by Heinz Bude
The ubiquitous mood of self-motivation, selfmonitoring and self-realization essentially has only two possible releases: acceleration or contemplation, self-optimization or self-absorption, intensification or escape.
The mythical place of acceleration is Silicon Valley. It is detached from the rest of the country, which appears to be undergoing an inexorable process of decline: on the one hand, there is the world of the privileged, with organic supermarkets, cooperative book shops and schools for creative learning; on the other hand, the world of the underprivileged, people who subsist on bad food, cheap education and gruelling multi-jobs.2 In Silicon Valley, work is underway to create a society of global digital platforms that provide not just everything that can be transformed into information, but also everything that can be extracted from information. Ethnologists who have studied the world’s most powerful valley3 tell of a tribal territory where all that matters are personal recommendations, permanent networking and visible presence. It is here that electronic payment systems get invented for immigrants without bank accounts, data glasses that allow you to recognize other people’s emotions, or apps for dating people in your area on the basis of just a photo. Only in the community of the tribe can this kind of thing be developed. Tribal elder Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, explains: ‘The biggest risk with start-ups is inventing something that already exists or not thinking it down to the final detail. You can only combat this risk with openness during the development stage. Whoever makes a secret out of their project has lost.’4
The idea is to design a world where the permanently self-controlled self is wrapped in a perfect info-sphere.5 Individuals can update themselves about their own consumer preferences, movement profiles and patterns of affinity in order to anticipate what they would have done anyway. For the providers of such a future, of course, this offers huge opportunities. Giving consumers what they want is no longer enough; now you need to know what they will want when they get to middle age or when they reach the peak of their talents. This goes not just for the private economy of commodities but also for public services and state welfare departments. In the age of global data-trading, market, state and civil society merge.
However, the accelerators of Silicon Valley go further still. The digital fusion of biotechnology, pharmaceutics, robotics and nanotechnology raises the possibility of an irrevocable transformation of the species. Ray Kurzweil, founder of the Singularity University in Silicon Valley, which is financed by Google, genuinely wants to develop a machine for everything that has been thought in the past and that will be thought in the future. This will complete the digital evolutionary process of Google.6 First comes navigational optimization through the search engine, memory supplementation through management software for emails and pictures, and reality enhancement through imaginative glasses and lenses. The next phase is artificial intelligence and the selfeducating machine and brain amelioration through the implantation of digital amplifiers. Finally, to crown it all, a cloud will emerge that will store all methods of human knowledge and be equivalent to total consciousness and pure mind. All we have to do is sever the associative mechanism of the mind from the neurones and transfer them to transistors.
It is no longer the knee or the thumb that is the most human part of the human being but the concealed, mysterious brain. This brain-centredness reveals just how radical the extreme accelerators are.7 By perfecting the closed circuit of control in which the self confines itself, they are trying to escape it. The way out of the system is the way through it.8 As Brecht said, one should start not from the good old things but the bad new ones. The result, however, is a mood of absolute intellectualization that combines enthusiasm for the new with relaxation towards the absolute. Surpassing the world becomes the condition for transforming it. What is left is the mundane, physical and mortal part of the self, the zero of existence that is the beginning of everything.
The other form of release is to retreat into an otherworldly place where one can avoid accelerated self-control. It feels as though one has passed the threshold from ordinary, agitated existence into extraordinary, peaceful existence. The counterpart of Silicon Valley would be something like the cloistral practices of deceleration offering silence, transcendence and simplicity. The society of control can only be escaped by abandoning self-control and allowing oneself to be controlled from afar. This transcendental referent usually has a religious connotation, but one that appears neither authoritarian nor conventional.
The various methods of deceleration usually emphasize exercises and rituals over arguments and beliefs. Like with the weekly yoga class, you can participate freely without bothering with the theories of some guru or other. Far from being suspended, the mundane, physical, finite part of the self becomes the point at which deceleration techniques begin.
Just as in Silicon Valley, deceleration involves initiation into an exclusive community. Smartphones are left outside. The community isn’t tied to a particular place but can form everywhere and anywhere, so long as you stick to the prescribed rituals. Meditation offers a break from the digital everyday and allows you to concentrate fully on the here and now. Be silent, feel the others and resonate with the universe.
Yet this inner composure usually means absolute self-closure. You block out the world with all its tensions and are alone with yourself. Just as the machines of communication, contact and control cannot reach you, nor can anything else. Withdrawal from the self often accompanies indifference to others. The self can only rescue itself from its own self-control by rejecting the world. Real experience, the goal, is not the mental reduction of the multiplicity of things but the existential reduction of desires and consciousness as such. The goal is to find inner peace through the mystical completion of the ego.9 Such moods idealize the phlegmatic states of contentedness, calm, composure and reflection, rather than the choleric, sanguine and melancholy states.10
But what about the generations of the future, those who don’t get carried away by fantasies of total power or seek escape in egocentric mysticism? They are people who, timidly, reservedly and shyly,11 see a different beginning. They want to leave behind an era of agitation and indifference. They are conservative in a fundamental sense, in that they see no sense in a disintegrating world where all that matters is security for yourself and your kin. It is a world that has given up on producing futures offering liveable lives to people beyond one’s narrow circle.
Of course, they also don’t want to cling to things that serve only to fend off a menacing future. Unnecessary battles waste energy and tend to stem from a troubled psyche incapable of satisfaction. Their progressivism is therefore based on insight and not desire.
The future generation dissociates itself from previous generations, which it believes have got caught up in ironic self-delusions that merely amplify a sense of sad weariness. For all their pretences, these want nothing better than to lie down and sleep. Though capable of cruel lucidity, previous generations all too often subscribe to weak thoughts that, confronted with irrefutable reality, fail to bear scrutiny. The future generation distances itself from a mood of dejection and apathy that condemns all visions as ideologies and predicts defeat before anything has even begun. They much prefer the generation before, the ‘angry old men’ who with slogans like indignez-vous! (Stéphane Hessel) or ‘Reinvent the future’ (Michel Serres) have also dropped their inhibitions. The future generations are not the bleating lambs of a barbaric capitalism, but nor are they the obnoxious puppets of the digital era.
With judicious scepticism and watchful reserve, the future generation seeks new openings in a world of diminishing space and elapsing time. There is no place on the planet left untouched where one might build a new world. In the Anthropocene, humans alter nature; in the ‘second machine age’, machines alter humans; and in the ‘info-sphere’, the mind alters the body. The future has always already begun, which is why hoping for a new age is no longer possible. In every generation, something disappears and something appears; eve
n the difference between past and future time becomes meaningless. The future generation is prudent and takes on responsibility, but it doesn’t believe in moralizations like ‘intergenerational justice’ or ‘sustainability’, which contain far too much teleological piety. Blaming the wasteful lifestyles of older generations for diminishing younger generations’ chances in life is all too obviously an existential evasion. As if humankind could change what happened all over the world long ago.
The future generation accepts the world, limited as it is, as the sphere of its beliefs, feelings and actions. Hence the pragmatic ethos of experiment that is motivating top graduates of elite US universities to venture into unknown territory rather than go to Silicon Valley. They want to dare to start anew, to feel resonance with others, to intentionally scale down. Their motto is a full life with a minimum of principles. Grand intentions that fail to bring self-efficacy are held in contempt just as much as settling for a false life and giving up on the idea of authenticity. Ethical know-how12 has something to do with communal immersion, personal courage and social engagement. No one wants to belong to a ‘bunch of nobodies’13 who go through life behaving like stage directors, actors and spectators but who have no sense of being partners or participants. Openness to the world without self-negation: that is the mood of the future.
Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze (1992), ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October 59 (Winter): 3–7.
2. According to the former intellectual companion of Ronald Reagan, Charles Murray (2012), in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, New York.
3. Christoph Keese (2015), Silicon Valley: Was aus dem mächtigsten Tal der Welt auf uns zukommt, 5th edn, Munich. (Original in German, trans. S. G.)
4. Keese, Silicon Valley, p. 52. (trans. S. G.)
5. Luciano Floridi (2014), The 4th Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality, Oxford.
6. Ray Kurzweil (2005), The Singularity is Near, New York
7. Ludwig Binswanger (1956), Drei Formen missglückten Daseins. Verstiegenheit, Verschrobenheit, Manieriertheit, Tübingen.
8. Steven Shaviro (n.d.), No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism, Minneapolis.
9. Ernst Tugendhat (2003), Egozentrizität und Mystik. Eine anthropologische Studie, Munich.
10. Fuchs, ‘Zur Phänomenologie der Stimmungen’, p. 28.
11. For Heidegger, the fundamental historical moods of gradual awakening. See Martin Heidegger (1989), Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe vol. 65, Frankfurt am Main, p. 393ff.
12. Francisco J. Varela (1999), Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom and Cognition, Stanford.
13. Mark Greif (2004), ‘A Bunch of Nobodies’, N+1, 1.
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