Internet, from Utopia to Nightmare

(A personal translation of the remarkable article of David Walther)

The Internet was an utopian promise, it became our contemporary nightmare, this is the alarm call from the pioneer of the French Web Bruno Walther. Hypnotized by our screens, we no longer seek to change the world but to flee it. What if we reconnect to the real?

Hangover. That is the feeling that many of us have today. We celebrated the promises of a new world. We thought that technologies, in general, and the Internet, in particular, signed the promise of a new hope. We imagined that the technology was inherently meaningful. That it could replace the reigns of the fallen ideologies. The Internet was prophetic. It was the multiplication of buns with more pornography.

Then came the unthinkable.

We thought that social networks would be the matrix of global collective intelligence and we had Trump. That the Net would be a pacified space and we have the cyberwars and fake news. That Youtube would be a space where benevolent creativity would be triumphant and we had negationists and the propagandists of AlQua?da. That data would build a more transparent world and we had Cambridge Analytica. That the Internet would be the matrix of a new growth of more durable knowledge and we have had the explosion of a cyber-consumerism embodied in Black Friday and planned obsolescence as a mode of product design.

The alarm clock is merciless.

What happened and how did we got there?

The pundits of the Internet, like the communists before them, thought that one could make a clean slate from the past. That tomorrows would overcome human and moral contingencies. The new Homo Numericus would inevitably be benevolent, open to the world and respectful of nature.

We were wrong.

We have been mistaken on one essential point: The Internet is not a utopia but a tool.

And to understand this tool we should delve into the readings of Ivan Illich.

A philosopher and forerunner of political ecology, Ivan Illich demonstrates that the tools are not neutral. They carry their own purpose. They are the matrix that models the social relationships that men tie together. The car, originally a simple technical object for transporting people, transformed landscapes and shocked ways of life.

A radical critic of industrial society, Ivan Illich asserts that "when a tooled activity exceeds a threshold, it first turns against its end, then threatens to destroy the entire social body."

For him as soon as a tool is institutionalized and is imposed as what it calls a "radical monopoly", a tool that no one can do without and whose use becomes a consumer injunction, it becomes dysfunctional and destroys the objective that it is Supposed to serve. The car loses more time than it makes.

The Internet, like social networks, has dramatically imposed itself in a handful of years, as a radical monopoly, in an extent rarely experienced. It is almost impossible to live in disconnected mode. The digital sphere has taken control of our intimacy, the mobile phone has become a prosthesis, an extension of our self.

The digital world scored the posthumous victory of Ivan Illich. It illustrates with superb its demonstrations. In few years, the Internet has become a dysfunctional mutant object. It was supposed to bring the mankind closer, it fractured it. Instead of making the planet Smarter, it develops a subculture of mediocrity.

The reality is cruel: The sole purpose of the Internet is its own growth, to impose itself on all.

For this, it mutates and imposes “bovarysme” as a unsurpassable horizon.

What is Emma Bovary doing in this adventure? Remember this character of Flaubert, always dissatisfied, who seeks to escape at all costs the boredom, banality and mediocrity of her provincial life. It is characteristic of how we use Internet. On social networks, reality is nothing more than a perception. We build an imaginary world made of selfies, margaritas on sunny beaches. Social success is accounted for in the number of likes. The challenge is no longer to be or to have but to appear.

Digital humanity seems to be addicted to movement. Time is shrinking.

"Fleeing in her dreams the proven dissatisfaction in her life" is the definition given by Jules de Gaultier of “bovarysme”. I have not found a better way to describe the present time.

The digital world, by proposing a digital response to this Bovaryste hope to leave the world of boredom by switching into a perpetual movement, conquered the attention/brain time available to humans.

The technological emphasis that the digital world offers today at Bovarysme marks a revolution in the way we live our world.

Since the birth of mankind, dissatisfaction is the driving force of progress. It is it that allows us to rise. To transcend reality through effort and creativity. To surpass our human condition to become creators.

The figure of the bovarysme that digital tools are proposing today is the exact opposite.

It's escaping reality rather than trying to transform it. It is the search for the incessant movement even the most futile. It's the panic fear of boredom. It is preferable to script its existence than to live it. It is the dictatorship of the moment, the quest for novelty. It is the illusion as infinite and void as reality.

To paraphrase Kant, this Society of Illusion is a social and ontological crime.

Social Crime because it distorts the word, the foundation of any social relationship.

We listen to our neighbour because implicitly we believe what he tells us. The word is only a commitment. Disconnect the verb from reality and the possibility of believing in the other is no more. You immediately cut off the social relationship. Otherness becomes absurdity. You no longer love each other but a chimera.

Ontological Crime because it distorts what differentiates us from the world of the Plants: our consciousness.

"A man who no longer believes himself what he says to another, regresses below the thing."

"Falsehood is a crime against oneself, against humanity," recalls Kant.

It is a somewhat radical observation but the digital bovarysed person causes a denaturation of consciousness, an intentional hoax. This is Berenice's victory over Titus. Of the absolute impetuosity of the mystic of Romantic happiness on the duties related to his charge or his inheritance.

I'll say it directly, but digital puts a deadly risk on our civilization.

A society where the stakes are no longer to transmit but to appear as a child of monsters. They're spreading on the reality TV sets. The ridicule and intellectual mediocrity of Emma Bovary become an absolute and invade the White House. Symptoms of this postmodern society that sanctifies vulgarity.

The catastrophe is not far away. It is unfolding.

Unless we options for a change of course. A radical rupture.

Life is not measured by the accumulation of objects but rather by the art of mastering or rather living the time that passes.

Let us remember that time is what the man has most precious. We can conquer space, accumulate things but time is unique. The minutes you just spent reading this text are only yours. You won't be able to redeem them. No more than you know how long you have left to live. It belongs to fate. It's sacred.

Time is the central battle that we should all, on our scale, lead. Regain control. Insert our reflection and our actions in the long time. Consume time with our loved ones rather than with screens. Accept to get lost in the face of the other and not in his fantasy avatar.

The day we will return builders and not the destroyers of time, digital will no longer be a "radical monopoly", but a space of exchange where collective and positive intelligences will flourish again.