Achille Mbembe

 

Technological Escalation

'This is therefore a moment in which technological escalation is resulting in the creation of a segmented planet of multiple speeds.

Let me now turn to my second observation which has to do with technological escalation and the kind of subjects it seems to produce, or the kind of affect it seems to generate.

First of all, it is a fact that unprecedented numbers of human beings are today embedded in increasingly complex technostructures while significantly intervening in the dynamics of the Earth system on a planetary scale.

This has led to the transgression of planetary boundaries such as those related to anthropogenic climate change, degenerative land-use change, accelerated biodiversity loss, perturbation of the global biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, and the creation and release of novel entities such as nanoparticles and genetically engineered organisms (Jonathan F. Donges and al., “The technosphere in Earth system analysis: a coevolutionary perspective”).

Second, it is true that technologies are becoming more and more tied in complex networks of extraction and predation.

Take, for instance, what is going on in the domain of genes and molecules.

The genetic codes of humans, plants, and animals has been cracked. This, in turn, has given way to an exponential rise of biological patents. Nearly 20% of the human genome is now privately owned.

Life itself is increasingly seen as  a commodity to be manipulated and replicated, while corporations are intervening directly in the natural cycles of life and ecosystems through the widespread genetic modification of key elements in the food chain.

Thus, to some extent, there is a shifting distribution of powers between the human and the technological in the sense that technologies are moving towards “general intelligence” and self-replication.

To all of this, we have to add what is going on in the field of knowledge where, along with the predominance of statistical forms of reasoning, we have witnessed the development of algorithmic forms of intelligence growing in parallel with genetic research, and often in alliance with it.

The integration of algorithms and big data analysis in the biological sphere brings with it a greater belief in technopositivism and the idea that everything is computable, everything can be turned into a data, or a code.

So, a dominant affect of our times is the belief that everything is potentially computable and predictable.

It is the belief that the fundaments of truth can now better be expressed in the form of algorithmic thinking by machines of different kinds capable of making decisions.

Of course this new state of being has dramatic consequences on the future of knowledge and the future of democracy itself.

As far as knowledge is concerned, we have reached a point where knowledge is increasingly defined as knowledge for the market.

Since markets themselves are increasingly turning into algorithmic structures, the only useful knowledge today is supposed to be algorithmic.

As a result of the conflation of knowledge, computation and markets, contempt has been extended to anyone who has nothing to sell and nothing to buy, or anything that cannot be bought.

The Enlightenment notion of the rational subject capable of deliberation and choice is gradually replaced by the consciously deliberating and choosing consumer.

Then we should factor in the quasi-hallucinatory power unleashed by contemporary computational technologies.

One of the many functions of computational media and digital technologies is to format as many minds as possible, to shape people’s desires, to recraft their symbolic world, blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, truth and lies and, eventually, to colonize their unconscious.

As such,  I think, these technologies have, maybe in spite of their originary intention, become key devices in the dissemination of micro-fascism in the interstices of the real.

Computational technologies and social media make us believe that there can be a world without opacity, a translucent world transparent to itself, without any nocturnal attribute.

To some extent, a different kind of human entangled with objects is therefore being constituted through and within digital technologies and new media forms. This is not at all the liberal individual who, not so long ago, we believed could be the subject of democracy.

New media forms have not only lifted the lid previous cultural eras had put on the unconscious. They have become the new infrastructures of the unconscious.

Yesterday, human sociality consisted in keeping a tab on the unconscious. For the social to thrive at all meant exercising vigilance over ourselves, or delegating to specific authorities the right to enforce such vigilance. This was called repression.

Repression’s main function was to set the conditions for sublimation. Not all desires could be fulfilled. Not everything could be said or enacted. The capacity to limit oneself was the essence of one’s freedom and the freedom of all.

Partly thanks to new media forms and the post-repressive era it has unleashed, the unconscious can now roam free.

Sublimation is no longer necessary. The content is in the form and the form is beyond, or in excess of, the content. We are now led to believe that mediation is no longer necessary.

Direct, originary experience is the new norm. This explains the growing anti-humanist stance that now goes hand in hand with a general contempt for democracy. 

To sum it up, finance capitalism and technological escalation have left in their wake a multitude of destroyed subjects, many of whom are deeply convinced that their immediate future will be one of continuous exposure to violence and existential threat.

They genuinely long for a return to some sense of certainty, the sacred, hierarchy, religion and tradition. 

They believe that nations have become akin to swamps that need to be drained and the world as it is should be brought to the end.

They believe that for this to happen, everything should be cleansed off.

They are convinced that they can only be saved in a violent struggle to restore their masculinity and virility, the loss of which they unfortunately attribute to the weaker amongst them, the weak they do not want to become.

In this context, the most successful political entrepreneurs  are increasingly those who convincingly speak to the losers, to the destroyed men and women of globalization and to their ruined identities.

In the street fight politics has become, reason hardly matters any longer. Nor do facts. Politics is in danger of reverting into an endless game of suspicion and brutal survivalism in an ultra-competitive environment.

Under such conditions, it is very difficult to see how affect, as such, can be mobilized for the benefit of a progressive and future-oriented mass politics of the left.

The transformation of the political into business raises the risk of the elimination of the very possibility of politics. Whether human civilization can give rise at all to any form of political life is the problem of the 21st-century. 

Conclusion

Neoliberalism has created the conditions for a renewed convergence, and at times fusion, between the living human being and the objects, artefacts or the technologies which supplement or augment us.

This event, which we can equate to a return to animism, is nevertheless not without danger for the idea of freedom and emancipation.

The concept of evidence has been discredited, throwing into confusion the related forms of accountability since there is no accountability without some form or other of evidence.

How do we get to the reality of reality is now at the center of public debate, as recently illustrated by the notion of a post-truth world or that of so-called alternative facts.

The main casualty of a ‘post-fact world’ is arguably democracy itself.

Democracy has no future in a fact-less world. Such a world is, by definition, hostile to the very idea of reason and of freedom.

It is also hostile to democracy understood not as ending at the borders of any national state, but as a kind of planetary and shared responsibility and agency in relation to the future of all inhabitants of the Earth, humans and other-than-humans'.