Authoritarianism and the Cybernetic Episteme, or the Progressive Disappearance of Everything on Earth

Notes

The collapse of reality, however, is not an unintended consequence of advancements in, for instance, artificial intelligence: it was the long-term objective of many technologists, who sought to create machines capable of transforming human consciousness

Platforms are allowed to secretly extract behavioral data from users, whether or not users are aware, transforming the information into targeted ads, destroying privacy, changing human experience into data, altering elections, and reshaping human civilization. This structure can be termed the “cybernetic episteme,” and the new form of control, which goes beyond the previous regime of biopower, can be termed “neuropower.”

waking consciousness that resembles “a mixture of dreaming, dementia, intoxication, and infantilization.”

individualized propaganda has become the order of the day.

The lord was both the manager and master not only of the process of production, but of the entire process of social life.

modernity’s enclosure of experience.

The shutter is the principle of imperialism by which campaigns of plunder have left people both worldless and objectless. For Azoulay, the logic of the shutter was invented centuries before photography gave it a technological apparatus1

dislocation is the essence of (imperial) modernity. The VR museum visitor is at the center of a world, but they are not really there

Disembodiment and dislocation are also fundamental epistemological premises of transhumanist Silicon Valley ideology.

Another way to see the cybernetic episteme is as the reconceptualization of social worlds into information-processing systems.

In Comment ça va?, mass media represents an illness that has killed communication and language.

For Godard, the consequence of the becoming-information of communication and language is the loss of ambiguity in communication.

suggests that digital media have destroyed face-to-face communication. He asks: What kind of self could emerge in a time when objects and bodies are disfigurable and refigurable through virtual manipulation?

For Godard, this means that the “face-to-face” encounter—a basic form of human relation that is the foundation of ethics—is no longer possible.

we need to flee from the invasion of images, to distinguish between image and reality, and to affirm the opacity of the world and the ambiguity of language.

Footnotes:

1

Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London ; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2019).