Digital Control

Slavoj Žižek, "As digitalization spreads, the subject that is supposed to know is lost" (Google tranlated from Turkish)

The ultimate goal of digital control is to free us from the burden of desire (the burden of deciding what to desire).

Thanks to the digital machine that desires on our behalf, we breathe a sigh of relief and gain a strange freedom: Since we are no longer desiring beings, we are no longer under the siege of machines that want to access the secret of our desire, because our very ability to desire is under regulation.

The paradox/absurdity is that such direct regulation of our internal experiences undermines the transference functions that operate in social interactions:

The other, the subject who is supposed to know, is the subject who is supposed to know exactly what I desire (which is why, as the analytic process ends, the analysand will step outside the transference to find out what he desires). To explain this function, Lacan refers to the role a good waiter plays in the restaurant: When we are confused by many things on the menu, our basic request from the waiter we consult is this: “Can you please tell me what I want?”

As digitalization spreads, the subject that is supposed to know is lost: I no longer need the Other as the subject of transference, I think that I am making the choice myself, because I am being manipulated at a deeper level, the framework of choices presented to me is already fraudulent.

In this case, the fundamental basis of our social bond (being able to establish a transfer with a subject that is assumed to know or believe) is threatened. We are expected to believe (or pretend to believe) the people we come into contact with in the transference, even though we know that they do not exist. This problem cannot be solved by turning to naive games; In other words, we cannot solve this problem by leaving behind what we know and preserving our beliefs to be regained; What we already know has never threatened what we believe.

Attributing our knowledge to the person in question , that is, assuming that 'he knows that he does not exist', creates problems. A recent cartoon in a Slovenian newspaper expresses this clearly: A Santa Claus who is losing his mind goes to a psychiatrist and hears from him: “You need to be more self-confident, you need to believe in yourself!” Wouldn't Jesus, who lost his belief in his own divinity while dying on the cross ("Father, why have you forsaken me?"), experienced something similar? Don't we, as a community of believers, play the same role as the psychiatrist in the cartoon, and isn't our message to Jesus: "Do not despair, we will restore your self-confidence, through our community you will come back to life!"

In these lines, we do not preach a return to faith, we recommend a belief based on despair: Yes, we are done, there is no clear way out, but let's not forget that the global capitalist system is even more done, it is approaching its own catastrophic end. The despair that appears when we feel at the mercy of the ever-victory global capitalist machine does not belong to us; Despair is at the very heart of that machine: It informs us that the current global system machinery offers us no hope. We need to start thinking in terms of radical changes.

From the book Freedom: An Incurable Disease

Turkish: Işık Barış Fidaner

See “Containing fragments of nothingness rooted in the lost land” Slavoj Žižek