On the Danger of Argumentative Extinction
Since we are all right, reason collapses
Establishing dialogue between humans in 2026 and in a formerly developed country like France is becoming a complex exercise. In several respects, this exercise requires ever more energy while seeing its objectives diminish. It is common, structural and accepted that the dynamics of dialogue presuppose a minimal understanding on this time of exchanging words, opinions more or less elaborate and morally-socially-compatible, the desire to elicit or receive empathy from one's interlocutor, or why not the projection in time of a production that exceeds the sum of the parts in place.
Discussion, an artifact of civilization in short that allows everyone to reposition themselves in the subset(s) they compose and to occupy their place in them.
Necessary therefore, because structural to our societies, but powerfully thwarted by a growing quantity of external agents that feed on these dynamics to exist (in biology biotrophic parasites or opportunistic saprophytes) at the expense of their hosts, even at the risk of killing the latter, by force of drawing from the source the lymph and blood, the sap and juice, for the sole purpose of their subsistence, without any added value to the ecosystem or the food chain.
Let us name them, these actors of exhaustion. They are placed at several levels of the economic and social scaffolding, omnipresent and enacting laws that are not part of the spectrum of republican enlightenment. Once identified, let us pierce their skin and throw them into the fire, as we throw a tick or a plague-infested cloth. Literally or figuratively.
The Industrialists of Opinion
Among the first OCDs that I was able to develop in contact with large information aggregation systems (Google News) the addiction to novelty stands out clearly. Consulting an information portal 100 times per hour is a behavioral disorder. I accept it but I analyze.
If we quickly deconstruct the phenomenon, what motivates an average individual to know what is happening on the other side of the world without any delay?
A fundamental fear of missing a change that would influence their own life? Irrational.
An inextinguishable appetite for geo-strategic knowledge? Let's be serious.
Having more "things to say" around the coffee machine? Quite probable but we're no further along.
The phenomenon, widely documented, conceptualized in "FOMO" (Fear Of Missing Out), PROC in French (Peur de Rater une Opportunité Collective) as early as 2004 by marketer Dan Herman, then theorized by Dr Andrew Przybylski (2013) in a study on digital behaviors, is a direct consequence of the reconditioning of the psyche by algorithms and the total accessibility of networks in the palm of our hands.
Let us add to this verticality that concentrates all the world's information at the point of contact of our retinas, a measure in time of the horizontality of the spectrum of information production and let us remember that the human eye processes up to 25Mb/s of signals.
Thus we have entrusted, blindly, the largest part of information channels to platforms whose great toxicity we know today and the full scope of their imperialist project. And everything is normal.
At the Over-Abundant Sources of Unique Information
Contemporary journalistic production (because before it was better), in its concentration (90%) in the hands of billionaire industrialists, has impoverished in quality and variety at the same time as it swelled in its volumes, its redundancy, its objectification of opinion as a weapon of political power, aided in this by platforms whose commercial interests take precedence and whose societal objectives under the guise of right-thinking cause more nightmares than radiant futures.
Scientific sources have suffered the same fate. Discredited in the great mess of the 2020 pandemic, polluted by the race for publications, impoverished by cuts in public subsidies that delivered research labs to private interests, when they were not directly resold for hard cash and dividends by force of taking advice from consulting firms with glaring conflicts of interest.
Note that AI has largely contributed to producing scientific-slop.
End of trust.(1)
Public speech? Here in quasi-direct contact (because platforms always arbitrate in the end) via social networks and other government sites is the great absentee from this dialogue that is nevertheless expected and has highly structuring scope. It has, like many others, diluted its responsibility and has not known how to manage the consequences of its failures. The state of public affairs testifies to this through the bankruptcy of the Fifth Republic on all its sovereign functions (education, territory, economy...), as well as on these democratic operating modes (negation of electoral results, alliances and scheming, pantouflage)
The man in the street, although capable of feeling that he no longer controls the flows that feed the essence of his reflections, is somehow forced to accept what is offered to him, by convenience, laziness or complacency with easy ideas, shallow, calling at best only to a very superficial level of common sense.
Thus takes shape the second "majoritarian" fact, consequence of the fracture operated by the pressure of concentrated flows on the maximum processing capacity of the human brain.
Yes, at this level of decrepitude of global intellect, which comes to strike the limits of our cognition at the biological borders of our gray matter, reading a book is an act of rebellion of great violence. Watching a film in its entirety borders on revolutionary. Thinking for oneself a high-level acrobatic feat.
But what we must be aware of, without falling into the crassest conspiracism, is that those who hold the keys to these problems are also those who caused them, structured them, industrialized them and industry has its mechanisms that ignore chance.
the finite time of attention
Thus goes the populist draft between the ears of our fellow citizens; by force of fantasized evidence, failed transitivities, weakening of what yesterday was authoritative, or downright barely veiled mysticism (Stérin or Bolloré are let's not forget the most dangerous and influential religious fanatics in the country), we slide the sense of realities into the bottleneck of suitable opinion, guarantor of a socially-compatible posture and low toxicity but which in high doses and over time produces what the worst of man is capable of. Seeing the rise of the extreme right in Europe and in the world is not only worrying. It should keep us from sleeping. It is undoubtedly the most notable and most violent effect to which we can attribute the wanderings of our capacity to seize the real to reorient it, decide on it, act humanely.
But let us remember the PROC mentioned above, anxious and pressing mechanics, existential anguish of not knowing or not having understood, at least as well as Dugland from the coffee machine, the why of bombs here, the price of oil there, BARCA's score at the 12th minute. Our available brain time shrinks to the measure of our breadth of mind and our patience to listen, understand, analyze, produce wealth or foresight.
Infovolution? Info-pollution? Certainly. But who cares about or even knows these notions and the underlying effects of our now totally normalized practices vis-à-vis the tools made available to us?
Solitude, an anti-social project
One of the most determining factors of this dynamic of dilution that transforms what has made society for centuries into a bothersome and corrosive anomaly is undoubtedly the isolation of the individual, in their physical, social and intellectual spheres. This other evil of the century shares the podium with back pain, cancer, depression, addictions to everything that can compulsively make one forget a malaise on which we can no longer even put our finger, for lack of having enough fingers or knowing where we hurt. We then wear out our thumb on the screen of a smartphone, an e-cigarette button, a fly zipper, a "like" button. Having 3,576 friends on Facebook is really problematic, not because the computer tool allows it, but because it's accepted as possible. By force of stratagems to deceive solitude, we ended up accepting it as a fact, an assumed normality even claimed. A mold of the soul, invisible, slow and progressive, gently propelling its victims into a retreat of the ego conducive to radical and not necessarily enlightened opinions. Individualism, both at the origin of opinion design, but also its economic fuel, ravages society, business management, families where dialogue is broken. Gaseous atoms, lost in space, that doesn't make a sun. It requires a consequent gravitational force and a few million years for it to take.
Let us concentrate.
You may be right, but I will have the last word
All strong and augmented with our supposed and/or artificial knowledge, never safe from seeing our contradictor pull out their mobile to demonstrate to us by ChatGPT that 2+2=5, the effort to go towards the other and initiate dialogue is corollary to a shadow part and in most cases the promise of an unbearable contradiction because no longer based on the common bases of reality (and there we can discuss the appreciation of the real), but on this half-tampered, half-hallucinated substrate, pocket product whose merits and quality we are praised but which, said in passing, once subjected to scrupulous analysis struggles to prove itself on the scale of the real economy for its "social cohesion" part and the manufacturing industry on its AI and automation part.
We are therefore at this turning point in history where a choice (must) present(s) itself to us:
Compose and take upon oneself with a good dose of patience and abnegation, even if it means accepting approximations, ignorance made law, hazy theories and the opinion of Dugland from the coffee machine armed with his €1,500 mobile (no, don't throw boiling liquid in his face, you're going to have problems). Survive in reality. Or Assume that the truth, as long as it is not established, well deserves to be discussed, tortured, turned over, worked like good dough from which we have the sincere will to make the best bread. The one we love to taste with several people, to share around other more or less earthly nourishments, sometimes even in silence, with an understanding and soothed smile, a generous connivance that predisposes to do great things, even if it must wait until tomorrow.
Sources and References
Books
- Byung-Chul Han – "Dans la nuée : Réflexions sur le numérique" (2015).
- Bernard Stiegler – "Dans la disruption : Comment ne pas devenir fou ?" (2016).
- Shoshana Zuboff – "L'Âge du capitalisme de surveillance" (2019).
- Cathy O'Neil – "Algorithmes : La bombe à retardement" (2016).
Articles and Reports
- UNESCO – "Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation" (2018).
- MIT Technology Review – "How social media is destroying democracy" (2020).
- The Guardian – "The age of surveillance capitalism" (2019).
- Le Monde – "Comment les algorithmes nous enferment dans des bulles" (2021).
Documentaries
- "The Social Dilemma" (Netflix, 2020) – On the dangers of social networks.
- "Nothing to Hide" (2017) – On mass surveillance.
- "The Great Hack" (Netflix, 2019) – On Cambridge Analytica.
