In times of crisis, things radicalize. In normal life, I already spent my days largely behind screens, while real life played out in the streets. These days, I live by the screen, in a kind of symbosis with my MacBook Air – and of course the complex ICT structures it is implicated with – while street life is choreographed by virus avoidance. The ever-present contradiction between virtual and real world radicalizes in both directions. While the physical world instills fear, we dream new dreams of virtual reality: Panopto! Teams! Zoom! Canvas! The more restricted our freedom of movement in the real world, the more expansive the new cyberspace vistas become. The real-world grinds to a halt, as the virtual world develops at warp speed.
Historically this is bound to be a new experience. In earlier ominous times, we had little choice but to contract our lives, lacking however any compensatory ability to expand virtually. Now that we can, we experience the first law of new cyberdynamics: what you lose in terms of reality, you win in terms of virtuality (this is of course actually the first law of media). Not being able to go play out in the streets, we lose ourselves online in endless possibilities of recombination. We collect, send, give away, store, pass on at will – as there is no scarcity in cyberspace, we live here unburdened by the hoarding shame prevalent in the real world.
This brave new online world is an ambiguous double of useful laboring and aimless drifting. Things must go on! If at all possible, even better than before. Online education, for example. Yes, it does feel very productive and useful. But just as much, it is an eschewing, or shunning, of the real world outside, which we can seemingly conjure and charm through such virtual means. In that sense, the virtual world may be considered a new human immune system, a part of anthropotechnics.
But old immune systems remain active as well. At times, I switch from my MacBook to my Steingraeber grand piano, and my fingers produce not Benjamin but Bach. Implied here is a certain human, or shall I say bourgeois, beseeching faith – a faith that the world will be better. I remember a similar faith from the series The mind of the universe, televised some three years ago, and still viewable online. Parading were mad scientists, super geneticists, and even someone aiming for a ‘chemical Google’: molecular recombination, of everything – at your service. But luckily, there was anchorman Robbert Dijkgraaf, Dutch celebrity scientist and IAS president, from his Princeton living room, seated behind his C.Bechstein grand piano, with Beethoven bust on top.
Gijs van Oenen
Erasmus School of Philosophy