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New realities, new policies?
of “non-cognitariat” unemployed and the “cognitariat” which abandons national
solidarity.
Individuals will ever more decide that the state is simply not organizing effectively
enough for the money they have to pay to this unity of organization that has
outsourced its law (over 80% European), its money (euro) and privatized its energy,
communication, media and health sectors, effectively being perceived as mainly
policing. It has no effective way of dealing with the speeds of the digital and the
breadth of the network, which was spearheaded by an application that is only 15 years
old, just in its teens: the Mosaic visual browser of 1993. From the first visual browser
Mosaic 1993 follows the first phase of personal gain: online medication, travel,
health information and banking. The second phase is interpersonal gain: sharing,
eBay, peer groups, gaming avatars. The coming decade will see the third phase:
institutional personal gain, organising parallel structures. The rich have always been
able to organize their private networks, structures, forms of travel and living, caring
and even dying. And now the old – what was once still to be perceived as mass in
Ortega Y Gasset’s terms – middle class in the western European countries – is going
to do it too. This withdrawal from responsibility for the commons, public space,
public facilities and sense of solidarity will be the end of the democratic state at an
organizational level. This stems from the logic of techné, outsourcing memory and
agency to an ever more seemingly controllable environment on an individual level
that is perceived as convenient. The fact that this scenario is hastened by the great
cultural and racial tensions in western European cities and countryside (where
extreme right wing parties keep growing) is secondary. Intellectuals are as ever
moving to the outskirts, leaving the centre wide open for reactionary, wild capitalist
forces and the threat of a barren commons, or not grasping the severity of the crisis in
high tech capitalism.
Unless we find new ways of scripting new forms of solidarities with digital
technology, it seems like we can envisage two roads that both lead to less dialogue,
less communication, less innovation, fewer business opportunities, fewer sustainable
options. The one focuses on control in a fundamentally flux wireless environment;
the other focuses on hiding the technological complexity behind ever more simple
user-friendly interfaces. In both cases there is no learning by citizens on how to
function within such a system, thereby opening up all kinds of breakdown scenarios.
The dominant computing paradigm is aiming straight at a world in which preferably
everything is dead, as it can not deal with agency at an operating level. Human
activity by its very nature is too messy for these systems. The problem “of temporality
is fundamental to the collecting process” according to Baudrillard (Baudrillard,
1994). Well, not anymore. It is covered now.
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