Living in the immediate world.
The un-mediated world. Free from signs and signifiers. Away from things pointing to others things. All the representations of the world, the images we are inundated with, cut us off from a putatively direct indwelling with the world and force us to consume the world at a remove as information, as fungible data.
At its worst technology accelerates this. At its best it gives us the rambling free time to 'first-hand' the world. The world is axiomatically authentic. Yet we take photos of the Forest, capturing and freeze drying it for later consumption. We lament not being able “find an outside to technology,” which seems like wanting to find an outside to ideology, where one can be in direct communion.
This is what it will mean to have “AI” infused into everything — objects will be outfitted with sensors and will attempt to manipulate us based on whatever data they can access. No object will come without the ability to tell you how you are supposed to see it and understand it, and what you are expected to do with it. It will hail you, like any other ideological apparatus, and when you heed the call you become more the sort of subject it demands.
This will lead to “total flow prolonged into the infinite” which sounds like a description of social media, or chatbot transcripts, or the experience of watching television — all one endless text which affects us in aggregate to dehumanized the world. And none of which can carry the charge of necessity.
However, a retreat from representation altogether is a kind of retreat from consciousness, a rejection of the sort of thought that requires the existence of others who can understand us. It is a way of becoming an organic computer, a biological machine generating signals that allow for no interpretation. Construing the problem with technology as “the loss of the world” is not very useful, because technology is not in itself making everything “abstract” but is used by forces to enact processes of dehumanizing that make the world nearly impossible to comprehend and speak about. Still, no matter how much empty verbiage various antisocial technologies are made to generate, language remains inexhaustible.
The un-mediated world. Free from signs and signifiers. Away from things pointing to others things. All the representations of the world, the images we are inundated with, cut us off from a putatively direct indwelling with the world and force us to consume the world at a remove as information, as fungible data.
At its worst technology accelerates this. At its best it gives us the rambling free time to 'first-hand' the world. The world is axiomatically authentic. Yet we take photos of the Forest, capturing and freeze drying it for later consumption. We lament not being able “find an outside to technology,” which seems like wanting to find an outside to ideology, where one can be in direct communion.
This is what it will mean to have “AI” infused into everything — objects will be outfitted with sensors and will attempt to manipulate us based on whatever data they can access. No object will come without the ability to tell you how you are supposed to see it and understand it, and what you are expected to do with it. It will hail you, like any other ideological apparatus, and when you heed the call you become more the sort of subject it demands.
This will lead to “total flow prolonged into the infinite” which sounds like a description of social media, or chatbot transcripts, or the experience of watching television — all one endless text which affects us in aggregate to dehumanized the world. And none of which can carry the charge of necessity.
However, a retreat from representation altogether is a kind of retreat from consciousness, a rejection of the sort of thought that requires the existence of others who can understand us. It is a way of becoming an organic computer, a biological machine generating signals that allow for no interpretation. Construing the problem with technology as “the loss of the world” is not very useful, because technology is not in itself making everything “abstract” but is used by forces to enact processes of dehumanizing that make the world nearly impossible to comprehend and speak about. Still, no matter how much empty verbiage various antisocial technologies are made to generate, language remains inexhaustible.