Every day starts the same way. He has to check a series of sites, follow the latest news, and completely immerse himself in what he himself calls “the flow of internet consciousness.” There’s then Twitter, the latest videos, and the new “popular” items. Scanning, checking, managing, commenting, repeat. All day long. Seven days a week. His popular blog requires updates every half hour, so the demand for new material never ends.
Until he got sick.
…“Not too long ago, browsing the internet, addictive as it certainly was, was a static activity. At your office at work or on your laptop at home, you would disappear into a mouse hole filled with links and re-emerge onto the surface of the world after a short while (or hours),” recently wrote the well-known American blogger Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine. “But then came the smartphone and made the mouse hole portable, inviting us to get lost anywhere, anytime, whatever else we might be doing.”
Dr. Michael Van Ameringen, professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, presented at the annual meeting (in Vienna) of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology a study on the internet habits of 254 first-year students. The 107 met the criteria for “problematic internet use.”
“People who engage in problematic use have significantly more anxiety and symptoms of depression. They have serious problems with their ability to concentrate,” Van Ameringen said. “What’s even more interesting is that these people have dysfunction problems. Which appear everywhere, at school, at work, in family life”… “People transfer a large part of their lives to the internet, and this multiplies the confusion,” he added.
Neurologists and various kinds of psychotherapists have reason to rub (secretly) their hands: a new mass clientele is gathering at their doors. Measurements (everything is measured, especially in the digital empire) show that the average typical smartphone user touches the screen 2,617 times every day. The top 10% of fanatic users touch the screen over 5,000 times every day. Apple (conducting its own measurements – privacy be damned) announced at the beginning of 2018 that its customers lock and unlock their phones an average of 80 times every day. This means 6 to 7 times per hour. Anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, inability to concentrate attention, serious memory loss, constant disruption in thinking are the consequences / “symptoms” that can easily be admitted. The “stream of internet consciousness” (and/or sociality) is a constantly swollen torrent, as it is continuously fed by increasingly intense “streams”… Murky, full of whirlpools, trash and mud, this “internet consciousness” leaves nothing alive in its wake except for roots (and even that’s questionable).
And yet what started as a “portable emergency telephone” and, within just half a generation, became the remote control of daily life, has not exhausted the limits of its capabilities; the limits of the benefits it offers. Only now are the proto-capitalist societies entering the era of the Internet of Things and sensors everywhere. And the applications of Artificial Intelligence have only just begun to unfold quietly, convincingly, attractively, full of “philanthropy.”
Artificial Intelligence? Could it be that the ever-improving “intelligence” of everyday machines inevitably produces the ever-worsening stupidity of their users?
So far, stupidity has been attributed to the elderly, as a deterioration of certain brain functions. A typical description of this “natural stupidity” (from wikipedia) goes like this:
Dementia (“a” negative + “nous”) is a serious loss of general mental ability (memory loss) in an individual who was previously not impaired, beyond what would be caused by normal aging. It can be static, as a result of a single general brain injury, or progressive, resulting in long-term reduction of cognition due to body injury or disease. Despite the fact that dementia is much more common in the elderly (approximately 5% of individuals over 65 years are involved), it can also appear before the age of 65, in which case it is called “early-onset dementia”.
Dementia is not a simple disease, but a general syndrome (i.e. a set of symptoms and signs). Cognitive areas affected are memory, attention, language and problem solving. Normally, symptoms must exist for at least six months for a diagnosis to be made. A cognitive disorder of shorter duration is called delirium.
In the later stages of the disease, patients may lose their orientation in time (not knowing the day, week, or even the year), in space (not knowing where they are), and in person (not knowing who they or others around them are).
The last thing that all kinds of specialists would do is to study the processes of mechanization over the past 150 years: never and nowhere, in none of the previous capitalist industrial revolutions, was mechanization made possible without mass displacements. If the word “displacement” seems excessive to you, we can say it differently: without large-scale replacements of human capabilities by mechanical capabilities. “Power” (muscle power) and “energy” were at the center of the first two industrial revolutions/mechanical replacements. Until in the third, “communication” entered the center, and in the fourth, “thinking” has entered.
In a research / analytical piece of work, the gathering of game over showed the …. the obvious. That the digitization of memory replaces and renders obsolete the entire persistent and painful process of “memorization” of the traditional educational system, essentially most of its usefulness.
And not only that. Practically, one no longer needs to remember anything, but it should already be considered a fact that the ways of learning to remember are disappearing—as the replacement of human memory by the “memory of machines” tends to become universal. The issue is not whether one remembers the 10-digit phone numbers of their friends; but their birthdays, their appointments, the day’s tasks; or, as the poet said, “… what I wanted to do…” 1 (There are apps of the sort that “remind you to drink water”—how many people, then, died of thirst in modern metropolises because they forgot to drink water before this life-saving app? Or “I’ll remind you what day your next period is”—how was it possible for previous generations of women to live without this mechanical reminder?)
The replacement of human memory by mechanical means is not framed within the “symptoms of dementia” (artificial dementia) – although in the elderly (without such mechanical replacement), the diagnosis of “memory loss” is fundamental. Similarly, the loss of orientation (without GPS), the inability to formulate logical sequences, or the incapacity to manage simple daily matters are treated as individual intellectual/psychosomatic “symptoms,” without a general and impersonal correlation to the new wave of mechanization (of thought and the senses). Symptoms that are articulated around rhetorics of “addiction” or “misuse,” and are addressed with instructions such as “don’t use your mobile phone for two hours after waking up”…
The alienation (and) of human memory/thought from machines is the alienation of “living capital” (human and, more broadly, animal capabilities) from “fixed capital” (machines) – on behalf of capitalist profitability. Artificial intelligence, as an attribution of “intelligence” to fixed capital, can only occur through the abstraction of intelligence from living capital. This does not happen while we sleep; agents of the bosses don’t come to cut off our heads! This process of alienation/expropriation/mechanical replacement (choose) occurs through the continuous use of smart machines.
Workers in the first industrial revolution did not lose their manual skills or muscular strength overnight; these were rendered obsolete generation after generation as they were “needed less and less” in capitalist production (and, later, in daily life). Only now, the loss of thinking abilities does not concern only contemporary workers. Only now, this “replacement” evolves much faster than any other alienation/expropriation/mechanical replacement of the past. Half, one generation, and the spirit has flown far from the skill of our life into electronic circuits. Leaving behind anxiety, confusion, depression, panic attacks, inability of logical reasoning either in normal situations or (even worse) under emotional pressure, sinking into Manichean metaphysics – etc. Perhaps unconsciously, perhaps guiltily: primordial Egos admit they “suffer damage” from their daily habits only when these become intensive…
Just as the underground agony for the flesh of bodies (which now seems “useless”) gave birth to the pretentious escape to gyms, so too will the degeneration of thought give birth, wherever it may be, to the psychological compulsion of “human brain gyms.” With the same sad results…
Here are the first hygienic tips for the age of mechanization of everything: do not eat networking for two hours after waking up…
Ziggy Stardust
cyborg #13 – 10/2018
- This text can be read on its own. However, it is even better as a continuation of the selection from the 3rd notebook on worker usage with the theme of mechanization of thought.
- Holes, amnesia, 1985. ↩︎