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Interactivity
The fourth way for human beings to communicate with each other, arising chronologically after spoken language, written language and the mass media in turn, starting in the 1980s and onwards. Since interactivity requires and encourages an entirely different kind of talent than the previously dominant mass media, the arrival of interactivity will continue to turn all earlier truths on their head and cause a dramatic paradigm shift with a concomitant power shift from capitalism’s bourgeoisie to informationalism’s netocracy. The concept is synonymous with participationism.
The burgeoning netocracy, the elite that is succeeding the bourgeoisie in the new paradigm being driven by digitisation and interactivity, obviously represented a special interest group when it initially marketed the anarcho-libertarian ideology as the metaphysics of the Internet age. If truth is an act, and if truth will set us free, it follows that if the Internet is allowed to be free, it will also set us free. There is here of course an ill-concealed intention to use noble motives as a pretext for the seizure of power. The netocracy is thus acting in exactly the same way that the feudal aristocracy did when it embraced monotheism, and in the same way as the capitalist bourgeoisie did when it embraced humanism. These specific metaphysics developed as the dominant stories – and they worked! – during their respective paradigms, for the very reason that they appointed the emerging social classes as the social theatre’s new protagonists.
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.
It is from Zoroastrianism that Kant gets the idea that existence is basically a correlation between thinking (Mazda) and being (Ahura), even if Kant sees Mazda and Ahura as eternalised constants instead of the intra-active variables that Zoroaster used in his proto-syntheology. If we use the network-dynamic terminology of the 2000s, we would express this as Kant opening the door to interactivity through his correlationalism, which Nietzsche later consummates through his relativism. But with Zoroaster there is not just one constantly moving activity between different phenomena, but rather the phenomena are also in constant motion around themselves. This is why we speak of Zoroaster’s building blocks as intra-acting variables in contrast to Kant’s and Nietzsche’s interactive constants. Intra-activity is the historical radicalisation of interactivity, and relationalism is correspondingly the historical radicalisation of relativism.
This means that the medium is not only the message, as the Canadian literary historian Marshall McLuhan clear-sightedly proclaims as early as the 1960s, but that the medium also creates the actor herself, rather than the other way around. We are literally the media with which we communicate. The netocrat of the information age therefore has a sober view of herself as an affirmative by-product of the interactive technologies that she is using in order to interact with her environment, rather than the other way around. And it is precisely because of the superiority of interactivity vis-à-vis the preceding one-directional communicating technologies – given the choice between on the one hand interactivity, with its equality at all levels, and on the other hand one-directional communication from the top down, from those in power to the masses, the current actors always choose interactivity – that ultimately the netocracy vanquish the bourgeoisie of the industrial age and take over society’s central functions. Since the ideas are fictives – concealed within ideologically coloured fictions, which move according to a certain metaphysical structure – according to the syntheist view, the ideas can never be said to be owned by any individual actor or any group of actors in any real sense.
This means that capitalism must be organised in such a way that it constantly excludes the glaring void at its own centre, all in accordance with the principle that something must be subtracted from or added to perceived reality in order for it to be ideologised, where this hidden something returns as the ideology’s demonic universal. After capitalism’s tyrannical pillaging throughout all of society’s nooks and crannies – there is hardly anything left to exploit that has not yet been converted into an open market, just as there is hardly any human effort left to exercise that has not been converted into a taxed professional category – there remains only one single subject area where an opportunity to author an alternative, cohesive, universal story for humanity is still offered. To the disappointment of many philosophers this will not occur within art – even art has long ago been transformed into an entertaining and somewhat piquant euphemism for money, whatever art and its vociferous supporters may claim – but here we are talking about the underestimated theological arena. For it is in theology’s meeting with the revolutionary trio of interactivity, quantum physics and chemical liberation that there arises a genuine possibility of creating the necessary metanarrative of the Internet age: syntheology.
Attention has of course in reality few or no links at all to capital, aside from the fact that they have both been power-generating during different historical epochs. Attention is, for example, not a structural lubricant, even if it both creates and changes power structures to a dramatic extent. Its power instead arises as a response to the Internet’s enormous information offering and the plurarchical chaos which this abundance creates. The need for curatorship, qualified information processing, is growing explosively, and the sorting of information is much more important and more valuable than the production of the same. At the very moment that information sorting becomes more important than information production, power over the society shifts from the producers of goods and services, the capitalists, to information sorting and its practitioners, the netocratic curators. We go through the paradigm shift from capitalism to attentionalism. With the advent of attentionalism, the focus of ethics shifts over from the individual’s self-realisation, the capitalist ideal, to the network-dynamical utopia, or what is termed the ethics of interactivity. What is important in existence are the nodes in the network and how these nodes can be merged as often and as much as possible in order to maximise agential existence. The power in this hectic network-building ends up with those who succeed in combining plausibility and attention in the virtual world. And even if this attention can be measured – according to the brilliantly simple but correct formula credibility multiplied by awareness yields attention – it cannot be substituted or in any other way used in transactions in the same way as capital and capitalism’s other valuable assets.
Since relationalism drives the new physics, it is hardly surprising that the metaphysics of the Internet age – from Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze via Alain Badiou to Slavoj Zizek – revolves around and is driven by the notion of the emergent event. Interactivity produces a class structure with the netocracy as the upper class and the consumtariat as the lower class. While the consumtariat is relatively uniform – consumtarians are of course defined by what they are not rather than what they actually are – the netocracy can be divided into three distinct categories. The first of these is the netocratic pioneers; the second category is the netocratic aspirationists who copy the pioneers at an early stage and successfully, and if possible milk an even greater surplus value out of their creativity than the pioneers do: imitation is the mother of survival. The third category of netocrats is the experimentalists, who, while they initially fail in copying the pioneers and who are rather too late to copy the aspirationists, for precisely this reason they are forced to and subsequently succeed in inventing their own original solutions, which motivate their position within the netocracy. The consumtarians meanwhile have their plate full passively chewing the nonsensical content, the calming and soporific entertainment that is produced in various trashy networks with no status whatsoever.
If emergences within hierarchies are central for the sciences, there is no reason why our studies of mental and social phenomena should be facilitated by defining emergences within mental and social hierarchies as well. It is sufficient to note that a new level in a mental or social phenomenon is no longer reducible to its constituent parts, and we have thus identified an emergence. In this way Christianity is emergent in relation to Judaism, socialism is emergent in relation to liberalism, syntheism is emergent in relation to atheism, to name just three clear and close-at-hand examples. While interactivity is emergent in relation to the mass media, the mass media are in turn emergent in relation to written language, just as written language is emergent in relation to spoken language. Etcetera.
Once the foundation of self-love is laid, the syntheist agent is open and receptive to the process that is called transparency within the community. The purpose of transparentisation is to maximise openness within the congregation, to bring its members closer to each other, to allow intimacy to develop, so that the collective manifestation of Syntheos is realised. Religion is about bringing people together and giving them an emergent, collective identity that is greater than the dividuals separately and greater than the sum of all the dividuals together. This occurs, for example, through the establishment of sharing circles, where the agents bear witness to their innermost thoughts and experiences in front of each other. However it is of the utmost importance that the transparentisation – in the spirit of the French philosopher Michel Foucault – follows the ethics of interactivity (see The Body Machines) and therefore is carried out from the bottom up rather than from the top down; that is, it is those who are strongest, most powerful, those most established who open themselves up first before the community in a process where everyone shares more and more of their innermost emotions and thoughts for every round of the sharing circle.
Through this transparentisation, agentiality in the phenomenon in question migrates from the separate dividuals to the community itself. This is what we call the manifestation of Syntheos. The ethics of interactivity are intimately connected with the identity of the subject. Therefore the syntheist agent – both as dividual and community – is very much an ethical being. And with conscious ethics as a generator of identity, the subject in turn becomes a formidable syntheist agent. Here we reconnect with Zoroaster’s amoral but highly ethical ideal: “You are your thoughts, your thoughts govern your words; you are your words, your words govern your actions; you are your actions, your thoughts, words, and actions together constitute your ethical substance, they are and shall be your identity.” At the same moment that the believer identifies fully with her thoughts, words and actions, Zoroaster’s concept asha goes from being a phenomenological description of existence to becoming an ethical ideal. It is in this merging of phenomenology and ethics that the subject and asha become one with each other.
According to David Hume, habit is a necessity for the dividual identity. We call the religious habit ritual. Syntheist rituals are often or regularly repeated habits with the purpose of strengthening the particular identity of the dividual and social identity within the community. Since syntheism unites around interactivity as an ideal, syntheists first and foremost conduct participatory rituals. Participatoryism is a principle which entails the participants meeting in radical equality without any hierarchies whatsoever between them; a meeting where each and every one is assumed to take full responsibility for herself and his own well-being as well as to actively participate and co-create rather than passively receive and consume. This means that syntheism is a radical egalitarianism. From an intersubjective viewpoint, all people have as much (or as little) value, and there is continuous work within the community to maintain this radical ideal. This means that syntheist leadership serves the community from below rather than manipulating it from above. It is driven by a will to lead the community through the mobilist chaos of existence to a more profound eternalist understanding of the conditions and opportunities of existence, from which the ethics of interactivity can be applied through truths as acts which are determined and then carried out.
During the 20th century, academic philosophy is instead reduced to a stuffy, self-referencing loop. Like an old castrated monster, it behaves as though interactivity, the new physics and chemical liberation do not exist, nor can exist either. So why has philosophy got stuck in the suffocating grip of hermeneutics? How did it come to be impacted by postmodern paralysis? The answer can, once again, be found in the academic marginalisation of philosophy that occurred during the 20th century. From having been a dialogue between independent agents, between politically and artistically driven activists, philosophy was transformed during the 20th century into a politically controlled and socially castrated activity. Philosophy became a business exclusively practised at universities and on academic terms, and thereby creativity was weakened within the discipline, with some extremely rare but consequently also so much more important exceptions, for example psychoanalysis and pragmatism, which in principle also evolved precisely because they had access to their very own institutions.
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.
The ethics of interactivity can and should be pitted against the hypersubjectivist ethics of the last great individualist ethicist, the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. According to Levinas, the other has lost all substance and has become an empty goal for the survival of ethics at all. With an almost psychotic conviction, Levinas claims that ethics is the primary philosophy, that it precedes and dictates ontology, epistemology and metaphysics. Justice is the promise to remember the victims of the past and the quest to act justly in the future. Levinas pursues his ethical fundamentalism by reducing the other to merely a face, in the presence of which Levinas claims to experience a blind existential love of almost biblical proportions.
Syntheism opens the way for an ethics of interactivity, based on the entangled, outstretched phenomenon’s quest for its own survival, its will to intensity and expansion. It is not in ethics and what the subject feels for the other that the primary arises. The primary is instead the existence of the Universe and how this existence manifests itself for itself by setting people in motion towards and with each other. Levinas’ individualistic infatuation is replaced by the manifestation of Syntheos in the encounter between people. This encounter does not get its existential substance via a certain emotion or a holy sacrifice in only one direction between two subjects isolated from each other, as Levinas imagines it, but in a conscious joint act between two equal agents – at once both entangled and autonomous – who realise that, through an act of will, they actually can and therefore choose to let agape into the relationship between them, who thus choose to sacralise the encounter and the joint action. Syntheos quite simply arises when love between people is established as a joint truth as an act.
Both nature and the creative arsenal of Man himself are full of these entheogens – the term was coined by the historian Carl Ruck, as a more factual replacement for the erroneous term hallucinogens, and it is of course derived from syntheism’s Entheos, the god within ourselves – which have always been used for spiritual purposes. This was the case despite many nation states, on the pretext of the most bizarre and prejudiced excuses, assiduously trying to stop the use of entheogens in what must be regarded as the current paradigm shift’s most obvious form of bourgeois religious persecution of the emerging netocracy’s metaphysical lifestyle choice. It is from this radical equality, in this literally syntheist procedure, that the ethics of interactivity is born and developed – not in Levinas’ sentimental and anti-Nietzschean self-sacrificing romanticism.
However, beyond the ethics of interactivity a landscape opens up for a pure syntheist ethics. It is an ethics where human actions can occur without any imagined observer, where the other as a target disappears from the equation. The Nietzschean übermensch does whatever should be done merely because it should be done and without any ulterior motive whatsoever. We can describe this as an ethical vacuum state. It is a case of a metaethics; a constantly ongoing investigative study of how the syntheist agent is changed by acting this way or that way. The artist that bases her whole creativity on her own desire and nowhere else is an early example of a syntheist ethicist. But there is really nothing to prevent all human behaviour in the syntheist utopia from taking as its point of departure such an ethics of intra-acting rather than an ethics of interactivity – because the ethics of intra-acting follows logically from the development of the syntheist agent as a human ideal.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58