Sviatoslav Vyshynsky
The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine H.S. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy
One of the main trends in the development of post-industrial society is the general virtualization and informatization of reality as an empirical fact, its conversion into a permanent flow of images, texts and figures, increasingly alienated not only from physical reality but also from man as a subject of thought and being. . Ancient Gnostic suspicions, supplemented by later dystopian pictures of "double" or "fake" reality, are now gaining a visible embodiment and a completely rational economic and technological justification. The very concept of "augmented" reality not only no longer looks utopian - but is generally perceived as a social and cultural norm, a necessity, an inevitable aspect of modern life. Therefore, it is easy to predict the path of pure virtuality, which so far seems neither quite possible nor quite acceptable - but after the erosion of traditional notions of real and illusory, human and non-human, right and wrong, this process is obvious. will accelerate and meet less and less resistance. The logic of social processes does not provide for stops or reversals other than due to apocalyptic shocks, so each causal chain according to the inexorable laws of history sooner or later reaches the point of exhaustive realization, whose temporal, spatial and value localization often exceeds the most daring expectations. . Except for perhaps the greatest dreamers - and at the same time skeptics and conservatives, for whom most of the social, technical and economic breakthroughs of mankind are steps towards self-deception. In essence, any desire for improvement is a desire for a new cover, a new, more perfect illusion.
The main driver of the process envisaged in the 1960s by Guy Debord [6, p. 120], became technologies for data transmission and storage, from television, mobile telephony, digital audio and video equipment, the latest means of electronic circulation and conversion of data and currency - and ending with personal computers as universal tools for integrating all others. information flows. However, the rapid development in the 1990s pp. Against the background of political, economic and cultural globalization, the Internet has taken the process of alienation to a qualitatively new level, turning the connection of computer devices into a single global field, where the means of integration over time becomes the Web itself. The non-localized, ephemeral Internet is taking over the monopoly on data integration in less and less isolated personal computers and shifting the focus of human attention and virtual existence to the shaky and uncertain realm of web reality. If previously a personal computer device played the role of an electronic assistant or library, now its defining feature of "personality" is questioned, because the inclusion in the network and delegation of most functions that previously performed autonomously, actually turns electronic devices into ordinary communication portals. through which information and related operational commands are only transmitted, but processed and stored no longer on the client side, but on the side of the depersonalized Network. The presence or absence of electronic devices today means only the possibility or impossibility of access to the collective information field, without which the former are deprived of any significant functionality - and the process of "pumping" information sovereignty becomes irreversible to the same extent as in the financial sphere. transactions.
Multiplication of electronic devices together with their combination in the network and removal of the area of ??storage and processing of data outside personal devices, in the collective "nothing" - is a process of one order with restriction of cash circulation, which is justifiably considered an attack on personal freedoms and privacy. However, if the reforms in the field of finance are almost forced, then information technology, inextricably linked with the field of entertainment, gains power over society to the cheers of most citizens ("And the crowd was happy, and everyone sucked their tongues" [9, p. 17]) . And thus devalue the meanings and the will to know [15], bringing the average person to a state of voluntary, pleasant enslavement - through information and for information - as a result of which real knowledge, meanings, feelings and emotions together with the allotted time of the individual are delegated and converted in flat information that denotes but does not mean. The ancient notion that everything in the world has a price can now be interpreted as that everything in the world has a sign - the value of which, however, is conventionally symbolic. In essence, it is an unequal exchange of the real for the virtual with a predetermined deficit, immanent lack and impossibility of achieving ontological completeness - the desire for which is compensated by a quantitative surplus of signs that indicate only signs, so compensation cycles do not allow to return to the plane. new and new turns of the unreal, fueled by the volume of individual consciousness. In this case, speaking of "real", we do not mean a purely empirical area of ??existence - but the subjective (and therefore the most objective) "inner world" of man, the realm of ideas, feelings, memory and will to live - which becomes the main, if not the only object of exploitation: "The space that scares you is always the same, and it is equal to the skull in which your brain is closed" [13, p. 125]. Depriving himself of the last "partitions" of corporeality, which guaranteed him, if not the external, then at least the internal dimension of freedom, the free individual loses his own differential features, his uniqueness:
... He is handcuffed
King of the world! king of freedom, king,
He is crowned with a stamp! ..
And where are your thoughts, pink flowers,
Well-groomed, brave, loving children,
To whom did you give them, my friend, to whom? [11, p. 317]
For the first time in its history, man is faced with the threat of undermining internal freedom, which until now was considered inviolable - a situation that calls into question the very idea of ??intellectual dissent, the possibility of Orwellian "doublethink" [10, p. 25] as the last screen of free existence, instead of Junger's Anarch [16, p. 43] leaving room on the stage except for a clown, a figure of a fool, "who publicly simulates madness" and "pretends to be a fool" [7, p. 9], safe for the System to the extent that the form of its existence looks like a game and is not setting traps or hunting [12, p. 18]. At the same time, the lives of most of the individuals included in the Matrix become a game, the very seriousness in cyberspace becomes a sign of "stupid tone", which unequivocally signals "washing out" of meaning as transcendental goal-setting - the desire to preserve identity and find a way out of the Labyrinth. perceived as sabotage and punishable by death [4, p. 186]. With an undeniable compulsion to correct in the newer, upgraded version of the personal Matrix. In fact, we are witnessing the relativization of the idea of ??permanent identity, blurring the boundaries of personality and the inner world of man, gradual polypersonalization, "fragmentation" of the individual (Latin persona - "mask", Latin individuus - "indivisible"), which ultimately means his de-personalization and closure in the webs of meaningless and infinite reconfigurations of reflected masks [4, p. 166], many of which create the architecture of the virtual Labyrinth.
Making existence beyond the edges of the "inner" on the plane of the monitor (whether a personal computer screen, tablet, TV, mobile phone, photo or video camera) in conjunction with the growing blurring of the virtual borders in the totality of the Internet is only a prologue to the transfer reality beyond the plane of the monitor, into the digital Mirror. There is no need to dwell on the critique of the alienating effect of various technical means that have become commonplace in the everyday experience of modern man, as well as on the speculative critique of the Internet as a whole as its main engine of globalization. With the transition to a new phase of development of web technologies, the problems of virtualization of reality, deconstruction of personality and the threat of total control over man become more concrete, in connection with which we are not the first to not only predict and outline likely trends, but also to judge completed facts and voiced by key actors projects for the formation of digital civilization. The latter are no longer political ideologues or utopian philosophers, but clusters of scientific and technical corporations that operate on the logic of self-sufficient engineering development, emancipated from social ethics and dependent only on resource provision and objective laws of physics. Man's place as a consumer deprives him of real economic subjectivity, turning him into a material of scientific and technological progress, whose voice, along with the priorities of power and profit, has long outweighed the normative theses of evolution.
Many electronic means and services at the same time for many still act as a fictitious guarantee of "freedom", which, at first glance, can carry modern technology. In fact, the economic trends of the global world, rather, make us talk about its all-encompassing monism, effectively hidden not only by many brands, but also by many opportunities, none of which provides a veto on globalization. Unlike the realities of Aldous Huxley's "Beautiful New World", the information world does not provide reservations for "savages" [14, p. 30] and escapists - in the Internet and mobile systems, which are monitored and cataloged at all stages of their work, there are no "vents" for virtual escape (except for escape into empirical reality, which in the current economic exploitation is rapidly becoming an ecological desert, doors in which for a "normal" organism at some point may be closed). Even today, no standalone Internet object has a guaranteed way to hide from the watchful eye of Googlebot, which searches web repositories without complying with conventional robots.txt instructions - and using user resources (Google Chrome browser, mobile devices, operating system). system and related products) to track all its actions on the Web - both for the purpose of studying the Internet and for the purpose of studying the client himself. Integration of Google's "default" search engines into third-party browsers (Opera, Firefox), Microsoft, Yahoo! and Facebook, the presence in almost all web developments of Adobe Flash and Java technologies with their "gateways" for tracking and deanonymizing users show that most of the world's information channels converge in several "nodes", debunking the established myths about network "pluralism" XXI Art. [2, p. 149-152]
The specificity of the postmodern situation is only that the fixation and accumulation of information does not occur by active search "from above", but is carried out through the objects themselves, which situationally become subjects of search, evaluation and classification of data, conveying themselves, creating own and "neighbor's" files - often without knowing about it, without realizing the weight of their own actions or without giving them due importance (excessive dramatization is neutralized by irony or ridicule). It is characteristic that the virtual "spider" tries to cover not only real-time data, but also, in the initial stages - information about the past, which historically precedes the era of electronic technology (large-scale digitization project "paper" libraries "Google Books", popular among older people memory services such as "Classmates"). In turn, social networks, blogs and messengers "feed" the "world wide web" with data about users at the stage of their formation - essentially in the format of an experiment - and mutual integration of client-side services or "merger" of companies on exchanges gradually, step by step combine information bases into a single World Mind, turning reality into an analysis of robotic systems and reflection of artificial intelligence, "which produces a series of internal monologues, stories, memories, coherent and incoherent combinations that occur as if in a dream" [13, p. 51]. The conversion of the physical world into signs thus acts as a way of "translating" reality into the language of virtuality through its accounting, quantification [3, p. 72] - but in the next stages, associated with the probable collapse of the real and the destruction of barriers between the empirical and the ideal, will provide a pure ontological "transfer" of reality in the existential format of "total reality", which knows no boundaries between physical and metaphysical ", Material and ideal, external and internal dimensions of being.
The first step in this direction is to erase the boundaries on the verge of physical and virtual dimensions of the technologies themselves - from virtual desktops, "devastation" of physical media on the client side and transfer their content to external servers, introduction of online storage and distribution, conversion services based on the Internet of the future. If before the physical drive on the user's side was in one or another. As an "information fortress", sufficiently protected from outside control and interference - and completely self-sufficient in its content - most transactions are now conducted de facto outside it, just as most data is stored online, only nominally, through forms of authorization. referring to the client. By and large, it is about transforming the Internet into a universal bank of information, which "pumps" it from autonomous users in the same way as a financial institution "pumps" cash into its accounts from the hands of customers. And if at first the technical devices and financial resources of the individual are deprived of autonomy, then the next stage will naturally be the erasure of the boundaries of his mental (and hence ontological) sovereignty, which entails a reversal of human existential status - its marginalization and loss of a single thinking role. ) space creatures. We can even predict the complete removal of the human factor in the brackets of rational discourse, which will inevitably reduce the technical universe, arbitrary modifications of human identity or its replacement by artificial substitutes - virtual machines Hoffmann-Junger [8, p. 143] literary tradition ("How then to explain that these results take such a visible form?" [5, p. 650]).
One way or another, such pessimistic forecasts are partly being realized today. The threat of the virtual lies not so much in the plane of possibilities of total control over a person in both authorized and apparently anonymous modes of network activity - as in the very ontological nature of the changes that human reality undergoes in contact with high technology. The danger of the global "web" is not so much of a political and conspiratorial nature (although this dimension should not be taken into account), but that the virtual is increasingly becoming a form and locus of reintegration of atomized individuals and society as a whole: The network steals not only objective time and space, but the soul itself as a set of irrational aspects of human nature and the primary creative forces (will) of the thinking subject. At the same time, the nature of existence "on the other side of the screen" exposes the revision and the idea of ??space, length, because virtual space is, in a sense, the lack of objective localization both at the level of physical impulses (units of encoded information) and at the level of infinite the number of illusory realities (images-interfaces). As a result, it is a matter of rethinking - or rather: removing from the agenda - the problem of differentiation of "subjective" and "objective", "unreal" and "real", "visible" and "real", "true" and virtual ontologies do not presuppose such oppositions: everything visible is real and illusory at the same time - except for the subject of non-virtual nature, which can, depending on the situation, take on the role of actor or passive spectator outside or in the middle of imaginary landscapes. Returning to the biblical story, the "beautiful new world" will soon have to speak through the perspective and the need for a "new fall" - a turn to the ethics of distinction, knowledge of "good" and "evil" in the endless mazes of Paradis artificiels [1, p. 29].
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Summary:
The article considers the problems of formation of network space as a way of postmodern reformatting of reality, emphasizes the fundamental change of the ontological situation associated with scientific and technological progress. The real negative consequences and probable threats of changing the ontological status of a person in cyberspace, the prospects of a new ethics and a new anthropology are emphasized.
Key words:
identity, reality, virtuality, monism, pluralism, postmodernism.
Abstract:
Vyshinsky S. Diffusion of space. Communicative dissonance. The article considers the problems of formation of network space as a way of postmodern reformatting of reality, emphasizes the fundamental change of the ontological situation associated with scientific and technological progress. The real negative consequences and possible threats of changing the ontological status of man in cyberspace, the prospects of a new ethics and a new anthropology are emphasized.
Key words:
identity, reality, virtuality, monism, pluralism, postmodernism.
Annotation:
Vyshynskyi S. Diffusion of space. The communicative discord. The article deals with the problems of network space and its development as the mode of postmodern reformatting of reality. The author underlines the fundamental modification of the present ontological situation - the fact he connects with a contemporary scientific and technological progress. At the same time the article shows some actual negative consequences and probable threats of the alteration of human mind, human corporality and ontological status of human being within virtual space. The author speaks about prospects of new ethics and new anthropology in the postmoderm society, the possibility of knowledge and knowing in this thought paradigm. Though he acknowledges the destructive influence of the Web and hi-tech on culture and communication, there are still ways to preserve a unique real identity within the virtual Matrix - that come out from denial of monistic metaphysics and a new philosophical interpretation of gnostic mythology. In this context the duplication of reality is closely connected to individual emancipation as freedom is seen and interpreted in terms of distinction and preservation of the self. That signifies some modernist aspects that cannot be eliminated from the postmodern cultural discourse as they are defining for humanity. Still they can be effectively suppressed or manipulated by social and technological means, turning the acts of communication into acts of self-denunciation and subjection to the dominant political and philosophical discourse, that is self-repeating and self-regenerating circulation of meaningless data consisting of human knowledge and emotions. Thus the concept of "the spectacle" in a modified interactive manner can be used to describe the contemporary state of Western society - at the same time indicating the concept of "seriousness" as its opposition and means for re-establishing "normal" ontological proportions.
Key words:
identity, reality, virtuality, monism, pluralism, postmodernity.
Recieved 17.03.2021
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