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    Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age
    Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age
    Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age
    Ebook265 pages1 hour

    Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    By Mark Jarzombek

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    Once, humans were what they believed. Now, the modern person is determined by data exhaust-an invisible anthropocentric ether of ones and zeros that is a product of our digitally monitored age. Author Mark Jarzombek argues that the world has become redesigned to fuse the algorithmic with the ontological, and the discussion of ontology must be up

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAmazon Pro Hub
    Release dateApr 13, 2023
    ISBN9781088110379

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      Book preview

      Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age - Mark Jarzombek

      About the Author

      Mark Jarzombek is a Professor of history and theory of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been teaching since 1995. He has authored several books on a wide range of subjects including in the area of digital philosophy. He is the co-founder along with Vikram Prakash of the Office of (Un)certainty Research, a design practice dedicated to rethinking architecture in terms of the emergent scientific, social and political parameters of the 21st century.

      About the Book

      No one disputes the fact that we live in a Digital Age. But unlike the transition into the Modern Age and the advent of various types of machines and technologies – a transition that we could see and experience as different and alienating – the transition into the Digital Age has been more insidious. Where exactly do we locate it? And when did it even become the norm?

      Today, the world of algorithms is almost completely invisible to the common person and yet is already everywhere. If there is no ‘outside’, how then do we assess the traditional relationship between the Human and the Technological? How do we understand our sense of Self?

      In this book, I argue that the study of Being calls for a new type of science, the subject of which is algorithmic ontology in which the human is being pushed to its corporeal, sensate, moral, physical, psychological, political, social, environmental, sexual, bacteriological or global limits.

      In a way, we are now more Human than ever before, and yet what we mean by Human is becoming increasingly illusive since the glue that holds all this together is a finely constructed type of hallucinogenic paranoia that speaks to us at different registers of reality.

      This book outlines the path that brought us here and explores different ways that data and humans are enmeshed in a spiral of dependency.

      In contrast to the outdated Three Laws of Robotics, I propose an alternative three laws as a way to describe the nature of this inter-dependency. These laws are thermodynamic in nature since the algorithmic world is a heat-producing-seeking world that produces, captures, and exploits the life pulse of data.

      Introduction

      Immanuel Kant, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, defined the parameters of the modern sense of personhood by replacing the standard assumption of the superiority of the soul over the body with a more complex entanglement built around an innate sense of unity.

      No one is immediately conscious of a particular place in his body, but only the one that he as a human being occupies with respect to the world around him. . . . Where I feel, there I am. I am just as immediately in my fingertips as in my head. It is myself whose heel hurts and whose heart beats with emotion. When my corn aches, I feel the painful impression not in a brain nerve but at the end of my toe. . . . My soul is wholly in my whole body and wholly in each of its parts.¹ [Kant’s emphasis]

      So powerful was this claim that it remained a key element of nineteenth and twentieth-century philosophy and was just as foundational to the dialectic of Hegel as to the psycho-historicism of Dilthey. It reached its most extreme figuration in Heidegger’s claim that the original act of building, bauen, derived from nothing less—and nothing more!—than Ich bin. The claim also produced a vast symptomology to describe conditions that did not fit the mold, schizophrenia, mood disorders, psychosis, paranoia, bipolarism, etc., all of which become ‘scientifically’ verifiable proof in the negative of the more elusive existence of the modern notion of a stable and unified Self.

      We are now in a situation where the discussion of ontology has to be updated. The world is designed from the macro to the micro/molecular level to fuse the algorithmic with the ontological. The result is a digitally monitored, pharma-corrected, ontic-ecology now common to many people across the globe, not just the wealthy and not just those savvy in the ways of the computer. The modern duality of the stable and the unstable when talking about the Self is increasingly revealed as little more than an artifice: a convenience.

      This book is, however, not about the media/digital world of gaming and gadgets, nor is it about the geopolitics of globalization. It asks a more personal question and tries to do so without first judging who we are or what we have now become. It used to be that we were what we believed, or we were what we ate. Now, we are determined by what data experts call our data exhaust—or, as I would like to call it, ontic exhaust. We participate in this exhaust-making willingly and unwillingly, wittingly and unwittingly, purposefully and accidentally.  The word exhaust is, of course, a misdirect. Unlike car exhaust that dissipates into the atmosphere, this exhaust is meticulously scrutinized, packaged, formatted, processed, sold, and resold to come back to us in the form of entertainment, social media, apps, health insurance, clickbait, data contracts, and the like.

      Without this invisible ether of one and zeros, the world as we know it would, in fact, cease to function. It is the new oxygen, and everyone—and every thing—has to be dedicated to its production and maintenance. Unlike oxygen, which came into existence long before humans, this new substance is anthropocentric in that its production is a global/human enterprise. The individual, the corporation, the nation-state, and thousands of nameless hackers are increasingly shaping a destiny with an unknown proportion and an unknown termination date.

      Though computers have been around for a while, this circulational condition has only emerged in the last five or so years, meaning that one has to completely rethink the philosophical and anthropological basis of our ontology and to do so without applying the lens of either victimhood or opportunity, the two modalities that are alien to this discussion. I do not, however, proclaim neutrality. Far from it. The questions are: What is this new ontology? What were the historical situations that produced it? And how do we adjust to the realities of our new Self? Only with these questions at least partially answered can we begin to develop a more substantial critique of the positional paradoxes that define the problem of Being.

      Being Global

      Global was born in the age of aeronautics and Sputnik, with great circles wheeling around the planet bereft of topographical restrictions. Global back then implied something visceral about movement, maintained in the world of tourism, commerce, and overnight shipping. Increasingly, however, global has become a parasitic adjective: global industries, global science, global news, global education, global exchange, global warming, global imperialism, global war on terror, global markets, global jihadism, global integration, etc. How many globals can a person comprehend? We live in a globalized world of global globalism.

      All these globals are the noisy symptom of an otherwise relatively quiet transformation that has taken place. For there is another global in all of this for which the word global does not, however, appear. It is the I made global not by how much the I travels or where its clothes are made, and not necessarily by the fact that the I owns an iPhone or iPad, but by a universe of anonymously implemented firmware, software, trackware, ransomware, trialware, malware, pirateware, and shareware. The intermediaries are the satellites hovering above the planet. They are what make us global — what make me global.

      Is there some way to reflect on this positioning/de-positioning as a question of Being?

      At first, it might seem that we should focus on someone who is savvy about emerging technologies, digital media, and a so-called culture of connectivity. Perhaps this is a person who travels a lot, a businessperson who understands to some degree the necessity if not the logic of capital, reads from his or her tablet, and worries about the next Global Crisis. A Hilton Cosmopolitan. Liberals would hope that this person is sensitive to the economic exploitation of capital. Conservatives would hope that this person enjoys making money. It doesn’t matter. There is more to it than that. We see in the last years a new ontology, one that is not the classic Being-in-the-World (Plato and Buddha); not the modernist Being-in-the-World (Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger), not the techno-liberated-performative cyborg of the 1990s; and not just a member of Facebook Universe. It is a new creature altogether, a new Being.

      Without getting too complicated, let’s say that the word Being points to life, to our social constructions, and to a sense of identity in the world, whether valid or not, whether validated or not. Needless to say, most philosophy, whether eastern or western, has tried to mold Being in a particular way. All philosophy operates on Being. Better said: Being is constructed by a philosophy to be vulnerable to the operations of philosophy. As a result, Being is continuously told what to do, what to eat, how to work, how to behave, how to think, how to have sex, if at all, and inevitably how to think of oneself as superior.

      So much for the past! Being today is moving on. It is

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