“A third modernity that solves our problems at the cost of our human future is a cruel perversion of the capitalism and digital capabilities that are currently in control. A market economy…left to itself contains within it…powerful forces of divergence, potentially threatening to our democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based. That is precisely the storm we will reap from the winds sown by surveillance capitalism, a mode…that is undoubtedly contributing to the attenuation of commitment to the democratic future…. Surveillance capitalism appeared on the scene when democracy was already on the ropes, and was sheltered and nurtured…by claims of freedom.”
Shoshana Zuboff
Sociologist and professor emeritus at Harvard Business School
Art since modernity has been in an eternal crisis, characterized by its changes and lack of understanding. Disorder, understood in our society as art, is observed in museums full of useless pieces and in libraries full of books with nothing to contribute, empty of content. The subjectivity of today’s art creates alternative paths to the real one, paths towards destruction, towards failure. The only thing that can triumph is the objective, the thought must adapt to the laws of nature found and remembered by
nature found and remembered by remote thought. The effect on the mind of the individual and society, as we can see, is null. It is a desert where we hardly find the occasional oasis.
In its main eagerness, contemporary art seeks the conquest of power. We see it in Greek art in its beginnings, it distorts Egyptian art by adding philosophical elements of its own character, up to the present day. Contemporary art generates adverse effects for those who consume it, that commodified art is empty or is simply entertainment.
On the other hand, academic art seeks to break barriers, to open new horizons on data, information or fashions, obtaining results that only serve itself, with very little contribution to the person. True art is not important in itself, as contemporary art is understood, but its relevance lies in the effect provoked in those who perceive it in its path of evolution. It is a dispensable art.
The work of art that does not create better human beings is facilitating the degradation of those to whom it is addressed. We see around us how everything that does not evolve deteriorates, perverts, breaks. And in the worst case, it corrupts. Professor Zuboff explains it clearly in her research on the consequences of the aimless society in which we are immersed:
“Surveillance capitalism has usurped our rights in areas such as the individual and the social to provide answers to Who Decides, Who Knows, Who Decides Who Decides Who Decides. It is a scandalous abuse of digital capabilities and of the promise from the beginning that argued for a democratization
of knowledge and a satisfaction of the need for a more efficient life. The motive may be digital, but the future must be more human. We are still in a position to stop these onslaughts by redirecting and orienting all our present actions towards other objectives,” says Professor Zuboff.
“Among the many insults to democracy and its institutions, I have counted the following:
1.The unauthorized expropriation of human experience.
- The hijacking of the division of social learning.
3.The structural independence with respect to individuals
4.The stealthy imposition of the collective hive
The rise of instrumental power and of the radical indifference on which its extractive logic is based.
The construction, ownership and management of those means of behavioral modification that make up the Big Other** 7.
7.The abolition of the elementary right to future time and of the elementary right of asylum and refuge.
8.The degradation of the self-determined individual as the fundamental fulcrum of democratic life.
9.The emphasis on psychic numbness as a response to its illegitimate Quid pro quo.
Now Surveillance Capitalism claims its right to a collectivist project that claims for itself the totality of society. Its anti-democratic collectivist ambitions reveal it as a son who does not hesitate to devour his parents.” Shoshana Zuboff comments. Jean-Jacques Rousseau enunciates this idea when he speaks of the social contract. The rights of men in society cannot be bequeathed, nor transferred, nor
bequeathed, nor transferred, nor annihilated: they are only inheritable; and it is not in the power of any generation to cut off and definitively interrupt that descent. If the present generation, or any other, is willing to be a slave, that does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free: injustices cannot have legal descent.
Woe to us! If we hand over a human future to powerful companies and a dishonest capitalism that disregards the commitment to meet our needs or serve our true interests.
The writer Hannah Arendt reminds us: “The natural human reaction to such conditions is anger and indignation because they are conditions contrary to the dignity of man. If I describe these conditions without allowing my indignation to interfere, I will have abstracted that particular phenomenon from its context in human society and thereby stripped it of part of its nature, deprived it of one of its most important inherent qualities.” Efficiency without autonomy is not truly efficient, conformity induced by dependence is no social contract, a beehive without an exit can never be a home, experience without a shelter is merely a shadow, a life that forces us to hide is not life, that the tactile that is not accompanied by feeling reveals no truth to us, and that freeing ourselves from uncertainty is not freedom.
What can we do in the face of the changes presented before us without any explanation, without plausible justification, without truthful reasoning. The last way out presented is to enter into the approaches of web3, in the blockchain, in its quest for trust, transparency, fairness. Basic and simple to understand, but far from being accepted by a lonely individual threatened by his own fears. Attentive to the screens where he forgets to watch the stars every night.
ABATE BUSSONI
*Surveillance capitalism is a very different system from industrial, commercial or financial capitalism. It works only on the Internet and the workforce are the users, who for free put their private lives at the service of technologies. Their personal data is the commodity, which is exchanged in an opaque manner at the margin of the individual. It refers to how large technology companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM), use human experiences and personal data to predict the behavior of society. They don’t just search our data, they scan our emotions and modify our behavior for their benefit. We think of them as innovative companies that occasionally make mistakes that violate privacy, when the reality is that those mistakes are the innovations.
Privacy is public, if we give it away we destroy society and diminish democracy. Companies like GAFAM, among others, have planted their flags in our lives. And they have said that it is their raw and free material, their private assets to sell as merchandise. Thus surveillance capitalism is born and it is profoundly undemocratic, bordering on totalitarianism. It is time to act, it is time to confront this manipulation. If we do not want to lose our little freedom.
**Surveillance capitalism imposes its will through digital devices, which the author calls the Big Other. Quietly a few companies like Meta (formerly Facebook), Google and Amazon, capture our habitus, practices, desires, feelings and dreams to market them and generate predictions that will be sold to large insurance companies, health, car dealers, political parties, among others; who in turn can shape our behaviors as consumers, social and political subjects.
Thanks to the capacity of the Big Other, the instrumental power aspires to reach a condition of certainty and thus increase its profits.
Page 4-5 magazine 22 Tatiana Kourochkina Biodiversity, nature’s reflection in contemporary art