contemporary western and westernized cultures have fully embraced technic, an accomplished reality system that, as we hope to briefly show, is all-encompassing and deeply troubling. reciprocally, the embrace has enabled technic to bring forth a specific kind of culture that can be understood as a device whose primary aim is to perpetrate, expand and infuse its world-making powers into every realm of human existence. the embrace is a techno-serpent that bites its own tail. but what sort of techno-poison does the serpent’s bite instill?
federico campagna has proposed to think of technic as a cosmogony, that is, as a series of emanations, or myth-making flows, the primordial one being the absolute language of numbers. the emanations of the technic cosmogony, with their fundamentally numeric nature, predetermine the way in which we understand the real and, in fact, prefigure the limits of that very understanding. under technic, the real is numeric, and therefore can be measured, serialized and exchanged. what cannot be measured, serialized nor exchanged is not real. consequently, the world-making agency of numbers has determined and constrained what can be counted and understood as culture: namely, those socially produced artifacts susceptible of being measured, serialized and exchanged. this technic nature of culture is felt strongly in the realm of digital works and, in particular, in the subset of language-based ones.
yet reality is a fragile, fleeting blur of contingencies. but what counts as real within the cosmology of technic tends to blind us to the vulnerability of what is, of what exists – and resists – in immeasurable and irreducible forms and ways. the absolutist, world-determining
condition that generates such a hallucinatory effect, leaves culture particularly vulnerable to being captured by the dark forces of numerization, currently led by capitalist markets. campagna argued that the age of technic is an age of metaphysical nihilism, which
undoes the fabric of reality, and in which “everything can become everything, that is to say: nothingness emerges.” meaning, thus, is shunned as a sign of superstition and nostalgia.
think about the endless scroll of facebook: everything: nothing. after a few minutes, nothingness indeed emerges. contained inside general-purpose, two-dimensional boxes made out of html, css, javascript and whatnot, every thing that counts as real is exchanged, serialized and measured.
minutes, hours spent gazing at nothing.
why are we not up in arms against this perverse technicization of reality, of culture?
