Almost everything that is successful and visible currently comes from a kind of clean-up. We are witnessing an endless museification of events, restorations, demolition of statues and name changes in the streets. Commemorations, cancellations and requests for forgiveness. Everything tends to whitewash the past, to an almost unusual purification, even if we compare ourselves with explicitly Victorian times.
Can progressive expectations around AI be understood without this environment of new moral correctness? At last the possibility seems to be at hand that even intelligence, one of the most intimate registers of the human being, is also bleached, purged of affective shadows and dark prejudices; of natal, partial and subjective chiaroscuro. The new normality also supposes a new objectivity. This cleaning offer is clearly too appetizing to be easily rejected. In this sense, social speculation around AI seems to run parallel to the expectations of a personalization democratic power, a dispersion of governance, finally managed by a self-sufficient individual.
This at the same time that intense nationalization is also growing. It is impossible to separate AI, here and in China, from unusual state interventionism. For the same reason, from an intensification of private secrecy, which seeks submerged paths of escape. There is no advance without loss. By the ancient law of action and reaction, the transparency achieved here will produce new forms of opacity there, also corruption and crime. God is dead, but because we must all act as gods. If the neighbor is today so vain and enigmatic, it is to compensate for a social power that has become invasive. What the digital State takes away from us with one hand, a personal independence that previously seemed inalienable, we now try to compensate with the other, granting us a freedom of expression and a delight in weirdness that shouldn’t feel guilty about anything. It is not so much narcissism, forced to act for others, as a loudly connected autism.
God is dead because we must all act as gods
Ethnic cleansing is a bloody scandal that we leave for backward nations, even if they are allies like Ukraine. Ours is cultural cleansing, a “hate of ants” (Limonov) that is exercised inside each subject, without blood and with the emotional participation of the person concerned. First, cold capitalist calculation “disenchanted” our scenarios. Now, through the cult of diversity, it seems to re-enchant them. For more than forty years we have entered into an endless company of revenge, recycling and purification, starting with human material. And not only in its social dimension, but also in terms of the genetic inheritance of the species and, in general, in everything that is native and not chosen. We live in a fundamentally revisionist society, which has to change even the past so that the present is not denied in its illusions. Like so many other displays of our racism yesterday, the James Bond books will be republished to “remove offensive racial references.” Obviously, it is only a matter of formatting our hatred, because under this new progressive essentialism the vast majority of humanity continues to be an easy and constant target. It is impossible to separate the emergence of AI from this social need for whitewashing, from the rise of correct, white-label hate.
In addition to the past and foreign cultures, it is also necessary to amend nature. If the bourgeois was the most notable figure of the urban order of a century ago, and the militant the outstanding character of the later social effervescence, he regretful he is the most notable figure of the advanced democratic order. Without this preventive background, without a hate techno to an old humanity too close to the ground, neither our gender ideology, with a sexuality designed in the bodies, nor our complicity could be explained spiritual with technologies that enter more and more into souls, cleansing them of analog demons.
The progressive appeal of AI is to take the fetishism of transparency and merchandise to its ultimate neural consequences.
AI is not only looking for an exponential increase in information, a new cognitive speed or accelerated calculation in previously off-limits terrain. The collective expectation also responds to the illusion of disappearing into discrete units of sensory isolation. We live in the slow and viral elimination typical of a late civilization. This is approximately what the numerical empire and the conversational systems promise: no more opaque lumps, no more real presences that demand the melee of affections. The old humanity is intended to be superfluous, a kind of sympathetic souvenir emotional for the weekend or vacation. Those who fight against this forced digitization of the present will be branded as nostalgic and reactionary, even as denialists. Militant humanist thought has thus been situated, for some time, in a strange area of complicity. Is not the background impolitic of a defense of the old humanity, which blurs ideologies and makes the resistance of a certain extreme left come closer to that of a certain extreme right?
Pablo Iglesias and ChatGPT
P0plo we needed to see Pablo Iglesias defending the “enormous good sense” of the ChatGPT teacher, and sending him a bland digital poem to Mònica Terribas,0 to understand the social order is based on an unimpeded fluidity. The progressive appeal of AI is to extend the imperative of circulation to the celebrated brain, achieving a kind of intelligence free from the humors of more visceral organs. It is taking the fetishism of transparency and merchandise to its ultimate neural consequences. And create, therefore, an obedient and interactive post-humanity, softy. A population that never dares the exception that makes us human, breaking with the interpassivity of this bovine obedience.
Now, a transparent man, who circulates without ever stopping, unable to be alone before the void, can he be faithful to something? At his wish, perhaps? Apart from his thousand daily whims, can he have desire Who never listens to his shadow or stops? Such a human will not even be able to be faithful to his sexual appetites. What’s more, can he have them? After all, not only in the male case, the erection -nipples, clitoris, penis- interrupts with a bulk the crystalline general fluidity. That is why erection and penetration are increasingly frowned upon. What this contrived political correctness, the social wrapping of AI requires is self-satisfied individuals, with the mobile at hand in a way fixed and capable of continuous sensory onanism. Onanism that perhaps begins with the celebrated self-perception of finally feeling recognized. Capitalism with a human face is curved and complex, that is, it gets us bent. Not head-on, but in the style of a self-managed abuse that uses minority rarity and attention to diversity. We have one consolation: It never rained that it didn’t rain. Not only Pablo Iglesias uses ChatGPT, so will the latest batch of serial killers. And what is better, some effective conspirators.
