De-con-struc-tion - Fanfarlo

Thoughts are mounted like specimens

We had to explain what we found

But the wasteland of possibilities is 

Playing tricks in my mind 

So I look away, I look away sometimes 

I look away, I look away sometimes 

Where is the focus and direction 

These cons are draggin' us away 

Aimless and numb, just drift along a little while 

Just look away, just look away sometimes 

It goes away, it goes away sometimes 

So come on, let's dissect it 

Let's cut it up till it's gone 

Let's break it up into pieces 

Throw away what we don't understand 

It comes together again, it comes together again somehow 

It comes together again, it comes together again yeah 

Motives and means, now they seem like a dream within a dream 

Concepts and ideas starting soon to be making any sense 

Just look away, just look away sometimes 

It goes away, it goes away sometimes 

So come on, let's dissect it 

Let's cut it up till it's gone 

Let's break it up into pieces 

Throw away what we don't understand 

So come on, let's dissect it 

Let's cut it up till it's gone 

Let's break it up into pieces 

Throw away what we don't understand 

It comes together again, it comes together again somehow 

It comes together again, it comes together again somehow 

It comes together again, it comes together again somehow 

It comes together again, it comes together again yeah 

Es gibt Welten auf Welten.

Sinnlose Verzeichnisse.

Kakofonie von Worten und Licht...

Korridore voll endlos aufeinander...

...verweisender zeichen.

There are worlds on worlds.

Pointless directories.

Cacophony of words and light ...

Corridors fully endless ...

... referring signs.

Innovations Founts...

1983

The Future is Now...

Chauncey Gardener's Weltanschauung

Sustaining the Holocough Hoax...

Ignorance is Bliss?

THE PHILOSOPHER’S IGNORANCE (WITH A RESPONSE BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK) Linsey McGoey 

In a recent article for The Philosophical salon, Slavoj Žižek offers a number of well-trodden ideas on the relationship between ignorance and knowledge. In doing so, he shuts a window creaked open by recent scholarship on the political economy of ignorance. 

Žižek’s understanding of ignorance is typical of philosophy and the social sciences for centuries, yet this staleness is masked by a posture of novelty. Like the three wise monkeys chosen to illustrate his commentary – wise because they see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil – it’s easy to ignore the problems in this piece. But this theoretical posture would miss a chance to consider its larger theoretical implications. 

Surely, the three overworked monkeys who are constantly used to depict the power of ignorance must be exhausted. Their hands are permanently frozen in a hackneyed pose: one with her hands over her mouth, one playing peekaboo with hands across her eyes, and the last with hands clasped over her ears. 

I’m guilty myself of making workhorses out of these monkeys. My recent book, The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World, features this same image on the jacket. 

Can an image that is used with such promiscuity be theoretically useful? I think the answer is yes, but only if the monkeys are allowed at least two weeks off. Preferably paid, but let’s face it, especially in the America that Žižek has endeavoured to bring about – Trump’s America – who’s getting a paid holiday? Paid, unpaid, give the monkeys a rest. Picture Žižek instead. 

Once you’ve got that as a mental image, Žižek with his hands over his ears, eyes and mouth, it becomes easier to see the limitations of Žižek’s recent take on unknowing. 

Žižek does make some good points, including a reference to Johann Fichte’s notion of a closed commercial society. Published in 1800, Fichte’s study contested theories of free trade that were on the rise. He believed that unrestrained economic competition undermined the quest for political equality, which the French Revolution and related struggles sought to achieve, and he called for deliberate protectionism to advance a just economy. Žižek rightly notes that Fichte’s ideas are relevant today, but it’s hardly a new point to make. Fichte was integral to a generation of German early romantic thinkers such as Novalis who helped to inaugurate a different, holistic understanding of nature and industry. What’s odd is Žižek’s main point: that Covid-19 has illuminated in an unprecedented way the need to ‘repoliticize’ the economy and bring it to heel through deliberate government planning. There’s really nothing new about this long-standing (even if continually ignored) imperative. 

Writing about lawsuits brought against governments in the effort to recoup corporate profits lost to the pandemic, Žižek argues that governments need to brutally intervene, or ‘it will be a clear sign that the worst capitalist barbarism is returning.’ Really? To return, this barbarism needs to have fled somewhere, and clearly it hasn’t. The reality, of course, is that different varieties of economic barbarism have stayed with us since the time of Fichte. My book, The Unknowers, describes how this economic violence is veiled through different forms of strategic ignorance.[i] 

This leads to the main problem with Žižek’s claim that we are all demonstrating a newfound ‘will not to know’ about the threat that Covid-19 presents. He puts it as follows: ‘It may appear that, at a time like ours, when the virus threatens us all, the predominant stance would have been that of the will to know, the will to understand fully the workings of the virus in order to control successfully and stop its spread. However, what we witness more and more is a version of the will not to know too much about it.’ 

The question is: who is the ‘we’ referring to? As the article unfolds, the answer becomes clear. He thinks that it’s all of us; that we’re equally guilty of a collective will not to know. The article beseeches everyone not to submit to a desire for unknowing: ‘THIS is the choice we all have to make: will we succumb to this temptation of the will-to-ignorance, or are we ready to really think the Covid-19 pandemic not only as a biochemical health issue, but as something that is rooted in the complex totality of our (humanity’s) place in nature.’ 

This flattens out different hierarchies of access to and desire for knowledge. The desire not to know is conditioned by a range of economic, gendered, racialized, and national advantages and disadvantages. Žižek is blind to the dynamism of ignorance, to the fact that not all social actors ‘refuse’ to know with equal conviction, motivations or liability. 

When Donald Trump (whom Žižek famously backed and supported until at least 2019), states “I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please’” – pointing out that too much testing uncovers too many cases – that’s an explicit admission of Trump’s personal ‘will to ignorance.’ Such wilful unknowing shouldn’t be taken as a general reflection of the citizen’s flight from knowledge. Even the ‘no-maskers’ aren’t necessarily ‘ignorant’ in the same way as Trump. Their stance may be misanthropic, selfish and unscientific, but their actions, however misguided, seem rooted in legitimate anxiety over the fact that the corporate goals of different medical actors, including big pharma, are not always aligned with the public interest. In other words, it has been a particular type of strategic ignorance – big pharma’s legal right to commercial confidentiality – that has contributed to another, second-order type of ignorance among a suspicious, anxious public. Just because flagging trust in corporate science has led to lamentable, dangerous outcomes, doesn’t mean that scholars should ignore conflicts of interest within big pharma. These different levels of unknowing are flattened out in accounts like Žižek’s, which claim that ‘we’ are all demonstrating a shared ostrich-like attitude to the implications of Covid-19. 

There is ‘no hierarchy of ignorance,’ Jacques Rancière once wrote in The Ignorant Schoolmaster,[ii] but on this point he was wrong, just as Žižek is to dismiss differences between social actors when it comes to retaining legal control over knowledge and ignorance. This power is something that I term ‘oracular power’: the capacity to use economic, cultural and national advantage to establish the boundaries between ignorance and power. As the philosopher Renata Salecl points out in her latest book, there is an ‘economy of ignorance,’ just as there is an economy of knowledge.[iii] 

After Trump made his repeated comments about ‘slowing’ down the testing, his staffers insisted that he was only joking. To this day, an intricate dance takes place. Trump repeatedly makes statements so ludicrous that it’s easier for his team to insist they are too outrageous to be taken literally. Just as Peter Thiel once remarked that Trump’s plan to build a wall shouldn’t be seen as literal (it was), so today, Trump’s will to foment ignorance about transmission rates is dismissed as a sort of joke, even though testing clearly remains sluggish and inadequate across the country. 

Underlying this dance is a type of power that Žižek’s article misses: the power of the powerful to inflict their own ‘will to ignorance’ on others. As the social theorist Jana Bacevic has pointed out in The Guardian, throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, authorities have sought to reduce their perceived liability for disastrous policy choices by asking as few questions as possible: ‘it matters what questions politicians don’t ask, such as whether coronavirus will disproportionately affect people from black and ethnic minorities communities, or whether the effects of the lockdown will be worse for women.’[iv] 

The privilege of not asking questions is not shared by society’s most vulnerable and exploited people, for whom the effects of Covid-19 are not a question to avoid, but an inescapable reality. This is why Žižek is wrong to ask ‘will we succumb to the temptation of the will-to-ignorance?’ Wrong, because it assumes that in non-Covid times, people exist in some elevated lofty sphere above ignorance. We don’t: humans have long cultivated ignorance, especially powerful people who have the most to gain from remaining ignorant of the negative effect of their privilege on others. 

A better question is: why is a centuries-old image of three monkeys a cross-cultural favourite used to illustrate the human economy of ignorance, as if to unknow is an animalistic, anti-rational urge? There is an important literature on the folklore of this cross-cultural image.[v] And clearly contributing authors, such as Žižek, don’t usually choose the associated image with their comment pieces. But my point holds. Why do we relegate the act of unknowing to the non-human? Or assume, as Žižek does, that we are collecively blind rather than selectively silenced, heard or seen? 

The more daring goal – the necessary goal – should be to substitute an image of our human selves. Once we do, it’s easier to see that the will to ignorance depends on economic and political power that is unjustly distributed. This will is never uniform, nor are its pernicious effects shared equally.

 

 

A SHORT REPLY Slavoj Žižek 

It would be boring to go through all the passages where my critic, after the first paragraphs of rather tasteless and forced comic remarks, goes on to misread and misrepresent my claims. Just a couple of cases should suffice. 

She writes: “Žižek rightly notes that Fichte’s ideas are relevant today, but it’s hardly a new point to make.” Really? I am talking about Fichte’s book The Closed Commercial State, which is largely ignored or dismissed as proto-Fascist and proto-totalitarian. 

“There’s really nothing new about this long-standing (even if continually ignored) imperative of politicizing economy.” Of course not; all I am saying is that this imperative got an unprecedented boost because of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“Writing about lawsuits brought against governments in the effort to recoup corporate profits lost to the pandemic, Žižek argues that governments need to brutally intervene, or ‘it will be a clear sign that the worst capitalist barbarism is returning.’” Her counter-argument: this barbarism never disappeared, “different varieties of economic barbarism have stayed with us since the time of Fichte”… Sure, but what I have in mind is a very specific mode of barbarism: making the state responsible for the profits lost due to a health catastrophe, which has nothing to do with state politics. This measure is definitely new. 

But let’s turn to my critic’s main reproach: I think that “it’s all of us, that we’re equally guilty of a collective will not to know.” In this way, I am said to ignore the specific levels and modes of ignorance. The will not to know “is never uniform, nor are its pernicious effects shared equally”: those kept in ignorance are always certain strata (classes, sexes, races), and ignorance is imposed on them by those in power, in whose interest this ignorance is… 

I must admit this line of argumentation surprises me: I simply don’t recognize myself in these reproaches. My critic quotes me: “what we witness more and more is a version of the will not to know too much about it”, and then raises the question: “who is the ‘we’ referring to? As the article unfolds, the answer become clear. He thinks that it’s all of us, that we’re equally guilty of a collective will not to know.” No: we all “witness” (see the reports in our media) signs of this will to ignorance, such as the anti-mask protests, resistance to social distancing and to vaccines, or claims that the pandemic is but a conspiracy, but we are not all succumbing to it—I never claimed that. 

As for the specific modes of ignorance allegedly ignored by me, in the text targeted by my critic, I don’t speak about the will not to know in general. Rather, I talk about its very specific case: the refusal to take the pandemic seriously displayed all around the world, mostly by new Right populists, but also by some Leftists (Agamben in Italy, some circles in France and Germany). This refusal has different forms: an outright denial of the pandemic, conspiracy theories, the interpretation of measures imposed by state powers as ways to impose social control… In this respect, there are five crucial points I made in my texts on Covid-19 that I want to emphasize. 

(1) What interests me is that, in most of the forms of refusal to think Covid-19, ignorance assumes the positive form of a special insider-knowledge, of an insight into what most of the people don’t see. For instance, those who deny the serious character of the pandemic talk about secret conspiracies, a project of the ”dark state” to impose total social control, etc. In short, ignorance mostly takes the form of an excess-knowledge accessible only to the initiated. That’s why, incidentally, I would never use the image of the three monkeys: those with the will not to know have their eyes wide open (for pseudo-facts invisible to others) and listen with attention (to conspiracy theories). 

(2) One of the prevalent forms of defence against the knowledge of Covid-19 is not its direct denial, but what psychoanalysis calls the fetishist disavowal, which follows the formula “I know very well (that the epidemic is serious), but…” – but I cannot accept it , I suspend the symbolic efficiency of my knowledge and continue to act as if I don’t know it. A similar thing often happens when I learn that someone close to me has died: rationally I know it, but I don’t really subjectively assume this knowledge… 

(3) Although I think that science is one of the few hopes today, I absolutely don’t simply trust science. Not only scientists can be corrupted by big pharma (and other) companies, there are also at least two other points to be made here: (a) the science itself is not monolithic; there are different theories about Covid-19 that are not the result of economic and political corruption; (b) there are immanent limitations in the scientific procedure as such (if by science we mean modern positivist natural science), which is why Heidegger wrote that “science doesn’t think.” This is what I aim at in the final sentence of my text quoted by my critic: “‘THIS is the choice we all have to make: will we succumb to this temptation of the will-to-ignorance, or are we ready to really think the Covid-19 pandemic not only as a biochemical health issue, but as something that is rooted in the complex totality of our (humanity’s) place in nature.” To “think” means here also a reflexive procedure, which brings us into the picture. And this is not what science does: science cannot fully reflect its own social and ideological presuppositions and implications. 

(4) This brings me to the next point: I am also fully aware of the positive side of ignorance. Heidegger points out that the fact that science doesn’t think is its strength. Hegel made this clear when he praised abstraction as the absolute power of Spirit: to grasp the essence of a phenomenon, one has to erase many things out of the picture, i.e., abstract from them. To function in our daily lives, we have to ignore numerous things, and this holds even for ethics. When someone who committed a great crime is trying to justify or relativize it by telling us how he experienced his act, what for him was its deeper meaning, we should flatly dismiss his endeavour. Behind every ethnic cleansing. there is always some “deep” poetic or religious vision. So, when a criminal says “try to understand me,” the answer is: no, thanks, the way you understand and justify the horror you did is a lie you are telling yourself to be able to live with it, not the “inner truth” of it… However, this general insight has nothing to do with the present efforts to discredit science. 

(5) The last and, perhaps, most important point: the will not to know should absolutely not be reduced to how those in power selectively manipulate, spin and constrain the knowledge of those whom they oppress. Two things disturb this image. First, manipulators are always also manipulated in their own way. Those in power also don’t know and can reign only in this way: that’s the point of Marx’s notion of ideology. Second, the ignorance of those who are oppressed is not just imposed on them from outside; it is immanent to their way of life. Let’s take thousands who protest against masks and social distancing from the US to Germany: they act, often even violently, because they see their freedom and dignity threatened. In Slovenia, many parents protested against their children putting on masks in the schools, saying: “Our children are not dogs who should wear a muzzle in public!” One can understand them: the epidemic has undermined our ingrained sense of “normality,” some of the basic customs that define our way of life, compelling us to live in a way which we have to experience as “unnatural.” So, they “ignore” the full truth about the pandemic not because of some epistemological limitation or animalistic will not to know, but because of a deep existential anxiety: are we still human, when we are forced to act like that?

Notes: 

[i] McGoey, L. 2019. The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World. Zed. 

[ii] Rancière, J. 1991.The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford University Press, p. 32. See McGoey, The Unknowers, for a longer discussion of the hierarchy of ignorance. As an ontological statement of individual equality, Rancière’s important point holds, but, I argue, operational hierarchies of unknowing are mobilized by the powerful to obscure this ontological reality. 

[iii] Salecl, R. 2020. A Passion For Ignorance. Princeton University Press. 

[iv] Bacevic, J. 2020. ‘There is no such thing as just ‘following the science’ – coronavirus advice is political’ (The Guardian, April 18). 

[v] Smith, A. 1993. ‘On the Ambiguity of the Three Wise Monkeys’ Folklore 104 (1/2): 144-150

...and Other Distortions of "Reality"

Gravitational Lensing...

WTC

Kurds

 

-Slavoj Zizek, "European leftists are rejecting the Kurds over their reliance on the US. It is just another disgusting betrayal"

Must they sacrifice themselves on the altar of anti-imperialist solidarity? While the sovereign states around them are gradually sinking into a new barbarism, Kurds are the only glimmer of hope

Well over a hundred years ago, Karl May wrote a bestseller, Through Wild Kurdistan, about the adventures of a German hero, Kara Ben Nemsi. This immensely popular book established the perception of Kurdistan in central Europe: a place of brutal tribal warfare, naïve honesty and sense of honour, but also superstition, betrayal, and permanent cruel warfare. It was almost a caricature of the barbaric Other in European civilization.

If we look at today’s Kurds, we cannot but be surprised by the contrast to this cliché – in Turkey, where I know the situation relatively well, I have noticed that the Kurdish minority is the most modern and secular part of society, at a distance from every religious fundamentalism, with developed feminism, etc. (Let me just mention a detail that I learned in Istanbul: restaurants owned by Kurds have no tolerance for any sign of superstition…)

The stable genius (Trump’s self-designation) justified his recent betrayal of Kurds (he effectively condoned the Turkish attack on the Kurdish enclave in northern Syria) by noting that “Kurds are no angels”. Of course, since, for him, the only angels in that region are Israel (especially on the West Bank) and Saudi Arabia (especially in Yemen). However, in some senses, the Kurds ARE the only angels in that part of the world.

The fate of the Kurds makes them the exemplary victim of the geopolitical colonial games: spread along the borderline of four neighboring states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran), their (more than deserved) full autonomy was in nobody’s interest, and they paid the full price for it.

Do we still remember Saddam’s mass bombing and gas-poisoning of Kurds in the north of Iraq in the late 1980s? More recently, for years, Turkey has played a well-planned military-political game, officially fighting Isis but effectively bombing Kurds who are really fighting Isis.

In the last decades, the ability of the Kurds to organize their communal life was tested in almost ideal experimental conditions: the moment they were given a space to breathe freely outside the conflicts of the states around them, they surprised the world.

After Saddam’s fall the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq develop into the only safe part of Iraq with well-functioning institutions and even regular flights to Europe. In northern Syria, the Kurdish enclave centered in Rojava was a unique place in today’s geopolitical mess: when Kurds were given a respite from their big neighbors who otherwise threatened them all the time, they quickly built a society that one cannot but designate as an actually-existing and well-functioning utopia.

From my own professional interest, I noticed the thriving intellectual community in Rojava where they repeatedly invited me to give lectures – these plans were brutally interrupted by military tensions in the area.

But what especially saddened me was the reaction of some of my “Leftist” colleagues who were bothered by the fact that Kurds also had to rely on the US military protection.

What should they have done, caught in the tensions between Turkey, Syrian civil war, the Iraqi mess and Iran? Did they have any other choice? Should they sacrifice themselves on the altar of anti-imperialist solidarity?

This “Leftist” critical distance was no less disgusting than the same distance towards Macedonia. A couple of months ago, the discussion was around how to resolve the problem of the name “Macedonia”.

The solution proposed was to change the name to “North Macedonia,” but this was instantly attacked by radicals in both countries. Greek opponents insisted that “Macedonia” is an old Greek name, and Macedonian opponents felt humiliated by being reduced to a “Northern” province since they are the only people who call themselves “Macedonians.”

Imperfect as it was, this solution offered a glimpse of an end to a long and meaningless struggle with a reasonable compromise. But it was caught in another “contradiction”: the struggle between big powers (the US and EU on the one side, Russia on the other).

The West put pressure on both sides to accept the compromise so that Macedonia could quickly join the EU and NATO, while, for exactly the same reason (seeing in it the danger of its loss of influence in the Balkans), Russia opposed it, supporting rabid conservative nationalist forces in both countries.

So which side should we take here? I think we should decidedly take the side of the compromise, for the simple reason that it is the only realist solution to the problem – Russia opposed it simply because of its geopolitical interests, without offering another solution, so supporting Russia here would have meant sacrificing the reasonable solution of the singular problem of Macedonian and Greek relations to international geopolitical interests. (Now that France has vetoed the fast-track inclusion of North Macedonia into the EU, will they be responsible for an unpredictable catastrophe in that part of Balkans?) Will the Kurds be dealt the same blow from our anti-imperialist “Leftists”?

That’s why it is our duty to fully support the resistance of the Kurds to the Turkish invasion, and to rigorously denounce the dirty games Western powers play with them.

While the sovereign states around them are gradually sinking into a new barbarism, Kurds are the only glimmer of hope. And it’s not only about Kurds that this struggle is fought, it’s about ourselves, it’s about what kind of global new order is emerging.

If Kurds will be abandoned, it will be a new order in which there will be no place for the most precious part of the European legacy of emancipation. If Europe turns its eyes away from the Kurds, it will betray itself. The Europe which betrays Kurds will be the true Europastan!

Neuralink THIS!

 

Slavoj Žižek, "Elon Musk’s desire to control our minds is dehumanizing and not what is needed in a socially distanced world" 

Neuralink, which would see humans receive brain implants readable by a computer, is Elon Musk’s latest big idea. But digital control of our thinking would be a step in the wrong direction.

At the end of August, Elon Musk presented the first living proof of the success of his Neuralink project at a press conference in Los Angeles. On display was what he referred to as “a healthy and happy pig” with an implant which made its brain processes readable to a computer. I’d be curious to hear how he knew the pig was happy…

Anyway, what we were then told was a familiar story. Musk emphasized the health benefits of Neuralink (silently passing over its potential for an unheard-of control over our inner lives), and announced that he is now looking for human volunteers to try it out.

Using pigs first, then men, is an ominous parallel with electroshock therapy, which was invented by Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti in 1938. After Cerletti saw electric shocks imposed on pigs before slaughter, making them more docile in their final moments, he was inspired to try the same treatment on humans.

Maybe this is a low blow against Musk, as extremes are to be avoided when considering Neuralink. We should neither celebrate it as an invention that opens up the path towards singularity (a divine collective self-awareness), nor fear it as a danger that we will lose our individual autonomy and become cogs in a digital machine.  

Musk himself is falling into an ideological dream, as seen in the headline and subhead of a recent report in The Independent: “Elon Musk predicts human language will be obsolete in as little as five years: ‘We could still do it for sentimental reasons.’ Neuralink chief says firm planning to connect device to human brain within 12 months ...” 

Even if we ignore the technical feasibility of this dream, let’s just think about what the reality of our minds directly sharing experiences – outside the realm of language – would mean for the process of, for example, erotic seduction.

Imagine a seduction scene between two subjects whose brains are wired so that the other’s train of thought is accessible. If my prospective partner can directly experience my intention, what remains of the intricacies of seduction games? Will the other person not react with something like: “OK, I know you desperately want to f**k me, so why are you asking me all those stupid things about the movies I enjoy and what I would like to have for dinner? Can’t you feel that I would never have sex with you?” All would be over in a second.

More fundamentally, the distance between our inner life, the line of our thoughts, and external reality is the basis of the perception of ourselves as free. We are free in our thoughts precisely in so far as they are at a distance from reality, so that we can play with them, conduct thought experiments, and engage in dreaming, with no direct consequences to reality. No one can control us there.

Once our inner life is directly linked to reality, so that our thoughts have direct consequences in reality – or can be directly regulated by a machine that is part of reality, and are in this sense no longer ‘ours’ – we effectively enter a post-human state.

Neuralink should thus make us raise basic questions: not just “Will we still be human if immersed in a wired brain?” but also “What do we understand by ‘human’ when we raise such questions?” 

I’ve dealt with these questions, including the new, unheard modes of social control opened up by Neuralink, in my book ‘Hegel in a Wired Brain’. We should never forget that if we can directly regulate processes in reality with my thoughts – for example, I just think that my coffee machine should prepare a latte macchiato, and it happens – the causal link works also in the opposite direction. Those who control the digital machine which ‘reads my mind’ can also control my mind and implant thoughts into it.  

What is important for us today, in the midst of the Covid epidemic, is to see that social distancing – or rather, bodily distancing – supplements the vision of Neuralink. How?

Physical distancing as a defence against the threat of contagion led to intensified social connectivity, not only within quarantined families but also with others (mostly through digital media). But there were also outbursts of physical closeness, such as raves and partying, which reacted to both. Rave represents not just bodily closeness, but also less social control and thus more distance to society at large.

What happened with the epidemic was not a simple shift from communal life to distancing, but a more complex shift from one constellation of closeness and distancing to another one.

The fragile balance that existed pre-epidemic between communal life and the private sphere is replaced by a new constellation in which the diminishing of the space of actual/bodily social interaction – due to quarantines, etc – doesn’t lead to more privacy, but gives birth to new norms of social dependency and control. Don’t forget that even drones were used to control us in quarantine.

And so, the prospect of Neuralink ideally fits the vision of a new society in which we will be bodily isolated, living in protective bubbles, and simultaneously sharing the same mental space. In our psychic lives, we will be closer to each other than ever before, immersed into the same space.

What we need now is not only more physical proximity to others, but also more psychic distance from others.