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Informationalism
The fourth information-technology paradigm, made possible through the arrival of the Internet and dominated by interactive communication.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
Capitalism’s fixation with exploitation is therefore being followed by informationalism’s obsession with its counterpart, imploitation, that is, a maximisation of the value of information by means of the community’s deliberate delimitation, rather than a naive openness towards the outside world (see The Netocrats). Within such a closed collective, one might claim unchallenged that “intelligent design” is a “theory” that is broadly superior to the theory of evolution, or anything at all as long as it wins the approval of the collective’s intersubjective liking. To the extent that the protests and indignation of the outside world seep through these walls, they rather tend to strengthen the sense of community, since this concern from the outside easily can be dismissed as propaganda from the enemy. And the more bizarre the ideas proclaimed by a religious community or a sect, the more robust the resistance they trigger in the hostile outside world, and the more they strengthen the sense of internal community and the production of social identity.
With the Cartesian revolution in the 17th century, the metaphysics of individualism arrived on the scene, with Man gradually replacing God as the theological foundation, even if this revolutionary change was kept hidden as far as possible in order to avoid outbursts of ecclesiastical rage. God is thus not dead to start with; God has only gone to bed and fallen asleep. But ultimately, what role does His potential presence play when His creation is perfect anyway? The main thing for the individualists is that God has become superfluous, which enables the individual to slowly but surely take His place. It soon became evident that humanism fitted perfectly as the religion for the new capitalist and industrialist paradigm, and society clung to humanism and its individualist and atomist ideal right up until the late 20th century, when the network society emerged with full force and the idea of the network as the new metaphysical foundation caught on. Syntheism is the metaphysics of the Internet age. A shift is necessary because the philosophy of every paradigm must have its own blind but nonetheless relevant faith as a basic axiom. The masters of informationalism – the netocrats – quite simply perceive the network as the most striking metaphor for the necessary metaphysical foundation of the paradigm.
Beyond the ongoing paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism (see The Netocrats) we need a new metaphysics, a new religion, a new common arena for collective spirituality in the Internet age. Without a credible metaphysics – no philosophy and no meaning either. Man is the meaning-generating animal constantly scanning his environment for patterns that indicate and keep confirming various causative links that engender a feeling of security. And if we do not find any such patterns, we don’t hesitate to quite simply invent them. With a utopia on the horizon, we give our lives a direction and a context. God is another name for utopia, and utopia is another name for God.
The sexual revolution under capitalism was followed by the chemical liberation during informationalism (see The Global Empire). The development of a post-atheist religiosity, which is built around the need for a new metaphysics, spurred on by globally collaborative, syncretist and religio-social practices, and not least by the exploding plethora of entheogenic substances, laid the foundation for a resolution of the conflict between theism and atheism which, in a Hegelian dialectics, has grown into syntheism as the metaphysics of the Internet age. This occurred at the same time as the sexual revolution was rejected when its unavoidable flip side, the hypersexualisation of the individual, was exposed as the underlying engine of capitalist consumption society; the sexual revolution ended up being a straitjacket of the superego where the chemical liberation offered a possible way out.
It is only when the Internet arrives with full force towards the late 1980s and early 1990s that society is endowed with an environment where holism and generalism are fostered at the expense of the academic world’s atomism and specialism. It is also only after the advent of the Internet that criticism of the individualist axiom begins to grow. The new paradigm with its new power structures requires a new mythology; a new narrative of the developing information, communication and network society in the Internet age. The informationalist paradigm is characterised by interactivity as the dominant form of communication, the cyber world as the geographical arena, attention rather than capital as the driving force socially, as well as the production, consumption and above all social reproduction of media as the main occupation (we have written about all of this extensively in The Netocrats). Informationalism is driven by the event as its metaphysical horizon, and is dominated by the conflict between the new classes, the small but wholly dominant netocracy and the considerably larger but in every respect subordinate consumtariat.
If we have learnt anything from history, there is no reason to believe that the academic world will be relevant as a producer of truth in the developing network society to any greater extent than the clergy of the monotheistic religions were as producers of truth for the industrial society. Which is another way of saying that universities are a thing of the past in all other respects than when it comes to pure networking: at best, one learns to run projects and come into contact with attentionally valuable people during one’s student years. On the other hand, truth production is automated, and itself becomes a network effect. Under informationalism, it is quite sufficient to use collectively generated and freely available sources of knowledge on the web (such as Wikipedia) in order not to have to consult academic experts if one wishes to formulate a socially acceptable truth. Nowadays, it is the Internet that is the arbiter (for better or worse). The universities’ power over truth production peaked as early as the mid-20th century in the same way that the power of the Church over truth production peaked as early as the 15th century. With the advent of informationalism, newer and more creative institutions take over. Through the increasingly marked independence of physical geography, the syntheistic monastery can act as the central agent for truth production in the Internet society in both the physical and the virtual world.
The university is individualism’s truth producer and this institution’s most important role is to moderate enjoyment among citizens. However, it continuously fails in its task, since enjoyment is only maximised in transgression, and transgression presupposes a host of prohibitions against crossing the boundaries for the taboos that the Church was much more adept at producing than the university. In this context, the university is reduced to the paltry imperative of identifying and subsequently maximising the individual’s enjoyment. Therefore, individualism’s complicated relationship with enjoyment is characterised by a fundamental envy of religion. In the 20th century, individualism was developed by the universities into cultural relativism, Kantianism’s ideological waste dump and its logical endpoint, where all that remains are unfounded solipsistic credos, the quality of which, because of a growing political hypersensitivity, it is forbidden to compare. This qualifies cultural relativism as syntheism’s ideological arch-enemy at the paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism.
With the advent of informationalism, a freedom arises to organise the rapidly-growing, expanding social networks in accordance with the long-neglected desires of our genes. The optimal size of a tribe of nomads or the newly-established, permanent settlement of around 150 adult members as a genetically determined ideal resurfaces constantly as the ideal size for these virtual networks. When this ideal can be reproduced without costly opposition over and over again from the advent of the network society and onwards, what musician Brian Eno calls technological primitivism arises, a kind of high-tech return to the primitivist tribe community. The virtual subcultures on the Internet replace the Church’s and nation’s identity-bearing functions from the previous paradigms (see The Netocrats). The Internet is a digital jungle filled with dividual-driven subcultures in vast quantities.
Informationalism’s view of mankind can crassly be described as a mobile phone surrounded by fat and muscle. The paradigm shift is rapid; as early as December 2012 traffic on Google’s search engine to the attentionalist left-hand column – which one cannot buy into but instead must deserve one’s prominent placement in by maximizing one’s attention, that is, making oneself interesting and attractive to the Internet’s users – passed 99% for the first time, while traffic to the capitalist right-hand column dipped below 1%. This fact confirms that traditional marketing is an impossibility on the Internet; there is quite simply no such thing as functional online marketing. Increasingly desperate mass media marketing is pitted against increasingly smarter online communication, which understands and uses the new participatory dynamics evolving on the Web.
Syntheism can be described as one long showdown with all the ideologies that are based on the historical case. Religion and metaphysics were developed under feudalism from being a cohesive and community-generating world view into becoming a well-honed tool for power and control. The monotheistic religions demand submission; the word is suddenly an order rather than a promise. Sin is basically a revolt against God, a questioning of the divine arbitrariness that is the very foundation of the Abrahamic religions. In practice, the Asian religions accomplish the same thing through making sinful behaviour function as the driver for desperate reincarnation rather than invoking hellish damnation. However syntheism in no way entails a return to paganism, but instead a dialectical further development. The real return to paganism at the paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism is instead the bewildering hodgepodge of naive ideas and quasi-religious nonsense that go under the label New Age, the phenomenon that, not without reason, syntheologians dismiss as theological cultural relativism.
The production of holy things is thus in full swing even during life’s first, explorative promenade across the mother’s belly and then continues all the way to the inescapably holiest state of all, death. Existential gaps open up and confront Man constantly, and all she can do is fill these negations with fantasies, which later prove to be more or less functional. The question is thus not whether gods exist in any deeper sense. They unquestionably do. The subconscious mind can never accept any kind of atheism. Syntheism rather poses the question: which divinity or divinities is/are credible for informationalist Man? What could and should be theos under informationalism? Where do we place the repressed hope of self-dissolution and communion with being, the longing of the subconscious for death which consciousness must repress and transform into the subject experience’s fanatical will to live?
The Bohrian revolution means that it is time and not space that is the really fundamental mystery within physics. Thus, we would do well to ignore Einstein’s spatiocentrism in order to instead move on with Peirce’s and Smolin’s proposal to construct a tempocentric world view. A more interesting alternative to Einstein’s failed attempt to domesticate time and convert it into a kind of extra dimension of space would be to do precisely the opposite: to regard space as three extra dimensions on top of time. Loop quantum gravity does exactly this when it quantifies Einstein’s general theory of relativity. According to the theory of loop quantum gravity, space is no longer void or fixed, but must rather be regarded as an elastic phenomenon subject to network dynamics. The new metaphors of informationalism are quite simply so powerful that even physics goes through a fundamental change with the starting point in the idea of network dynamics. In the new relationalist physics even the Universe itself is a phenomenon of network dynamics.
But we are also living in an informationalist world – no longer in a world of just written language or oral communication – where the total quantity of information is expanding at such tremendous speed that the world around us is becoming increasingly difficult to grasp and more and more incomprehensible to us. We see how the ontic deluge in the Universe gets an ontological equivalent in the gigantic, rapidly expanding and thereby incalculable flow of words, thoughts and ideas that confront us in our immediate environment. This ontological rather than ontic flow of impulses gushes – with the same torrential force as our expanding Universe – through the interlinked, interacting and therefore in practice convergent media that shape and dictate the conditions of our socio-cultural biotopes, which puts a lot of pressure on our brains and senses. We cannot possibly not be part of it, but instead live very much within – always and only within – the ontic as well as ontological flows of existence. This means that the principle of explanatory closure, at least under informationalism, also must include ourselves and our communications with each other and the world around us.
The concept of information stress is not particularly old, but with the advent of informationalism we have been forced to relate to this phenomenon and create strategies for managing it to some extent and preserving at least an illusion of overview and control. This means that our only possibility of embracing the world as a whole under informationalism arises if we complement the ontic relationalism for the natural sciences with ontological relationalism.html">social relationalism for the social sciences. We are now being forced to realise that we are not only constantly forced to eternalise the mobilist world around us in order to make it understandable and manageable (see The Global Empire), but that in addition our new eternalisations on top of our earlier eternalisations – because of the explosive expansion of the Universe and the sheer quantity of information – are constantly being moved further and further away from the fundamental mobilist ontics of existence. This insight means that we are reduced to trying to manage our relations with both the surrounding world and ourselves, our own identity as ethical creatures, through transrationalism – and with the starting point in a conception of existence as an open entirety, not through rationalism based on a conception of existence as a closed logical construction in all its constituent parts.
However counter-intuitive this may sound for the syntheist agent, she can only regard herself as a by-product of the ideology coming from the future, and in this Hegelian sense act in a revelatory role and as a supervisor vis-à-vis the now prevailing but rapidly eroding ideology. For it is only in the collision between the ideological paradigms – the history of ideas time after time shows how philosophy virtually explodes with creativity as a direct consequence of a socio-cultural paradigm shift, with Axial Age Greece and India and early Industrialism’s Western Europe and North America as illuminating examples – that speculative philosophy can see through and reveal the illusory qualities of the prevailing ideologies. And there we are at this moment, in informationalism’s infancy, in the midst of a cascade of information flows exploding in all directions, where syntheism is slowly but surely growing as the paradigm’s built-in and necessary metaphysical Higgs field.
As physics migrates to informationalism and thereby becoming relationalist, a new view of humanity and a new world view are becoming apparent. Metaphysical individualism is dead; it disappears along with physical atomism, since these constitute two sides of the same outdated coin. Both stem from Kant’s onto-epistemology from the second half of the 18th century, which in turn is based on Descartes’ classic proposition “Cogito, ergo sum”, where the subjective experience is the only indisputable thing in existence and therefore constitutes the point of departure for all assertions about anything at all. This axiomatic subject then relates to other objects, which in the same way as the subject and its Cartesian theatrical stage is construed first as noumenal and then as phenomenal, indivisible entities with solid substances, that is, as individuals and atoms.
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze devoted a lot of work to the art of managing the chaos that occurs in the world before Man appears. He goes back to humanity’s nomadic roots and calls this deeper picture of the human being the dividual (the divisible human being), in contrast to the capitalist individual (the indivisible human being). Deleuze’s post-humanist dividual in turn happens to fit perfectly as an ideal for the rising netocracy under informationalism (see The Netocrats). Deleuze argues that the dividual is autoimmune. To be autoimmune is to see both good and bad sides in oneself as necessary. To be autoimmune is to acknowledge that one is finite and constantly divided in every moment, driven by internal desires and drives, which in the encounter with an incessant flow of external memes unite around the nomadic, dividual identity. To be autoimmune is to give full expression to our pathological sorrow and fear of death. The dividual is of course always conscious of the fact that the Universe has both the right and the capacity to crush her at any moment. Life is very fragile for real; this is not just some maudlin, sentimental phrase.
This means that if syntheism is to be successful in establishing itself as the metaphysics of the Internet age, it must be constructed on the foundation of an entirely new utopia; an idea that in contrast to individualism in all its forms has credibility in the network society, where the individual is reduced to a curious remnant from a distant past. It must create the hope of the impossible being possible, even for informationalism’s people. Naturally syntheism has no chance of accomplishing this if it were to start from a capitalist perspective, since individualism is just as dead within philosophy as atomism is dead within physics. Syntheism’s utopia must instead be formulated as the consummate network dynamics. And how could a network be consummate, if it were not free and open to the surrounding world and the future in a contingent and relationalist universe?
In the same way that cosmologists and quantum physicists strive for agreement on a theory of everything in physics, syntheologists are working towards constructing a social theory of everything for informationalism. What is striking about the syntheist utopia is that it cannot be formulated beforehand – since it is located in a contingent and indeterministic universe – which means that instead it must be practised before it is articulated. Therefore it is of central importance for both syntheist ethics and creative development that the ideas in a society are not kept locked away behind virtual firewalls or towers of legal papers, but that they can be exchanged in complete freedom between the active dividuals on the Internet. The syntheist utopia is thus first and foremost a society where ideas are free and are not owned by anybody, where the memes form memeplexes that wander freely from human to human, from network to network, and are transformed during these movements without being met with any resistance whatsoever anywhere, apart from the lack of attention that sifts out all memetic losers. Therefore, the digital integrity movement receives the syntheist movement’s full support as the necessary path to this state, which we consequently call utopian memetics.
From the 1960s onwards, individualism and its ally atomism are put under enormous pressure from a new supra-ideology: relationalism and its partner network dynamics. The capitalist patriarchy – from Napoleon onwards, probably the most evident individualist power structure – is attacked by feminism, which puts forth demands for equality between the sexes, and thereafter by the queer movement, with its requirements of equality between people of different sexual orientations and identities. The feminists represent female individuals’ interests, and the queer movement is fighting for sexually divergent individuals’ civil rights. This means, of course, that both these movements are still fundamentally individualist. The criticism against the patriarchy thus has come from inside the individualist paradigm. But the argumentation contains numerous network-dynamical arguments, for example that the woman’s freedom is also the man’s freedom from patriarchy, and that the liberation of homo- and transsexuals also entails the liberation of heterosexuals from narrow and repressive heteronormativity. The dividualist criticism thus begins from inside individualism – through informationalism liberating new desires and drives in the collective subconscious and thereby exposing the shortcomings of individualism – in order to slowly but surely establish a new, independent paradigm where the old individual is dead.
The dystopia concerns itself with the finite, utopianism focuses on the infinite. Accordingly, the fight for the free and open Internet is the answer to what must be done; it is the engine that drives the new utopia rather than the brake that hinders the old dystopia. What we are talking about here is far more than just parallel phenomena in the market for the shaping public opinion: syntheism is de facto the name of the digital integrity movement’s underlying metaphysics. This explains why the fight for the free and open Internet is the central political struggle in the 21st century. All other important political conflicts that play out during, and contribute to giving colour to, informationalism’s growth, are completely dependent on how this conflict unfolds. It concerns far more than the growing netocracy’s striving to ignore the ruling bourgeoisie, which has controlled the world since the paradigm of the printing press gained broad acceptance. Beyond the fight for the free and open Internet, the approaching ecological apocalypse is rearing its ugly head: a potential catastrophe that capitalism is responsible for and at the same time evidently lacks the ability to prevent.
Statism, faith in the nation state’s necessary supremacy and monopoly on violence, is capitalism’s political supra-ideology. Under statism’s banner, conservatism emerges as a protector of the establishment and its interests; liberalism constitutes a faith in the individual as a rational accumulator of resources in a market governed by a mystical hand which is invisible to the naked eye; while socialism is a blind faith in the political party as a substitute for God. Obviously, the advent of informationalism puts all these ideologies into deep crisis, since it attacks the very foundation for statism by undermining the drawing of borders in an increasingly irrelevant geography, which makes accessible alternative and infinitely much more tempting possibilities in terms of identity creation. In this process, not only is meliorism exposed as a banal myth, it also loses all its power of attraction; the netocratic dividual would much rather experience herself as a constantly ongoing and dynamic event throughout life than as a representative of any kind of slowly developed and predetermined progress. The old ideologies are quite simply plagued by statism’s deterministic view of history, which no longer has any credibility in an indeterministic universe. Therefore the ideological work must be done anew, and in that case all the way up from the theological foundation.
In an age obsessed with syntheist network dynamics, history cannot credibly strive for either feudalist eternities or capitalist progress. Above all, the human being has of course not changed much during the course of history, at least not into something objectively better than she has been previously. For example, we use a smaller part of our brain today than we did 10,000 years ago, mainly due to the fact that more and more of the calculations and considerations essential for our lives are today outsourced to external technology instead of being managed by the brain in-house. This fact kills meliorism. Syntheist utopianism instead focuses on planning for the definitive event, informationalism’s fundamental metaphysical idea. For this reason syntheists are fighting for both the free and open Internet with its anarchist information flows and against the ecological apocalypse in order to save the fundamental prerequisite for human survival, the planet itself. That in addition social policy must be pursued based on the principle of minimisation of harm – not with banal, knee-jerk moralism as its guiding light – is a foregone conclusion based on these two positions. The free and open Internet is also of course driving chemical liberation – one of our three dramatic revolutions at the start of the Internet age – and we cannot take care of our planet in a constructive way if we do not also take care of each other in a constructive and preferably also a loving way. Syntheism is the social theory of everything that merges these three ideological projects.
The industrialist writing of history however is completely irrelevant for people in the age of informationalism, since they neither own, nor work in, nor relate to heavy-duty factories, and have much greater use for a history retold from the vantage point of various information technology paradigms. Spoken language, written language and the printing press replace stone, bronze and iron as prefixes to the epoch divisions that are construed as relevant. The writing of history in terms of information technology (see The Netocrats) has only just begun, and it also inevitably has the narratives of relationalism, attentionalism and dividualism in tow. Syntheism is the name of the metaphysical system, the social theory of everything and its ideological network, which ties all these narratives together and gives them their relationalist substance. Thus, informationalism’s netocrats at last get a narrative that gives them a cohesive social identity. Through the intersubjective identification with the writing of history in terms of information technology, they get the strength and self-confidence to take power.
The same thing of course applies to the network, informationalism’s fundamental metaphysical idea, which does not either exist in any physical sense. The concept does not acquire weight as a consequence of any tangibly physical existence, but as the node that connects the dominant memes of the moment together into a cohesive world view, where this cohesive world view then in turn subsequently accords the node its weight. Naturally this relationalism.html">social relationalism is analogous with how phenomena in relationalist physics acquire weight from the network in question and not the other way around. Without a fictive but nonetheless highly functional node such as God, the ego or the network, the world view does not hang together. And if the world view does not hang together, nothing in existence acquires any meaning or context. Thus we must first of all believe and act in accordance with this faith of ours in order to then be able to know, in exactly the same way that within physics we must first of all weave together a network in order to then be able to give its nodes substance. Relations generate the substance and not the other way around. And even the most fanatical atheists are thus true believers. They just think that they are not.
When we say that the network is informationalism’s fundamental metaphysical idea, this means in fact that we are theologising God’s most recent reincarnation in the form of the network. We are saying that the Internet is God. And when a sufficient number of people adhere to this view it becomes a fact: a truth. It was in precisely this way that the 18th century Enlightenment philosophers turned the individual into God. Neither more nor less. Syntheism quite simply addresses itself to conscious believers who have understood the conditions of the existential theatre and who want to live affirming and complete lives within this credible and intellectually honest framework. We may then, in the best democratic spirit, leave those of our fellow humans who do not understand or do not want to understand the beauty in this project to their superstition, free in peace and quiet to spend their time consuming entertainment and empty enjoyment from the broad and varied offering that is directed precisely at the consumtarian masses. Syntheism is not, nor can it ever be, a religion that forces anyone to do anything. And quite honestly this is connected to the fact that this sort of thought control is almost impossible to administrate in the informationalist plurarchy.
In his work, Badiou in particular discusses the theological revolution that is introduced with Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics. The reason why Cantor’s calculations are called transfinite is that with them he proves that a greater cardinality (a measure of the size of a quantity) is always possible. Mathematics can very well provide a number for the totality, but never totalise the number per se. Cantor quite simply proves that mathematics is always open, and then, according to Badiou, there is no reason that physics also could be open either. Cantor’s transfinite mathematics thereby pulls the rug out from under the totalist tradition within philosophy and theology, and at the same time, it confirms the mobilist tradition’s sudden upper hand under informationalism. Zoroaster and Heraclitus all at once appear considerably more contemporary and clear-sighted than Paul and Plato.
Informationalism’s obsession with the event – that is, informationalism’s the event as the equivalent of monotheism’s eternity and individualism’s progress as the metaphysical engines that produce the dynamics within each of these paradigms – is driven by a greater fascination in the face of, and an obsession with, death than ever before in history. Regardless of whether we see Man’s deepest longing as a quest for survival (the driving force behind Pantheos) or as a quest for immortality (the driving force behind Atheos), we return to our obsession with death. Death as a concept thus operates constantly in the oscillation between Pantheos and Atheos. But what then does our obsession consist of? What is it that drives Badiou to turn all forms of meaning into a meaning based on a suddenly arisen truth event, which in turn reflects death?
Meillassoux is inspired by both Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, who also build utopian systems around the event, informationalism’s metaphysical centre. The event is a dramatically altering event that suddenly just happens and then changes the course of history in a decisive manner. Small events occur constantly in the dividual’s life or in the local social arena, but the real singularities affect the future of both humanity and the planet for good. Events such as the invention of spoken language, written language, the printing press and the Internet have even generated completely new historical paradigms with new power structures, followed by new metaphysicists who have taken over the world and defeated old paradigms and narratives. Consequently with the advent of informationalism, we are compelled to rewrite all of history into a history of events in order to make it comprehensible and relevant for ourselves and for future generations.
A necessary component in hypercapitalism – and its infiltration and colonisation of the human, existential experience – is the hypersexualisation of the social arena. Capitalism must commodify even the most sensitive and most intimate of human experiences in order to consummate itself. And capitalism cannot get there without first being liberated from both responsibility and shame concerning its own ruthless exploitation. This freedom from responsibility occurs through the creation of the sexualist ideology, not to be confused with sexual liberation, which in its capacity as a cultural predecessor to informationalism’s relationalist view of humanity strives in the exact opposite direction. The problem is in fact that hypersexualisation requires a fundamental and deep-seated self-hatred, an all-encompassing conviction of inadequacy of the self, what Foucault calls “the internalised police”, a kind of turbo-driven superego that arises as a necessary by-product to hyper-Cartesian self-centredness.
The distinction between escapist and inscapist religion becomes all the more important when the Internetified world – where all nations and cities of the world become intimately dependent on and entangled with each other – transitions from the patchwork of industrialism’s sovereign nation states to the global empire of informationalism. It is important here to understand that the global empire is not some frictionless, synchronised, centralised millennial kingdom, but rather a fragmented and highly decentralised mishmash of social nodes. This mishmash is in turn subordinate to uncontrollable and ruthless flows of capital and information criss-crossing the old national borders, rather than being subordinate to some symbolically masterful central power with tangible or even discernible reach. Out of these flows, a decisive conflict emerges between on the one hand the capitalist power structure of nation states and the giant corporations – organisations that will do everything they can to halt, limit and above all attempt to domesticate the Internet’s development and potential to their own advantage – and on the other hand the attentionalist power structure, created and celebrated by netocrats who are fighting for a free and open Internet in order to take over and control the world, driven by their vision of theological anarchism.
Philosophy does not live up at all to its enormous potential during the 20th century. The most important reason for this is its academic marginalisation. Philosophy ceases to be a living, all-encompassing art form that is carried out by independent, risk-taking free thinkers who scrutinise society from its undefined margins. It is instead turned into a self-perpetuating and self-referencing academic activity and a system-affirming meal ticket among numerous others, with long and footnote-heavy repetitions and backward-looking references as its main activity. Thus, philosophy is no longer in dialogue with either other disciplines or society outside of academia. Neither Georg Cantor’s new mathematics nor Niels Bohr’s new physics have any impact worth mentioning within philosophy until after informationalism becomes widely accepted at the turn of the millennium, despite these two revolutions materially shaking up the world view of thinking people in the 20th century and shifting the mainstays of both ontology and phenomenology. The new relationalist ideas do of course pull the rug out from under the entire correlationist paradigm which has been regarded as axiomatic and unassailable ever since Kant presented his texts. But embarrassingly enough, philosophers are the last ones to understand and analyse this earth-shattering paradigm shift.
It is unreasonable to ask of the consumtarians that they should be able see through and be able to distance themselves from late capitalist consumption society. They are not even authentic social producers in a Foucauldian sense: rather, they are social consumers, thereof the tragic term the consumtariat. It is about a consumption proletariat which, in contrast to the classical workers’ proletariat, is no longer united around a proud productivity, but has been reduced to an underclass that have the passive consumption of entertainment and identity production in prefabricated mass editions as their only cohesive factor. Resistance against the corrupt system must instead come from inside the netocracy, which constitutes the subversive branch of social production. However, there are no indications suggesting that the netocracy will stand united in the political struggle under informationalism, no more than the bourgeoisie were politically united under capitalism once it had managed to push through its formative struggle for liberal democracy.
The ideological cracks within the netocracy are already clearly discernible (see The Netocrats). The sole political project that is guaranteed to unite the netocracy under informationalism is the struggle for the free and open Internet, since this struggle de facto concerns its most fundamental conditions as a social class. Without a free and open Internet, the netocracy as a societal elite will not be realised, but will remain, in the best-case scenario, an odd group with interesting special skills on the outer fringes of the social arena. A conceivable, not to say likely, scenario is that a small minority within the netocracy first oppose the statist-corporativist power structure, adopt the absolute standpoint in the age of interactivity, break loose from the corrupt system and construct the parallel utopia. To begin with as a temporary autonomous zone, which subsequently with time is made permanent with the purpose of making the utopia and its potential visible; a visibility that inspires other aspiring netocrats to creatively imitate the utopia and thereby complete the information-technology revolution.
The values and valuations of informationalism stem from what we call the ethics of interactivity (see The Body Machines). The network-dynamical effects must be the basis of the production of the values and valuations in a network society, where everything from physics and biology to artistic creation and religious practice is characterised by the obsession with intra-acting phenomena, and not least by their relations with each other. This is a world where everything is always at least two, as Friedrich Nietzsche expresses the matter, and often many times more than that. An agency for change in such a world is an extremely complex phenomenon in itself: multi-polar, multi-dimensional, multi-dependent and in all directions entangled with its environment. In a relationist society in a relationalist world, ethics must first be interactive and later also intra-acting.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58