2 title: "Waiting for a breakthrough"
8 The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed – says William Gibson,
9 the co-creator of cyberpunk and author of the cult _Neuromancer_.
17 The concept of cyberspace had appeared for the first
18 time in a book by William Gibson, long before the
19 Internet became popular, so let’s trust Gibson’s intuition and go in search for the future.
21 The most radical scenario for a future can be found
22 very easily, look for a signpost with the inscription
23 “Singularity” pointing towards Silicon Valley. There arise not only technologies of tomorrow there, California
24 headquarters of an online business is a utopia, a place
25 beyond time and space, where the Brave New World is
26 forged. It is expected to come somewhere in the middle of this century, after reaching the “Singularity” -
27 an evolutionary jump, induced by merging technology
28 with biology. The true Artificial Intelligence will become
29 a fact, and the man will become immortal.
31 True, culture has been thriving on such tales for centuries. This time, however the zeal of “singularists”
32 goes beyond harmless, Faustian fantasies – there are
33 powerful people behind them, the heads of Web corporations disposing of billions of dollars. They invest
34 not only in the development of services for the digital
35 people, but they also want to approach the moment
36 of Immortality. If they succeed, as Zygmunt Bauman
37 pointed out in one of his latest books, culture is over.
38 Due to the cessation of its most important function -
39 dealing with the irreversible terminality of human life.
41 This seemingly obvious track pointing to the Silicon
42 Valley as a place where you should look for the future,
43 therefore, leads to a dead end. The Californian utopia
44 is extremely trivial, and it culminates in the death of
45 culture. Whether it will happen, we do not know. We
46 cannot , however, exclude the possibility that in the
47 end Doctor Faustus is successful, but then there will
48 be nothing to discuss any longer. The most interesting
49 today seems to capture the moment at which culture
50 began to regard itself (its death or metamorphosis) as
51 the food for reflection and performances. This moment
52 came during the Paraolympics in London in 2012, which
53 were designed in the truly Nietzschean style. Ads preparing the audience to welcome the disabled athletes
54 shouted: “Meet the Superhumans!”. On billboards the
55 running Blade Runner, Oscar Pistorius, urged : “Look at
56 the results , not on your feet.” The event was opened
57 by Stephen Hawking, a brilliant astrophysicist, one of
58 the greatest minds of modern times. A special mind,
59 too, because located in a virtually lifeless body. It can
60 work and communicate with the world only through
61 digital technologies. Thanks to them the scholar, half
62 a century ago “sentenced” to death, today is a superman par excellence.
64 These are all show elements, however, staged by the
65 organizers of the Games. But what happened during
66 the end of the Paralympic Games, when on the streets
67 of London over a million people applauded the athletes,
68 was not part of the script. Apparently, people understood the message accompanying the event and came
69 out to pay tribute to the heroes who, from the status
70 of “persons with disabilities” changed into supermen.
72 London 2012 confirmed what many seem not to notice: that we have already become a society of cyborgs,
73 created by people with their complex electronic gadgets
74 and identities distributed in the cyberweb. And that the
75 society has created for itself a symbolic representation
76 making a common expression of emotions and building
77 of collectively understood meanings possible, in other
78 words – it has created its own culture.
80 A manifestation of this new culture could be seen not
81 only in London, the hyper-modern centre of the world,
82 but also on its periphery, during Euromaidan in Kiev on
83 the turn of 2013 and 2014. The crowd gathering on the
84 square was not convened by some Central Committee
85 or party - the first call to action appeared on Facebook.
86 In response, thousands of people, or rather “ontological
87 collectives” (people with their smartphones connected to the Web) came. Almost each action was mediated by the Web or at least spied by it. The Maidan
88 was transformed into a hybrid space of action played
89 out both in the real world and the digital dimension.
90 Participants, like Internet data packets, commuted in
91 the network, turning their virtual presence to the real
92 presence, when the situation demanded it.
94 A dramatic illustration of the new identity and its culture was the message sent by Twitter, by a nurse Olesya
95 Żukowska. Shot by a sniper she wrote: “I’m dying”.
96 Fortunately, doctors resuscitated her, but a few days
97 that passed on to her next message on Twitter, the global Internet crowd spent looking for information about
98 the fate of the heroic woman.
100 Stephen Hawking surrounded by machines to read his
101 thoughts, Oscar Pistorius and his prosthetics, Olesya
102 Żukowska with her smartphone - these are new forms
103 of subjectivity that we are still awkwardly trying to define, using such concepts as cyborgization, networked
104 individualism, ontological collective. Regardless of the
105 name, this subjectivity can express itself in the only
106 way known to man - through culture.
108 In Kiev the Maidan culture had been to the end the
109 strongest arms of the revolutionaries. And it was made
110 of available symbols and codes: helmets and shields
111 were covered with icons of the national heroes of literature - Taras Shevchenko, Lesya Ukrainian, Ivan Franko.
112 At the same time in the social media there appeared
113 references to Star Wars, Harry Potter or Lord of the
114 Rings, as universal texts expressing the ideas of good
115 and evil. Codes of cosmopolitan pop culture mingled
116 with national and historical codes. In constant communication process the Web revolutionaries gathered in
117 the Maidan created a new political community, a new
120 New identification demands a new political and institutional expression, new structuring. Here, however,
121 there is a problem – in the game there are still old institutions that based their legitimacy on factors that
122 used to build the status of Modernity players. The influence and power in the field of culture used to depend not on the communication effectiveness, but on
123 the ability to control limited physical resources and
124 the use of associated violence. The need to control
125 caused by limited at that time technical capabilities of
126 radio frequency spectrum shaped the electronic media. The economics of printing determined to a large
127 extent not only the structure of the publishing market,
128 but also other print-related forms of culture, such as
129 encyclopedias or newspapers. Similarly one can analyze the music and film market. This structure legitimized legal solutions, their task being to facilitate the
130 production of cultural goods and the control of their
131 circulation in the capitalist society. The key legal and
132 institutional solution was the system of copyright law.
133 Its emergence and development can be interpreted as a
134 system of translation and transmission of the aesthetic
135 value to the economic value, the effectiveness of this
136 being determined by the state.
138 Today, in the era of digital technology and the increasing importance of an economy based on intangible
139 assets, when the final costs of production and distribution of more and more goods and services decrease
140 to zero, the above legitimacy is eroded. Institutions that
141 refer to it, however, do not intend to abdicate, but on
142 the contrary, they are rather trying to master and capture the energy of the new revolutionary subjectivity
143 or consolidate against it the incumbent establishment.
144 It is a short term strategy and can not be successful,
145 because the old forms do not conform to the culture
146 of networked individualism. Its final shape we are not
147 able to predict, although the absolute horizon defines
148 the vision already described - Singularity, beyond which
149 there is no culture. What is going to happen before this
150 horizon? Responses are looked for by authors of scenarios published in this paper. They made a risky effort to reduce the complexity of the social world and
151 identify the trends and factors that will determine the
152 development of culture in the coming decades. The
153 result are scenarios, none of which has to wait for its
154 realization - they are not predictions, but the options
155 for development of reality, depending on the factors
156 determining the future. What will decide are individual
157 choices of each of us, the networked individualists. It
158 is therefore important to examine what forces determine our autonomy in the postmodernity. The key is
159 to understand the Web, the environment in which and
160 through which the networked individualists participate
161 in social, political and cultural life.
fnp / static.git / blob