THE WORLD AS A SCREEN
DIGITAL PLATONISM
Hito Steyerl's videos help us
adapt to today's world,
which is marked by
digital totalitarianism.
A voiceover warns us,
after the first few minutes
of Factory of the Sun,
saying:
You will not be able
to play this game,
it will play you.
You will not be able to play this game,
it will play you.
It's also about us feeling
freer in our intimate space,
finally stripped of
our daily prejudices and masks.
Virginia Woolf said that it's not wars
and death that make us old and kill us,
but rather the way in which
others look at us and laugh
as they get on the bus.
And anyone who has ever felt,
as Gombrowicz suggested,
small in front of another person,
knows what I'm talking about.
And anyone who has a hard life,
anyone who gets home
and feels liberated
on removing their daily mask,
knows what I'm referring to.
The interface promotes a somewhat
ambiguous socialisation,
because it connects us
and isolates us at the same time.
The interface offers us
a long-distance reality,
but the distance isn't far enough,
and thus disappears
what Byung-Chul Han calls
the "pathos of distance":
that which allows us to differentiate
between "respetare", respecting
and "spectare", observing.
Without respect, that which is public
disappears, only the private remains.
Just like a TV's closed circuit,
where the subject is
ominously fed back his own image.
Like a Tantalus of appearances.
If in the past, the aim that
characterised western societies
was to protect
our intimacy and privacy,
now we want to be seen.
Please don't go.
Please stay with me.
I'm just going to wait so that
those who want to leave can do so.
That's it! Time's up!
The screen turns us into voyeurs
on the hunt for something
exciting or disgusting.
If voyeurism and action
are irreconcilable,
then voyeurism allows for
a kind of mimetic chain reaction,
a dramatized imitation,
of what has been seen,
a viral action.
Social networks pass off
the constant and bulimic definitions
of who we are as emancipation.
The best way to explain
who we are to the world
is to post millions
of signs and images,
like some kind of identity superstore.
We want to be recognised.
We validate the messages on
an individual and social level,
not for their content
or their relationship to us,
but by the response
they've generated.
The main tool of
this validation are "likes",
a mechanism so tiny and simple,
and yet, much like the best
or worse drugs,
they generate dopamine in our brains.
And so what happens is
they trigger happiness,
and triggering happiness
is very profitable.
We continue to refresh, checking whether
or not our expectations have been met.
If they haven't, we get depressed.
If they have, we're euphoric.
Seen from the outside,
like a room in a house,
we see ourselves as a reticle
to be potentially observed.
Each building or set of windows,
hides the possibility to become
a voyeuristic eye from a dark room.
The temporary nature
of an indiscreet window.
Each window, like each connection,
hides a potential subject behind it.
If we look inside, at the solitude
of many online rooms,
we will notice that the desired object
is almost always missing.
But its non-presence
releases its erotic energy.
Desire is, essentially,
the desire to desire.
In other words,
what desire is, fundamentally,
is a conjuration of oneself.
It's difficult
to not achieve your aim,
not to achieve it,
but to not not achieve it.
Kristeva said that love
is the time and space
in which the self grants itself
the right to be extraordinary
and to be lost
at the same time.
The formlessness of the internet makes it
the ideal place for imagination,
for fiction.
Intimacy becomes a performance space,
not as a complex construction of the
subject, but rather as a simulation.
Before, the bedroom was
where we tended to disappear,
to think of the other, to summon
the other through our thoughts.
The room looks bigger empty.
Whereas now,
it's all about appearing.
The imprecision of this image
we summoned of the other,
made the moment of
encounter a revelation.
Whereas now, the relationship
with the other is diluted
and has become an extension of
the relationship with oneself.
Our virtual self has taken
so much control over us,
that it maintains an exclusive
and disjunctive relationship with us.
People don't want to certify
the real image of our virtual self,
because it often disappoints.
The intimacy of the online room
puts us in a state of relaxation
typical of an always preventative contact.
Far from material dangers,
pollution, diseases,
procreation, commitments,
daily life and its collective rules,
although more than ever,
governed by desire.
In Apple stores,
there are more than 200 apps
where little girls can perform
plastic surgery on dolls.
In 2017, the American Academy of
Plastic Surgeons carried out a survey
and found that more than
50% of their clients
wanted to look better in selfies.
That was the main reason
for surgical procedures.
And for the last few years,
we've been hearing about
phenomena such as
Snapchat dysmorphia,
which is wanting to have surgery
to look like your virtual avatar,
that person who is the result of using
filters, or facial retouching apps.
Your connection to this
virtual avatar is such,
that your real self
takes second place.
This double agent,
this on-screen proxy or assistant,
has usurped your identity.
A techno-utopic version of
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
where the only thing
that gets older, is the app.
We must then consider
how sexual desire can materialise
into touching one's own body,
or desiring another body,
but also into fantasising
about an imaginary body.
In this last case,
I find it interesting
how metaverses,
virtual worlds where we socialise
through avatars that
are normally anthropomorphic,
can help us to think about
the future of online desire.
The act of experimenting and modelling
your image acquires great importance.
Aside from imagining, when playing
these role-play games in the metaverse,
we can experiment without
the taboos of the physical world
and are able to subvert the cultural
dualisms of our offline bodies.
But even though our avatars
can all be different,
it's scary how
homogenous they all are.
It's a world of
frozen Barbies and Kens.
So a challenge for the body
of the future could be
how to create conditions
of freedom for our imaginations.
Today's episode is a bit special.
Instead of searching for strange users,
like I usually do in my videos,
I'm going to search this SIM
that's dedicated to rape...
and a load of dirty stuff.
Virtual bodies have no organs,
they have no holes.
They're the antithesis of
Marta Sagarra's theory of holey bodies,
which states that bodily orifices
organise the body's
experience and self-knowledge.
It's funny to see the fascination
for these virtual selves without holes
and then the rise in news related to
violence against bodies with holes,
by way of all kinds of assault,
rape, mistreatment and abuse,
converting the real body into a victim
and instrument of social control,
that can only organise experiences
through pain and solitude.
If we lose control of our body,
we lose our capacity
for political action.
A new type of individualism
has been generated
to isolate ourselves from
physical loneliness.
But in online rooms...
others are always online.
The loneliness of the past
has been dismantled.
This is a different kind of
loneliness we're talking about,
because in the online room,
we are never truly alone.
