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+---
+title: "Waiting for a breakthrough"
+author: "Edwin Bendyk"
+order: 3
+---
+
+{% block lead %}
+The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed – says William Gibson,
+the co-creator of cyberpunk and author of the cult _Neuromancer_.
+{% endblock %}
+
+
+
+
+{% block text %}
+
+The concept of cyberspace had appeared for the first
+time in a book by William Gibson, long before the
+Internet became popular, so let’s trust Gibson’s intuition and go in search for the future.
+
+The most radical scenario for a future can be found
+very easily, look for a signpost with the inscription
+“Singularity” pointing towards Silicon Valley. There arise not only technologies of tomorrow there, California
+headquarters of an online business is a utopia, a place
+beyond time and space, where the Brave New World is
+forged. It is expected to come somewhere in the middle of this century, after reaching the “Singularity” -
+an evolutionary jump, induced by merging technology
+with biology. The true Artificial Intelligence will become
+a fact, and the man will become immortal.
+
+True, culture has been thriving on such tales for centuries. This time, however the zeal of “singularists”
+goes beyond harmless, Faustian fantasies – there are
+powerful people behind them, the heads of Web corporations disposing of billions of dollars. They invest
+not only in the development of services for the digital
+people, but they also want to approach the moment
+of Immortality. If they succeed, as Zygmunt Bauman
+pointed out in one of his latest books, culture is over.
+Due to the cessation of its most important function -
+dealing with the irreversible terminality of human life.
+
+This seemingly obvious track pointing to the Silicon
+Valley as a place where you should look for the future,
+therefore, leads to a dead end. The Californian utopia
+is extremely trivial, and it culminates in the death of
+culture. Whether it will happen, we do not know. We
+cannot , however, exclude the possibility that in the
+end Doctor Faustus is successful, but then there will
+be nothing to discuss any longer. The most interesting
+today seems to capture the moment at which culture
+began to regard itself (its death or metamorphosis) as
+the food for reflection and performances. This moment
+came during the Paraolympics in London in 2012, which
+were designed in the truly Nietzschean style. Ads preparing the audience to welcome the disabled athletes
+shouted: “Meet the Superhumans!”. On billboards the
+running Blade Runner, Oscar Pistorius, urged : “Look at
+the results , not on your feet.” The event was opened
+by Stephen Hawking, a brilliant astrophysicist, one of
+the greatest minds of modern times. A special mind,
+too, because located in a virtually lifeless body. It can
+work and communicate with the world only through
+digital technologies. Thanks to them the scholar, half
+a century ago “sentenced” to death, today is a superman par excellence.
+
+These are all show elements, however, staged by the
+organizers of the Games. But what happened during
+the end of the Paralympic Games, when on the streets
+of London over a million people applauded the athletes,
+was not part of the script. Apparently, people understood the message accompanying the event and came
+out to pay tribute to the heroes who, from the status
+of “persons with disabilities” changed into supermen.
+
+London 2012 confirmed what many seem not to notice: that we have already become a society of cyborgs,
+created by people with their complex electronic gadgets
+and identities distributed in the cyberweb. And that the
+society has created for itself a symbolic representation
+making a common expression of emotions and building
+of collectively understood meanings possible, in other
+words – it has created its own culture.
+
+A manifestation of this new culture could be seen not
+only in London, the hyper-modern centre of the world,
+but also on its periphery, during Euromaidan in Kiev on
+the turn of 2013 and 2014. The crowd gathering on the
+square was not convened by some Central Committee
+or party - the first call to action appeared on Facebook.
+In response, thousands of people, or rather “ontological
+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
+was transformed into a hybrid space of action played
+out both in the real world and the digital dimension.
+Participants, like Internet data packets, commuted in
+the network, turning their virtual presence to the real
+presence, when the situation demanded it.
+
+A dramatic illustration of the new identity and its culture was the message sent by Twitter, by a nurse Olesya
+Żukowska. Shot by a sniper she wrote: “I’m dying”.
+Fortunately, doctors resuscitated her, but a few days
+that passed on to her next message on Twitter, the global Internet crowd spent looking for information about
+the fate of the heroic woman.
+
+Stephen Hawking surrounded by machines to read his
+thoughts, Oscar Pistorius and his prosthetics, Olesya
+Żukowska with her smartphone - these are new forms
+of subjectivity that we are still awkwardly trying to define, using such concepts as cyborgization, networked
+individualism, ontological collective. Regardless of the
+name, this subjectivity can express itself in the only
+way known to man - through culture.
+
+In Kiev the Maidan culture had been to the end the
+strongest arms of the revolutionaries. And it was made
+of available symbols and codes: helmets and shields
+were covered with icons of the national heroes of literature - Taras Shevchenko, Lesya Ukrainian, Ivan Franko.
+At the same time in the social media there appeared
+references to Star Wars, Harry Potter or Lord of the
+Rings, as universal texts expressing the ideas of good
+and evil. Codes of cosmopolitan pop culture mingled
+with national and historical codes. In constant communication process the Web revolutionaries gathered in
+the Maidan created a new political community, a new
+collective identity.
+
+New identification demands a new political and institutional expression, new structuring. Here, however,
+there is a problem – in the game there are still old institutions that based their legitimacy on factors that
+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
+the ability to control limited physical resources and
+the use of associated violence. The need to control
+caused by limited at that time technical capabilities of
+radio frequency spectrum shaped the electronic media. The economics of printing determined to a large
+extent not only the structure of the publishing market,
+but also other print-related forms of culture, such as
+encyclopedias or newspapers. Similarly one can analyze the music and film market. This structure legitimized legal solutions, their task being to facilitate the
+production of cultural goods and the control of their
+circulation in the capitalist society. The key legal and
+institutional solution was the system of copyright law.
+Its emergence and development can be interpreted as a
+system of translation and transmission of the aesthetic
+value to the economic value, the effectiveness of this
+being determined by the state.
+
+Today, in the era of digital technology and the increasing importance of an economy based on intangible
+assets, when the final costs of production and distribution of more and more goods and services decrease
+to zero, the above legitimacy is eroded. Institutions that
+refer to it, however, do not intend to abdicate, but on
+the contrary, they are rather trying to master and capture the energy of the new revolutionary subjectivity
+or consolidate against it the incumbent establishment.
+It is a short term strategy and can not be successful,
+because the old forms do not conform to the culture
+of networked individualism. Its final shape we are not
+able to predict, although the absolute horizon defines
+the vision already described - Singularity, beyond which
+there is no culture. What is going to happen before this
+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
+identify the trends and factors that will determine the
+development of culture in the coming decades. The
+result are scenarios, none of which has to wait for its
+realization - they are not predictions, but the options
+for development of reality, depending on the factors
+determining the future. What will decide are individual
+choices of each of us, the networked individualists. It
+is therefore important to examine what forces determine our autonomy in the postmodernity. The key is
+to understand the Web, the environment in which and
+through which the networked individualists participate
+in social, political and cultural life.
+
+{% endblock %}