Forgetting the kidney on the table

Three weeks ago I stopped accessing the network. I now learn that the degradation of this virtual space, at the hands of Musk’s algorithms and his hordes of digital assassins, has led the newspaper to The avant-garde to announce, through its director, its withdrawal from the social network; announcement which was followed by a cascade of defections of concerned journalists and thousands of active users whose decision generated a controversial logic. Should we leave or stay?

I don’t know. I think out loud. If and where it is possible to reason and argue without insults.

If

If X is a vice, it is perhaps appropriate to take refuge in the most classic ones: gambling, sex, drinking.

If X is a battlefield, then we must be aware that we are losing.

Everything therefore seems to invite us to leave this poisonous enclosure. Perhaps we should now broaden the scope of our criticism to direct it towards the format of digital exchanges itself. I’ve said it like that several times. What is a network-connected computer? Is it a tool like the hammer? A technique like writing? A territory like Valencia or America? Or is it mainly an organ like the kidney or the pancreas? It’s probably all of those things at once. It can be a very useful work or knowledge tool and even a soothing support for difficult lives; It is undoubtedly a technique based on complicated digital programming whose mysteries are little known, but which can be learned; and it is also a territory in which events occur and through which we move at full speed. But it is above all an organ. I always give this example: if you have to hang a picture, you take the hammer out of the toolbox and, once you have nailed the hook to the wall, you put it back there. A hammer does not entail the obligation to use it; Only in a nightmare or in a dystopian story (like the story of Andersen’s red slippers) can we imagine an object that is incorporated into our body in such a way that we cannot get rid of it: a hammer, for example, which forces nails to drive without stopping just by having it in your hand. The tools have left our body and fortunately they cannot return: this is why, in a certain sense, they expand our freedom. But that doesn’t happen with organs. We don’t have to take our shopping to the hammers, to the university or on an excursion, but we cannot say to ourselves in the morning while we are getting dressed: “Today I am going to go to work without my right.” kidney.” Well, an Internet connection is more like a kidney than a hammer; Faced with this, our freedom is reduced to the negative decision to disconnect, as traumatic, in a certain sense, as deciding to disconnect a patient assisted breathing which keeps him alive.

This organic dimension of new technologies imposes itself through ease and speed, which prevent long stories and degrade attention. We cannot blame the users and there is no point in educating us on the proper use of networks: no one can accuse us of having a kidney and no one can teach us how to use our liver: they work – and that’s it. is why we are alive – because of their account. We can then say that there is, yes, a tool and a technique and a territory locked under this spontaneous life which is organically imposed on us, but that we can only recognize and activate them by repressing their organic dimension. Everything good about a computer connected to the network is revealed to us by fighting against it. However, a technology that only reveals its virtues to us when it is repressed is a fundamentally bad technology, just as the growth of cells that we call “cancer” is fundamentally bad. Certain heroic users, particularly disciplined, will perhaps be capable of this exercise of free repression: that which allows an organ to be reduced to a tool. But we cannot judge a technology (and even less its users) on the basis of a few individual victories that are as rare as they are exceptional.

So it’s not clear that It’s also not clear that, when it was called Twitter, it was significantly more compatible with thought and conversation. In an age of structural speed, where nostalgia claims ever closer pasts, the tendency to idealize the networks of 2015 says more about our anxieties than about the digital world. Let us recall, without going any further, how the late Mark Fisher described “left-wing Twitter” as a “miserable and hopeless zone”.

It is also not clear that social networks are “public spaces” and not rather cancerous private spaces that have devoured the public. They did so in such a way that traditional political spaces (parliaments, newspapers and even courts) came to depend on them and even be configured according to them.

Is this at least a vice? I don’t believe it. Although our organic relationship with them mimics many addiction-related dependencies, it cannot be said to be a vice for the same reason that living cannot be said to be a vice. Excessive alcohol consumption can be a vice; secrete cholesterol and proteins do not. We are not “vicious” towards the Internet; We live there and sometimes we make a living from it.

That said, we must at the same time accept that, precisely because of its organic dimension, we cannot escape its meshes or at least we cannot get out of it for the moment, in a context of neoliberal capitalism and proletarianized leisure. . In the countryside, among the trees, life is undoubtedly better, but almost no one lives among the trees anymore. More and more people live on the Internet. In the neighborhoods, in the bars, in the beds, there are still real people, yes, and we will have to defend the bars, the neighborhoods and the beds; but even in bars, quarters and beds we are already taking our right kidney. Whether we like it or not, the battle will have to be fought wherever it arises; That is to say in all places where people gather, including social networks. But please let us have no illusions about its emancipatory character. Networks are a battlefield, not an instrument of liberation and even less of anthropological liberation. Anthropological liberation (and this is an essential part of the battle) will consist, in any case, of promoting the repression of networks to seize the tools, the technique and the territory they shelter; and deproletarianize leisure by moving it outside, where slow bodies slow down.

Now, the initial question remains: do we leave X or not? The question is not whether to abandon the Internet; The question is whether Musk’s social network is specifically one of our battlegrounds. Networks, yes, we have already said it, that we like them more or less. But X? I don’t know. It’s probably just a hornet’s nest of robots responding to each other in an enclosed space. And in which there is no longer anyone to convince of anything. Or in which, of course, no amount of information can neutralize a hoax and no reasoned opinion can defuse an insult. Or maybe some erratic digital souls continue to wander these minefields alone, exposed to Trumpist poison, and it is not our duty to abandon them. I don’t have a clear answer; and I certainly have no value or talent as a virtual warrior. Personally, I understand very well those who try to repress digital life from the inside and deproletarianize leisure from the outside. But personally, I really admire those who don’t give up and stay there to continue publishing good information or making visible the wounds that the newspapers neglect; continue to fight until the last minute, in short, in a stifling room which looks more and more, right and left, like a public urinal and a zombie slaughterhouse.

The dilemma itself already says a lot about the balance of power. The battle of the networks must be fought by carefully choosing, as in any battle, the most favorable terrain. We are losing the network battle; and we lose it because we have fewer resources, certainly, but because we also succumb to its organic dimension, between the pure heart and the loose intestines. The battle of the networks, in any case, must not make us forget that it is there, in the world, that the rain kills and that the sun dries our clothes.