Tatiana Trouvé, Desire Lines, 2015.

Technology is a modern word, a strange combination of old skills, techné that is no longer defined by familiarity with equipment. Sciences today do not only explain phenomena or discover laws of nature. They are deeply embedded in all corners of the material world. New crystalline structures, new objects, that never existed, has been added to the world.

Among these new objects are those that are truly virtual. Those are like real objects. Similitude that is the key term, but they don’t need to represent the external reality. They are detached from the reality, as much as we are detached from earth. Above all, they carry a promise, they are the embodiment of a promise. Their shapes may differ; a wall or a room in a video game, an item on sale on another platform, app, site.  but the shape carries the promise of a next level, next item, like a chain series of doors that stand ajar along a long corridor.

These virtual objects create a virtual world in a narrative structure. That narrative is sometimes called games, sometimes shopping and delivery, online influencers, online healing, etcetera. After each shopping episode, the discrepancy of the object received in reality and the virtual object unlucks a new door, and the subject is invited to the next door. Doors that are called levels. Sometimes, some extra points, bonuses, incentives are given too, so that the game continues.

A continuous repetition of the same guided by a quest for immortality. No wonder that all those melancholic experiences, that some call depression, find a fertile ground in our contemporary world, where the smallest portion of enjoyment can only be experienced through the phantasy of immortality, all in line with the flight of time inside the myriads of organelles of a finite being.

Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #1146 D 2006.

We are told that we are at the brink of the creation of autonomous syntagms within this universe, there are machines that can plot a narrative. There are research and concrete investments in hybridization of human neural network and computer-based networks. Elon Musk’s hyped project of Neural lace is one of them. Others, such as the venture capitalist and XPRIZE Foundation chairman Peter Diamandis develops instrumental concepts such as “meta-intelligence”. Ray Kurzweil, a computer scientist turned popular science writer, prophesies how this technology will in the future improve human lives (2012).

Most of these latest trends are assembled under the umbrella buzz word of Artificial Intelligence, a very ambiguous term. At least, these machines are capable of carrying out inductive logical operations. You show them thousand different elephants and they can recognize the next one on a blurry photo. Quite similar to a trail dog. There are new reports that show these machines can search and learn by themselves. At any rate, we can speculate and it is possible that machine may one day be able to think, regardless of what we mean by thinking. And yet, the crucial question remains: Do they know that they are learning? For a long time, we humans, have known that we don’t always know what we are doing. This non-knowing is paradoxically the ground of what in the English-speaking world is called “awareness”. In psychoanalysis, this awareness that is on the side of doing rather than our self-representation, one of the premises for therapeutic process.

It is doubtless that the crucial feature in the automated, algorithmic process is the all-encompassing character of the processes involved. This process, collection of enormous amounts of data, automated selection and categorization processes, and more importantly, the work of singling out patterns, establishing relational nodes, at the final end creates a vast and algorithmically controlled network of numerical relations established between marketing, security, and decision making that require a minimum of human intervention. 

It is not difficult to see that a floating, all-encompassing numerical totality is the horizon of this process. At each step, from home services and the idea of Internet of Things, to recommended articles to read, there is a rationally organized network. Moreover, all this happens in real time or with a negligible lapse of time. A totality of intelligible representation of all things, marked by numerical values, is at least the goal. This phenomenon is, according to one recent work on the subject by Eric Sadin (2015), another incarnation of a profoundly Western or modern ambition to achieve an absolute degree of rationality. Reality is absolutely rational and rationality is perfectly numerical. Adorno and Horkheimer qualified this ideal as instrumental rationality, an instrumentality that can be contrasted to the radical modernity of thinkers such as Marx or Spinoza.

This absolute rationality becomes more palpable if we realize that human corporeal reality, its subjective inclinations and joys are also transformed into numerical values, ciphered and are included in the Big Data. If any human being, as far as she is brought into the world of relations with others, both humans or things, tries to find a place in this ocean of data, he or she presupposes that this ocean contains all messages and all meaning. Does the emergence of this absolute form of rationality change how we position ourselves in relation to the world we live in?

It is then a perhaps subtle but certainly bitter irony that this Western ideal of instrumental rationality stumbles upon what makes humans what they are: fallible. We find the reality of being “hooked” or “addicted” to internet in one or another form. Juvenile retreat from everyday life to the extent that their studies and relations become a concern for parents is one example. However, we should be careful and ask the question what it means to employ the term addiction in this new context. What is the person addicted to? Beyond hormonal or chemical reactions that a computer game may produce, beyond the insatiable quest for satisfaction that online shopping may present, one would find a peculiar dimension that we should not neglect. The addictive substance is informational.

In all these cases, we do see a transformation of desire to the level of a hallucinated satisfaction of an imaginary need. There is in severe cases a heroic and equally tragic sacrifice involved. But this aspect does not cover the peculiarity of this type of addiction.

 In online life, under the surveillance of Googles and FaceBooks, we should perhaps speak of a tendency towards data overdose. This overdose brings us to what is the essential question for clinicians. Does the data overdose consume the subject of the unconscious, does it already map out the future answers to the questions about our past desires? Remember that children at an early age do believe that parents know all their needs or thoughts, until they discover that it is not the case, that they are not transparent to themselves and to others. To formulate it in Freudian terms: Can we dream outside the algorithmic oceanic ?

As we know since Zhuangzi, being human means the possibility of waking up after a dream of being a butterfly, asking if one is not a butterfly dreaming to be a human. In contrast to this certainty of being awake at the edge of an opaque identity, we are faced with a question which may not be at all about an uncertain horizon for any space of subjective act, best formulated by by Philip K Dick “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”. This is undoubtedly an enigma —for Androids.

Ray Kurzweil. 2012. How to Create a Mind. Viking Press.

Éric Sadin. 2015. La Vie algorithmique, Critique de la raison numérique. L’Échappée.