology committed to a profit making model, one could imagine that its own self-interest is totally opposed to that of the user. In order to be sustainable the application asks that I spend as much time as possible using it. Thus its desired function is not to help me meet my soul-mate, it is to keep me under the illusion that it will happen. We know that this principle is built and controlled by calling upon a combination of technical instruments, of cognitive sciences, the fruit of advanced and costly research which functions in a similar fashion to highly accurate tools. If on the surface this doesn’t work, it is because the tools that one uses are incorporated into the mechanism or system that one is using. There where we pridefully imagine ourselves to be the ones who benefit from this technology, we are in fact the raw materials of much vaster process.[6]
Because if we believe so blindly in the immanence, immediacy and benevolence of technology, it is first and foremost that we believe in technology. If we have trouble grasping how technology functions first and foremost as an ideological tool, it is because it is caught up in a broader ideological construction which is that of progress. And if this ideology of progress can not be questioned, it is that while it presents itself as rational, it reveals itself ultimately as a religious belief. Here one could employ the theory of Pierre Musso who explains how Christianity has progressively evolved to become an industrial religion. This religion takes up the contract of the Catholic religion where the Church organizes people’s submission to religious rules in exchange for the promise of a better after-life. In the wake of the shifting of a number concepts, it is today the Firm, the Company, which has taken on the role of organizing structure and which, on the basis of a belief in progress to come, ensures the docility of workers and consumers.
The transition is made starting with Catholic dogma itself: “the power of the monastic institution”, writes Pierre Musso, “is its ability to set a rhythm for organizing life and activities. Whereas it should simply have been a place of prayer hostile to the economy, the monastery actually adopted manual labor, measurement and technology for its rational and regulated organization: it appears as the ancestor of the workshop which was followed by the factory. Not only are the monks mechanics and inventors, but their disdain for the body also paves the way for the machine.”[7]
Industry thus develops as a cult founded on a belief in science and progress. The factory and then the Company provide them with a church. Musso considers that “in texts, images, places and objects, industrial religion formulates faith in this great promise. Industrialist faith operates in the name of this founding “revolution”, announcing a new “golden age” on earth, happiness to come, happiness promised in a recurring fashion with each new wave of techno-scientific innovation, sometimes via some kind of messianic social novelty, other times in the form of hero-entrepreneurs or techno-geniuses, from Henry Ford to Steve Jobs. The repetition of the mythical tale of the “Industrial Revolution” allows, among other things, to increasingly marginalize the “political revolution” to the benefit of a vision of the world carried forward by industrialists, scholars and engineers, creators of technologies which are more and more complex and revolutionary.”[8]
If I work backwards through the reasoning which leads me to the hypothesis of an industrial religion, I am able to precisely map out the discomfort that the presence of digital interfaces produces “within me”. This discomfort is caused by a dissonance between technological promise and its true reward. There where I should live as an “augmented” individual, the feeling that I have is first one of decline, of fragmentation, if not of being torn apart, both in space and in time. In reality we have little time to think about this discomfort. If we become aware of it, we first look for the cause in a malfunction of the technology, or in ourselves, assuming that we have incorrectly used the tool that is available to us. Yet one must assume that the tool functions perfectly, but that we are not the ones using it. What stops us from taking this leap is a complex fiduciary edifice. In effect technology presents itself as being transparent, practically part of our bodies, to the extent that we can’t distinguish it at first. If we do, we can often only consider its use in an environment that it has itself defined.
Our body might also malfunction but it has just as much difficulty breaking free from this malfunction that it has laboriously learned, indifferently, both in play as in work[9]. It has just as much difficulty to be aware that its technicization, synchronized with that of its environment, saturates its affects and its attention, through gratifications and rewards that are as effective as they are symbolic, all the more hypnotic as they add a precise rhythm to their activity, one which simultaneously stops us from thinking and from going mad. On the horizon of this apparatus for exploiting time, having moved past the various spectacles of cinema and politics, is a religion of technology forced upon us by technology as dogma and management as a cult. Obviously, it is neither technology in itself, nor the religious mechanism which produces what could be described by the traditionally used term “alienation”. It is more-so the way that this system produces the control and exploitation of the bodies that it holds sway over. The digital interface is a two way mechanism, it uses me just as much, if not more, than I use it, it modifies my body and my environment.
In a sense I am comforted by the idea that this anxiety that I feel, when faced with the shredded time of technology, is the result of a precise organization of reality by man. I am reassured that I am not at fault, and also reassured that it is a construction, as vast as it might be. This implies on one hand that this construction is not the only construction possible, but also that this construction can be modified. It is not a matter of fighting against “Progress”. It is a matter of taking into account the fact that “Progress” is simply a condition of organization of the world, a manner of considering man and his environment, and that this particular condition is maintained as the only option at the price of a double violence. Not only does progress carry a certain level of violence within it by subjecting me to a certain number of systems or mechanisms of exploitation, but it is also supported by a structural violence in order to maintain the reign of its particular modality as the only option, at the expense of other possibilities for the world. It is enough to observe the space occupied by the notion of “democracy” in the rhetoric of Western military operations over the last sixty years – even though most of these occurrences could easily be replaced by the term “hegemony” with little or no effect. To impose a model of functioning is to guarantee that behaviors will emerge within a predefined framework.
The violence of the mechanism should obviously not simply be reduced to it’s explicit violence through police or military action. One should see the structural violence of the system that David Graber defined in the following way: “Structures that could only be created and maintained by the threat of violence, even if in their ordinary, day-to-day workings, no actual physical violence need take place. If one reflects on the matter, the same can be said of most phenomena that are ordinarily referred to as “structural violence” in the literature – racism, sexism, class privilege – even if their actual mode of operation is infinitely more complex.”[10]
One might find this to be exaggerated, this reasoning which links structural violence to the difficulty that one might experience when trying to concentrate on reading or writing. Yet this is the exact question which provided the starting point for Virginia Woolf when she claimed for women, the possibility of having “a room of one’s own”. It is the same question raised by Jack London when his character, laborer Martin Eden, exhausted by his day of work, tries at night to write or read. In both cases, what is required, in the name of a human group, has often been identified by the same group. As long as they are deprived of the possibility of thought, the worker, the housewife or the contractual worker are unable to see themselves as exploited. It is indeed here the paradox that was identified by Robert Linhardt when he discovered the world of the factory.[11]
For the Western individual, reality is polarized by a fake, and thus ineffectual, décor: he or she works in order to have access to leisure activities. And yet this dichotomy hides the fact that this leisure space has been colonized by work, producing notably what is called the economy of attention. In a symmetrical fashion, the leisure ethos has colonized that of work, producing a whole set of “benevolent” concepts such as the open space, teleworking, Friday wear, etc. This profound reconfiguration of the contract did not emerge from social demands or grievances or from revolutions, it was carried out on via technology, from above, driven by business. This reorganization seemingly renders the image of work more sympathetic, multiplying the possibilities for leisure, to the point of intentionally making it difficult to tell the difference between them. Obviously what emerges between the lines is a constant perfecting of the organization of time, in the service of the “religion of technology”.
Being able to concentrate on reading is to have and recognize the possibility of thinking. Being able to concentrate on writing is to have time which is not “employed”, in other words not in the service of an activity which is foreign to me. The fundamental question is to know if I am using my time to do things which seem significant to me, whether it be work time or leisure time, that I use for myself or that I dedicate to effective personal or social relationships. If this is not the case, one could assume that this time has been siphoned away, with my consent, with the same mixture of cunning and menace that leads certain to exchange their land or their goods for a handful of glass beads.
The scientific and technological reorganization of time doesn’t only produce the systematic exploitation of our temporal resources. It also creates a décor which renders any possibility of having access to time ineffectual. In exactly the same way that a certain number of companies are working to privatize water resources, others are working on the privatization of temporal resources. This privatization functions through the methodical replacing of things by their images. The contemporary individual sees his existence progressively shifted to the symbolic field which has been erected as an operating décor. It is literally the décor produced by Spielberg’s film as described above[12]. What is inherent to the image, as it penetrates deeply into our socio-technological environments today, is that it appears immediately, which is an obvious paradox as it is by its very nature a mediation of the object that it represents. But if it overtakes the reality that it is supposed to represent in this way, it is because it does not embrace that reality.[13]
Starting with this observation and this analysis of a structural occupation and exploitation of time, consideration should be given to the leeway that one has. Can we consider technology outside of the framework of a fiduciary architecture? Can we decolonize our bodies and minds from the grip of a digital religion? Can we find our feet in reality and in time?
The first hypothesis that can be put forward is that a techno-scientific civilization founded on notions of efficacy, profit and progress, is neither the sole, nor the best way of envisioning and organizing reality. From here emerge a number of corollary hypotheses.
-The alternatives to a techno-scientific civilization are not necessarily antagonistic but they must be radically different. They do not target the destruction of the dominant model, but they do aim to establish themselves as an alterity.
Because the dominant model aspires towards hegemony, any and all aspirations towards the development of a different model could and would be seen as hostile in that they results in the deconstruction of the techno-scientific model. This deconstruction is not a social deconstruction, but rather on the contrary a recovery, given that the techno-scientific model has rid itself of politics, which has been replaced with a managerial model.
The development of an alterity is not anti-scientific, and it aims to deactivate the religious foundation of beliefs which polarize the scientific model. An alternative model can perfectly incorporate a techno-scientific dimension, but it has to deconstruct the fiduciary structure which assumes the hegemony of the techno-scientific model.
Among the key paradigms of the model to be dismantled can be found the notion of progress, whose form is that of a promise which is constantly being postponed. The notion of progress operates hand in hand with the idea of growth, the fantasy of infinite multiplication beginning with a finite quantity[14]. This notion is just as applicable to energy resources as it is to the human body, the productivity of which we ceaselessly seek to boost. This ideological system operates throughout the totality of its “model spaces”, from sport to sexual relationships, from the university to the business. One might note the particular nature of productivity, which is that it is always only quantitative (including the fact that this quality is itself evaluated quantitively).
Kenneth Goldsmith, when analyzing the contemporary literary space, notes the exponential increase in the quantity of information[15]. He cites a study on the volume of the texts in circulation: “By using words as a unit of measurement […], we estimate that 4,500 billion words were consumed in 1980. And we have calculated that the consumption of words reached 10,845 billion words in 2008, which corresponds approximately to 100,000 words[16] per person and per day in the United States”.
Beyond a certain stage, one might assume that the human body and human space is operating at a critical level of saturation.[17] Nevertheless, the hypothesis of a reduction in the number of vehicles, in traffic, in the circulation of people, objects and/or information is never envisaged, as it lacks a fiduciary basis which would render it at the same time credible and imaginable.
From this emerges the following idea: That belief in progress can only be deactivated by an alternative form of thinking, based on a reasonable evaluation of the data of the world. That this thinking is rooted in everyone’s understanding that the promise of progress only engages he or she who receives it. The idea is not to frontally oppose an over-powerful model, but rather to grasp that the model is based on nothing more than an illusion.
The basis of this awakening is not a revolution, but an accumulation of sensible gestures. Refusing a solicitation, a purchase, a rule, lucidly adjusting one’s use of the world. Let us be clear; it is not because the gestures are simple that they are easy. On the contrary, one can observe an economy which is inherent to these daily gestures, whose operation has been set out by technology thanks to processes which present themselves as inoffensive or benevolent – user-friendly. On this daily and anecdotal level, each gesture and each choice is proposed by inducing the desired response, conveniently producing a cascade of repeated consent. Yet it is precisely these micro-behaviors which form the guiding rules of a piloted use of the world. It is the sum of these minuscule prohibitions which guarantees the maintenance of order. Challenging them exposes one to a retort, the violence of which would only be disproportionate in appearance.[18]
This dismantlement can only be personal, but it is always stated in common, simply because it defines another form of individual and collective relationships. From there it is capable of producing alternative structures and capable of defending them. Once again it is not a question of refusing the fact of technology, but rather a question of shifting the finalities. This also assumes the clear nature of its finalities.[19]
Unity comes perhaps with searching on a different scale, the augmented body, which is often an issue. But the augmented body is also a matter of an obsession with performance. Though the idea of the augmented body makes sense, it does require an understanding of what this augmented whole would produce through my association with technology along with the space that I would occupy, as a body or as an individual. How to consider what a complete, augmented body, intertwined with a multitude of interfaces and entities, human or technological, would be, because in this space where I would exist, augmented by others, I am like the cell which is incapable of knowing the body that it is a part of?
In a similar fashion, my augmented thinking is a thinking which is outside of time, it is a cut up thinking, it connects, establishes links between scattered elements. Sometimes the simple fact of finding these elements is enough, not that they are enough for me, but by remobilizing them, I subject them to the numerous extensions of my body which employ them elsewhere. There where the constructed text would be inhabitable by a sole body, the digital body is only able to carry fragmented information in order to exist as a cumulative whole. The question, both inside and outside of this system, is to know whether we can imagine a link between my body and another body which is devoid of violence.
NOTES /
[1] The successful Carpe Diem, in the tattoo-shops as in psychology and self-help literature, can be seen as an injunction relative to the use of time.
[2] It is interesting to see the reappearance of the White rabbit in the film The Matrix, even more if we relate Alice in Wonderland to the industrial revolution. A relation already underlined by Marshall Mc Luhan in Understanding media.
[3] This goes beyond the simple prosthesis augmenting my body “from outside” that was described by Mc Luhan – like the wheel functioning as an extension to the foot, or the radio as an extension to the ear.
[4] David Graber, Bureaucracy
[5] Among the dating-apps, the regular distinction between sexual interest and love interest can be seen as a lure. One suggest that the ideal love partner will also satisfy my physical needs and that the ideal sex partner is the one who will also satisfy my sentimental needs. Still the distinction remains as a perfect excuse for the dysfunction of the dispositive, often rooted in the idea of an irreducible distinction between genres. This fake opposition functions like the opposition between left and right in the contemporary political game. By polarizing any choice with an artificial opposition, we are diverted from more significant and operative differences.
[6] In 1964, Mc Luhan writes : Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man’s sex relation to the motorcar.” Understanding media, p46
[7] Pierre Musso, La Religion industrielle d’Occident, p.168
[8] Pierre Musso, La Religion industrielle d’Occident, p.453
[9] The human body dysfunctions, because it has to establish himself from an outer point of view. On the contrary, this dysfunctional body is perfectly fit for its use by an interface.
[10] David Graber, Bureaucracy
[11] Robert Linhardt, L’établi
[12] The movie ends precisely by the shutting of this decor. In the last scene, the teenage hero is lounging in a vast bohemian-like loft. He is resting in a confortable chair with the heroine. Both of them are now the owners and main shareholders of the virtual world in which the population lives. A voice-over explains that this world is now closed twice a week in order to push the people to reconnect with the real world… This hypocritical demonstration, concluded by « There is nothing more real than reality » happens cynically inside the symbolic space of a movie.
[13] I once needed a white shirt, with certain qualities. I had the choice between fabricating (or have fabricated) the shirt or shopping a preexisting item. In such a situation you realize how making has gotten much more difficult than shopping. Then the shopping itself, visiting small shops, brand shops and malls, make you realize that it is barely impossible to select a product by its real specifications (quality of the fabric, nature of the cotton, shape, finish). It appears that the quality of the object has nothing to do with its symbolic construction and value from which we usually make our decisions. The price is not related to the quality of the object, nor is the brand, the talk of the salesman or the information on the label. The only way to measure the quality of the product is to spend time to understand how it is actually made and to incorporate this understanding through experience. Yet, in a technologically ragged time, this experience appears way more complex than a withdrawal, back to the socially accepted exercise of a simulated choice.
[14] The reaction of a techno-scientific model to the ecological crisis is a perfect example of the unrealistic principle. Facing the energy crisis, the only response available is one of an electric car, which environmental cost is as bad as for a petrol car. Same-wise in the information field the digital solution, because it is dematerialized, is seen as a neutral and green solution. Yet stock and exchange of data consume vast and expanding energy. The hypothesis or reducing the quantity is never envisioned. On the opposite, the last decade have seen an explosion of the car traffic, plane traffic and everyday spams, which saturate our mental space.
[15] Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative writing
[16] Which is approximately the length of George Orwell’s novel 1984.
[17] It would be interesting to know the quantity of messages treated by a person along the past century. How many telegrams, letters, emails or messenger notification every day, both in the professional and private fields.
[18] This is no surprise that most dictatorship accumulates bureaucratic rules, mostly absurd and attacking minor liberties, forbidding particular books, films or music.
[19] For the first time [on March 16th, 2018], I find myself talking with ease about an algorithm. I mention it, as if it was the weather or a common object. I realize that, without any knowledge about its motives, I consider this algorithm as something familiar. After all, I spend hours, everyday, interacting with algorithms. This is more than the time I spend interacting with animals. The algorithm kingdom has become more familiar, more domestic to me than the animal kingdom. Except I miss an algorithm etiology, a code ethic.