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Title: Technology Author: Alfredo M. Bonanno Date: 2017 Language: en Topics: technology Source: Negazine — 1 — 2017. https://archive.elephanteditions.net/library/negazine-en-1
When reading the following pages it would be well to put everything that
we already know about technology aside. Indeed, what knowledge or
hypothesis passed off as certainty makes up the scientific aspect of
technology? Not much.
If we take a look inside the drawer of established scientific research
from which something concrete did emerge, we see a series of utilities.
That is, things done for a purpose, even negative, as in the case of
military techniques. This purpose is nearly always twofold: to replace
something pre-existent, thus achieving a surplus of use and returns, and
to open up new horizons of usability. Specialized workers
euphemistically referred to as scientists, usually nitwitted and in the
payroll of various patrons, do not have ideas, only capability, and
these concepts need to be clarified.
Ideas allow us to understand what lies before us and how this could
evolve, in other words they enable us to see in order to foresee.
Capability enables us to use a device, read a program or even build one
(silly binary sequences), put an object in the appropriate box then turn
over and fall asleep in peace.
Ideas keep us in constant turmoil, they don’t let us rest, they demand
the best of us and when we give everything they push us still further,
beyond the imaginable, beyond the down-to-earth submission that
domesticates both scientists and know-all idiots, but not someone with
an idea in their head and their heart. A skilled worker who has
completed their research and been applauded by the illustrious public
for their discovery, so to speak, feels accomplished. The knowledgeable
idiot who has produced the ultimate annotation of a literary opus ends
their days in the ivory tower of a university auditorium. Neither of
these prototypes is capable of perceiving the powerful derealizing
action that is striking both them and their cohorts through technology.
Why?
Because the world is made of things that need to be put in their place,
things that lie limply in the hands and projects of these idiots or
science workers, are manipulated, built and rebuilt every day so that
everything proceeds as it should. Any hiccup must be stifled, any
contradiction overcome, but none of this levelling and overtaking must
go beyond pre-established roles, even if right now they seem like the
impervious heights of operational intelligence. And in fact they are,
but all within the ambit of quantitative doing, no quality glimmers on
the horizon where the continuous repetition of the accumulation of facts
marks the epitome of progress. This collective generalized flattening
does not exclude the most productive minds on the planet, those normally
considered to be the beacons of intelligence who attract the interest of
some of the privileged seeking to increase their wealth.
Far away from this low-life of learned fools and bleating workers there
still exists a world of personal commitment, action, attack on the
supporting structures seeking to possibly go beyond and reach a quality
that can transform life and, along with life, reality right there in
front of us. Of course, this is obviously a small thing (a pinprick
perhaps?), and so what? For us it is never a pinprick but something that
transforms our whole existence as it rises to attack a wretched project
that is taking everything we are, our very reality, away from us.
Because technology’s project is to accomplish a totalizing task, the
derealization of the world.
What do these words mean?
I shall try to explain them as best I can.
The whole of the techniques currently in operation makes up what we call
the economy. This has been incorporated into technology. Yet technology
is something different, radically different from the sum of the
individual techniques. The latter are continually reproducing the world
in which we live, technology makes it unreal, takes away its substance,
deprives it of its reality. At this point a little patience is required
from the reader to avoid giving up and throwing these poor pages away in
disgust.
Let’s not forget that technology’s aim is to flatten and uniformize
reality. So far this goal has only been achieved in small part, but the
attempts of the various techniques to fight for the highest profit for
individual producers cannot go on indefinitely. It is impossible to
force everybody to use the same model of car, even if it is the one best
suited for the current traffic conditions, or to wear the same suit. So
the problem must be bypassed. This is derealization. Objects are freely
produced and imposed on consumers through the market in all the ways
that we know, but their meaning, their significance, has been weakened,
that is, they have been deprived of their substance. This process is not
yet wholly visible, it exists in certain sectors more than in others,
but it is precisely by promoting this generalized cultural flattening
that technology is achieving its goals. We buy cars that are clearly not
suitable for the traffic in the big cities and use them well below their
potential because the remainder, their imposing construction, is simply
a sign of our social level, the so-called status symbol on which so many
words have been wasted. Fashion shows present designs that no one could
ever wear, so we happily downgrade these cultural aspirations to our own
level. A thousand signals (see cinema, television, literature) give us
indications of all the erotic impulses that we could experience, then we
content ourselves with more modest levels of fulfilment better suited to
our own sexuality, which is usually not all that extraordinary. As we
point out in another article, our time is horrendously sectorialized,
giving us the illusion of living, breathing and enjoying life but we are
actually asleep most of the time. Taken to the extreme, this is sounding
the death knell for any other possible perspective.
As we can see, technology has succeeded in building an extremely
advanced model of derealization in some areas, less so in others, but
the project has a greater, all-encompassing, purpose, to derealize the
human being.
Cultural flattening is not the main aim of the technological
undertaking, this is more an instrument than an aim. Beyond that, a
horizon of uniformizing is unfolding in the absence of reality. In the
face of this rampant fictitiousness, an effective response could be to
reaffirm harsh reality. I am what I am capable of doing, so I try to
extend this and become the homo faber of my destiny. I can change it,
differentiate it from that of others, live a meaningful life within the
very production set-up that is trying to suffocate me. Of course this is
just chatter, or gibberish. By merely doing I cannot achieve anything
beyond what is being built around me. Unrealized, I build
non-realizations and become ever more inclined to take irreality for
reality, so can adapt to my zombie life. I can accumulate all the
knowledge I like by merely doing, but I will never be able to transform
any of it into a tool of liberation or, without going too far, a means
of attack. This is the mistake made by many who see knowledge as an
aristocratic tool used by the powerful to maintain their privilege.
There is a lot of truth in this but something is lacking. Knowledge
secures dominance, but dominion idiotizes itself, leaving differentiated
processes in circulation that could endanger it at any moment. A
committee of learned idiots and skilled workers would never be able to
control the world, whereas the technological process of derealization
could. This is what we need to understand. We must seize the instruments
to attack while we are still in time, that is, before we are completely
derealized by technology, and these instruments are also cultural.
One of the ways that technology is derealizing us is through offering us
incomplete patterns of reasoning that are meaningless in themselves, so
quite unreal, but which we are already capable of taking as real. A
series of these is being formed by extracting certain models of protest
from the recent past, opportunely emptying them of content and rendering
them unreal. For example, the struggle against technology by refusing to
use the gadgets that influence our daily lives (mobile phones,
computers, etc.), shutting oneself away in some hole in the country or
in the mountains, using ridiculous linguistic obstructions to indicate a
rejection of past behavioural patterns (for example the refusal of the
masculine form to include the feminine, etc.), the vegetarian ideology,
the vegan one, and so many other little traps opportunely put into
effect by technology.
The transition from the symbol to the real thing and vice versa often
happens rapidly for no apparent reason. We listen to mangled music
reduced to symbols that we absorb passively. Every now and then we
reemerge due to a surviving trace of culture and become aware of what is
happening to our ears. But this step cannot be taken without mediation
and support. Often alongside the symbol something comes into play, that
distorts the substitutive meaning. The syncretic wealth becomes the
intermediary between the symbol as going beyond and the unrealized
presence of the thing beckoning us from under our daydream. So we wake
up with something in our hands and become aware not only of our idiocy
but of the forces that made us so profoundly idiotic. This thing finds
us now lost in the forest of symbols but, sometimes, it is so strong as
to show us a path amidst thousands and thousands of them, a path that
can lead us out to the point of clashing with reality. But this reality
isn’t that hard thing full of meanings that can be used to satisfy
desires and needs, it is still a hallucination. So we are at a
crossroads. We can charge head down against all that resonates in
ignorance and false immanence, and for this we need a designation, a
solid foothold that we must find there in the path that we opened up in
the forest with so much effort. Or we can turn the other way and go back
to sleep. After all it might just have been a bad dream, a warped sense
of life, when we have been dead for some time and stink like corpses
without realizing it.
But the designation has struck us, in some way. Resist as we might,
having sensed that behind the unreal hides another connotation unknown
to us, that behind the turning of the path in the forest there is a
breath of life that could wake up the sleeping “beauty” and recall many
things that we have long forgotten or have never known. We sense that
behind this designation lies the black void of action, the dream that
awakens, accusing us of sloth and cowardice, of the urgent need to give
our lives a push, look around, and above all fight the syncretism that
connects the symbol with the thing symbolized, irreality with reality,
the irrealizing mechanism that sang us the lullaby right to the point of
a possible awakening.
And here we must put our life on the line.
Alfredo M. Bonanno
March 2017