By imposing the constant possibility of being somewhere else and settling for something else, the era of universal transience praises change as a form of freedom and, at the same time, reduces it to coercion toward instability, to a perversion of the forced plurality. In fact, it is not possible to make a plan out of Heraclitean change, especially if the coercively imposed transience translates into the threat of eternally starting over from scratch in one’s work and existential experience.
The “ethical life” (sittliches Leben), in the Hegelian sense, is denied in its possible constitution, since its very foundations are destroyed, that is, the stability of forms and the bond of solidarity that cannot be entirely reduced to business logic. The world of life is completely precarious and flexible, detached from any roots and any stability.
By promoting the “corrosion of character” already highlighted by Sennett, the de-ethicalized and flexible system of needs deprives individuals of their identity and of the possibility of connecting with each other in community forms other than those alienated from shopping malls and their derivatives. The logic of capital and its non-socially constructed society remains that of the disintegration of real communities, from the family to solidarity associations, to the state as the living reality of the ethical idea. The only connections allowed and promoted are those that are part-time, modeled on the logic of commerce.
Solidarity-based communities are being replaced by new atomistic systems made up of consumerist monads who enjoy themselves without restraint (nightclubs, shopping centers, etc.), and by the breakdown of authentic, supportive, and real connections between individuals, replaced by false digital communities on social networks. These, from Facebook to Twitter or X, create the illusion of being connected to the whole world when, in reality, one is alone in front of one’s own terminal, confined to cells scattered in the ether, in what can rightly be considered the culmination of the loneliness of the global citizen. As a general theorem, it can be said that the more connected one is online, the more disconnected one is from reality and social relationships.
The homo digitalis increasingly takes on the appearance of a subject of the “cyber empire” in integral technification, populated by oceanic tides of loneliness connected via the Internet, dedicated to the post-human language of “smiley faces” (emoticons) of the society of likes. Socialism, as a political form centered on the dyad of freedom and equality, falls to the rank of mere individual activity on social media. More precisely, “real socialism” is displaced by the “digital socialism” of social media and cyber platforms, new “smart” prisons that trap the subject in the mechanisms of connective loneliness and the uninterrupted valorization of value.
The digitized space, smooth and seemingly free, looks more and more like a huge smart concentration camp, where subjects are controlled and tracked, exploited and happy, tricked into thinking they are having fun and entertainment while, in reality, they work nonstop—and without any exchange of equivalents—for the neoliberal order.
This does not suppress freedom, but rather exploits and capitalizes on it at every turn, transforming each of our virtual gestures into a source of surplus value. It benefits from our data and induces us to live in a condition in which, Hegelianly, Servant and Master coexist in the same person: each, as Master, demands maximum productivity from themselves as Servant, taking capitalist exploitation to its hyperbolic level.
In the digital bubble, where connection supplants contact and the loneliness of social networks replaces sociability, we are alone and watched, since almost every gesture, in addition to generating profit for capital, is panoptically monitored and tracked. This also supports the thesis expressed by the Platonic image of the cave: the ideal slave is one who, without knowing that he is a slave, strenuously defends his own unfreedom as if it were the only freedom possible. The subjects of the digital Panopticon voluntarily register and literally donate an amount of personal data that probably no dictatorship of the past could have extracted from them, even through the use of violence.
A triumph of the capitalisme de la séduction (capitalism of seduction) once described by Clouscard, the system of digital neoliberalism seduces rather than represses: it works in every possible way to get its subjects to talk about themselves and bare themselves (in every respect), providing all kinds of data and information, and believing themselves to be absolutely free in doing so.
The old tyrannies, as we know, sought to silence their subjects, to isolate them and reduce them to aphasia: the new regime of digital control, on the contrary, encourages them to share and participate, to express ideas and visions, opinions and desires, moods and perspectives. In short, it urges them to talk incessantly about themselves and their own existence, with the dual aim of profiting from these activities and controlling them in every possible way.
Following what Han has shown, stabilizing power is no longer repressive, but seductive, and it is no longer as visible as it was under the disciplinary regime. It is not directed against bodies, but against souls, colonizing them completely and reducing them to inert appendages of the production system. Digitalization and the suppression of freedom form a system, since perfectly complete “totalitarianism” is not that which represses dissidents whose minds are unwilling to accept the unacceptable: it is, on the contrary, that which has devitalized the very sources of possible dissent, inducing souls to willingly accept the intolerable.
Indeed, a regime that still harbors critical and unalienated voices, perhaps even willing to challenge it, is only incompletely totalitarian: it is, we might say, an imperfect totalitarianism, since its work of “totalization” has not been entirely completed. And the fact that it is capable of successfully repressing dissidents is indicative of its weakness, certainly not of its strength.
The fabula docet teaches that true totalitarianism, perfectly realized in its premises and promises, is one in which power no longer even has to repress dissidents, simply because there are none left: for this reason, too, the neoliberal order will always show great zeal in condemning the atrocities with which the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century repressed dissidents. And, comparing itself to these regimes, it will always be able to present itself, in a twisted way, as a “kingdom of tolerance” and an “empire of freedom,” provided that it invariably omits to specify that, within its armored spaces, chains have not been abolished, but directly transferred from the bodies to the souls of the unconscious inmates. Using the terminology of Deleuze, we could say that the old totalitarian regimes were “disciplinary societies,” while the new one, in the form of an infinite digital cage, is a “control society,” or, if you will, a virtual Panopticon, in which subjects do not need to be repressed, since they are constantly seduced and controlled.
In the digitalized world, the intolerable and those willing to tolerate it are produced one motu—of their own free will—and precisely in this lies the intrinsically totalitarian character of the new mode of production and existence. The derealization of the world produced in the image and likeness of the processes of digitization generates, in a single stroke, an increasingly drastic reduction in freedoms, ultimately leading to the almost complete eclipse of the distinction between public and private and, beyond that, of social and community life. The homo digitalis thus appears as a subject emptied of all freedom and, at the same time, perpetually seduced and distracted by the system that has turned him into an unconscious servant, ignorant of his own “comfortable” slavery: he, at the height of alienation, does not want to escape from his cell, but rather desires further doses of that comfortable, seductive, and gentle illiberty.
The “lonely crowd” described by David Riesman allows us to decipher the essence of the unsociably sociable relationships that are established on the internet. In fact, social networks create a non-social society, where the individual is the center of everything and interaction between people is purely virtual. The other is permanently absent. The individual is always alone with himself, the more he believes he is in relationship with the whole world. He isolates himself and locks himself in the smart and virtual prison of the Internet, deceiving himself into thinking that it guarantees greater freedom and opportunity, entertainment and sociability.
Two of the main assumptions of the postmodern era are derealization and dehistoricization, that is, the loss of the experience of the real and the loss of historicity. Historicity is absent today, in the triumph of the End of History and of what, varying Nietzsche, we define as the “anti-historical disease”: the homo neoliberalis is incapable of thinking historically and, therefore, of understanding reality in its historical dynamics. He thinks of what exists in terms of a given, natural-eternal presence (there is no alternative), which must be reflected scientifically and, in any case, endured (and supported) with a spirit of resilience.
The twilight of historicity brings with it the decline of dialectical thinking and its prerogative of understanding the entity in its becoming. Reality ceases to be thought of Hegelianly as Wirklichkeit, as “processual reality,” as a flow in which beings are immersed in their becoming: that is, as a space in which beings are the result of a process pregnant with the past and projected into the future. Reality, in the age of postmodernism, is instead understood as Realitaet, as the “dead positivity” of things, conceived as given and immutable presences that must only be confirmed and accepted. In Fichtean terms, this is the triumph of realistic dogmatism, which understands being as an Object that fieri nequit—cannot be made—and to which the Subject is called to adapt with a spirit of resilience (that is, by changing itself to better endure the real, perceived as unchangeable).
This is the fundamentum inconcussum – unshakeable foundation – of neoliberal ontology, with its categorical imperative ne varietur—unchangeable—and its primordial axiom of the “end of history.” Postmodern man thus lives in a landscape of social, economic, and political relations fetishistically rigidified in the form of “things in themselves” that have no history and are therefore nature as it has always been given, presented as neither transformable nor criticizable.
The so-called cancel culture, which could rightly be considered “the highest stage of postmodernism,” must be interpreted in this context: it expresses the spirit of a spiritless age which, having annihilated the space of the future as a horizon for projects oriented toward ennobling ends, moves on to deconstruct the past as a space of experience in whose light to evaluate and eventually criticize the alienation of the present. With the past and the future banished, the idea of historicity evaporates and only the order of a dehistoricized present survives, deprived of origin and ulteriority, and consequently reduced to the status of nature as always given, to which there is no choice but to adapt cadaverically.
As for the loss of reality (or derealization, one might say), this is fully manifested in the digitization of the world and the end of experience: the digitized world is the world of “non-things” (e-things) and data, algorithms, and the de-objectification of the real.
Digitization de-realizes, disembodies the world, said Han, since it computerizes it and replaces it with screens: from the fetishism of objects, described by Marx, we thus move on to the new fetishism of information and data. The infosphere of the digital realm presents itself in all respects as a two-faced Janus: on the one hand, it seems to break down all boundaries and guarantee us greater freedom; on the other, it exposes us to increasing surveillance (surveillance capitalism), presenting itself as a smart prison or, if you prefer, a virtual Panopticon, a kind of global village in which subjects do nothing but share information, talk about themselves, and provide data to the ruling order.
But above all, they have no awareness of the real scope of their ordinary way of acting: on the one hand, they condemn the forms of “espionage” and imperfect control that characterized previous totalitarian regimes, while at the same time stupidly and joyfully accepting the new forms of surveillance that, infinitely more advanced on a technical level, are projected onto their existence, experiencing them simply as convenience and opportunity. It would, in fact, be quite easy to demonstrate how the control of “the lives of others”—to borrow the title of a successful film—in disciplinary regimes such as Nazi Germany or the GDR was decidedly less pervasive and less effective than that of the current liberal-digital system, which is incomparably more advanced on a technical level. And yet most people will continue to accept their own daily digital control with indifference, if not with deplorable enthusiasm, convinced that, deep down, it is qualitatively different from previous forms of control because it is solely oriented toward their well-being and prosperity.
In the apotheosis of the Internet, typical of the era of the “disappearance of fireflies” described by Pasolini, hypertrophic communication replaces relationships, which are increasingly clandestine and rarefied. Those scattered throughout the cosmic space of the network are never true relationships: at best, they appear as promises of relationships that, in order to be fulfilled, require real relationships between “faces,” according to the thesis of Lévinas.
In other words, they favor processes of individualistic isolationism and privatization of the collective imagination of those “enchanted by the network,” confirming the general trend of a connective age that aspires to the multiplication of fluid relationships and, at the same time, works to ensure that they never take stable form. In the unprecedented format of a mass monologue, individuals do nothing but “chatter” about themselves and everything else, without ever delving into anything and always repeating the same discourse, which they have internalized without reservation. Everyone can say everything and, at the same time, no one has anything to say.
